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Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast.

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This is Season 15, Episode 68, and we are live with Paul Sztorc, CEO of LayerTwo Labs, which is one of the four sponsors of the show, alongside Sideshift and
KnowOnce, which is the new one that just joined, and also Hodling.ch.

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And it's really exciting because I spoke with Paul for the last time on the show.

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I think it was in June when you decided to have this spontaneous contribution to the
interview with Chris DeRose, but you didn't mention too much about what you're up
to.

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Prior to that, you joined in January to talk about Drivechains, and at the time you
were still hoping to get through this BIP process.

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But in the meantime, what became really interesting about the evolution of your
attempt to create sidechains for Bitcoin was that you decided to not pursue this BIP
process anymore.

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And you came up with the CUSF, which is the Core Untouched Soft Fork, which is a way
for miners to activate and deactivate soft forks without consulting the opinions of
the conservative core developers.

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And to me, this is pretty interesting.

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I did see some reactions in regards to your proposal.

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I did see how Peter Todd tried to trash everything about it and say that instead of
improving your ideas, you're trying to activate them in a different way.

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And I don't know where this is going to lead, but it's exciting because...

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I definitely think that the fact that Peter doesn't like it is a very good sign.

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But notice that he just kind of shotgunned a bunch of things.

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So he said, like, number one, this is a terrible idea.

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Like, the idea is objectively bad.

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And then number two, he said, we should remove invalidate block from Bitcoin, which
would be extremely dangerous and would also not work in preventing the idea because
the idea has ways of working that don't involve invalidate block.

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That's just the simplest way.

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But he said, we should remove invalidate block to prevent anyone from doing it.

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And then he said something like, you know, some people I was sitting next to said
it's a terrible idea and they'll never do it.

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So it's kind of like in A Few Good Men when the guy transfers the guy off the base
and he says his orders are always followed or whatever.

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It's kind of like, you know, jumping off a cliff is a terrible idea.

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We need to build a fence around the cliff so that no one ever tries to do it.

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And then he's like, I talked to a bunch of people and they said they would never
jump off a cliff.

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It's like, if the idea is really bad, then those other two things don't add up.

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So I think the fact that I actually think that this is the, you know, the end game
and all these people are going to be like, I'm not sure, defeated is the right word.

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But, you know, like, there's only so much longer.

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Something has to give, I think.

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Because the actual bit process doesn't work.

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And it becomes more apparent over time to everyone that they either have to have a
process that actually works.

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Like an alternative to CUSF, the Core Untouched Soft Fork, that would be something
that actually works for activating bips.

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So where's that thing?

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And then otherwise people have to say it's terrible to do any soft forks.

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But that also doesn't work.

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Because in the world of open source, where you have all this variation and
innovation all the time, you will eventually not be competitive.

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Of course, there are a lot of people who say that.

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They say that, you know, Bitcoin is the thing that is the most stable and it does
not add features.

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But this ignores a lot of the realities as well.

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Like soft fork doesn't change Bitcoin.

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It leaves the old Bitcoin network exactly the way it is.

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So the soft fork is the thing that doesn't change Bitcoin.

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But that's the funny part, right?

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Because I think it was a couple of days ago that you had this disagreement with Luke
Dasz, Jr.

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And he believes that a soft fork is something that everyone must upgrade to.

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So it's sort of like a slow, hard fork.

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Right.

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This is like the opposite of the truth for me.

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But Luke has always had this point of view.

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And I think it's even a fringe point of view among even ossifier people and among
elite core developers.

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I don't think that a lot of people share his point of view.

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Not that that makes it wrong, but it is wrong.

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But not that that makes it wrong.

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I just bring that up because Luke is...

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I mean, Luke is great and Luke is a genius.

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But he does have...

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He and I completely disagree on this idea of the soft fork.

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I mean, I have discussed this with Luke a bunch of times.

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And we just don't agree.

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But basically, Luke has his own private vocabulary of words, which make it very
confusing to talk to him.

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But from my point of view, a soft fork is miners could build on one of two blocks.

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They may not even exist.

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They may just be aspirational blocks.

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They may be about to come into existence.

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But miners could mine on one or the other.

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They choose one path every time.

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They always choose to mine on the block that enforces the new tightened rules.

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To me, this is really like...

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We don't see...

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In the case of a soft fork that's written in code, we all know why they are mining
one side over the other.

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It's because one of the functions returns...

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You know, the script interpreter returns false or something.

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But to me, it's not fundamentally different than them just deciding to say,

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I'll never build on a block that ends in an even...

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The hash of the block is odd or something.

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Where it's something that we never see.

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So to me, there could be like 100 soft forks that have been activated that we just
don't know about at any given moment.

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But according to Luke, everyone must run the latest version of the software.

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I mean, it's very difficult to steel man Luke.

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Because again, Luke has his own weird definitions of things.

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But according to Luke, if you run the...

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If you do not...

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Like if everyone is not running a full node, then Bitcoin has died, according to
Luke.

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It's like Bitcoin just becomes a CBDC.

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So he's very black and white, of course.

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There's no sense of...

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It's like we have totally decentralized Bitcoin and then it's like, bang, it just
becomes a CBDC.

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The moment a few people aren't running the latest version of Bitcoin Core.

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And he has never unraveled like the numerous threads that this makes...

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This is a cure worse than disease.

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Because now you need to go to Luke to figure out which version is the latest
version.

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You know, if there's...

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Or you need to go to Bitcoin Core.

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Or you need to go to like Bitcoin.org.

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You need to go to somewhere to figure out.

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Or you need to be an elite Bitcoin developer yourself.

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In which case, you need to be a super specialist.

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That's how you find the next...

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Which version is the latest version.

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Whereas many people take a much more reasonable point of view.

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And they just say, I will research it for a little bit, download a version.

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And then I will wait to upgrade until I am ready to upgrade.

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Which is very, very reasonable for a lot of reasons.

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You don't have to be...

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Could be an issue with the new software.

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You have the opportunity to look around and see who's going to be hit by the bug
first.

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They're going to hit Coinbase or whatever with the bug.

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So you have an opportunity to get familiar with it before switching.

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It's just annoying to upgrade.

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Software in general.

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So don't break it.

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If it's not broke, don't fix it.

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It's ironically a very pro-ossification point of view.

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To just upgrade like slowly and behind...

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Three to six months behind everyone else.

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That's a very reasonable thing.

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And that's what most people do.

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But according to Luke, you can like trip some wire at some point.

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And then Bitcoin is dead or Bitcoin becomes a CBDC.

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He has this totally black and white point of view.

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That I think is ridiculous.

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I mean, it goes against even what Satoshi said, right?

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Because he was counting on people running SPV wallets.

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Right, he was.

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There's actually research in the white paper about it.

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Yeah, and he is...

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This is a big debate.

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The SPV wallets have the flaw that they must get some information from a full node.

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So it's kind of like cheating in a way.

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But it's really not cheating because most people do not...

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I mean, it's actually a non-starter to ask someone who's new.

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This is another thing that I have debated with Luke about.

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Luke says that you have 100 users.

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They all use full nodes.

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According to Luke, if you add 10,000 users to that who are SPV.

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Then like Bitcoin is dead or something.

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I mean, this is me trying as hard as I possibly can to understand Luke.

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He may go on Twitter and say this is not it at all.

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But he says something like 80% of the network or some percent.

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Then people try to pin it down.

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And they say, well, what percent needs to be full nodes?

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And then he gives some kind of evasive answer.

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I mean, I don't know.

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All I can do is tell people that this is...

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I'm doing the best I can to try to figure out what his argument is.

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But he thinks like if you have 100 users and maybe 50 of them are full node 50 SPV.

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Then Bitcoin is a failed project.

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The whole thing is failed.

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It doesn't matter.

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Like it's no difference between it going to zero or the price going to zero.

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Or no one using it.

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Or this is just 100 black and white.

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It's dead.

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And so then...

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But I asked him like, what about how are we going to get new users?

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You know, regular lay people who are just normal people.

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They are not going to...

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If the pitch is, oh, you should try this new thing.

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It's called Bitcoin.

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It's going to take up 700 gigabytes on your hard drive before you can use it.

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Most people are not going to do that.

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You need to give them at least at the very minimum, you need to give them the SPV
wallet first.

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So that they can play around with $50, $20, $50 worth of Bitcoin.

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Yeah, but it's not black or white, right?

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Because you also have Neutrino, which is this BIP that was actually developed to
support

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Lightning Network wallets, which basically lets you download block filters.

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And it works on mobile wallets.

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It's sort of...

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It is a slightly improved SPV mod.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And there's also something that these zero knowledge proof people are trying to
achieve,

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which is to verify against the zero knowledge proof within a few seconds.

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Yeah, I'm very skeptical of this.

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I think this is totally misconceived.

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So, for example, having the zero sync, sync the headers.

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All of this is actually a mistake, I think, actually.

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And we can get into that if you want.

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But I think that this whole thing is a mistake.

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There's one thing, which is there's the so-called full node,

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which has the property that it contains the whole blockchain.

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And it doesn't have any data availability issue.

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Because you have the whole blockchain.

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And you can send...

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Interesting, because I thought that the full node is something that only validates
your

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transactions.

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So you can prune it to only contain the transactions that make sense to you.

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Right.

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So I kind of disagree with that.

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But, you know, it's a complicated issue.

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But basically, I think there's the full node, which is like...

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That's the archival.

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Yeah.

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And it's like, if everyone on Earth, their computer is hit with a meteor,

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you can like regenerate the whole network with this node.

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And the other thing is, all those other things that try zero sync SPV.

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It's like you have...

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SPV is kind of a little bit like you have a big library with like a photocopying
thing.

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And you can go into the library, find a book and turn it to a page, make a photocopy
of

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the page.

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That's like your transaction.

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Walk out with the photocopy.

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But if everyone only has SPV nodes, it's like you just have photocopiers.

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There's no library.

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So that's the free riding.

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Everyone's free riding on the full node.

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And in order to get all this information in the first place, like it has to come
from

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somewhere.

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So I think the data availability problem is the problem.

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And people say stuff like, oh, we have this new thing and it solves all these
things.

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It's a full node, but it doesn't have data availability.

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But I think data availability is the only thing, because it's the only thing that
you

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cannot get.

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You can't, like, if no one does the data availability, the data is not there on the

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blockchain.

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No one knows if the blockchain contains valid transactions or not because no one
knows what's

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in the blockchain.

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So now you have no idea.

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You have no choice but to just go back to the last point in the blockchain where
people

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actually have the data.

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And then to start again.

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Because you have no choice.

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You have no.

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So the data availability is the whole thing.

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And everything else is just a different version of SPV.

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And what's worse is all of those other things, you know, zero sync, zk-SNARK,
whatever, all

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that stuff.

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I think most of that is really a big waste of time.

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I think Neutrino is actually a good idea, because it helps with the privacy of the
SPV

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mode.

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But the reason it's a waste of time, it would, let me explain, it would not be a
waste of

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time.

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It would be a good use of time.

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If we lived in a world where people were constantly being tricked, they would get a
bunch

232
00:14:35,960 --> 00:14:39,000
of block headers, 80 byte block headers that have the proof of work.

233
00:14:39,800 --> 00:14:43,400
And they were constantly being tricked into going onto the wrong chain.

234
00:14:43,400 --> 00:14:45,640
And so they said, oh, I have three confirmations.

235
00:14:47,000 --> 00:14:48,600
But they're not real blocks.

236
00:14:48,600 --> 00:14:50,760
They have the valid proof of work, but they are fake blocks.

237
00:14:53,720 --> 00:14:55,240
But that has literally never happened.

238
00:14:55,240 --> 00:14:59,320
And it never will happen, because the headers already have, the miners have to do
all the

239
00:14:59,320 --> 00:15:00,280
proof of work on the header.

240
00:15:00,280 --> 00:15:03,320
So I don't know if this explanation is going to make any sense to anyone.

241
00:15:03,320 --> 00:15:08,440
But the headers, Satoshi's SPV mode already basically is a zk-proof.

242
00:15:08,440 --> 00:15:11,080
The proof of work is a zk-proof that the block is valid.

243
00:15:11,080 --> 00:15:17,160
It's not a literal proof, but actually its reliability is the same, it's in the same

244
00:15:17,160 --> 00:15:20,680
class of thing of like being 99.999% reliable.

245
00:15:20,680 --> 00:15:22,680
So it actually makes no difference in practice.

246
00:15:25,000 --> 00:15:25,720
Okay.

247
00:15:25,720 --> 00:15:27,480
I'm trying to remember how we got here.

248
00:15:28,280 --> 00:15:33,320
We're talking about Luke and Luke's weird, people's weird ideas about like Luke's

249
00:15:33,320 --> 00:15:39,080
ideas, a theory about what constitutes Bitcoin surviving, which is that a very high
percentage

250
00:15:39,080 --> 00:15:40,280
of the nodes are full nodes.

251
00:15:41,480 --> 00:15:42,520
Otherwise, Bitcoin is dead.

252
00:15:43,080 --> 00:15:48,600
His refusal to accept the fact that there are like aspirational users who you would

253
00:15:48,600 --> 00:15:49,480
have to ramp up.

254
00:15:50,680 --> 00:15:54,040
At first, on day one, they don't run any kind of node.

255
00:15:56,680 --> 00:15:57,320
You know what I mean?

256
00:15:59,960 --> 00:16:02,760
On day one, they don't run any coins, they don't run any kind of node.

257
00:16:02,760 --> 00:16:07,880
So if we can get them up from nothing to SPV node, and then maybe three months from
now,

258
00:16:07,880 --> 00:16:12,360
they will run a full node, because they'll see that this actually has the privacy
benefit

259
00:16:12,360 --> 00:16:13,320
that they like.

260
00:16:13,320 --> 00:16:17,400
Because one benefit of the full node is you download every transaction.

261
00:16:18,200 --> 00:16:29,800
So no one knows which transaction is yours, because you download them all.

262
00:16:29,800 --> 00:16:32,120
So anyone watching you, they have no idea.

263
00:16:33,720 --> 00:16:39,880
Whereas the SPV has this trick that you're asking about, oh, what about transaction
number

264
00:16:39,880 --> 00:16:40,360
45,203?

265
00:16:41,000 --> 00:16:47,880
Then anyone who's watching you or the full node who's talking to you, they know,
well,

266
00:16:47,880 --> 00:16:49,400
he's really interested in this transaction.

267
00:16:49,400 --> 00:16:52,440
So that's what Neutrino tries to confuse that by.

268
00:16:52,440 --> 00:16:58,680
You ask for like this mask that could apply to many different transactions, or you
ask

269
00:16:58,680 --> 00:17:00,840
like a bunch of decoy transactions or something like that.

270
00:17:00,840 --> 00:17:03,160
So that is why I like that idea.

271
00:17:03,160 --> 00:17:03,880
That's very clever.

272
00:17:06,040 --> 00:17:08,280
Yeah, and it goes back to a proposal.

273
00:17:09,240 --> 00:17:13,720
It's similar in philosophy, but different in what it tries to achieve.

274
00:17:13,720 --> 00:17:20,840
There was Dandelion++, which was proposed for Bitcoin Core, and it was meant to
basically

275
00:17:20,840 --> 00:17:28,280
mix the IP addresses of nodes so that you cannot pinpoint to a specific node and
associate

276
00:17:28,280 --> 00:17:29,480
it with an IP address.

277
00:17:30,280 --> 00:17:32,920
And for some reason, that was never implemented.

278
00:17:32,920 --> 00:17:34,680
It made its way into Monero.

279
00:17:34,680 --> 00:17:42,200
It made its way into, I think it's Zcoin or Zerocoin, which is an early version of
Zcash.

280
00:17:42,760 --> 00:17:43,960
And now it's called Firo.

281
00:17:45,080 --> 00:17:49,800
It's a very clever name, Dandelion, because the first person broadcasts the
transaction

282
00:17:49,800 --> 00:17:53,960
with like a little counter, and then it goes like in a line, like a stem.

283
00:17:55,000 --> 00:17:59,080
It goes from node to node to node, only forwarding it to one person.

284
00:17:59,960 --> 00:18:04,600
And then after the timer runs out, that person broadcasts it to the whole network.

285
00:18:04,600 --> 00:18:08,040
So it poofs out like a dandelion, you know?

286
00:18:08,040 --> 00:18:09,000
It's a very clever name.

287
00:18:09,640 --> 00:18:14,120
And then no one knows, just because you broadcast the transaction to the whole
network, no one

288
00:18:14,120 --> 00:18:18,760
knows if that is yours or if you just were the last one, the hot potato.

289
00:18:19,800 --> 00:18:21,160
So I thought that was a clever idea.

290
00:18:21,160 --> 00:18:28,520
But yeah, there was some technical argument given for why not to do it, but I don't
remember

291
00:18:28,520 --> 00:18:29,080
what it was.

292
00:18:30,200 --> 00:18:33,480
It probably, I mean, it seemed like it was a perfectly fine idea.

293
00:18:33,480 --> 00:18:37,640
I mean, what exactly, what's the downside?

294
00:18:38,760 --> 00:18:39,320
I don't know.

295
00:18:39,320 --> 00:18:42,520
It doesn't seem like there is any, but it must have been something.

296
00:18:42,520 --> 00:18:43,560
Or maybe not.

297
00:18:43,560 --> 00:18:48,440
This is the other part of the issue, which is that the competence of Bitcoin Core is

298
00:18:48,440 --> 00:18:52,360
the competence of Bitcoin Core has been steadily declining.

299
00:18:53,000 --> 00:18:56,680
And that is the real issue, is that it's become bureaucratic.

300
00:18:57,560 --> 00:19:02,360
No one wants to actually take responsibility for making the software good.

301
00:19:02,360 --> 00:19:08,040
It's just a committee, a round robin, which is, on one sense, understandable,
because

302
00:19:08,040 --> 00:19:15,720
no one wants to be like, oh, we're pointing to you and saying, you are responsible
for

303
00:19:15,720 --> 00:19:21,960
Bitcoin Core, like you are basically like a Satoshi and we don't like Bitcoin, so
we're

304
00:19:21,960 --> 00:19:22,840
going to take it out on you.

305
00:19:23,640 --> 00:19:34,040
But it has the problem that when no one is responsible, then the quality degrades
very

306
00:19:34,040 --> 00:19:34,280
much.

307
00:19:36,920 --> 00:19:41,880
Well, something that I do want to mention on the topic of full nodes is that we have

308
00:19:41,880 --> 00:19:47,480
this alternative client of Bitcoin, which is called LibBitcoin, and the maintainer
of

309
00:19:47,480 --> 00:19:55,400
the project, Eric Voskiel, was able to get this, I think he ordered like a $300
computer

310
00:19:55,960 --> 00:20:00,600
and was able to synchronize a full node from Genesis on that one in like two hours.

311
00:20:01,400 --> 00:20:01,640
Yeah.

312
00:20:02,920 --> 00:20:08,040
In fact, I think he said 53 minutes is like he was achieved a few times.

313
00:20:08,040 --> 00:20:12,440
And there's one at one point, there's a theoretical limit, which is just your
internet

314
00:20:12,440 --> 00:20:19,240
speed divided by the size of the blockchain, like divided by your internet speed.

315
00:20:19,240 --> 00:20:24,920
And I think he thinks that he can he can like come very close to that limit, which
is shocking

316
00:20:24,920 --> 00:20:28,120
because Bitcoin Core takes like, you know, at least a day.

317
00:20:29,880 --> 00:20:33,720
Depends on machine, depends on everything, but it takes a while.

318
00:20:34,360 --> 00:20:37,480
Yeah, you need a lot of RAM and fast internet.

319
00:20:37,480 --> 00:20:39,160
At least that's been my experience.

320
00:20:39,720 --> 00:20:43,080
But my question is, why do you think we're not getting these?

321
00:20:43,080 --> 00:20:44,600
We're not getting down the line.

322
00:20:44,600 --> 00:20:49,160
We're not getting fast sync with these optimizations from LibBitcoin.

323
00:20:49,160 --> 00:20:53,880
And it seems like we look at Core like it's sacred and it's not meant to be touched.

324
00:20:54,920 --> 00:21:00,600
Well, I mean, Eva Chao has explicitly explained on Twitter that the policy is not to
do anything

325
00:21:00,600 --> 00:21:01,400
controversial.

326
00:21:01,400 --> 00:21:06,360
And the policy is that if anyone threatens any kind of lawsuit or whatever, that
they

327
00:21:06,360 --> 00:21:08,600
will yield completely to that threat.

328
00:21:08,600 --> 00:21:10,200
So it is like a threatocracy.

329
00:21:11,560 --> 00:21:13,960
So it's a horrible decision.

330
00:21:13,960 --> 00:21:17,640
But, you know, so we have to find a way around.

331
00:21:19,640 --> 00:21:22,360
Around this disastrous governance scenario.

332
00:21:24,040 --> 00:21:28,760
I mean, I do understand that all of them got sued by Craig Wright, and it was not a
pleasant

333
00:21:28,760 --> 00:21:29,400
situation.

334
00:21:29,400 --> 00:21:35,480
But I've reacted to that by saying we will preemptively avoid letting the terrorists

335
00:21:35,480 --> 00:21:35,800
win.

336
00:21:35,800 --> 00:21:42,920
Basically, they're saying we will preemptively act in a way such that it's like
appeasement.

337
00:21:42,920 --> 00:21:45,400
You know, they're just saying we will not we don't want to be sued.

338
00:21:45,400 --> 00:21:48,280
So we will not touch any anything important.

339
00:21:49,160 --> 00:21:50,360
They don't they have a view.

340
00:21:50,360 --> 00:21:52,440
That's just how can I deflect?

341
00:21:52,440 --> 00:21:54,920
It's a very bureaucratic EU.

342
00:21:55,480 --> 00:21:59,560
You know, everyone's sitting in a circle kind of like you don't know there's no one
that

343
00:21:59,560 --> 00:22:00,120
says.

344
00:22:02,680 --> 00:22:06,600
Like there's no one to actually address any problem to.

345
00:22:06,600 --> 00:22:11,080
They all just want to deflect the blame to someone else and that no one wants to do
the

346
00:22:11,080 --> 00:22:17,960
right thing, which is display any kind of responsibility for the project being good.

347
00:22:19,480 --> 00:22:22,760
They only think about how can they deflect blame away from themselves.

348
00:22:22,920 --> 00:22:28,360
So, of course, it's in that sense, it should not be a surprise that it's that Eric
Voskall

349
00:22:28,360 --> 00:22:31,800
is just like one guy tinkering with it, but who actually cares?

350
00:22:31,800 --> 00:22:34,120
Because when Eric Voskall does his work.

351
00:22:35,080 --> 00:22:36,840
He's getting up every day.

352
00:22:36,840 --> 00:22:40,040
I mean, I don't think he's literally working on it every day, but when he sits down
to

353
00:22:40,040 --> 00:22:45,400
work on, you know, his project, he is thinking, how can I make this project really
good?

354
00:22:45,560 --> 00:22:47,160
But the Bitcoin core people are not.

355
00:22:47,160 --> 00:22:50,360
They're thinking, how can I get more social status?

356
00:22:50,360 --> 00:22:52,760
How can I avoid being criticized?

357
00:22:55,320 --> 00:22:58,680
Of course, that's like hell on Earth, basically, who wants to be a part of that
project?

358
00:22:58,680 --> 00:23:03,160
Eric Voskall is this engineer slash mechanic type.

359
00:23:03,160 --> 00:23:09,400
I do know that he built his own motorcycle from parts and he is the tinker type.

360
00:23:09,400 --> 00:23:11,960
So I do see him as a tinkerer.

361
00:23:12,280 --> 00:23:14,040
And he is the tinker type.

362
00:23:14,040 --> 00:23:21,720
So I do see him spending a lot of time playing with parameters, seeing what works,
what is

363
00:23:21,720 --> 00:23:23,640
a good idea, what's not a good idea.

364
00:23:24,200 --> 00:23:29,240
I do know that LibBitcoin was exploited and they did lose some money like a couple
of

365
00:23:29,240 --> 00:23:29,800
years ago.

366
00:23:31,080 --> 00:23:32,360
And that was a major incident.

367
00:23:32,360 --> 00:23:35,720
I'm not familiar with the details of that, but I do think there was something like
he

368
00:23:35,720 --> 00:23:39,320
had like a randomness thing early on.

369
00:23:39,320 --> 00:23:42,280
And he had in the comments, it says like, do not use this.

370
00:23:44,920 --> 00:23:46,360
But someone else used it.

371
00:23:47,000 --> 00:23:49,560
So I think there was a little bit more nuance.

372
00:23:49,560 --> 00:23:51,160
I do remember that, though.

373
00:23:51,160 --> 00:24:00,520
And he should, I think, even though that sounds like an unfortunate situation, I
don't really

374
00:24:00,520 --> 00:24:03,400
know anything about it, knowing nothing, basically nothing about the details,
though.

375
00:24:03,400 --> 00:24:09,400
But I would say that Eric should, he should not go in the direction of Bitcoin Core
and

376
00:24:09,400 --> 00:24:11,640
try to deflect responsibility.

377
00:24:11,640 --> 00:24:17,640
He should say, OK, listen, I did say not to use this and the user screwed up also.

378
00:24:18,840 --> 00:24:23,320
But since I want LibBitcoin to be the absolute best piece of software on planet
Earth, I

379
00:24:23,320 --> 00:24:31,160
will now take responsibility for fixing not only all the Bitcoin Core performance
sub

380
00:24:31,160 --> 00:24:37,480
optimalities, but I will also take responsibility for fixing this other thing.

381
00:24:39,480 --> 00:24:47,960
So I think that he should, you know, whatever, sort of, I'm not saying that he is to
blame,

382
00:24:47,960 --> 00:24:51,560
but I think he should, the more responsibility someone takes, the better.

383
00:24:51,560 --> 00:24:53,800
So that's just how it is.

384
00:24:56,520 --> 00:24:57,560
Better the product will be.

385
00:24:58,345 --> 00:25:25,345
It's sort of messed up because I do have this feeling, and I'm not sure if you share
it with me, that as Bitcoin becomes more mainstream and we get to this phase, I
think David Bailey is pushing it into this political sphere where he, I saw him
today tweeting about super nations that are going to be accumulating a lot of
Bitcoin and getting a lot of hashrate, and it seems like the stakes are getting much
higher.

386
00:25:25,345 --> 00:25:29,865
And this window of opportunity for improving Bitcoin is narrowing down.

387
00:25:31,225 --> 00:25:34,905
I don't agree. Well, I mean, I do agree, but I think I wouldn't despair.

388
00:25:34,905 --> 00:25:51,265
I think everything David Bailey is doing and even to some extent what Michael Saylor
is doing, even though Satoshi would like if Satoshi could see that if he were today
and he could see that the plan is to have corporations and nation states adopt
Bitcoin, I think he would just be like.

389
00:25:52,265 --> 00:26:10,665
Like, what the heck, you know, he'd be like so confused as to how, because he'd be
like, but he would be, my guess is he would be thinking like, OK, but which people,
who's, who has the private keys and like, won't those people just steal the coins,
which I think we will continue to see this, the FTX, Mt.

390
00:26:10,665 --> 00:26:14,545
Gox pipeline, I think it will continue.

391
00:26:15,185 --> 00:26:16,745
It's only a matter of time before.

392
00:26:16,985 --> 00:26:21,745
And I don't want to name any names because then it looks like I'm like, but I hate
to say anything.

393
00:26:21,745 --> 00:26:24,345
But, you know, it could be all of all of the.

394
00:26:25,905 --> 00:26:36,625
In El Salvador, you know, you have a giant pot of money, OK, so that's the same
thing as running an exchange, you have a huge pile of money there, El Salvador,
MicroStrategy, whatever.

395
00:26:37,625 --> 00:26:46,745
BitGo, I hate to say, I'm not trying to say anything about these particular, I'm
just saying this, this type of thing is set up to to fail where you have you have
Mt.

396
00:26:46,745 --> 00:26:52,105
Gox, you have Bitfinex, you have whatever, it's just a giant pile of money.

397
00:26:53,225 --> 00:26:57,065
Everyone's going to try to steal it, everyone's going to try to do whatever they can
to take it.

398
00:26:57,065 --> 00:27:03,585
So this type of thing, the idea of having government have this huge thing, it's
going to be very difficult to pull off.

399
00:27:03,585 --> 00:27:15,145
And there will be Black Swan, FTX type thing where people say and the thing that
collapses will be whichever thing people most overconfidently believe is the most
secure thing.

400
00:27:15,145 --> 00:27:20,585
So whatever, whatever, wherever the delusional optimism is, that is the thing that
will, you know.

401
00:27:21,585 --> 00:27:28,265
That's where there'll be the next hack, could be an actual hack, could be just be an
inside job where the person says we got hacked.

402
00:27:28,265 --> 00:27:29,945
Meanwhile, they take all the coins.

403
00:27:29,945 --> 00:27:36,345
So I mean, it's I just think it's it's a force of nature.

404
00:27:36,345 --> 00:27:39,065
It's like a guarantee it will happen again.

405
00:27:39,065 --> 00:27:40,025
It will happen over and over.

406
00:27:40,025 --> 00:27:41,265
It will happen forever.

407
00:27:41,305 --> 00:27:41,705
So.

408
00:27:44,265 --> 00:27:55,505
Yeah, this sort of messed up and you did say indirectly that you believe that
Michael Saylor and whatever he's doing right now is going to be the next FTX or the
next Terra Luna or whatever.

409
00:27:55,585 --> 00:28:01,065
Well, OK, he has this point of view where he thinks like Bitcoin with yield is
better than Bitcoin without yield.

410
00:28:02,065 --> 00:28:24,065
He insisted on that, even safety and tried to and I, you know, I think safety and is
I don't have a super high opinion of safety, but he was looking like a genius when
he was talking to Michael Saylor and he was trying to even let him off the hook with
like a little lighthearted joke about, oh, I'd rather have like five million percent
and Saylor doesn't even understand like what safety is talking about.

411
00:28:24,065 --> 00:28:30,385
Like safety and tries to take like an extreme case to make the argument very clear.

412
00:28:32,105 --> 00:28:36,425
And like Michael is going right over his head, I don't I don't know, I don't know.

413
00:28:36,425 --> 00:28:41,625
Like, I think he's got some nutty ideas, but the reason I bring it up is David
Bailey, Michael Saylor, whatever, all these other people.

414
00:28:43,145 --> 00:28:44,465
El Salvador president.

415
00:28:47,185 --> 00:28:53,745
All the adoption is good, and it may mean that Bitcoin core, the software suffers as
a result in some ways.

416
00:28:55,065 --> 00:28:59,185
But it does open the door to certain things.

417
00:28:59,185 --> 00:29:00,745
OK, so you have like wrapped a Bitcoin.

418
00:29:02,785 --> 00:29:08,105
The Bitcoin, like it could be the case that BTC is like.

419
00:29:09,825 --> 00:29:20,825
The interface with it's the bridge between the U.S., the fiat world and the the
crypto world, the HDLC world or something, you know, and so then you have all these
other things.

420
00:29:20,945 --> 00:29:23,865
HDLC wrapped Bitcoin.

421
00:29:25,465 --> 00:29:27,065
You can have all these things that.

422
00:29:29,305 --> 00:29:42,465
Where those things cryptographically swap for BTC and then BTC swaps for it, so even
if BTC became like central bank digital currency coin and it was like only adopted
by corporations and governments and it had like some kind of KYC.

423
00:29:43,425 --> 00:29:49,065
As long as it retains the ability to interface cryptographically.

424
00:29:49,465 --> 00:29:51,185
Like hash functions and other things.

425
00:29:52,625 --> 00:29:56,865
It will still be a bridge into the privacy coins.

426
00:29:57,825 --> 00:30:11,145
So and if it doesn't, so either it will be the the the USB port into the privacy
world, at which point the whole thing will be still pretty private or.

427
00:30:11,745 --> 00:30:12,225
Or.

428
00:30:13,345 --> 00:30:24,665
BTC completely 100 percent captured, in which case I think BTC has no value in that
situation, so I think that that won't happen, you know what I mean, because in a
world where everything is.

429
00:30:25,585 --> 00:30:32,505
Everyone is KYC, this was actually what the 2016 era, the DeRose, Chris DeRose, Josh
Unseth era.

430
00:30:33,505 --> 00:30:44,065
In a world where everything is like KYC and everyone's identity is known, then the
entire proof of work thing is completely superfluous and has no value over just
signatures.

431
00:30:44,585 --> 00:30:58,665
And the entire blockchain structure is just a pointless seven transaction per second
limitation that is completely and you see this, you see this, we have seen this play
out consistently with Ethereum versus like Solana.

432
00:30:59,665 --> 00:31:04,185
Or like you can say Bitcoin versus Ethereum, Ethereum is way less decentralized.

433
00:31:05,865 --> 00:31:08,025
But still, there's a bunch of users that don't care.

434
00:31:08,105 --> 00:31:13,465
And then Ethereum, the issue is now Solana outflanks Ethereum.

435
00:31:14,105 --> 00:31:18,105
Solana says and then the Ethereum people have to say, oh, that's that's not as
decentralized.

436
00:31:18,105 --> 00:31:21,065
Oh, then you have BTC versus Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin SV.

437
00:31:22,185 --> 00:31:25,865
And then Solana is now outflanked by, you know, Base and all these other things.

438
00:31:26,105 --> 00:31:35,225
So we have a situation where it will go, we'll have the whole spectrum of
decentralization.

439
00:31:36,345 --> 00:31:38,025
And so it doesn't actually matter if.

440
00:31:38,905 --> 00:31:48,905
So more adoption is always better, because even though it will, it might screw up
the BTC software or even the BTC coin, it will still be the bootloader or whatever.

441
00:31:48,905 --> 00:31:49,785
It will be the like.

442
00:31:50,985 --> 00:31:58,825
Like the first, you know, like in an atomic bomb, they need the first explosion to
trigger like the second explosion, like a two stage explosion.

443
00:31:58,825 --> 00:32:04,665
I'm not sure if that's the common knowledge or not, but but they need in fact, I
think they need a few.

444
00:32:04,665 --> 00:32:06,265
It depends on the design.

445
00:32:06,265 --> 00:32:08,265
But like, so.

446
00:32:09,865 --> 00:32:17,705
You know, like I think, right, don't you have like the first one has to like heat
everything up and make it really and then the second one like explodes and destroys
the city or something.

447
00:32:17,705 --> 00:32:21,385
I'm not, I'm not an expert on such things.

448
00:32:21,385 --> 00:32:24,345
But some things have two stages.

449
00:32:25,545 --> 00:32:29,705
Like Starship Heavy, you know, Starship is the booster.

450
00:32:29,705 --> 00:32:31,305
And then there's the detachments.

451
00:32:31,305 --> 00:32:32,425
So there's two stages.

452
00:32:32,425 --> 00:32:32,585
So.

453
00:32:34,185 --> 00:32:37,465
So anything that gets this up, maybe that's just the booster.

454
00:32:38,265 --> 00:32:43,865
And so what the bizarre implication is that it may not be Bitcoin that is the
winning coin.

455
00:32:44,825 --> 00:32:48,025
But that depends on like a million factors.

456
00:32:48,025 --> 00:32:57,545
But I do think that in general, we want more adoption, even among the crazies, the
governments and corporations.

457
00:32:57,545 --> 00:32:58,105
So I think.

458
00:32:59,625 --> 00:33:03,145
You know, even what Michael Saylor is doing is a net positive.

459
00:33:04,265 --> 00:33:06,745
Even though it caused a lot of negatives.

460
00:33:06,745 --> 00:33:09,145
And I think David Bailey also is very positive.

461
00:33:09,865 --> 00:33:11,065
The political stuff is.

462
00:33:12,665 --> 00:33:14,505
That's much better than the reverse.

463
00:33:15,705 --> 00:33:17,705
Although it does change everything around, I think.

464
00:33:19,465 --> 00:33:25,785
I mean, this is why I enjoy inviting you, Paul, because every time you get on the
show, you have a fresh perspective.

465
00:33:26,985 --> 00:33:37,945
I did notice and it's impossible not to pay attention to the fact that WBTC has more
liquidity than Lightning and Liquid and Rootstock.

466
00:33:38,025 --> 00:33:40,985
And yeah, by like a hundred or something.

467
00:33:40,985 --> 00:33:42,425
Yeah, yeah, right.

468
00:33:42,425 --> 00:33:48,585
And it has more volume simply because people want to use their Bitcoin for smart
contracts and stuff.

469
00:33:48,585 --> 00:33:50,425
And Ethereum provides that.

470
00:33:50,425 --> 00:33:53,705
And I did see news like yesterday or something.

471
00:33:53,705 --> 00:33:54,745
There's this.

472
00:33:54,745 --> 00:34:01,065
So basically, it's like Monero, but with tokens and it's called Xano and Roger Ver
is promoting the whole out of it.

473
00:34:01,625 --> 00:34:03,865
And it's trying to tokenize Bitcoin right now.

474
00:34:03,865 --> 00:34:07,465
So basically, you're going to have ZBTC or something.

475
00:34:07,545 --> 00:34:11,545
And that one's going to be moved around with Monero level privacy.

476
00:34:12,745 --> 00:34:19,785
And I do see some value, like there's going to be a change for contracts and there's
going to be another one for privacy.

477
00:34:19,785 --> 00:34:24,025
And it's messed up because this is exactly my tweet from yesterday.

478
00:34:24,025 --> 00:34:29,705
I said, you know, some guys would rather see Xano succeed instead of activating
Drivechains.

479
00:34:31,305 --> 00:34:32,025
Yes.

480
00:34:32,025 --> 00:34:36,825
So the key point here, and this is a very good thing that you brought up.

481
00:34:37,465 --> 00:34:45,225
It's very, very important, which is that one, this is an implication of the view
that Bitcoin core isn't very good right now.

482
00:34:45,225 --> 00:34:49,785
And also that just Bitcoin core is not aggressively pursuing new features as quickly
as possible.

483
00:34:50,665 --> 00:34:52,505
Which I think everyone would admit that now.

484
00:34:52,505 --> 00:34:54,025
That's not even a controversial thing.

485
00:34:54,585 --> 00:35:01,385
You know, the Bitcoin core priority is not improve the software as rapidly as
possible.

486
00:35:03,465 --> 00:35:05,305
Everyone would agree with that statement, right?

487
00:35:05,305 --> 00:35:08,265
Because everyone says, well, now it's like, don't break it.

488
00:35:10,505 --> 00:35:11,865
Change it very slowly.

489
00:35:11,865 --> 00:35:13,625
Never change it, you know, et cetera.

490
00:35:14,265 --> 00:35:20,425
So in that world, there is no Bitcoin maximalism.

491
00:35:21,625 --> 00:35:26,665
Because now anyone who wants the new feature must, by definition, get it from a
different project.

492
00:35:27,705 --> 00:35:28,425
So you can't have it.

493
00:35:28,425 --> 00:35:30,265
You have to pick your poison, right?

494
00:35:30,265 --> 00:35:34,105
Either you say Luke-Jr or ossification.

495
00:35:34,105 --> 00:35:39,625
Ossification people say, it's basically Luke-Jr says no changes without total
agreement.

496
00:35:40,345 --> 00:35:42,425
And the ossification people are like a subset of that.

497
00:35:42,425 --> 00:35:44,985
They say, well, the only thing we will agree to is no changes.

498
00:35:46,665 --> 00:35:49,305
So either you say no change unless everyone agrees.

499
00:35:49,865 --> 00:35:55,225
But then on the other hand, innovation is just change if one person wants a change.

500
00:35:55,625 --> 00:36:01,625
So now, once you've explicitly said that there's no, we are not prioritizing
innovation

501
00:36:01,625 --> 00:36:04,985
and we are not prioritizing adoption and we are not prioritizing features.

502
00:36:06,505 --> 00:36:12,185
Then anyone, now all the entire altcoin thing is totally legit.

503
00:36:12,185 --> 00:36:19,225
And it is, in fact, anti-competitive guild monopolism to like just say,

504
00:36:19,225 --> 00:36:21,385
oh, we want Bitcoin core to be the only thing.

505
00:36:21,385 --> 00:36:25,225
Because now you're just saying, we know our thing doesn't have the features,

506
00:36:26,345 --> 00:36:29,625
but we want you to buy it anyway, even though it doesn't solve your problem.

507
00:36:30,665 --> 00:36:33,065
So it actually flips the whole thing around completely.

508
00:36:35,705 --> 00:36:39,225
So it's quite an interesting development.

509
00:36:39,225 --> 00:36:40,185
I would never have thought this.

510
00:36:40,185 --> 00:36:46,425
And one final thing to point out is that BIP300, the whole point of BIP300 is that
it is not,

511
00:36:46,425 --> 00:36:48,505
as a soft fork, it is not a change.

512
00:36:48,825 --> 00:36:52,905
It is not a change to BTC, like the Bitcoin core at all.

513
00:36:54,745 --> 00:36:59,465
And it gives you all these new features without them being on Bitcoin L1 and without
anyone

514
00:36:59,465 --> 00:37:02,185
on Bitcoin L1 noticing them at all.

515
00:37:02,185 --> 00:37:09,705
So it's like even that type of a thing, where the change is not even seen by anyone

516
00:37:09,705 --> 00:37:10,585
who doesn't want to see it.

517
00:37:11,305 --> 00:37:13,145
People say, oh, we have a problem with that.

518
00:37:13,705 --> 00:37:17,945
Well, now Bitcoin maximum is completely dead, I think, because people are saying it
doesn't

519
00:37:17,945 --> 00:37:18,445
matter.

520
00:37:20,185 --> 00:37:25,225
Like people are just saying, we just want to kill the feature just for the sake of
killing

521
00:37:25,225 --> 00:37:30,265
the feature, even if the feature has no effect on L1 Bitcoin at all, to the point
where you

522
00:37:30,265 --> 00:37:33,705
wouldn't even notice if some other people were using it.

523
00:37:33,705 --> 00:37:37,545
The same reason why I don't, you know, if someone does a Bitcoin transaction, I
don't

524
00:37:37,545 --> 00:37:42,185
know if they wanted to buy, if they're buying hot dogs or hamburgers.

525
00:37:42,265 --> 00:37:43,065
Or something else.

526
00:37:44,265 --> 00:37:45,945
That motivation is invisible to me.

527
00:37:46,985 --> 00:37:50,505
The same thing is the L2 would be invisible, the BIP300 L2 would be invisible.

528
00:37:50,505 --> 00:37:51,385
People say even that.

529
00:37:51,385 --> 00:37:54,905
So then now what they're saying is they just want to kill all the features out of
spite,

530
00:37:55,785 --> 00:37:57,545
even though it has no effect on L1.

531
00:37:58,665 --> 00:38:00,585
So that is where we are.

532
00:38:00,585 --> 00:38:05,545
And I think that that and so now, of course, now it makes perfect sense to launch an
altcoin

533
00:38:06,425 --> 00:38:12,425
because you have you what, because you literally have no alternative.

534
00:38:14,265 --> 00:38:16,985
And it makes no sense at all to call Bitcoin core meritocracy.

535
00:38:16,985 --> 00:38:20,665
It's an anti-featureocracy.

536
00:38:20,665 --> 00:38:25,465
So people could try to say that something's better if it has less features.

537
00:38:27,705 --> 00:38:32,665
No, it's silly because you are one of the true Bitcoin maximalists who are trying to

538
00:38:32,665 --> 00:38:34,105
maximize what Bitcoin does.

539
00:38:34,745 --> 00:38:40,905
But for some reason, the term has been redefined to mean conservative.

540
00:38:40,905 --> 00:38:46,985
So you're a maximalist right now if you just, I guess, post yours.

541
00:38:48,425 --> 00:38:52,105
I don't want to get there too much, but there are a bunch of guys who just post
their gains

542
00:38:52,105 --> 00:38:53,625
from micro strategy stocks.

543
00:38:55,065 --> 00:38:59,225
And they are proud in the fact that Bitcoin hasn't changed and they're rejecting.

544
00:38:59,785 --> 00:39:04,665
I think there is a very strong resistance even against these covenants, which
honestly,

545
00:39:04,665 --> 00:39:06,505
I don't see as being harmless.

546
00:39:06,505 --> 00:39:12,665
And I appreciate that there is Floppy, the Floppy guy, who was also on the show.

547
00:39:12,665 --> 00:39:14,745
And I know he also works for LayerTwo Labs.

548
00:39:15,305 --> 00:39:16,825
And he's making this effort to.

549
00:39:19,865 --> 00:39:24,585
He's a very cool guy, but he showed up for like a month and then he didn't really.

550
00:39:24,585 --> 00:39:25,785
He's like a very interesting.

551
00:39:25,785 --> 00:39:31,065
I think that guy's a genius, but he doesn't really like he poked his head in and did
a

552
00:39:31,065 --> 00:39:35,305
couple one or two things and then departed kind of like a Mary Poppins figure, you
know.

553
00:39:36,025 --> 00:39:37,385
But he is a very interesting guy.

554
00:39:39,145 --> 00:39:44,825
He's putting together this Wikipedia page where he puts names of developers and what

555
00:39:44,825 --> 00:39:47,465
they think about various covenant proposals.

556
00:39:48,105 --> 00:39:51,305
And it's interesting to see where people agree and where they disagree.

557
00:39:51,305 --> 00:39:58,185
And well, I can just it's clear that all of them are harmless in the sense that you

558
00:39:58,185 --> 00:40:01,305
could lay every soft fork, you could just shut off later.

559
00:40:01,305 --> 00:40:05,545
So 51 percent hashrate to turn it on and then 51 percent hashrate to turn it off.

560
00:40:07,065 --> 00:40:13,225
And as I said before, my view is that there could be 18 soft forks that miners have
already

561
00:40:13,225 --> 00:40:14,505
activated that we don't know about.

562
00:40:14,665 --> 00:40:20,905
So I like the idea of them being harmful is ridiculous to me, that all of them, it's

563
00:40:20,905 --> 00:40:24,425
impossible for them to be harmful, including BIP300.

564
00:40:25,065 --> 00:40:27,145
So they should all just be activated.

565
00:40:28,105 --> 00:40:33,065
It's like it's very funny that everyone else is tying themselves into these weird
knots

566
00:40:33,065 --> 00:40:33,625
and saying.

567
00:40:36,025 --> 00:40:41,065
Something will happen, but it doesn't make any sense if it's if it's something that
miners

568
00:40:41,305 --> 00:40:45,385
incentive, if it's something that makes more money for miners, they will do it and
you

569
00:40:45,385 --> 00:40:46,185
cannot stop them.

570
00:40:48,905 --> 00:40:50,745
And so the whole discussion is pointless.

571
00:40:51,945 --> 00:40:54,585
If it will not make them more money, they will not do it.

572
00:40:55,145 --> 00:40:58,505
If it does have it has some kind of negative consequence that actually affects users
who

573
00:40:58,505 --> 00:41:03,625
are paying transaction fees or the price of the coin, miners can shut it off and
they

574
00:41:03,625 --> 00:41:05,785
will shut it off and you can't stop them from shutting it off.

575
00:41:06,105 --> 00:41:11,865
The only the key thing in our era, I think, is that the miners are specialists at
mining.

576
00:41:11,865 --> 00:41:16,185
They get they find cheap power and those other stuff, but they don't they have yet
to.

577
00:41:17,465 --> 00:41:22,105
Because the block reward is still higher than the transaction fees, they are not
interested

578
00:41:22,105 --> 00:41:23,545
in what the software does.

579
00:41:23,545 --> 00:41:24,905
They're only interested in mining.

580
00:41:25,465 --> 00:41:30,105
Eventually, this will all flip and then at that point, it will be impossible for I
mean,

581
00:41:30,105 --> 00:41:34,825
all every idea that I've ever had will be, I think, totally vindicated and the
equilibrium

582
00:41:35,785 --> 00:41:39,225
will just switch to exactly what I have always said it would be back in 2015.

583
00:41:39,785 --> 00:41:46,505
But we are living through a period where temporarily the miners do not care about
the

584
00:41:46,505 --> 00:41:48,265
software, but that will change.

585
00:41:50,185 --> 00:41:53,465
Eventually, it will change because they have to maximize the transaction fees.

586
00:41:56,185 --> 00:42:00,985
Yeah, at this point, let me plug LayerTwo Labs, which has been a sponsor for many
months now.

587
00:42:00,985 --> 00:42:01,785
I'm on the show.

588
00:42:01,785 --> 00:42:03,065
You don't have to plug this.

589
00:42:03,065 --> 00:42:09,145
You guys have been shipping code and it's important to describe this and explain to

590
00:42:09,145 --> 00:42:11,145
people that it's not just an idea.

591
00:42:11,145 --> 00:42:14,345
It's actual code that you can run on the Bitcoin Signet.

592
00:42:14,345 --> 00:42:20,105
You go to LayerTwoLabs.com slash download and you're going to find software for I
guess

593
00:42:20,105 --> 00:42:23,145
it's on all major desktop operating systems.

594
00:42:23,785 --> 00:42:27,625
And this can give you a pretty good idea of what the future is going to look like.

595
00:42:27,625 --> 00:42:30,585
You have the Z-site sidechain for privacy.

596
00:42:30,585 --> 00:42:35,865
You have a big block sidechain for low fees and scaling.

597
00:42:35,865 --> 00:42:39,625
And you also have prediction market and assets.

598
00:42:39,625 --> 00:42:41,305
Yeah, that's not finished.

599
00:42:41,305 --> 00:42:45,625
OK, so if you go to releases.drivechain.info and then there's a folder with all the
old

600
00:42:45,625 --> 00:42:49,385
the pre-CUSF stuff, which all work to some extent.

601
00:42:49,945 --> 00:42:56,985
But now to retool it to do the CUSF, which is sort of new, I think only one of them
will

602
00:42:56,985 --> 00:42:59,865
actually work and it may not work on Windows right now.

603
00:42:59,865 --> 00:43:03,865
But what the point is, if you go on GitHub, you can see people are working on it
every

604
00:43:03,865 --> 00:43:04,185
day.

605
00:43:04,185 --> 00:43:10,585
So pop in, try to run it and then pop into the Telegram and tell us why it didn't
work.

606
00:43:10,585 --> 00:43:14,025
Because redoing it, we're redoing it a lot for CUSF.

607
00:43:14,025 --> 00:43:19,705
But yeah, we had all this stuff that worked earlier this year, then decided that
this

608
00:43:19,705 --> 00:43:21,225
CUSF thing is the way to go.

609
00:43:21,225 --> 00:43:27,545
So the CUSF thing is, instead of waiting for Bitcoin to activate a soft fork, which

610
00:43:27,545 --> 00:43:32,825
I think will take like a long time, a prediction market on when the next soft fork
will activate

611
00:43:32,825 --> 00:43:39,225
would be very, very interesting to me, because I think a lot of people know that it
will

612
00:43:39,225 --> 00:43:39,785
come back to that.

613
00:43:39,785 --> 00:43:40,665
That's a very important point.

614
00:43:40,665 --> 00:43:41,305
Don't let me forget.

615
00:43:41,305 --> 00:43:48,585
But instead of waiting around for Bitcoin Core to activate a soft fork or code one
or

616
00:43:49,065 --> 00:43:52,185
whatever the process is, no one really knows what the process is anymore.

617
00:43:53,385 --> 00:43:58,105
But instead, the Core Untouched Soft Fork is just a thing that miners run in
addition

618
00:43:58,105 --> 00:43:59,065
to Bitcoin Core.

619
00:44:00,745 --> 00:44:05,545
And this activates the soft fork, even with Bitcoin Core just staying exactly the
way

620
00:44:05,545 --> 00:44:05,865
it is.

621
00:44:06,905 --> 00:44:10,345
No changes to the code, no changes to the binary or anything.

622
00:44:10,345 --> 00:44:14,265
So when you download it now, what it does differently than what it does earlier in
the

623
00:44:14,265 --> 00:44:18,265
year, it just downloaded our, which is like our own version of Bitcoin Core that we
had

624
00:44:18,265 --> 00:44:20,905
like a fork of like $16.99 from like a long time ago.

625
00:44:22,345 --> 00:44:25,945
Now, it downloads the latest version of Bitcoin Core, like the real one.

626
00:44:26,745 --> 00:44:31,065
It does change the SIGNET 60 seconds, but that has nothing to do with anything.

627
00:44:31,065 --> 00:44:37,865
Downloads the actual real Bitcoin Core and runs it in the SIGNET mode, which is with

628
00:44:37,865 --> 00:44:40,585
fake coins, but it's the same software.

629
00:44:41,385 --> 00:44:45,785
And then it downloads this activator thing, and then it downloads the, it now
downloads

630
00:44:45,785 --> 00:44:51,705
a new graphical user interface that I've been working on, which I think is great.

631
00:44:51,705 --> 00:44:58,745
And then it will download the L2, the large block L2 that I call Thunder.

632
00:45:00,105 --> 00:45:02,345
So yeah, give this a try.

633
00:45:02,345 --> 00:45:07,865
And, but because we have recently changed it from something that worked to this new

634
00:45:07,865 --> 00:45:13,465
CUSF thing, not everything works, but you can go to releases.drivechain.info and
find

635
00:45:13,465 --> 00:45:16,265
all the old software that did work.

636
00:45:16,265 --> 00:45:22,425
And, you know, once we fix this, it should be easy to port all the changes that we
made,

637
00:45:22,425 --> 00:45:24,185
the software that we wrote the first time.

638
00:45:25,145 --> 00:45:27,385
We'll just move it into this new version.

639
00:45:27,385 --> 00:45:35,065
The CUSF thing is way better because there is no, you know, like now we have to talk

640
00:45:35,065 --> 00:45:39,705
about this whole line of argument, which is like, okay, Jeremy Rubin did CTV.

641
00:45:39,705 --> 00:45:41,785
I think, I don't even know when that was finished.

642
00:45:41,785 --> 00:45:45,385
I think it may have been finished in like 2018 or 2019.

643
00:45:46,025 --> 00:45:47,625
The code is finished then.

644
00:45:49,625 --> 00:45:52,185
OpVault, you know, cat.

645
00:45:54,185 --> 00:45:59,545
All this stuff, like the code is finished, but you have to go through the BIP
process,

646
00:45:59,545 --> 00:46:04,025
which is just like a lot of people talking for years and years and nothing getting
done.

647
00:46:04,025 --> 00:46:05,465
No one wants to take responsibility.

648
00:46:06,105 --> 00:46:10,665
A perfect example is Taproot where they finished the code and the people who worked
on the

649
00:46:10,665 --> 00:46:15,465
code refused to even discuss activation because everyone knows that it's a
politically sensitive

650
00:46:15,465 --> 00:46:15,785
issue.

651
00:46:17,225 --> 00:46:19,705
So then someone else had to propose speedy trial.

652
00:46:19,705 --> 00:46:20,825
That was very controversial.

653
00:46:20,825 --> 00:46:23,305
Everything's controversial because it's very political.

654
00:46:24,105 --> 00:46:25,545
But you can see the timeline.

655
00:46:26,105 --> 00:46:28,985
Let me get returned to my, I know this is a lot of bizarre points.

656
00:46:28,985 --> 00:46:32,185
So, but let me return to a point that I was making about, you know, Moon Settler.

657
00:46:32,185 --> 00:46:33,465
I love Moon Settler.

658
00:46:33,465 --> 00:46:33,945
Great guy.

659
00:46:35,865 --> 00:46:42,905
And he, I was talking to him, I believe this was a December of last year.

660
00:46:42,905 --> 00:46:45,865
So I think it was a whole 12 months ago on a space, Twitter space.

661
00:46:47,625 --> 00:46:53,625
And he said he was getting behind L Enhance because he thought it had the best
chance

662
00:46:53,625 --> 00:46:59,385
of getting consensus, you know, among the developers.

663
00:46:59,385 --> 00:47:02,025
And I said, well, what are you going to do if it reaches the end of 2014?

664
00:47:02,825 --> 00:47:04,105
Excuse me, 2024.

665
00:47:04,105 --> 00:47:05,465
Whoa, my mistake.

666
00:47:05,465 --> 00:47:07,785
What are you going to do if we get, time travel is the best.

667
00:47:07,785 --> 00:47:13,225
What are you going to do if we make it to the end of 2024 and there's still no
progress

668
00:47:13,225 --> 00:47:14,665
on L Enhance being activated?

669
00:47:15,305 --> 00:47:18,185
And then he's like, oh my God, then I think I would just quit Bitcoin.

670
00:47:19,465 --> 00:47:20,345
You know, stuff like that.

671
00:47:20,345 --> 00:47:21,465
I don't want to put words in his mouth.

672
00:47:21,465 --> 00:47:24,185
But the point is, it's a recorded space and people can look it up.

673
00:47:25,065 --> 00:47:32,425
The point is that people feel like the next soft fork is always like three months
away

674
00:47:32,425 --> 00:47:37,225
or something, but really when you get there, it's another three months and it just
goes

675
00:47:37,225 --> 00:47:38,585
on and on and on and on and on.

676
00:47:38,585 --> 00:47:42,185
And there's no progress towards actually getting any of them activated.

677
00:47:42,265 --> 00:47:55,065
So, like what I'm saying is, I mean, where's L Enhance now?

678
00:47:55,065 --> 00:47:59,705
You can say that maybe there's been a little bit of progress over years.

679
00:47:59,705 --> 00:48:02,105
But so the question is, we extrapolate that out.

680
00:48:02,105 --> 00:48:03,785
Where are we going to be 12 months from now?

681
00:48:06,265 --> 00:48:10,345
Probably we'll make about as much progress in the next 12 months as we made during
the

682
00:48:10,345 --> 00:48:11,225
previous 12 months.

683
00:48:12,185 --> 00:48:19,225
And I have, as you may have seen, I had a graphic about what we used to do soft fork

684
00:48:19,225 --> 00:48:20,745
every six months.

685
00:48:20,745 --> 00:48:21,785
We used to do two a year.

686
00:48:22,665 --> 00:48:29,225
Then we did only in the first seven to eight year period, we did 16.

687
00:48:30,345 --> 00:48:33,705
In the second seven to eight year period, we did two.

688
00:48:34,745 --> 00:48:40,105
And one was SegWit took 26 months from when it was coded to when it was activated.

689
00:48:40,105 --> 00:48:42,745
And then Tapper took 40 months.

690
00:48:43,865 --> 00:48:45,545
So, it's just been getting slower and slower.

691
00:48:46,585 --> 00:48:52,585
So, that is why I redid what I was working on for this Qstiff idea.

692
00:48:52,585 --> 00:48:56,425
And another interesting property of the Qstiff idea is that it's very, very, very,
very easy

693
00:48:56,425 --> 00:49:02,265
to, because it doesn't even mess with the full node software.

694
00:49:02,265 --> 00:49:07,705
It's very easy to deploy it on a different L1.

695
00:49:08,265 --> 00:49:10,905
So, any L1 can do it, Litecoin or whatever.

696
00:49:10,905 --> 00:49:13,225
So, some people are interested in that.

697
00:49:13,225 --> 00:49:22,025
So, it does expand the new dimension of competition, which is kind of neat.

698
00:49:25,305 --> 00:49:29,705
But yeah, if you go to the software, if you go to the site you can download, you can
see

699
00:49:29,705 --> 00:49:30,105
our software.

700
00:49:30,105 --> 00:49:36,745
If you go to the GitHub LayerTwo Labs organization on GitHub, you can see all the

701
00:49:37,945 --> 00:49:40,745
work that people are doing every day to ship the code.

702
00:49:42,825 --> 00:49:48,585
Please try to run the code, but it may not, because if you pop into the telegram and
tell

703
00:49:48,585 --> 00:49:54,185
us what happened, if you go to work, we, but yeah, it was actually annoying because
months

704
00:49:54,185 --> 00:49:57,145
ago I had like, everything was like working very well.

705
00:49:57,145 --> 00:49:59,225
And then I decided to switch to the Qstiff thing.

706
00:50:00,091 --> 00:50:27,091
Which is pretty complicated because you have Bitcoin Core, then you have this other
thing. And what, what does everything talk to is just a little bit of a grind, but
it is much better because the alternative is to deal with Bitcoin Core, which is,
again, they're determined to, like, Bitcoin Core is set up so that, you know, it's,
you know,

707
00:50:27,891 --> 00:50:33,571
you, it's like, you have to go through a lot of people and justify all of your
decisions.

708
00:50:35,171 --> 00:50:41,011
So, if you are, if you have the best decisions and you are actually have the
smartest,

709
00:50:41,651 --> 00:50:48,051
best idea, you are, you're at a disadvantage because everyone else is still catching
up to you.

710
00:50:49,011 --> 00:50:57,011
It is pretty political and it's easy to be hated when you're participating in the,
these discussions.

711
00:50:57,011 --> 00:51:07,731
I think it got to a very ridiculous point where people are shilling custodial
solutions and they claim, you know, it's the best that we have, and we don't want to
change Bitcoin too much.

712
00:51:07,731 --> 00:51:10,451
So you either use this or you're a shit coiner.

713
00:51:11,011 --> 00:51:19,811
And I don't like it too much. I don't know. I don't like, I like the idea of eCash.

714
00:51:19,811 --> 00:51:31,011
I do get the point that people who use custodial lightning can get better privacy,
but I don't see the value in it when it's being promoted as the scaling and privacy
solution.

715
00:51:31,811 --> 00:51:39,251
The problem with eCash and the problem with this whole, the whole ecosystem is
evolving in the wrong direction.

716
00:51:39,251 --> 00:51:43,171
So it's always just like assuming that people use custodial lightning, what can we
do?

717
00:51:43,971 --> 00:51:50,611
And same with, so, I mean, I love Taj Draja and Joseph Poon, who invented the
lightning network. Those guys are great.

718
00:51:51,491 --> 00:51:57,011
I love Taj. Up next, Taj presented on, can we have an L1 block size increase?

719
00:51:57,651 --> 00:52:03,331
So even Taj has decided to use an enormous political capital as the creator of
lightning.

720
00:52:04,291 --> 00:52:12,291
And he's trying to say, he's trying to, he's trying to expand the creative direction
of saying, can we de-stigmatize the L1 block?

721
00:52:12,291 --> 00:52:18,771
So I don't agree with that, but I think he's doing the right thing by trying to say,
okay, can we just talk about what is actually a good idea?

722
00:52:22,051 --> 00:52:32,771
And so he's great. And then Barack, who invented ARK, Barack is also great, but
these two ideas are not good.

723
00:52:33,331 --> 00:52:43,891
Lightning and ARK will take us in the wrong direction for a lot of reasons, but they
take us in the direction of developers collecting salaries,

724
00:52:45,971 --> 00:52:50,611
confusing things that the VCs will be confused by, so they'll fund.

725
00:52:52,291 --> 00:53:00,371
They take us in this direction of just not caring about the end user's experience
because the experience is terrible,

726
00:53:00,931 --> 00:53:06,131
where you like have to keep refreshing your funds and you need to be, I need a live
connection.

727
00:53:06,131 --> 00:53:09,731
It's terrible for privacy. It's terrible for everything, really.

728
00:53:10,691 --> 00:53:16,371
And it ultimately won't work because the transaction fees on those L2s are not piped
down to the miner.

729
00:53:16,371 --> 00:53:27,091
So they cannot compete with an L2 that does, such as BIP300, which, where the
transaction fees are sent down to the L1 miners.

730
00:53:27,651 --> 00:53:34,851
So ultimately, it's going to be a huge waste of time. And you can see, I mean,
imagine you had time traveled to the past.

731
00:53:36,211 --> 00:53:42,211
You time traveled to Scaling 2, which was in December of 2015. So you go nine years
in the past.

732
00:53:42,211 --> 00:53:48,691
And people said Lightning Network is three months away. And then you time travel to
the past, and then the people there ask you,

733
00:53:48,771 --> 00:54:02,771
Oh, like, you know, how did, you know, what was, what was Lightning Network like in
2016, or in 2017, or in 2019, you know?

734
00:54:05,251 --> 00:54:11,971
These are the same mistaken people who have a track record of being totally wrong.

735
00:54:12,051 --> 00:54:19,331
Again, the Lightning Network, you know, the number of coins is like, you know, four
or 5,000, whereas Wrapped Bitcoin is like 150,000 or something.

736
00:54:20,371 --> 00:54:31,811
So Lightning, so if you are not paying, if you pay 10 times as much attention, if
you think Lightning Network gets a certain amount of attention,

737
00:54:34,691 --> 00:54:40,051
Wrapped Bitcoin should get like, you know, 10 times, that's still too much, too
little for Wrapped Bitcoin.

738
00:54:40,051 --> 00:54:48,451
It's not disproportionate. But of course, Lightning gets a ton of attention, and
these other things that people actually use get no attention.

739
00:54:49,651 --> 00:55:01,251
And so this just speaks to how, and it's like, the other thing is the psychological
and social aspects of it are horrendous, which is people feel very uncomfortable
criticizing Lightning.

740
00:55:01,891 --> 00:55:10,371
If you, when you talk to people in a bar, you know, this happened for years, and I
would bring, I would say, well, you know, like, it doesn't, it doesn't work.

741
00:55:11,011 --> 00:55:14,371
Probably wouldn't say, what do you have against the Lightning Network? I'd say,
well, no one, it doesn't work.

742
00:55:15,411 --> 00:55:21,411
The HTLCs don't work. They don't work when the fee, nothing works when the fees are
high, nothing works when the fees are volatile.

743
00:55:22,131 --> 00:55:30,291
No one wants to be online and have their private key. They need to sign to receive
money. They need to have a hot wallet with their private key on the internet.

744
00:55:32,211 --> 00:55:35,331
None of it works. Like, the whole thing, you can't onboard enough people.

745
00:55:37,011 --> 00:55:45,731
Like, not thinking about it works, but then people would say, oh, you know, you
shouldn't criticize Lightning because then you won't get, like, invited on stage.

746
00:55:46,931 --> 00:55:55,011
People will say things like that. So when you see the integrity collapse like that,
you know, actually, the whole, the whole culture is actually a sinking ship.

747
00:55:55,811 --> 00:56:10,691
And so the, the crazy thing about that is the software space is so competitive that
it means that there may be more opportunities to make a huge amount of money off
betting against these people.

748
00:56:10,691 --> 00:56:19,491
But that's a kind of a complicated conversation. But, but basically, the big problem
with the Lightning Network is the followers. So everyone wants to just look the
other way.

749
00:56:20,451 --> 00:56:26,451
Every Lightning person either is totally ignorant of the facts, or they know that
the facts are bad.

750
00:56:28,131 --> 00:56:41,971
And they are lying about, you know, they're lying to try and hope that they, it's,
it is like Theranos, where they're just trying to get the, or Thomas Edison, where
he didn't have the working light bulb, it was all fake for a while.

751
00:56:42,131 --> 00:56:55,251
And then he, just in time, he figured out how to get the cheap light bulb right
before he ran out of money. And Elizabeth Holmes modeled Theranos on that. All the
demonstrations were fake.

752
00:56:55,251 --> 00:56:59,331
The little blood machine didn't work, and everyone knew it didn't work.

753
00:57:01,331 --> 00:57:07,011
But they were just going to keep it going, try to keep it going until they get it
and make it work. And that is what ARK is.

754
00:57:07,171 --> 00:57:09,731
ARK is just the latest attempt to get it to work.

755
00:57:11,171 --> 00:57:24,451
But it doesn't work. And it will be, think about like how long it will take to even
get the soft fork and to even then get software that understands the dev tooling to
get like the wallets, the front-facing user interface.

756
00:57:24,451 --> 00:57:37,011
And that is stuff that we had, we already had working earlier this year. And when
the CUSF transition is complete, we already have like a graphical user interface, a
wallet and all this other stuff.

757
00:57:37,011 --> 00:57:49,891
So, I don't, I think all this whole thing is, because this is why I'm going on this
speech, as you mentioned, this idea of like eCash.

758
00:57:49,891 --> 00:57:56,851
And okay, if people are using custodial lightning, then they can get, but everything
is going to evolve in the wrong direction.

759
00:57:56,851 --> 00:58:12,931
And that is why BIP300 and CUSF are so controversial, because they put us back on
the right track and they, no one is going to care about what any of these other
people had to say after it's, their incompetence is revealed.

760
00:58:13,891 --> 00:58:21,091
There's a lot to unpack there, but I think ARK is just a more centralized version of
lightning.

761
00:58:21,091 --> 00:58:41,571
And I did interview the guys from Decred and this guy who is one of the lead
developers of the Decred project explained to me that he was able to make the
lightning network much more efficient with something that would require some changes
to the base layer and Bitcoin.

762
00:58:42,211 --> 00:58:53,411
But I don't see or hear anyone talking about this in the Bitcoin space saying, you
know, these guys with their altcoin, they were able to make lightning work more
efficiently.

763
00:58:53,411 --> 00:58:55,411
How about we look into this?

764
00:58:55,411 --> 00:59:10,211
Well, probably, I don't know the details of that, but think about, this is the other
issue, is the more difficult the BIP process is, the more it deters people from even
investigating in the first place.

765
00:59:10,851 --> 00:59:20,051
I mean, we have seen over the last few years, the big line is, oh, we can do this on
Bitcoin without a soft fork.

766
00:59:20,051 --> 00:59:28,051
But the whole point of the soft fork was that you could do it without everyone
upgrading and without, you know, you could do it without a hard fork.

767
00:59:28,051 --> 00:59:30,051
That was the trick before.

768
00:59:31,011 --> 00:59:43,011
So I think people just want to live in a world where, I mean, in one sense, people
say Bitcoin is the best software and you can't improve on it.

769
00:59:43,011 --> 00:59:49,011
But then that's, you know, the reality is that very few people are even looking.

770
00:59:49,011 --> 00:59:53,011
Because, like, what would you do if you found this, what would you do?

771
00:59:53,011 --> 00:59:55,011
You find an improvement.

772
00:59:55,011 --> 00:59:57,011
Oh, I can make lightning more efficient.

773
00:59:57,011 --> 00:59:59,011
What are you going to do?

774
00:59:59,011 --> 01:00:01,011
Most people don't know how.

775
01:00:01,011 --> 01:00:03,011
It's a huge amount of time.

776
01:00:03,011 --> 01:00:17,011
Then everyone will hate the BIP, because now another perverse incentive is that
since the BIPs are not activating, there's this jostling in place for line, in the
line of activation.

777
01:00:17,011 --> 01:00:21,011
Because it's perceived as an either or, when in reality, we should just activate
them all.

778
01:00:21,011 --> 01:00:31,011
So it's perceived, like, if you have a new BIP, like, you have CPV and then someone
has TX hash, it's like, which one are we going to do first?

779
01:00:31,011 --> 01:00:33,011
When in reality, we should just activate them all.

780
01:00:33,011 --> 01:00:37,011
Because we can always deactivate them later, so it makes no difference.

781
01:00:37,011 --> 01:00:43,011
But now, if you have a new BIP, then all the other BIP authors are going to, like,
they have an incentive to criticize your BIP.

782
01:00:43,011 --> 01:00:47,011
And then you get this table, which I think the floppy disk guy is great.

783
01:00:47,011 --> 01:00:55,011
The previous version of that table was for SegWit2x, and that was to create
political opposition to SegWit2x.

784
01:00:55,011 --> 01:00:59,011
And I was also on there as saying SegWit2x is not a good idea.

785
01:00:59,011 --> 01:01:11,011
And one of the reasons why I said is that there's no reason for SegWit2x, because we
could just have large block L2 Drivechain that was back in 2017.

786
01:01:12,011 --> 01:01:18,011
So now the floppy disk guy has copied that, and he has made it multidimensional.

787
01:01:18,011 --> 01:01:22,011
So you can now weigh in on multiple BIPs.

788
01:01:22,011 --> 01:01:27,011
But this is why the prediction market would be good.

789
01:01:27,011 --> 01:01:38,011
Because the prediction market would be something that pays off a certain amount of
money based on, like, you know, when the BIPs activate.

790
01:01:39,011 --> 01:01:46,011
And my guess is that the smart money would be betting that none of them will
activate for a while.

791
01:01:46,011 --> 01:01:55,011
Even when they did LNHance and CTV, the activation parameters, like, they don't even
start for, like, a few months.

792
01:01:55,011 --> 01:02:00,011
And then the miner signaling period is, like, multiple years.

793
01:02:00,011 --> 01:02:03,011
And then they activate in, like, 2028 or something.

794
01:02:04,011 --> 01:02:17,011
So the fact that people would even consider that shows you that how little everyone
still understands about, like, the soft forks can be turned on with a soft fork and
then shut off with a soft fork.

795
01:02:17,011 --> 01:02:20,011
And it's true that we don't want to create emergency situations.

796
01:02:20,011 --> 01:02:29,011
But, like, what the emergency situation is, like, people are spending money into a
certain type of script and then spending money out of it.

797
01:02:29,011 --> 01:02:32,011
It's very limited, the emergency.

798
01:02:32,011 --> 01:02:36,011
The whole thing is about political control.

799
01:02:36,011 --> 01:02:51,011
Because the more that the L1 changes with respect to these optional opt-in soft
forks, which, again, Satoshi put in the op-nops exactly for them to be used for this
purpose, and they have already been used for this purpose.

800
01:02:51,011 --> 01:03:01,011
But the more that the L1 changes, the easier it is to build a better mousetrap, an
outflank lightning, an outflank arc.

801
01:03:01,011 --> 01:03:04,011
So people want to build a little fiefdom.

802
01:03:04,011 --> 01:03:07,011
They want to have, like, a lightning fiefdom.

803
01:03:07,011 --> 01:03:10,011
And then they don't want Bitcoin to improve.

804
01:03:10,011 --> 01:03:12,011
And including the custodial fiefdom.

805
01:03:12,011 --> 01:03:14,011
They want the custodial fiefdom.

806
01:03:15,011 --> 01:03:30,011
The last thing you want, if you want people to have their Bitcoin in a legal
framework, like a corporation.

807
01:03:30,011 --> 01:03:41,011
So if you want a corporation to have Bitcoin in custody with BitGo or something, or
Fireblocks or whatever, but it's protected by a legal document.

808
01:03:42,011 --> 01:03:52,011
The worst thing in the world for BitGo would be if multisig improved, if it was
easier to run a full node, and that improved, key management improved.

809
01:03:52,011 --> 01:04:02,011
The worst thing in the world for, like, Michael Saylor's corporatist position would
be if more people took an interest in running full nodes and taking self-custody.

810
01:04:02,011 --> 01:04:07,011
Then they would think, why am I giving my clients to someone else?

811
01:04:08,011 --> 01:04:18,011
So the custodial fiefdom is one of these many fiefdoms that the more L1, the worse
L1 gets, the better something else gets.

812
01:04:18,011 --> 01:04:22,011
So that is part of it.

813
01:04:23,011 --> 01:04:30,011
Today, we would really have to weigh the, you know, like, the computers and internet
speeds have improved enormously.

814
01:04:30,011 --> 01:04:41,011
The idea that the full node would be negatively affected by these opcode types is,
you know, like, absurd.

815
01:04:41,011 --> 01:04:44,011
There's a lot of concern trolling, right?

816
01:04:44,011 --> 01:04:48,011
People come up with ideas that are no longer feasible.

817
01:04:48,011 --> 01:04:56,011
It seems like some guys are stuck in 2017, and that was the peak of their
involvement and their willingness to learn.

818
01:04:56,011 --> 01:05:01,011
And afterwards, they just embraced this ideology where they said, you know, we're
the smartest guys in the room.

819
01:05:01,011 --> 01:05:03,011
Blockchains don't scale.

820
01:05:03,011 --> 01:05:06,011
Don't even think about doing this and that.

821
01:05:06,011 --> 01:05:09,011
You can't scale blockchains with other blockchains.

822
01:05:09,011 --> 01:05:11,011
You should build second layers.

823
01:05:11,011 --> 01:05:14,011
You should do client-side validation, even if it's hard.

824
01:05:14,011 --> 01:05:20,011
Maybe take 10 more years to figure it out.

825
01:05:20,011 --> 01:05:23,011
I agree. Yes, I agree.

826
01:05:23,011 --> 01:05:29,011
And even so, I'm not sure if you take any sides in this whole Covenant situation.

827
01:05:29,011 --> 01:05:34,011
I do know that some Covenants can enable Drivechains, even though it's not the ideal
way to do it.

828
01:05:34,011 --> 01:05:38,011
And it doesn't grant the users the right protections.

829
01:05:38,011 --> 01:05:45,011
But my point is that I did join the Cult of the Covenant group on Telegram.

830
01:05:45,011 --> 01:06:00,011
And people pointed out to me that I should look into the conversations that were
being had in 2021 or 2022 between Adam Back and Jeremy Rubin.

831
01:06:00,011 --> 01:06:06,011
And it's fascinating to see how Adam Back basically joined the group, spent some
time trolling the project.

832
01:06:06,011 --> 01:06:15,011
And within two weeks, he was able to demoralize everyone and delay the activation
debates by another two years.

833
01:06:15,011 --> 01:06:18,011
Yeah, I don't know if he intended to do that or not.

834
01:06:18,011 --> 01:06:22,011
Because, of course, he is a sharp guy.

835
01:06:22,011 --> 01:06:25,011
But there's also – let me finish.

836
01:06:25,011 --> 01:06:32,011
There's also the marketing side that's trying to portray Jeremy as this insane guy
who has no idea what he wants.

837
01:06:32,011 --> 01:06:37,011
There's Grubbles, who is very much against anything that Jeremy does.

838
01:06:37,011 --> 01:06:43,011
And my suspicion is that Blockstream is either working on a CTV alternative.

839
01:06:43,011 --> 01:06:48,011
And they're going to promote that as the soft fork that we need to push forward.

840
01:06:48,011 --> 01:06:54,011
Or else, maybe they just want to maintain political control.

841
01:06:54,011 --> 01:06:56,011
Because Blockstream is not a profitable company.

842
01:06:56,011 --> 01:06:59,011
They're not selling anything that's profitable.

843
01:06:59,011 --> 01:07:03,011
I think mining might be the only product that's making them money.

844
01:07:03,011 --> 01:07:06,011
No, I think mining is certainly losing them money.

845
01:07:06,011 --> 01:07:10,011
Liquid is not making money. The Jade Harbor wallet is not making money.

846
01:07:10,011 --> 01:07:13,011
Mining is so real that you cannot fake.

847
01:07:13,011 --> 01:07:17,011
You cannot just get up there and say, well, we have Adam Back.

848
01:07:17,011 --> 01:07:25,011
Because Adam Back is great, but it's not like Adam Back can just smile at the miners
and make them more profitable or something.

849
01:07:25,011 --> 01:07:28,011
But I think the sun is setting on Blockstream.

850
01:07:28,011 --> 01:07:32,011
It's a miracle it made it this long, in a way, because they don't put anything out.

851
01:07:32,011 --> 01:07:36,011
I don't know how much actual – I think people love Adam Back, including me.

852
01:07:36,011 --> 01:07:43,011
And Adam Back is a huge supporter of mine, which I appreciate.

853
01:07:43,011 --> 01:07:48,011
But it doesn't just make a profitable company.

854
01:07:48,011 --> 01:07:53,011
Okay, so let me – a lot of different things to say.

855
01:07:53,011 --> 01:08:02,011
So my position on covenants is that the entire covenants project is a mental
illness.

856
01:08:02,011 --> 01:08:05,011
Every single one of them is a mistake.

857
01:08:05,011 --> 01:08:12,011
But nonetheless, we should still activate all these soft forks because they are
completely harmless.

858
01:08:12,011 --> 01:08:23,011
The idea that we must debate a soft fork is just Luke Dashjr.'s mistaken idea of
needing consensus for soft forks, which we don't.

859
01:08:23,011 --> 01:08:31,011
And we can – miners should turn them on and off as they think that they will
increase the price of Bitcoin.

860
01:08:31,011 --> 01:08:38,011
Imagine a completely different conversation where Foundry announces and they say,
CTV has been invented by Jeremy Rubin.

861
01:08:39,011 --> 01:08:45,011
And we hope that this will bring these new use cases and new options to Bitcoin, and
we hope that this will make us more money.

862
01:08:45,011 --> 01:08:55,011
And in fact, as a publicly traded company, we must – we have a fiduciary duty to
maximize our own shareholder value, and we must.

863
01:08:55,011 --> 01:08:58,011
That would be a rational world, actually.

864
01:08:58,011 --> 01:09:01,011
But then all these people say, oh, if we do soft fork, we might do this.

865
01:09:01,011 --> 01:09:13,011
This is – again, this is all because people do not want the L1 to improve because it
alters which L2 tradeoffs are better.

866
01:09:13,011 --> 01:09:18,011
So, for example, people who are bad on BidVM and you tool the whole thing on BidVM.

867
01:09:21,011 --> 01:09:25,011
So, it's ironic because Robin Linus is a huge fan of mine.

868
01:09:25,011 --> 01:09:26,011
I think he's great also.

869
01:09:26,011 --> 01:09:28,011
But I think – and Sergio is also a huge fan.

870
01:09:28,011 --> 01:09:30,011
Everyone's a huge – but Sergio is doing like a BidVM thing.

871
01:09:31,011 --> 01:09:41,011
Now, he's not going to want BIP300 to activate because all the work he's done
related to BidVM would be unnecessary, and it would just not do anything.

872
01:09:41,011 --> 01:09:43,011
So, this is the real issue is people make investments.

873
01:09:43,011 --> 01:09:53,011
They make specific investments in their tech stack that rely on the L1 being a
certain way.

874
01:09:54,011 --> 01:10:07,011
All these people are making a huge mistake because, as I've said, the end game, when
the miners care more about fees than the block reward, the end game will all be
mined L2s.

875
01:10:07,011 --> 01:10:11,011
L2s that pay the transaction fees to miners.

876
01:10:11,011 --> 01:10:14,011
So, I have a lock on the end game.

877
01:10:14,011 --> 01:10:21,011
There's no way – I mean, of course, anything can happen in technology, but this is
all a mistake.

878
01:10:22,011 --> 01:10:24,011
And I don't think any – people really don't even care.

879
01:10:24,011 --> 01:10:26,011
They just think, oh, I can be like Lightning Labs.

880
01:10:26,011 --> 01:10:32,011
I can raise $55 million, $90 million, whatever, and we'll just raise all this money.

881
01:10:34,011 --> 01:10:36,011
People don't even care about the fact that it's not going to work.

882
01:10:39,011 --> 01:10:40,011
And it's like an ego thing, too.

883
01:10:40,011 --> 01:10:46,011
With Blockstream, they have simplicity, although no one has heard from simplicity in
a while.

884
01:10:46,011 --> 01:10:48,011
So, is it still around?

885
01:10:49,011 --> 01:10:50,011
Simplicity.

886
01:10:50,011 --> 01:10:55,011
The joke is that it should be renamed complexity, but whatever.

887
01:10:55,011 --> 01:10:56,011
So, they want that.

888
01:10:56,011 --> 01:10:58,011
So, again, this is the incentive.

889
01:10:58,011 --> 01:11:09,011
When you have a situation where it's difficult to activate the BIP, where the BIP
activation is scarce, you must care about which one is first in line.

890
01:11:09,011 --> 01:11:11,011
So, then the BIPs compete with each other.

891
01:11:11,011 --> 01:11:13,011
But this is all – all of it's irrational.

892
01:11:13,011 --> 01:11:15,011
So, the entire covenants thing is a mistake.

893
01:11:15,011 --> 01:11:17,011
Covenants are a mistake.

894
01:11:17,011 --> 01:11:19,011
Lightning was a mistake.

895
01:11:19,011 --> 01:11:23,011
The last nine years have been wasted and have made the project worse.

896
01:11:23,011 --> 01:11:25,011
We've been making the project worse and worse and worse and worse.

897
01:11:28,011 --> 01:11:30,011
BIP300 teleports us out of this, back to safety.

898
01:11:35,011 --> 01:11:41,011
But, nonetheless, all of the – I mean, I thought about adding my name to the table,
but I don't know if I should or not.

899
01:11:41,011 --> 01:11:42,011
I would just put, like, weak.

900
01:11:42,011 --> 01:11:44,011
There's one that's, like, better than nothing.

901
01:11:44,011 --> 01:11:46,011
I would just put that for all of them.

902
01:11:46,011 --> 01:11:48,011
But I don't know if that would be seen as a troll.

903
01:11:48,011 --> 01:11:50,011
People would think, oh, he's just trolling the table.

904
01:11:51,011 --> 01:11:54,011
But that's my honest opinion, is that all of them are better than nothing.

905
01:11:54,011 --> 01:11:56,011
All of them are perfectly safe.

906
01:11:56,011 --> 01:12:00,011
The idea that we need consensus for softworks is flatly untrue.

907
01:12:02,011 --> 01:12:08,011
And, in fact, it is just an excuse for all these people to pretend to be important
by talking to each other on Twitter instead of shipping something that actually
works.

908
01:12:10,011 --> 01:12:12,011
And then competing for real users.

909
01:12:12,011 --> 01:12:15,011
The users are not going to use something where the payment can fail.

910
01:12:16,011 --> 01:12:29,011
So, the Lightning – your Lightning stack, your Arc stack, it needs to have a – it
needs to hit 399 times out of 400.

911
01:12:32,011 --> 01:12:33,011
You know what I mean?

912
01:12:33,011 --> 01:12:48,011
Like, if you have two cards, you have a Visa and a MasterCard, and you know that
maybe MasterCard will miss one out of every 200 times.

913
01:12:48,011 --> 01:12:50,011
And Visa always works.

914
01:12:52,011 --> 01:12:54,011
And you're in line at the supermarket.

915
01:12:56,011 --> 01:12:58,011
You will never take out the MasterCard.

916
01:12:58,011 --> 01:13:00,011
You'll say, oh, this one doesn't work sometimes.

917
01:13:00,011 --> 01:13:01,011
It's embarrassing.

918
01:13:02,011 --> 01:13:03,011
It's annoying.

919
01:13:03,011 --> 01:13:11,011
I mean, so, of course, there's a tradeoff, and there's some number, but really,
Lightning is too interactive.

920
01:13:12,011 --> 01:13:13,011
The fees are high.

921
01:13:13,011 --> 01:13:22,011
When you – it's either custodial, a wallet of Satoshi gets pulled from the App
Store, or to actually make it work, the fees are high.

922
01:13:23,011 --> 01:13:25,011
It's difficult to manage the liquidity.

923
01:13:25,011 --> 01:13:31,011
People cheat on managing the liquidity with the submarine swaps, where there's – for
every Lightning transaction, there's an L1 transaction.

924
01:13:31,011 --> 01:13:32,011
And it's like, well, wait a minute.

925
01:13:32,011 --> 01:13:35,011
I thought you were doing that.

926
01:13:35,011 --> 01:13:39,011
You were taking care of the – I thought I didn't have to use L1.

927
01:13:39,011 --> 01:13:41,011
That's the whole point of this.

928
01:13:41,011 --> 01:13:45,011
So, none of this stuff will be competitive in the long run.

929
01:13:45,011 --> 01:13:47,011
It's all just a developer grift.

930
01:13:47,011 --> 01:13:51,011
So, the whole Covenants thing is – but nonetheless, we should activate all the
software.

931
01:13:51,011 --> 01:13:52,011
So, I've been repeating.

932
01:13:52,011 --> 01:13:53,011
That's my point.

933
01:13:55,011 --> 01:14:03,011
I think that's the best approach, to let the free market decide, to let the users
try all of them and figure out for themselves if there's anything valuable.

934
01:14:04,011 --> 01:14:08,011
Because obviously, there's going to be investments in one or the other.

935
01:14:09,011 --> 01:14:17,011
And maybe this might dictate which one is going to win eventually, because marketing
and user experience are also important.

936
01:14:17,011 --> 01:14:19,011
It's not just the best idea that wins.

937
01:14:20,011 --> 01:14:26,011
But it's important to have competition for finding solutions to scale Bitcoin and
make it more private.

938
01:14:27,011 --> 01:14:29,011
It's just that it seems like some people have given up.

939
01:14:30,011 --> 01:14:32,011
The ETF seems to be the scaling layer.

940
01:14:33,011 --> 01:14:41,011
And for privacy, I went to Monerotopia last month, and I did see that quite a lot of
OG Bitcoiners were there.

941
01:14:41,011 --> 01:14:46,011
And it seems like they sort of gave up on the idea of even trying to improve privacy
in Bitcoin.

942
01:14:46,011 --> 01:14:48,011
And now that we've seen Bitcoin, they're saying, OK, we're fine.

943
01:14:48,011 --> 01:14:55,011
We're going to have not 21 million, but maybe 100 million coins in the world for the
stuff that we want.

944
01:14:55,011 --> 01:14:56,011
And that's fine.

945
01:14:59,011 --> 01:15:01,011
Well, I mean, Monero is like...

946
01:15:01,292 --> 01:15:23,852
The Monero people are have their like, you can only serve one god, right? So Monero
people are serving the privacy god. And as I explained earlier, the official
position of Bitcoin is not that we will make Bitcoin as private as possible as
rapidly as possible.

947
01:15:24,412 --> 01:15:32,532
So it's intentionally not doing that, unfortunately.

948
01:15:34,372 --> 01:15:44,732
So this open, if anyone who wants to be creative and do something new must do this
different thing.

949
01:15:47,572 --> 01:15:50,412
You know, they must do the altcoin route.

950
01:15:51,412 --> 01:15:57,532
I mean, that's where you find the interesting experimentation, because it doesn't
have the same boundaries.

951
01:15:57,852 --> 01:16:06,092
You can see people actually trying something like there are a lot of academic papers
that get published with ideas and proposals.

952
01:16:06,652 --> 01:16:09,572
I did have Nick Jonas from...

953
01:16:10,052 --> 01:16:16,692
No, it's Jonas Nick from Blockstream and Liam Egan from Alpenlabs.

954
01:16:17,532 --> 01:16:19,692
And also was the third one.

955
01:16:19,732 --> 01:16:24,492
Oh, Robin Linus from ZK Sync or Zero Sync.

956
01:16:25,372 --> 01:16:43,412
So they did co-author this paper in which they described shielded client-side
validation and how that can work as a protocol on top of Bitcoin and to provide a
large number of transactions per second with good privacy, Zcash level privacy.

957
01:16:44,532 --> 01:16:48,132
And that's fascinating, except that there's almost zero demand for it.

958
01:16:49,052 --> 01:16:58,252
So they put out this paper in the wild and the reactions from Bitcoiners were at
most a retweet, but they don't seem to care.

959
01:16:59,932 --> 01:17:11,212
And it takes money, it takes a few years of your life to build something like this,
and if you do it and then you discover that there's no demand, I think that's one of
the most painful experiences you can have.

960
01:17:11,812 --> 01:17:14,772
Well, I mean, I don't really know. You might be right about that.

961
01:17:14,772 --> 01:17:29,772
I do think like, you know, science is kind of like everyone is someone is lost on
the mountainside and we need the rescue operation to find them, you know, and so
someone takes the north side and someone takes the west side or whatever.

962
01:17:29,772 --> 01:17:32,292
We all were a search party, right?

963
01:17:32,292 --> 01:17:34,532
And we all go out, we're looking for the person.

964
01:17:34,532 --> 01:17:38,652
And then the other person and then someone you hear on the radio, oh, we found the
person.

965
01:17:38,652 --> 01:17:44,852
OK, then we all meet back at base camp, you know, at the lodge and they say, where
was they?

966
01:17:44,852 --> 01:17:48,372
And then, oh, they were in the they were on the south part of the mountain.

967
01:17:49,772 --> 01:17:58,012
It's not like you say, oh, I searched the west part, but it was, but it was, but I
wasted my time.

968
01:17:58,732 --> 01:18:00,892
But it was, but I wasted my time.

969
01:18:03,292 --> 01:18:03,792
Right.

970
01:18:05,052 --> 01:18:08,892
That's you wouldn't say that because you would say, oh, I.

971
01:18:11,212 --> 01:18:14,492
We all had to look everywhere to find the thing that worked.

972
01:18:16,172 --> 01:18:17,292
Does that make sense or no?

973
01:18:21,692 --> 01:18:22,492
It does make sense.

974
01:18:22,492 --> 01:18:24,332
Sorry, I was reading the comments.

975
01:18:24,412 --> 01:18:30,652
It seems like we have a very colorful and active chat, but people commenting stuff,

976
01:18:30,652 --> 01:18:31,452
they're saying anything good.

977
01:18:32,972 --> 01:18:34,492
They do say some good stuff.

978
01:18:35,452 --> 01:18:39,452
So I guess at one point we're going to stop and read what they're saying.

979
01:18:39,452 --> 01:18:43,852
And I do agree with your point that like people have to choose how to invest their
time.

980
01:18:44,412 --> 01:18:46,332
And if they if they look at this and they think.

981
01:18:47,692 --> 01:18:51,852
Well, no one cares, then, of course, they're going to, you know, they'll be at
Manero Topia or

982
01:18:51,852 --> 01:18:52,652
whatever.

983
01:18:52,652 --> 01:18:57,212
So then the maximalist position starts to look really stupid because then it's just
like, oh,

984
01:18:57,852 --> 01:19:01,052
you have your thing that you really want to do that other people want you to do.

985
01:19:01,052 --> 01:19:02,732
And that will actually have an effect on the world.

986
01:19:02,732 --> 01:19:03,852
And then it will make people money.

987
01:19:03,852 --> 01:19:05,212
And they'd be so happy that you did it.

988
01:19:06,092 --> 01:19:07,212
You shouldn't do that thing.

989
01:19:07,212 --> 01:19:09,932
Like, you know, whatever, like then.

990
01:19:11,052 --> 01:19:14,012
But well, OK, I mean, I mean, do you want to read it?

991
01:19:14,012 --> 01:19:14,652
What did they say?

992
01:19:14,652 --> 01:19:17,132
Did anyone say anyone have a good question or anything?

993
01:19:18,572 --> 01:19:19,612
We'll get to that.

994
01:19:19,612 --> 01:19:25,612
I just also wanted to mention that I did an interview with the guys from Starkware
because

995
01:19:25,612 --> 01:19:31,772
they were working on this proposal to do covenants without a soft fork.

996
01:19:31,772 --> 01:19:32,272
Right.

997
01:19:33,292 --> 01:19:36,332
With Tapscript and something that's already available.

998
01:19:36,332 --> 01:19:39,212
But that's one of the most expensive ways to do a covenant.

999
01:19:39,212 --> 01:19:45,292
It's almost like a way to prove that, yes, you can do this, but no, it's not useful.

1000
01:19:46,092 --> 01:19:51,132
So, of course, you need some sort of covenant to make it affordable for the end
user.

1001
01:19:52,572 --> 01:19:54,092
There's two interpretations of this.

1002
01:19:55,692 --> 01:19:58,172
The good interpretation, and this is what I think people are doing.

1003
01:20:00,412 --> 01:20:04,732
Similarly to I think this is part of what Andrew Polster was doing of.

1004
01:20:06,412 --> 01:20:06,912
Saying.

1005
01:20:08,092 --> 01:20:12,092
Right now, it's basically saying, listen, this thing that you think we should never,

1006
01:20:12,092 --> 01:20:13,292
ever, ever be able to do.

1007
01:20:14,092 --> 01:20:15,452
We actually can do it now.

1008
01:20:15,452 --> 01:20:16,892
It's just kind of expensive.

1009
01:20:16,892 --> 01:20:18,332
So why don't you just drop the issue?

1010
01:20:19,772 --> 01:20:21,212
So I think that's a good interpretation.

1011
01:20:21,932 --> 01:20:25,612
All of these things also have a cynical interpretation, which is that this is all

1012
01:20:25,612 --> 01:20:28,332
just for the attention, and this is just to show off.

1013
01:20:29,292 --> 01:20:30,732
Look at my look at my weird paper.

1014
01:20:32,252 --> 01:20:34,012
I can make weird collisions, you know.

1015
01:20:35,532 --> 01:20:37,372
So that is the cynical interpretation.

1016
01:20:38,972 --> 01:20:41,772
Kind of similarly for CUSF, for the software CUSF.

1017
01:20:42,572 --> 01:20:45,852
It's like, listen, these softworks will happen if they make miners money.

1018
01:20:45,852 --> 01:20:47,692
They will not happen if they do not.

1019
01:20:47,692 --> 01:20:50,172
Miners are the only one who throws the switch.

1020
01:20:50,172 --> 01:20:55,292
So complete non-issue now.

1021
01:20:55,292 --> 01:21:01,052
The question of how to activate softworks, which is the question, doesn't exist
anymore.

1022
01:21:02,972 --> 01:21:09,692
And yeah, so those are the two interpretations of that.

1023
01:21:12,012 --> 01:21:15,212
I mean, what will people actually use at the end of the day?

1024
01:21:15,212 --> 01:21:16,812
That's what I'm most interested in.

1025
01:21:16,812 --> 01:21:17,692
I try to build that.

1026
01:21:18,492 --> 01:21:23,052
I think that is the long run winner.

1027
01:21:23,052 --> 01:21:28,332
And the other stuff, I think people don't actually care if anyone uses it or not.

1028
01:21:28,972 --> 01:21:30,572
People will want privacy.

1029
01:21:32,572 --> 01:21:35,692
It's interesting that people have been trained not to use the software.

1030
01:21:35,692 --> 01:21:39,052
They've been trained to just go on Coinbase and buy Bitcoin the same way you would
buy

1031
01:21:39,052 --> 01:21:41,292
a stock, the same way you would buy MicroStrategy.

1032
01:21:41,292 --> 01:21:42,412
People have been trained to do that.

1033
01:21:42,412 --> 01:21:48,972
So, and again, the worst the software is, if there's no user-friendly multisig, if
there's

1034
01:21:48,972 --> 01:21:56,652
no user-friendly wallets, Bitcoin Core didn't support the BIP39 word list for a long
time.

1035
01:21:56,652 --> 01:21:58,252
And as far as I know, it still doesn't.

1036
01:21:58,252 --> 01:21:59,372
I haven't really checked in a while.

1037
01:22:00,252 --> 01:22:00,892
No, they don't.

1038
01:22:01,692 --> 01:22:08,492
Why is the multisig is, you are 100 times more likely, I'm making this up, 80% of
statistics

1039
01:22:08,492 --> 01:22:14,092
are made up, but you are very likely to just destroy all of your own money if you
try to

1040
01:22:14,092 --> 01:22:14,892
use multisig.

1041
01:22:15,452 --> 01:22:19,852
Because people do not know that you have to back up the whole thing with all the
keys

1042
01:22:20,492 --> 01:22:26,412
and the public keys and the number, the quorum number.

1043
01:22:28,012 --> 01:22:29,452
You have to back up this whole thing.

1044
01:22:30,332 --> 01:22:31,852
The private keys are not enough.

1045
01:22:33,052 --> 01:22:35,452
You need to back up this giant file.

1046
01:22:35,852 --> 01:22:38,652
And people don't know that.

1047
01:22:38,652 --> 01:22:41,612
So if you try to, but we could easily fix all this.

1048
01:22:43,452 --> 01:22:46,812
But there's no interest in the front end.

1049
01:22:46,812 --> 01:22:49,612
There's no interest in the graphical user interface.

1050
01:22:50,172 --> 01:22:51,932
There's no interest in the user experience.

1051
01:22:52,492 --> 01:22:55,132
In other words, people want the software to just continue to get worse.

1052
01:22:55,132 --> 01:23:01,052
And that's what, and then people, you know, whatever, Ava Chao, whatever, they just
say,

1053
01:23:01,052 --> 01:23:02,252
that's exactly what we want.

1054
01:23:02,252 --> 01:23:04,252
We want this status quo.

1055
01:23:06,572 --> 01:23:07,372
So that's the problem.

1056
01:23:09,052 --> 01:23:12,172
They say, if we change it and it gets worse, we'll be blamed.

1057
01:23:12,172 --> 01:23:14,332
So then there's zero changes, there's zero improvements.

1058
01:23:16,172 --> 01:23:18,412
Well, that's why I still do the podcast, right?

1059
01:23:18,412 --> 01:23:25,532
Because it's easy to get jaded and disillusioned and have no hopes for the future
and just

1060
01:23:25,532 --> 01:23:30,332
assume by default that Bitcoin is never improving and we're playing it safe.

1061
01:23:30,332 --> 01:23:33,372
It's never improving and we're politically captured.

1062
01:23:33,372 --> 01:23:38,572
And this is actually a delegated proof of stake system where the guy with the most
coins

1063
01:23:38,572 --> 01:23:40,732
can actually shut down innovation.

1064
01:23:41,852 --> 01:23:43,532
But I'm trying to change the culture.

1065
01:23:43,532 --> 01:23:47,692
I'm trying to present to people that there is a lot of interesting stuff out there.

1066
01:23:49,132 --> 01:23:52,492
Listen to it with an open mind, try to understand what it does.

1067
01:23:52,492 --> 01:23:56,972
Look at it as software and don't think too much about the money aspect of it.

1068
01:23:57,852 --> 01:24:01,052
Because it makes no sense as long as it's not even activated.

1069
01:24:01,052 --> 01:24:02,732
Just experiment with stuff.

1070
01:24:04,012 --> 01:24:09,612
Well, you won't get the last laugh because eventually the difference between what
the

1071
01:24:09,612 --> 01:24:16,332
technology will support, like what Eric Voskel can do and what all these other
people can

1072
01:24:16,332 --> 01:24:25,212
do, everyone else, Fluffy Pony and everyone, Roger Ver, because adoption is the kind
of

1073
01:24:25,212 --> 01:24:26,012
technology.

1074
01:24:26,012 --> 01:24:28,492
So there's a kind of innovation.

1075
01:24:28,492 --> 01:24:31,212
I suppose it's a kind of innovation if it's not a kind of technology.

1076
01:24:32,892 --> 01:24:38,332
So if Bitcoin Core stays here and the state of the art of the technology increases,
then

1077
01:24:38,332 --> 01:24:39,132
there'll be this gap.

1078
01:24:40,892 --> 01:24:44,252
And if something cannot go on forever, it won't.

1079
01:24:45,452 --> 01:24:50,652
So eventually the gap will be so big that it'll be possible for anyone to just
launch

1080
01:24:50,732 --> 01:24:55,372
a new coin that scales to the whole planet and has user-friendly multi-sig and it
has

1081
01:24:55,372 --> 01:24:58,332
bit 39 and it has sidechains and it has privacy.

1082
01:24:58,332 --> 01:25:04,412
Eventually the tech stack will get so powerful when just anyone can do that and the
full

1083
01:25:04,412 --> 01:25:10,572
nodes fit on everyone's laptop and everything syncs in 35 minutes despite processing

1084
01:25:11,612 --> 01:25:12,972
transactions for 8 billion people.

1085
01:25:13,932 --> 01:25:19,932
The tech stack will get so big that it will eventually just become whatever is
adopted

1086
01:25:19,932 --> 01:25:21,612
fastest will have the network effect.

1087
01:25:23,532 --> 01:25:28,092
And you understand that that will be once you reach a situation where something's
big

1088
01:25:28,092 --> 01:25:34,732
and it has network effect and something smaller, which is for the non-network effect
reasons

1089
01:25:34,732 --> 01:25:40,092
it is better, it catches up, then it will be a blowout and that thing will take
over.

1090
01:25:40,092 --> 01:25:41,132
That will go planets.

1091
01:25:41,212 --> 01:25:47,372
So one thing, one coin will reach planetary scale and there will only be one
survivor.

1092
01:25:48,412 --> 01:25:51,132
I have always believed that and I still believe that.

1093
01:25:51,852 --> 01:25:55,532
None of the reasons why that has, you know, because you have a strong network
effects,

1094
01:25:55,532 --> 01:25:57,532
but you also have strong other effects.

1095
01:25:58,572 --> 01:26:01,452
If only the network effects matter, then the US dollar would win.

1096
01:26:03,852 --> 01:26:07,772
But there are these other effects.

1097
01:26:07,852 --> 01:26:12,412
One is that it's very hard to use the US dollar in a country that, you know, like in
Europe

1098
01:26:12,412 --> 01:26:14,812
or in, no one wants to give up the seniorage benefits.

1099
01:26:15,532 --> 01:26:19,612
Another issue is that using the US dollar in the United States has the disadvantage

1100
01:26:19,612 --> 01:26:21,052
that you pay the inflation tax.

1101
01:26:23,052 --> 01:26:24,732
Which is going to be very high because our budget.

1102
01:26:26,172 --> 01:26:30,172
I mean, maybe the funny thing is it would be disastrous for Bitcoin if Elon could
actually

1103
01:26:30,172 --> 01:26:35,852
cut 2 trillion from the deficit and balance the budget and we don't get the whole
money

1104
01:26:35,932 --> 01:26:41,132
supply shrinking again and there'd be deflation and there'd be American prosperity
is in some

1105
01:26:41,132 --> 01:26:42,172
sense bad for Bitcoin.

1106
01:26:43,212 --> 01:26:48,732
Not completely, you know, it's a little more nuanced than that, but anyway, you're
going

1107
01:26:48,732 --> 01:26:51,292
to get the last laugh because the technology will continue to improve.

1108
01:26:53,132 --> 01:26:59,772
And eventually it will be, you know, an iPhone versus a Motorola Razr or something,
you know.

1109
01:27:00,732 --> 01:27:06,492
Yeah, at the end of the day, it is technology, even if some people worship the
current version

1110
01:27:06,492 --> 01:27:11,132
of the code, like it's some sort of holy scripture.

1111
01:27:11,132 --> 01:27:12,572
Is that the way you describe it?

1112
01:27:14,332 --> 01:27:20,332
Holy textbook or whatever, they just make some assumptions that this is where it's
at

1113
01:27:20,332 --> 01:27:22,492
and it can never get replaced.

1114
01:27:22,492 --> 01:27:26,012
And, you know, it's only been 16 years and.

1115
01:27:26,732 --> 01:27:33,612
You know, it's only been 16 years and Bitcoin was built with technology, with
libraries

1116
01:27:33,612 --> 01:27:36,092
that were available in the early 2000s.

1117
01:27:38,012 --> 01:27:42,812
In the meantime, we have a lot of interesting stuff that was built by virtue of
Bitcoin

1118
01:27:42,812 --> 01:27:49,612
existing, and it's only a matter of just reaching not just scale, but also the
features that

1119
01:27:49,612 --> 01:27:50,252
people want.

1120
01:27:50,972 --> 01:27:52,892
And I do see some of that in Solana.

1121
01:27:52,892 --> 01:27:55,292
Of course, it doesn't scale because it's centralized.

1122
01:27:56,492 --> 01:28:02,572
So it's silly to assume that it does scale, but it seems like they're pushing and
they

1123
01:28:02,572 --> 01:28:07,612
have a very optimistic philosophy for reaching their goals.

1124
01:28:07,612 --> 01:28:11,452
And possibly that's why they keep on succeeding.

1125
01:28:13,052 --> 01:28:18,252
I mean, they have more decentralized now than they were in, I think, January 2022,
when

1126
01:28:18,252 --> 01:28:19,532
there was just one node.

1127
01:28:20,492 --> 01:28:23,532
So that's part of the spectrum.

1128
01:28:23,532 --> 01:28:28,092
We're going to explore the whole spectrum of decentralization.

1129
01:28:28,092 --> 01:28:33,532
So there will be totally centralized, very centralized, very decentralized,
everything

1130
01:28:33,532 --> 01:28:34,332
in between, probably.

1131
01:28:36,172 --> 01:28:40,652
I used to hate Eric Voorhees for making this point that decentralization is a
spectrum.

1132
01:28:40,652 --> 01:28:41,212
I know, the competition point.

1133
01:28:41,212 --> 01:28:42,892
No, he got the last laugh on the competition point.

1134
01:28:42,892 --> 01:28:43,452
He did.

1135
01:28:43,452 --> 01:28:44,012
Yeah.

1136
01:28:44,012 --> 01:28:46,732
And also decentralization as a spectrum.

1137
01:28:47,132 --> 01:28:51,052
Like this guy was very much ahead of his time.

1138
01:28:51,052 --> 01:28:53,452
He was a Bitcoin maximalist in 2013.

1139
01:28:53,452 --> 01:28:58,572
Yeah, because back then it was like what's competing with Bitcoin was like Litecoin,

1140
01:28:58,572 --> 01:28:59,932
which is like exactly the same.

1141
01:28:59,932 --> 01:29:04,252
So the competition was really kind of like a sham, like in the sense that there was
nothing

1142
01:29:04,252 --> 01:29:05,452
really new about Litecoin.

1143
01:29:05,452 --> 01:29:09,292
You know, the altcoins were not really, there was nothing really new and they were
just

1144
01:29:09,292 --> 01:29:12,892
people launching the coin to make money.

1145
01:29:12,972 --> 01:29:19,692
And plus a bunch of really weird people, NXT, which had like 100% pre-mine and
BitShares,

1146
01:29:19,692 --> 01:29:24,732
Dan Larimer, you know, so the competition was just horrible.

1147
01:29:25,692 --> 01:29:30,252
And so anyone who walked up and said, oh, well, don't you want, why should we just
bet

1148
01:29:30,252 --> 01:29:31,452
everything on Bitcoin?

1149
01:29:31,452 --> 01:29:35,212
It was like, yeah, because of network effects, because it's the only good idea.

1150
01:29:36,172 --> 01:29:42,892
Now it's kind of traded places to some extent where the Bitcoin maximalists have no
idea

1151
01:29:42,892 --> 01:29:47,852
the issues with Bitcoin and they have no idea that they may in fact be the retail
that is

1152
01:29:47,852 --> 01:29:55,132
dumped on as something else gets out the vote, you know, gets on the adoption and
tech stack

1153
01:29:57,052 --> 01:29:58,732
and it's reversed.

1154
01:29:58,732 --> 01:30:04,972
And the people who are pro competition are just having fun and doing whatever they
want.

1155
01:30:05,292 --> 01:30:06,652
And just having a great time.

1156
01:30:07,932 --> 01:30:14,732
So yeah, competition is, a monopoly can destroy anything, you know, because of
complacency.

1157
01:30:14,732 --> 01:30:19,852
And as with Bitcoin Core, after winning the block size war, after winning all this
other

1158
01:30:19,852 --> 01:30:23,532
stuff, now we have a situation.

1159
01:30:23,532 --> 01:30:26,332
I mean, do you think that, what is it?

1160
01:30:26,332 --> 01:30:28,092
Xano or whatever, what is it called?

1161
01:30:28,092 --> 01:30:34,572
The privacy, privacy lightning or whatever that you were mentioning before.

1162
01:30:35,532 --> 01:30:42,252
They're not, they're thinking, how can we make the product as good as possible, as
quickly

1163
01:30:42,252 --> 01:30:42,892
as possible?

1164
01:30:44,972 --> 01:30:49,132
They're not making a stupid little Wikipedia table and asking people's opinions
about.

1165
01:30:49,132 --> 01:30:58,012
No, but their goal has been from the very beginning to use the crypto node protocol

1166
01:30:58,012 --> 01:30:59,292
for tokens.

1167
01:31:00,092 --> 01:31:07,212
So they're trying to be like sort of the Ethereum of the Monero world, where you can
issue assets

1168
01:31:07,212 --> 01:31:12,172
and do some very light contracts because they don't have the EVM side of it.

1169
01:31:12,812 --> 01:31:19,612
But on the blockchain, all the assets are equal to the native assets.

1170
01:31:19,612 --> 01:31:21,612
So there is no distinction.

1171
01:31:21,612 --> 01:31:23,612
You cannot really tell between them.

1172
01:31:23,612 --> 01:31:25,292
And I think that's pretty interesting.

1173
01:31:26,092 --> 01:31:31,532
On the other hand, I wish this was happening on Bitcoin and it hurts to see.

1174
01:31:31,532 --> 01:31:35,452
I mean, of course, it's useful for experimentation to exist elsewhere.

1175
01:31:35,452 --> 01:31:40,892
But what hurts is that nobody even cares to look at it and say, you know, maybe
let's

1176
01:31:40,892 --> 01:31:42,812
figure out how to bring this to Bitcoin.

1177
01:31:42,812 --> 01:31:48,652
And this is why I like you, Paul, because you think in terms of how to make this
side

1178
01:31:48,652 --> 01:31:49,292
chain work.

1179
01:31:50,412 --> 01:31:52,252
And of course, there are tradeoffs.

1180
01:31:52,972 --> 01:32:00,332
They're very clear that I think it's outlined in BIP300 that these are minor
controlled

1181
01:32:00,332 --> 01:32:00,972
sidechains.

1182
01:32:01,932 --> 01:32:08,892
But it's so much better to have that within the ecosystem as opposed to giving up on
the

1183
01:32:08,892 --> 01:32:11,932
whole pursuit and submitting to a federation.

1184
01:32:13,532 --> 01:32:16,012
There is so much cowardice in this space.

1185
01:32:17,852 --> 01:32:23,292
I did this privacy magazine and I wrote an article that's called On the Limitations
of

1186
01:32:23,292 --> 01:32:24,492
Bitcoin Privacy.

1187
01:32:24,492 --> 01:32:30,172
And I made the argument that pretty much all the ideas that are right now in privacy
projects

1188
01:32:30,172 --> 01:32:32,012
started out as Bitcoin proposals.

1189
01:32:32,012 --> 01:32:37,692
And the more time you spend searching for Bitcoin talk, you're going to find even
Satoshi

1190
01:32:37,772 --> 01:32:42,652
mentioning zero knowledge proofs and the idea that you can rewrite the Bitcoin
client in

1191
01:32:42,652 --> 01:32:47,052
a more efficient way if you have better cryptography and better libraries.

1192
01:32:48,092 --> 01:32:54,412
And the fact that Bitcoin is stagnant and is not improving is not an accident, is
not,

1193
01:32:56,332 --> 01:33:04,092
you know, it's maybe the sum of a lot of people's willingness to not improve it.

1194
01:33:05,292 --> 01:33:06,732
And they became complacent.

1195
01:33:07,372 --> 01:33:14,092
They discovered this powerful narrative that they can push to investors, to
governments.

1196
01:33:15,052 --> 01:33:18,172
And maybe that it's the way it's meant to be, right?

1197
01:33:18,172 --> 01:33:24,252
Because they believe in this Trojan horse approach where basically you're welcoming

1198
01:33:24,252 --> 01:33:25,532
governments to invest.

1199
01:33:25,532 --> 01:33:29,932
And once they have some skin in the game, it's going to become impossible to
regulate.

1200
01:33:30,492 --> 01:33:36,652
And you also have this entire crypto space alongside Bitcoin that's trying new
stuff.

1201
01:33:37,132 --> 01:33:41,212
Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where Bitcoin becomes the one currency.

1202
01:33:41,212 --> 01:33:46,332
But right now, it seems like we're heading towards this multi-chain world.

1203
01:33:46,332 --> 01:33:51,212
And I'm not, in the beginning, I was not very comfortable with the idea.

1204
01:33:51,212 --> 01:33:53,852
I just realized that maybe that we failed.

1205
01:33:54,572 --> 01:33:57,452
But on the other hand, maybe that there is no other way to succeed.

1206
01:33:57,452 --> 01:34:03,852
And if Bitcoin had everything, it could be easier to ban from the beginning.

1207
01:34:04,332 --> 01:34:07,692
And now we get these, you are in Nashville, right?

1208
01:34:08,812 --> 01:34:09,452
Yes, of course.

1209
01:34:09,452 --> 01:34:12,972
And you saw all these politicians praising Bitcoin.

1210
01:34:14,092 --> 01:34:17,292
But that has been going on for a long time, even since the 2019 conference,

1211
01:34:17,292 --> 01:34:20,812
the first conference in San Francisco, where you'd have, you know, I think.

1212
01:34:20,812 --> 01:34:27,772
Sure, there was the mayor and stuff like that, or I guess the guests, the hosts,

1213
01:34:27,772 --> 01:34:29,292
and they were welcoming everyone.

1214
01:34:30,252 --> 01:34:36,252
But my point is that it's very strange to have all of these people who otherwise are

1215
01:34:37,292 --> 01:34:40,252
very ignorant of Bitcoin suddenly praising it.

1216
01:34:40,252 --> 01:34:44,412
And then you have, have you seen that documentary that David Bailey has produced

1217
01:34:44,412 --> 01:34:46,972
with celebrities who talk about Bitcoin?

1218
01:34:46,972 --> 01:34:48,812
No, I haven't.

1219
01:34:48,812 --> 01:34:50,412
Thank God for Bitcoin.

1220
01:34:50,412 --> 01:34:51,612
I think that's what it's called.

1221
01:34:51,612 --> 01:34:52,892
It's on YouTube.

1222
01:34:52,892 --> 01:34:53,692
It's insane.

1223
01:34:54,252 --> 01:34:56,332
You feel replaced to a degree.

1224
01:34:56,332 --> 01:34:58,252
You're like, well, why am I even here?

1225
01:34:58,972 --> 01:35:02,972
We got to this point where we have these big names talking about Bitcoin,

1226
01:35:02,972 --> 01:35:06,252
like it's the best thing since bread came sliced.

1227
01:35:06,252 --> 01:35:07,692
And it solves all the problems.

1228
01:35:07,692 --> 01:35:12,172
And it's basically the talking points that you've seen from Saifedean and Jimmy
Song,

1229
01:35:12,172 --> 01:35:17,852
but said by, I don't know, what's the name of the Shark Tank guy?

1230
01:35:19,292 --> 01:35:20,972
Kevin O something.

1231
01:35:20,972 --> 01:35:21,852
Kevin O'Leary.

1232
01:35:21,852 --> 01:35:23,292
And there's also Mark Cuban.

1233
01:35:23,372 --> 01:35:28,172
So you get both of them who were critics of Bitcoin, now praising it.

1234
01:35:29,052 --> 01:35:31,132
You're like, what am I even doing here anymore?

1235
01:35:31,132 --> 01:35:32,652
I don't think it's necessarily.

1236
01:35:32,652 --> 01:35:34,332
I mean, okay, think about it like this.

1237
01:35:34,332 --> 01:35:40,092
Imagine that your life is a series of you being first to something that later goes
mainstream.

1238
01:35:41,132 --> 01:35:43,212
Oh, it sounds so hipster-esque, right?

1239
01:35:43,212 --> 01:35:45,052
We find the cool band and then we.

1240
01:35:45,692 --> 01:35:46,572
Think about it like this.

1241
01:35:46,572 --> 01:35:48,012
You're going to be making a huge amount of money.

1242
01:35:48,732 --> 01:35:49,932
There's going to be a next Bitcoin.

1243
01:35:50,332 --> 01:35:53,852
Just as no one early in the early days of Bitcoin, you didn't.

1244
01:35:53,852 --> 01:35:57,692
I'm just saying hypothetically in this example, but I think it could literally be
true as well.

1245
01:35:59,132 --> 01:36:02,812
If your life is just a series of being early.

1246
01:36:04,812 --> 01:36:07,532
Then you can be the, you know, you can be the first investor in Google.

1247
01:36:07,532 --> 01:36:09,372
You can be the first investor in SpaceX.

1248
01:36:09,372 --> 01:36:11,372
You can be the first investor in Bitcoin.

1249
01:36:11,372 --> 01:36:13,532
You can be the first investor in whatever, all these other things.

1250
01:36:13,532 --> 01:36:16,732
And you can say, well, I understand all these people are just.

1251
01:36:16,812 --> 01:36:18,812
They're just doing what the people around them do.

1252
01:36:18,812 --> 01:36:19,372
They're sheep.

1253
01:36:20,092 --> 01:36:24,652
But, you know, I understand what, what they're going to like in five to 10 years.

1254
01:36:24,652 --> 01:36:28,492
So that doesn't sound so bad, you know?

1255
01:36:28,492 --> 01:36:28,972
Yeah.

1256
01:36:28,972 --> 01:36:34,012
But this also means that all of our ideas of turning Bitcoin into the currency
that's

1257
01:36:34,012 --> 01:36:35,452
going to replace everything.

1258
01:36:36,412 --> 01:36:38,732
I don't think that those ideas are not dead.

1259
01:36:38,732 --> 01:36:44,252
I think those ideas will survive in, in fact, as I pointed out with the, the, the
whole

1260
01:36:44,492 --> 01:36:47,532
gap thing, eventually there may be a coin.

1261
01:36:47,532 --> 01:36:53,772
There may come a time when the complacency is so strong that a different coin is
poised

1262
01:36:53,772 --> 01:36:58,012
to just take over and hit 8 billion users and, and go to 300 trillion.

1263
01:36:58,012 --> 01:37:00,012
And then Bitcoin will go to zero in that scenario.

1264
01:37:00,012 --> 01:37:06,172
So the fact that we have a more of an awareness of how it actually works is not
necessarily

1265
01:37:07,852 --> 01:37:08,732
like a curse.

1266
01:37:09,052 --> 01:37:10,092
Like a curse.

1267
01:37:10,092 --> 01:37:14,012
It's, it has beneficial aspects.

1268
01:37:15,212 --> 01:37:21,052
I also believe that at one point, someone's going to figure out a way to do internet
money

1269
01:37:21,052 --> 01:37:23,932
without a blockchain in a decentralized way.

1270
01:37:23,932 --> 01:37:26,172
So solve the trilemma somehow.

1271
01:37:26,172 --> 01:37:30,732
And if someone ever does that, I think that's the end of the entire industry.

1272
01:37:30,732 --> 01:37:32,092
That's going to be like a reset.

1273
01:37:32,652 --> 01:37:40,252
Well, I mean, I think that's the thing about innovation is innovation, you know, it,
it

1274
01:37:40,252 --> 01:37:44,492
destroys the, you know, when you out innovate someone, then they, they, everything
goes

1275
01:37:44,492 --> 01:37:48,252
to zero, you know, Netflix versus Blockbuster or whatever.

1276
01:37:48,252 --> 01:37:55,932
So I think, again, the idea that you are early and that everyone around you is
catching up

1277
01:37:55,932 --> 01:38:00,332
to you and now it's going mainstream and, but it's going mainstream in a lame
version

1278
01:38:00,492 --> 01:38:07,452
that is not, that is a cheap knockoff of the real deal.

1279
01:38:08,812 --> 01:38:10,252
That, that's not really so bad.

1280
01:38:12,652 --> 01:38:13,932
I wouldn't worry about that too much.

1281
01:38:16,252 --> 01:38:16,572
Okay.

1282
01:38:16,572 --> 01:38:21,532
Let me plug the sponsors and then we can get to questions that we have in the chat.

1283
01:38:22,332 --> 01:38:23,612
Yeah, we have to do that.

1284
01:38:24,332 --> 01:38:28,812
So Sideshift.ai, we are in the middle of this bull market.

1285
01:38:28,812 --> 01:38:30,172
Everything is going up.

1286
01:38:30,972 --> 01:38:33,852
It's irrational for you to hold stable coins.

1287
01:38:33,852 --> 01:38:39,772
Honestly, if someone offers to pay you in those, just swap them for free market
money

1288
01:38:39,772 --> 01:38:42,412
and use Sideshift because they have pretty good liquidity.

1289
01:38:42,412 --> 01:38:48,012
They have low fees and I don't think they work in the US, unfortunately.

1290
01:38:48,012 --> 01:38:52,092
You can, I'm not going to tell you exactly how you can make it work in the US
because

1291
01:38:52,092 --> 01:38:58,652
I'm not allowed to, but if you have a brain, you can figure it out and it's pretty
cool.

1292
01:38:58,812 --> 01:39:05,132
They have a nice interface to just swap that CBDC wannabe for free market money and
they

1293
01:39:05,132 --> 01:39:07,852
have a very rich offering.

1294
01:39:07,852 --> 01:39:09,292
There's a lot on the menu.

1295
01:39:09,292 --> 01:39:16,572
You have BTC, you have, used to have Lightning, but now you have Rootstock BTC.

1296
01:39:17,292 --> 01:39:24,012
I think Sideshift was the first exchange to implement Lightning and Liquid also, but
maybe

1297
01:39:24,172 --> 01:39:28,892
the first to remove, you know, like there's a terrible ideas and the volume is very
low.

1298
01:39:28,892 --> 01:39:35,132
I mean, I hate to interrupt the ad read, but yeah, they did give up on Lightning, I
think

1299
01:39:35,132 --> 01:39:39,772
last year and they were very much ahead.

1300
01:39:40,332 --> 01:39:44,092
Yeah, first in, first out because they were the only, because these people who talk
about

1301
01:39:44,092 --> 01:39:46,012
Lightning, they have never used it.

1302
01:39:46,012 --> 01:39:47,532
These are people who tweet about it.

1303
01:39:47,532 --> 01:39:51,532
They don't, they haven't formed their opinion of Lightning based on their experience
with

1304
01:39:51,532 --> 01:39:52,652
the product.

1305
01:39:54,252 --> 01:39:58,572
By used, I guess you mean that they haven't run a node because maybe that they have
this

1306
01:39:58,572 --> 01:40:02,012
mobile wallet and they're like, oh, well, it works.

1307
01:40:02,012 --> 01:40:04,572
They don't, they don't even realize that that's not Bitcoin.

1308
01:40:04,572 --> 01:40:06,012
That's not Lightning either.

1309
01:40:06,184 --> 01:40:10,504
Anyway, Sideshift, it's very cool, Sideshift.ai, check them out.

1310
01:40:11,304 --> 01:40:13,724
And there's also no one's, they're a new sponsor.

1311
01:40:13,724 --> 01:40:15,964
It's the first episode that they sponsored today.

1312
01:40:16,224 --> 01:40:20,064
It's this peer-to-peer marketplace that's trying to unite the global

1313
01:40:20,064 --> 01:40:24,784
South with the rest of the world to destroy the financial apartheid.

1314
01:40:25,244 --> 01:40:27,604
Ray Youssef is the CEO and the founder.

1315
01:40:28,044 --> 01:40:32,644
You might know him from his days in Paxful and now he's trying to build

1316
01:40:32,644 --> 01:40:38,684
something that's pure ideologically and not just pure from a Bitcoin only

1317
01:40:38,684 --> 01:40:42,044
perspective, he's trying to build something with free markets for gift

1318
01:40:42,044 --> 01:40:48,364
cards, for lots of stuff that people want to use and to create, you know,

1319
01:40:48,604 --> 01:40:54,204
there was this whole idea right back in 2013 that was circulating in the

1320
01:40:54,204 --> 01:40:59,284
Bitcoin space that we're going to bank the unbanked and I think these

1321
01:40:59,284 --> 01:41:04,484
peer-to-peer marketplaces are sort of filling into that role and they're

1322
01:41:04,484 --> 01:41:10,844
trying to do it with lower fees and pretty good scale and with products

1323
01:41:10,844 --> 01:41:12,924
that people actually want to trade.

1324
01:41:13,844 --> 01:41:18,924
And Ray also has this philosophy that everyone eats, which means that you

1325
01:41:18,924 --> 01:41:23,684
have these ambassadors and hustlers from the global South who are selling

1326
01:41:23,684 --> 01:41:28,084
products and they're making some fees and they're able to put food on the table.

1327
01:41:28,364 --> 01:41:28,924
It's pretty cool.

1328
01:41:28,924 --> 01:41:29,604
So check it out.

1329
01:41:29,604 --> 01:41:32,604
It's noones.app, if I'm not mistaken.

1330
01:41:33,484 --> 01:41:41,244
Let me check the URL, noones.com, but they also have an app and they

1331
01:41:41,244 --> 01:41:44,484
don't do KYC and that's important.

1332
01:41:46,644 --> 01:41:53,084
And there's also hudling.ch, which is this business from Switzerland,

1333
01:41:53,084 --> 01:41:55,164
which specializes in self-custody.

1334
01:41:55,564 --> 01:42:00,164
If you hold a lot of Bitcoin or else you're part of a company that wants to

1335
01:42:00,164 --> 01:42:04,524
start buying Bitcoin because it's very hip these days, you can reach out to

1336
01:42:04,524 --> 01:42:09,284
these guys, they'll provide you a service with very good confidentiality

1337
01:42:09,284 --> 01:42:13,084
because they're from Switzerland and they'll let you know what kind of setup

1338
01:42:13,084 --> 01:42:15,564
you should be using for your use case.

1339
01:42:15,964 --> 01:42:20,804
So for example, they will tell you if you need a multi-sig, if you should be

1340
01:42:21,124 --> 01:42:25,644
hardware wallets, how you should be distributing them, which ones you should

1341
01:42:25,644 --> 01:42:27,564
be using and stuff like this.

1342
01:42:28,084 --> 01:42:32,404
And also if you have this seed phrase with scrambled words or you're missing

1343
01:42:32,404 --> 01:42:34,604
a few words, they can also help you recover.

1344
01:42:35,004 --> 01:42:35,924
So check them out.

1345
01:42:35,924 --> 01:42:39,204
They're hudling.ch and I also did an interview with them.

1346
01:42:39,844 --> 01:42:42,364
You can listen to that one for some free tips.

1347
01:42:43,244 --> 01:42:44,044
Those were the ads.

1348
01:42:44,044 --> 01:42:45,484
Thank you for sitting through them.

1349
01:42:45,684 --> 01:42:48,124
And now let's get to the question part.

1350
01:42:49,084 --> 01:42:52,484
We have hundreds of comments in the chat.

1351
01:42:52,484 --> 01:42:53,524
I'm scrolling through them.

1352
01:42:56,244 --> 01:42:59,644
Most of them are comments for what we spoke about.

1353
01:42:59,644 --> 01:43:03,404
So let's get to Twitter because this is where the action is happening.

1354
01:43:03,644 --> 01:43:07,564
There's a guy named BitFrankie in the meantime, and he says, Paul, can

1355
01:43:07,564 --> 01:43:09,804
you please unblock me on Twitter?

1356
01:43:11,164 --> 01:43:11,764
Who is that?

1357
01:43:12,364 --> 01:43:13,884
It's BitFrankie.

1358
01:43:14,564 --> 01:43:19,324
B-I-T-F-R-A-N-K-I-E.

1359
01:43:22,284 --> 01:43:27,004
Oftentimes I'm very happy with who I block, but growing up.

1360
01:43:33,004 --> 01:43:34,964
If people block me, then I block them back.

1361
01:43:35,364 --> 01:43:39,324
And I don't, I just think it's, I kind of laugh when I do it.

1362
01:43:39,444 --> 01:43:43,044
I don't really like, but, uh, I don't remember.

1363
01:43:44,884 --> 01:43:45,204
But yeah.

1364
01:43:45,204 --> 01:43:47,804
And then other things that I think it's totally fair.

1365
01:43:47,884 --> 01:43:54,164
Sometimes if you just reply, like the replies have to be good, you know, if

1366
01:43:54,164 --> 01:44:01,244
the reply is just noise, then it's one thing to say that you disagree or

1367
01:44:01,244 --> 01:44:02,724
that you think an idea is really terrible.

1368
01:44:03,764 --> 01:44:06,764
But if the, if, if you're putting stuff out and then people are just

1369
01:44:06,764 --> 01:44:12,244
stapling a bunch of junk, then I just, it is really about trying to improve

1370
01:44:12,484 --> 01:44:14,964
the quality of my own feed.

1371
01:44:15,684 --> 01:44:16,084
I don't know.

1372
01:44:16,084 --> 01:44:18,724
These are reasons why I block, but if people block me, I usually block.

1373
01:44:18,964 --> 01:44:22,564
Usually I think I'm 99% of the blocks are because someone has blocked me and I'm

1374
01:44:22,564 --> 01:44:24,844
like, okay, fine, I'll block you then.

1375
01:44:26,124 --> 01:44:29,044
But I don't, I don't really know what it achieves, especially now.

1376
01:44:30,004 --> 01:44:32,364
I think Elon's making a mistake with the block button.

1377
01:44:32,404 --> 01:44:34,444
He should go the other way.

1378
01:44:34,724 --> 01:44:44,204
He is, in one sense, he is saying, okay, if you just open it in a private

1379
01:44:44,204 --> 01:44:47,764
browser, private browsing mode, you can still see all the tweets.

1380
01:44:47,764 --> 01:44:55,964
So, but I think that he should re-conceptualize the block as the

1381
01:44:55,964 --> 01:45:00,804
person is like a bad person and they should get de-boosted.

1382
01:45:00,964 --> 01:45:03,804
If people block you, you should get de-boosted, but I don't know.

1383
01:45:03,804 --> 01:45:06,924
I haven't totally figured that out.

1384
01:45:07,644 --> 01:45:08,004
I don't know.

1385
01:45:08,604 --> 01:45:10,964
Well, you cannot comment if someone blocks you.

1386
01:45:11,124 --> 01:45:12,444
And that's sort of the point.

1387
01:45:12,524 --> 01:45:15,844
You can still see what they're posting, but you cannot interact.

1388
01:45:15,844 --> 01:45:17,404
You cannot like, you cannot comment.

1389
01:45:17,404 --> 01:45:18,404
You cannot retweet.

1390
01:45:18,724 --> 01:45:21,884
I mean, it's like, I can go to you, you say something and then I can say,

1391
01:45:21,884 --> 01:45:23,044
oh, I'm going to reply to this.

1392
01:45:23,324 --> 01:45:24,284
I block you.

1393
01:45:25,244 --> 01:45:26,684
Then I reply to you.

1394
01:45:28,404 --> 01:45:30,004
Then you can't reply to that reply.

1395
01:45:31,884 --> 01:45:33,244
I don't know, it doesn't really make any sense.

1396
01:45:33,684 --> 01:45:36,404
But I'm sure they're working on it over there on Twitter.

1397
01:45:37,124 --> 01:45:39,084
I mean, ex-formerly Twitter.

1398
01:45:40,844 --> 01:45:42,124
I still call it Twitter.

1399
01:45:42,204 --> 01:45:45,244
Anyway, you have some questions.

1400
01:45:45,684 --> 01:45:51,644
There's early NFT.bit who says many hardened Bitcoiners see you as an enemy of
Bitcoin.

1401
01:45:51,924 --> 01:45:57,044
If you cannot open the eyes of the miners to CUSF without the blessing of those

1402
01:45:57,084 --> 01:46:04,804
hard asses, then there has to be a point where we, capital W, capital We, you know,

1403
01:46:05,084 --> 01:46:11,644
we need to give up on BTC as the unit of account of the real Bitcoin and openly

1404
01:46:11,644 --> 01:46:13,204
embrace another, right?

1405
01:46:15,764 --> 01:46:16,484
Yeah, I agree.

1406
01:46:16,924 --> 01:46:22,004
And says we'll be heretics, branded chip coiners, which doesn't so much matter, but

1407
01:46:22,044 --> 01:46:27,684
which may bring undue animosity to the legitimate projects we elect to support.

1408
01:46:28,084 --> 01:46:33,764
Knowing how this all will likely play out, we should temper our message moving
forward

1409
01:46:33,764 --> 01:46:35,684
to minimize collateral damage.

1410
01:46:37,844 --> 01:46:39,444
Well, that's a very intelligent point.

1411
01:46:40,124 --> 01:46:41,204
That person is correct.

1412
01:46:41,204 --> 01:46:42,564
Very nice vocabulary.

1413
01:46:45,204 --> 01:46:50,564
However, I think so the miners don't know anything about anything.

1414
01:46:51,164 --> 01:46:55,124
I mean, no offense to them, but again, I think they find all this stuff totally
baffling.

1415
01:46:55,924 --> 01:47:04,004
But. And they have a very low incentive to even look into it, because even if you,
you

1416
01:47:04,004 --> 01:47:08,404
know, the mining pools are thinking I'm competing with another mining pool, the

1417
01:47:08,404 --> 01:47:11,884
individual hashers are thinking, how can I get cheap electricity?

1418
01:47:12,884 --> 01:47:22,284
If everyone increases like transaction fees by a factor of 10, then that's a little
bit

1419
01:47:22,284 --> 01:47:28,204
of a gain for a while, but after a few weeks, the difficulty rises and then it's
wiped

1420
01:47:28,204 --> 01:47:35,564
out. So actually, it's a little bit of a puzzle, who would invest the time to learn

1421
01:47:35,564 --> 01:47:39,564
all of this? I further agree with that person.

1422
01:47:39,884 --> 01:47:45,444
I mean, that was a kind of me disagreeing, but the idea that.

1423
01:47:48,084 --> 01:47:51,004
If Bitcoin is like the door slams closed.

1424
01:47:52,524 --> 01:47:57,404
On Bitcoin, then there will have to be a different project that succeeds, as I was
talking

1425
01:47:57,404 --> 01:47:58,724
with you before.

1426
01:48:00,644 --> 01:48:05,804
That will help happen no matter what, even if we meet you and I, that person, we
have

1427
01:48:05,804 --> 01:48:06,764
nothing to do with anything.

1428
01:48:07,764 --> 01:48:15,284
And being labeled a shit coiner, the crazy thing is I'm already labeled a shit
coiner,

1429
01:48:15,284 --> 01:48:18,164
even though there's literally zero or negative shit.

1430
01:48:18,524 --> 01:48:21,404
So it's true that that literally means nothing.

1431
01:48:23,244 --> 01:48:28,444
And like the Ordnos people are called, which at least makes a tiny bit of sense
because

1432
01:48:28,444 --> 01:48:31,764
they're selling a different thing that you can invest in, even though it's 100% on

1433
01:48:31,844 --> 01:48:39,284
Bitcoin. So even that is like that word has really changed its meaning from someone
who

1434
01:48:39,284 --> 01:48:46,404
believes in altcoin is better than Bitcoin to like your Bitcoin project.

1435
01:48:48,124 --> 01:48:58,324
Your Bitcoin art is for sale, but so as far as hampering the message, I think I
don't

1436
01:48:58,324 --> 01:49:00,844
know if that would work because we need.

1437
01:49:02,564 --> 01:49:06,204
We have to actually build a reputation of integrity and telling the truth.

1438
01:49:07,964 --> 01:49:11,364
So that is the message and the.

1439
01:49:15,764 --> 01:49:18,004
That is there's no choice but to go.

1440
01:49:19,604 --> 01:49:22,364
I think so, I don't know, I'm not sure exactly what that means.

1441
01:49:23,604 --> 01:49:27,684
But if it means lie and tell everyone that lightning is a great idea, which is what
that's

1442
01:49:27,924 --> 01:49:35,804
used to mean. I think like that's just eventually, eventually people will just say
that

1443
01:49:35,884 --> 01:49:37,124
there was no difference between.

1444
01:49:38,484 --> 01:49:41,964
I'll send the people who were overly optimistic about.

1445
01:49:44,164 --> 01:49:49,204
Lightning, so I don't think that that is, I don't know, I'm not sure that person
maybe

1446
01:49:49,204 --> 01:49:50,604
should be more specific.

1447
01:49:51,604 --> 01:50:02,724
Yeah, there's another comment from A.O.I.Y.N.U.L.M.X.C.3, that's quite a mouthful.

1448
01:50:03,244 --> 01:50:06,084
Could we see USF BIP300?

1449
01:50:06,124 --> 01:50:11,604
What are the other avenues does he see for improving Bitcoin privacy and what are
his

1450
01:50:11,604 --> 01:50:12,524
thoughts on Monero?

1451
01:50:13,204 --> 01:50:24,564
Yes, BIP300 can be activated by CUSF, C-U-S-F, the other options are adding Bitcoin

1452
01:50:24,564 --> 01:50:27,604
privacy. These are kind of slightly different questions.

1453
01:50:28,044 --> 01:50:32,244
I did have this thing called deniability that I wrote and that someone coded and put
as

1454
01:50:32,244 --> 01:50:37,884
a pull request in the Bitcoin Core, the patent holder, creator of Google
Autocomplete, which

1455
01:50:37,884 --> 01:50:39,364
later became all this AI stuff.

1456
01:50:39,484 --> 01:50:44,244
Alex K., he had a pull request in the Bitcoin Core for this thing, deniability.

1457
01:50:46,124 --> 01:50:50,484
The BIP300 question is more of like a life or death thing, because it's like, do we

1458
01:50:50,484 --> 01:50:52,964
actually care about improving the software or not?

1459
01:50:53,004 --> 01:50:57,964
And do we actually care about getting Zcash level privacy in a way that does not
even

1460
01:50:57,964 --> 01:51:00,164
affect L1 Bitcoin?

1461
01:51:00,724 --> 01:51:06,124
So it's kind of like it's just such a good idea that it's almost, you know, it's a

1462
01:51:06,124 --> 01:51:12,404
it's just such a good idea that it's almost the people who are against it are really

1463
01:51:12,844 --> 01:51:18,484
hilting their hand and revealing that their priority is not Bitcoin success.

1464
01:51:18,764 --> 01:51:20,444
They have some other priority.

1465
01:51:21,644 --> 01:51:29,364
So the fact that BIP300 gives us Zcash level privacy is like a very small effect,
in my

1466
01:51:29,364 --> 01:51:36,124
opinion. It is just one of the infinite things that it does.

1467
01:51:38,964 --> 01:51:48,164
So Monero, I think, you know, Monero has a focus on actual users, so that is much

1468
01:51:48,164 --> 01:51:53,164
healthier. I still think that, you know, I think one coin is going to win.

1469
01:51:53,164 --> 01:51:54,964
So if you're going to win, you have to be the best.

1470
01:51:54,964 --> 01:51:57,444
You have to be good at everything and you have to have the biggest network effect.

1471
01:51:57,444 --> 01:52:01,924
So I don't know if I would like invest and hold Monero.

1472
01:52:02,684 --> 01:52:04,044
I mean, I don't. So.

1473
01:52:06,684 --> 01:52:09,604
So I don't know, that could be a mistake.

1474
01:52:11,124 --> 01:52:15,524
Of course, but I do think most people are sticking with like the number one coin,
the

1475
01:52:15,524 --> 01:52:19,124
Bitcoin coin, and the.

1476
01:52:20,324 --> 01:52:25,924
Everyone, I think, will jump ship if there actually is a situation where Bitcoin
doesn't

1477
01:52:25,924 --> 01:52:29,164
make it, because it's either going to make it, Satoshi was 100 percent correct when
he

1478
01:52:29,164 --> 01:52:35,324
said. In 20 years, there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume,
he

1479
01:52:35,324 --> 01:52:46,284
said, I'm certain. And I think he said that in the year 2010, so that gives us six

1480
01:52:46,284 --> 01:52:53,964
years. So we're 20 years from when he said that, so so six years from now, I think
he's

1481
01:52:54,124 --> 01:52:58,084
right, Satoshi was right, either everything will be on Bitcoin, Bitcoin maximalism,
and

1482
01:52:58,084 --> 01:52:59,604
there will be huge transaction volume.

1483
01:53:01,604 --> 01:53:04,884
Or everything will be on something else and Bitcoin will be zero.

1484
01:53:06,284 --> 01:53:10,564
But at the same time, Satoshi was very supportive of Namecoin, so.

1485
01:53:11,124 --> 01:53:24,004
Yes, of course. But this is, yeah, I think that Satoshi was pro-technology and he
was

1486
01:53:24,004 --> 01:53:31,164
pro-inventing all this stuff, he was pro-merge mining, he was pro, that's not the
same as

1487
01:53:31,164 --> 01:53:36,604
and in fact, in the thread where he sort of invents Namecoin and merge mining with a

1488
01:53:36,604 --> 01:53:38,844
bunch of other people who deserve credit.

1489
01:53:39,164 --> 01:53:43,644
But in that thread, he talks about having blockchains of different sizes where
there's

1490
01:53:44,044 --> 01:53:47,684
there are many unrelated blockchains and some have very low transaction fees and
some

1491
01:53:47,684 --> 01:53:52,524
have higher, the Bitcoin L1 would have a high L1 because it would be the most
prestigious.

1492
01:53:54,284 --> 01:53:59,604
So he did think of all that, but I think, you know, once the sidechain, in fact, in
that

1493
01:53:59,604 --> 01:54:03,004
thread, he talks about, oh, unfortunately, it would be a different coin.

1494
01:54:04,004 --> 01:54:05,484
So it would not be a peg.

1495
01:54:06,364 --> 01:54:12,924
But actually, I take that as evidence that once the peg idea comes out, Satoshi
would

1496
01:54:12,924 --> 01:54:20,644
be a buyer of that idea, just as he is a buyer of the, as if he was pro-merge
mining.

1497
01:54:22,484 --> 01:54:26,244
So I think that if Monero wants to succeed, it has to actually have its own small
block

1498
01:54:26,244 --> 01:54:29,124
L1, its own sidechains, its own whatever.

1499
01:54:29,164 --> 01:54:31,684
So I don't, that's like my guess.

1500
01:54:31,684 --> 01:54:32,844
I'm not sure about that, but.

1501
01:54:33,804 --> 01:54:34,804
It's definitely possible.

1502
01:54:36,964 --> 01:54:41,884
There's another question by Vilela, V-I-L-E-L-A.

1503
01:54:42,964 --> 01:54:46,564
How does Truthcoin CUSF handle mempool policy?

1504
01:54:46,884 --> 01:54:50,164
It tackles block consensus with invalidate block.

1505
01:54:50,404 --> 01:54:59,524
But what about commands like test mempool accept, get mempool info, get AW mempool?

1506
01:54:59,524 --> 01:55:00,364
That's a very good question.

1507
01:55:00,644 --> 01:55:03,324
Get block template and submit block.

1508
01:55:03,644 --> 01:55:07,044
These rely on consensus rules and will not be affected.

1509
01:55:08,164 --> 01:55:09,884
This is a very good point.

1510
01:55:09,884 --> 01:55:15,604
So we have, if you go to BIP300CUSF.com, which is the site, and then there's a bunch

1511
01:55:15,604 --> 01:55:19,164
of software in the download section, and we're actually changing this around.

1512
01:55:19,164 --> 01:55:21,364
So I feel terrible answering this question on this exact day.

1513
01:55:21,404 --> 01:55:26,364
But if you go to the site and there's a thing called the block maker and that the

1514
01:55:26,364 --> 01:55:31,124
actual, its actual name on GitHub, which we're going to change, but the actual

1515
01:55:31,124 --> 01:55:33,324
name is BIP300 mempool enforcer.

1516
01:55:34,204 --> 01:55:36,404
I think we're going to change it to CUSF mempool enforcer.

1517
01:55:36,844 --> 01:55:37,524
So it's unfortunate.

1518
01:55:37,524 --> 01:55:43,724
A lot of the stuff is like in flux right now because it's being actively developed.

1519
01:55:44,444 --> 01:55:48,964
And, but basically this is a tool that it does basically does like get block

1520
01:55:48,964 --> 01:55:54,564
template, but these are very good questions where it, what it does is it, it

1521
01:55:54,564 --> 01:55:57,124
looks at the regular mempool from Bitcoin core.

1522
01:55:58,644 --> 01:56:01,924
It looks through that and says, which of these transactions would get bounced?

1523
01:56:03,084 --> 01:56:07,724
And also which Coinbase transactions must we include if we, because some of BIP301
is

1524
01:56:07,724 --> 01:56:11,604
like a transaction is only valid if there's a Coinbase transaction that matches.

1525
01:56:12,244 --> 01:56:17,964
So the weird, same for BIP300, the withdrawal has to match something that.

1526
01:56:18,964 --> 01:56:26,164
So, it's kind of like purifies, you have like get block template from Bitcoin core

1527
01:56:26,164 --> 01:56:31,204
and then the template is like refined and these transactions are all tagged as like

1528
01:56:31,204 --> 01:56:36,284
requiring like a 21 million Bitcoin fee, which will never happen.

1529
01:56:36,284 --> 01:56:39,924
So they are sorted out, but that's a very good question.

1530
01:56:39,924 --> 01:56:44,124
That person is a very, whoever that is, is very serious about whether or not the

1531
01:56:44,124 --> 01:56:44,684
idea will work.

1532
01:56:44,684 --> 01:56:48,444
So that would be great if that person would look into, because we are actually

1533
01:56:48,444 --> 01:56:51,924
tinkering with it now, because it's actually kind of a little confusing if you

1534
01:56:51,924 --> 01:56:58,204
don't draw a giant diagram, like when, who is doing what?

1535
01:56:58,204 --> 01:57:05,644
So let me make a diagram, because the transaction come in on Bitcoin core side,

1536
01:57:06,124 --> 01:57:10,324
and then the miner is going to construct the, what is the aspirational next block

1537
01:57:10,444 --> 01:57:11,684
using the mempool?

1538
01:57:11,684 --> 01:57:17,164
And they cannot include anything that would break a rule that the CUSF enforcer

1539
01:57:17,164 --> 01:57:17,924
would enforce.

1540
01:57:18,684 --> 01:57:20,244
So that's a great question.

1541
01:57:20,244 --> 01:57:28,124
And the answer is that the enforcer not only does the enforcer scan a new block

1542
01:57:28,124 --> 01:57:32,684
that has come in for any rule breaking, and if it finds rule breaking, it bounces

1543
01:57:32,684 --> 01:57:34,324
the block and says invalidate block.

1544
01:57:34,364 --> 01:57:35,484
That's the full node side.

1545
01:57:36,444 --> 01:57:41,644
There is a separate mining side that says when we construct what we want the next

1546
01:57:41,644 --> 01:57:47,924
block to be, which transactions can we not have in the mempool?

1547
01:57:50,404 --> 01:57:52,164
So there is a piece of software for that.

1548
01:57:52,724 --> 01:58:01,044
And if someone wants to help us test that, and we, it's all, this is all active

1549
01:58:01,044 --> 01:58:03,644
development right now.

1550
01:58:03,724 --> 01:58:06,484
So check it out.

1551
01:58:08,204 --> 01:58:12,764
Another question that you have is from Sean A in the YouTube chat.

1552
01:58:12,804 --> 01:58:17,684
And he says, could the issues with core be due to a Bitcoin variant of Conway's

1553
01:58:17,684 --> 01:58:18,164
law?

1554
01:58:20,524 --> 01:58:22,884
Just got to refresh my memory on Conway's law.

1555
01:58:24,644 --> 01:58:28,084
Actually someone asked in the chat, what is Conway's law?

1556
01:58:28,924 --> 01:58:30,484
And I'm reading right now.

1557
01:58:31,444 --> 01:58:32,644
Let me just look it up.

1558
01:58:32,884 --> 01:58:33,724
No, he didn't say.

1559
01:58:33,724 --> 01:58:34,244
I'm familiar.

1560
01:58:39,124 --> 01:58:41,364
Yes, this is it.

1561
01:58:44,724 --> 01:58:46,884
Can you read it for the people who are not aware?

1562
01:58:48,564 --> 01:58:52,164
The connection between a company's internal structure and the results it

1563
01:58:52,164 --> 01:58:53,524
delivers to end users.

1564
01:58:53,564 --> 01:58:59,564
So in Bitcoin core's case, it is the structure is like this big circle of no

1565
01:59:00,444 --> 01:59:01,684
one taking responsibility.

1566
01:59:02,604 --> 01:59:07,484
And as a result, the end user who doesn't take responsibility for their life, the

1567
01:59:07,484 --> 01:59:14,404
end user says, oh, the what's it's the, what am I trying to say?

1568
01:59:14,444 --> 01:59:18,884
The, like the end user wants to go on the darknet market and it only accepts

1569
01:59:18,884 --> 01:59:19,324
Monero.

1570
01:59:19,324 --> 01:59:19,964
So they switch.

1571
01:59:19,964 --> 01:59:22,004
The end user can always switch to the better thing.

1572
01:59:23,444 --> 01:59:26,604
The end user can always switch from Bitcoin to Monero for their particular use

1573
01:59:26,604 --> 01:59:27,044
case.

1574
01:59:30,164 --> 01:59:35,284
But so because of that reason, the organization must be optimized to put out

1575
01:59:35,284 --> 01:59:39,284
the best possible product to minimize the switching, because the end user can

1576
01:59:39,284 --> 01:59:41,084
switch at the drop of a hat.

1577
01:59:42,244 --> 01:59:45,844
But we are not set up, we are not optimized for that because there is no

1578
01:59:45,844 --> 01:59:48,244
structure and because there is no leadership.

1579
01:59:49,124 --> 01:59:50,004
No one says.

1580
01:59:51,924 --> 01:59:57,004
If we lose customers to Monero, I will resign and I should be fired, no one says

1581
01:59:57,004 --> 01:59:57,244
that.

1582
02:00:00,564 --> 02:00:04,364
I do something else to do a three, so can we quickly, how many questions we have?

1583
02:00:04,684 --> 02:00:05,244
Are there good ones?

1584
02:00:05,244 --> 02:00:06,084
I don't want to miss any.

1585
02:00:06,404 --> 02:00:07,564
I'm scrolling right now.

1586
02:00:07,564 --> 02:00:10,484
There's a lot of hateful comments.

1587
02:00:11,204 --> 02:00:11,564
Right.

1588
02:00:11,644 --> 02:00:15,004
That's not directed towards you, directed towards Bitcoin.

1589
02:00:16,924 --> 02:00:17,604
What do they say?

1590
02:00:18,204 --> 02:00:21,324
It's the worst shit coin, blah, blah, blah, 70 PS.

1591
02:00:21,484 --> 02:00:25,564
I don't know how these guys found the show, but subscribe anyway.

1592
02:00:25,564 --> 02:00:31,044
Has serious problems syncing on a hard drive, unfixable, blah, blah, blah.

1593
02:00:33,284 --> 02:00:34,164
I think it is true.

1594
02:00:34,164 --> 02:00:35,844
Someone said something to me once.

1595
02:00:36,204 --> 02:00:39,044
I hope this person won't mind that I'm taking a brilliant point.

1596
02:00:39,244 --> 02:00:44,364
I may have brought it up to you before, Vlad, but someone told me at a very

1597
02:00:44,364 --> 02:00:48,044
prestigious Bitcoin conference with a lot of smart people and someone said, you

1598
02:00:48,044 --> 02:00:52,604
know what, it's not a, it's not a shit coin if you don't have a hard drive.

1599
02:00:52,644 --> 02:00:55,324
It's not a, it's not a shit coin.

1600
02:00:55,364 --> 02:00:58,244
If you, if you say you're a shit coin, then you're not a shit coin.

1601
02:01:00,124 --> 02:01:04,404
And what they were getting at is we in Bitcoin, we are so sanctimonious

1602
02:01:04,404 --> 02:01:06,004
and we're so high and mighty, you know?

1603
02:01:06,764 --> 02:01:10,324
And we say like, we're so great.

1604
02:01:10,364 --> 02:01:13,524
But, but then we say we lie about lightning all the time.

1605
02:01:13,524 --> 02:01:18,964
And we try to say like, we try to say that we, we, we lie to

1606
02:01:18,964 --> 02:01:20,204
ourselves and to other people.

1607
02:01:21,204 --> 02:01:22,564
And we have been doing that for years.

1608
02:01:22,964 --> 02:01:25,444
So that's what makes it a shit coin.

1609
02:01:25,444 --> 02:01:26,924
And that person was correct.

1610
02:01:26,924 --> 02:01:33,444
I think you just go out there with self-awareness and you say, you know, I

1611
02:01:33,444 --> 02:01:35,124
mean, base is the perfect example.

1612
02:01:35,364 --> 02:01:40,804
Base is like, we are not, we're going to be a less decentralized version of

1613
02:01:40,804 --> 02:01:43,604
Solana and we don't, we don't care, you know?

1614
02:01:45,484 --> 02:01:49,484
There's also Sean A who asks, seems like it would be preferable

1615
02:01:50,044 --> 02:01:56,364
for Core to support CUSF-like tooling to take pressure off consensus

1616
02:01:56,444 --> 02:01:58,564
decision slash responsibility.

1617
02:01:59,884 --> 02:02:04,484
This is true in an ironic way, which is that many of these people who are

1618
02:02:04,484 --> 02:02:08,884
very legit people, including Francis Puyo, the bull Bitcoin guy, he's great.

1619
02:02:09,124 --> 02:02:10,124
Love Francis Puyo.

1620
02:02:10,644 --> 02:02:13,204
His point of view is that Core should never do soft forks.

1621
02:02:13,244 --> 02:02:17,684
Someone should build a different client somewhere else, get consensus

1622
02:02:17,764 --> 02:02:20,084
that, and then Core should update to become compatible.

1623
02:02:20,324 --> 02:02:22,604
And ironically, this is kind of what CUSF does.

1624
02:02:23,284 --> 02:02:26,844
And the second irony is that Core doesn't want to take responsibility for this.

1625
02:02:26,844 --> 02:02:28,124
So you would think, oh, this is great.

1626
02:02:28,684 --> 02:02:32,604
This is now a tool that removes the responsibility from us.

1627
02:02:32,604 --> 02:02:34,044
And it has a very clear criterion.

1628
02:02:34,044 --> 02:02:36,324
It's just as miners run it, if it will make them more money.

1629
02:02:37,164 --> 02:02:39,644
So they would think, oh, this is this, you'd think this would be great.

1630
02:02:40,204 --> 02:02:44,564
But the fact that Peter and Luke don't like it proves that

1631
02:02:44,564 --> 02:02:46,444
actually they are on the bad team.

1632
02:02:47,124 --> 02:02:50,404
It's like you're playing a game of Mafia or Among Us or something.

1633
02:02:50,404 --> 02:02:52,404
You know, you're playing a game, one of these games.

1634
02:02:53,164 --> 02:02:53,964
You know what I'm talking about?

1635
02:02:53,964 --> 02:02:57,404
One of these games where some people are secretly on the evil team and then the

1636
02:02:57,404 --> 02:02:58,484
other people are on a good team.

1637
02:02:58,524 --> 02:03:00,444
You got to figure out who they are.

1638
02:03:00,604 --> 02:03:10,404
It's like this reveals that they are against good Bitcoin ideas in a way.

1639
02:03:10,404 --> 02:03:13,484
I'm not sure how long it will take for everyone else to figure that out.

1640
02:03:13,924 --> 02:03:20,564
But for now, I guess it's the easiest to frame you as the one who's sabotaging

1641
02:03:20,564 --> 02:03:22,284
the project or at least trying.

1642
02:03:22,284 --> 02:03:26,004
One weird thing is that they say is that they say they try to say something like,

1643
02:03:26,004 --> 02:03:29,724
oh, if Paul were just nicer or if Paul would engage with the process, then his

1644
02:03:29,724 --> 02:03:31,364
thing would be further up the line.

1645
02:03:32,964 --> 02:03:33,124
Yeah.

1646
02:03:33,124 --> 02:03:34,524
So it's not about the idea.

1647
02:03:34,524 --> 02:03:36,124
It's about the politics.

1648
02:03:36,124 --> 02:03:36,364
Exactly.

1649
02:03:36,364 --> 02:03:36,884
It has nothing to do.

1650
02:03:36,924 --> 02:03:39,604
That is an argument that has literally nothing to do with the

1651
02:03:39,604 --> 02:03:40,564
objective merit of it.

1652
02:03:40,564 --> 02:03:44,604
So that's why you actually see that that when I hear something like that, I think,

1653
02:03:44,604 --> 02:03:48,564
OK, I got to run away from the process and and do something else.

1654
02:03:50,604 --> 02:03:54,724
It's the whole thing is being derived from the from their assessment of the

1655
02:03:54,724 --> 02:03:59,204
process, according to them and their infallible knowledge of consensus or

1656
02:03:59,204 --> 02:03:59,604
whatever.

1657
02:03:59,684 --> 02:04:03,804
So when I interviewed Andrew Polstra, I think this was in April.

1658
02:04:04,204 --> 02:04:10,204
He did mention something which made me feel a bit concerned when he said, I

1659
02:04:10,204 --> 02:04:13,404
think it was about a covenant software proposal.

1660
02:04:13,404 --> 02:04:16,644
And Jeremy had the same thing.

1661
02:04:16,724 --> 02:04:18,404
I believe it was any prevout.

1662
02:04:19,284 --> 02:04:23,644
And he said that he doesn't see it happening because the person who proposed

1663
02:04:23,644 --> 02:04:25,204
it has lost passion for it.

1664
02:04:25,724 --> 02:04:28,524
And I'm like, is this really about the best proposal?

1665
02:04:28,524 --> 02:04:29,044
It makes no difference.

1666
02:04:29,044 --> 02:04:29,284
Right.

1667
02:04:29,284 --> 02:04:29,724
Exactly.

1668
02:04:29,724 --> 02:04:32,964
If the idea is good, it would be literally irrelevant.

1669
02:04:33,444 --> 02:04:36,924
In fact, the idea could come from Jamie Dimon or something or could come from

1670
02:04:37,404 --> 02:04:40,444
one of our great enemies, whoever, Janet Yellen or whatever.

1671
02:04:40,444 --> 02:04:44,884
They could write the BIP and then they could they could hate the BIP and say

1672
02:04:44,884 --> 02:04:47,604
this is the worst because it because it'll make Bitcoin so good.

1673
02:04:48,644 --> 02:04:51,524
But the fact that they wrote it makes no it's a complete ad hominem.

1674
02:04:52,124 --> 02:04:54,964
And Jeremy had the similar thing happen with him where people said, oh, the

1675
02:04:54,964 --> 02:04:56,964
problem is not with CTV, the problem is with Jeremy.

1676
02:04:57,444 --> 02:04:58,724
They said explicitly.

1677
02:05:00,244 --> 02:05:03,484
That is explicitly ad hominem, so it's all ridiculous.

1678
02:05:04,721 --> 02:05:14,721
OK, Paul, let's make a closing statement of sorts and just explain to people why
they should consider CUSF.

1679
02:05:14,721 --> 02:05:19,081
Well, it's inevitable and it is the future of this and it's the way out of this
tangled mess.

1680
02:05:19,081 --> 02:05:27,361
And the alternative is to do this process on Twitter where you're trying to build
consensus among people.

1681
02:05:28,161 --> 02:05:39,121
Who all hate each other and whose motivations for disliking the other rival projects
are inherently strategic and insincere and have nothing to do with the merit of any
of the ideas.

1682
02:05:39,121 --> 02:05:41,481
So the alternative is horrible.

1683
02:05:41,481 --> 02:05:47,721
I mean, there's like do nothing ossification, which is also not a very appealing
idea.

1684
02:05:47,721 --> 02:05:50,641
And then there's like try to do whatever.

1685
02:05:50,641 --> 02:05:53,721
I mean, in a sense, there is no alternative because what is the BIP process?

1686
02:05:53,721 --> 02:05:57,721
No one knows. So whereas I have this other thing.

1687
02:05:57,721 --> 02:06:11,481
That. It's just something that miners can either run and they can stop running it at
any time, the software deactivates, whoever used it may lose money at that point,
whoever has coins in the feature.

1688
02:06:11,481 --> 02:06:21,521
But no one actually there's no one on Earth who's going to the software activates
and they're going to pour like one hundred million dollars into the everyone will
just be testing it at first.

1689
02:06:21,521 --> 02:06:24,481
We need to get to an idea where.

1690
02:06:24,481 --> 02:06:33,721
Miners, there's a little bit where there's less of a risk of each soft fork, we
reduce the risk, then it's possible to do more soft forks and be more experimental.

1691
02:06:33,721 --> 02:06:39,161
The the existing ideas about why the soft fork and why not are all incorrect.

1692
02:06:39,161 --> 02:06:52,121
The soft fork does not require consensus, the soft fork is not a change to the
existing protocol because the existing protocol survives intact and may not even be
aware of new version variants of it that have a soft fork activated.

1693
02:06:52,121 --> 02:07:02,961
So the whole situation is, oh, and the soft fork, you know, the soft fork is the
difference between us being able to have ossified L1 with a small block size plus.

1694
02:07:02,961 --> 02:07:12,201
A huge list of features, planetary scale, Zcash privacy, EVM compatibility, the
ability to issue assets and do Namecoin, all that stuff.

1695
02:07:12,201 --> 02:07:17,201
So so this is like the like a huge issue.

1696
02:07:17,201 --> 02:07:20,721
This is the number one thing to make Bitcoin a success.

1697
02:07:20,721 --> 02:07:26,281
And the is just to have these soft forks.

1698
02:07:26,281 --> 02:07:30,121
And the thing blocking them is this consensus process that doesn't work.

1699
02:07:30,121 --> 02:07:34,201
And CUSF is a complete solution to that problem.

1700
02:07:34,201 --> 02:07:47,721
But it does require everyone to admit that how wrong they were about the soft fork
process and what the soft fork is, which I think very few people actually understand
it to this day.

1701
02:07:47,721 --> 02:07:51,721
Although another benefit of CUSF is that it does kind of teach you what a soft fork
is.

1702
02:07:51,721 --> 02:07:55,241
It's something where invalidate block is triggered if something happens.

1703
02:07:55,241 --> 02:08:08,161
And that's why it's so harmless, because you could already trigger invalidate block
just because miners just wake up and they just decide that every block that ends in
a three, they're going to invalidate or something.

1704
02:08:08,161 --> 02:08:11,321
So so those are some those are some reasons.

1705
02:08:11,321 --> 02:08:15,241
I hope that's enough for people to at least look into it a little.

1706
02:08:15,241 --> 02:08:17,961
Now, one final question and then I'll let you go.

1707
02:08:17,961 --> 02:08:19,201
All right.

1708
02:08:19,201 --> 02:08:24,481
For the longest time, for longer than a decade, you have been known as the
prediction market guy.

1709
02:08:24,481 --> 02:08:30,201
And you've been trying to push this and you've been speaking highly of the potential
of prediction markets.

1710
02:08:30,201 --> 02:08:37,361
And you try to build it on Bitcoin and you tried to bring it on the second layer on
the sidechain.

1711
02:08:37,361 --> 02:08:42,241
And then all of a sudden you see Polymarket taking off on Ethereum.

1712
02:08:42,241 --> 02:08:48,481
And it's good to see that the idea succeeded the first time that I interviewed you.

1713
02:08:49,361 --> 02:08:50,801
I don't I don't feel that bad.

1714
02:08:50,801 --> 02:08:56,721
It's not like I'm pinning my entire life on whether or not I'm the prediction market
guy.

1715
02:08:56,721 --> 02:08:59,121
I really like the prediction market idea.

1716
02:08:59,121 --> 02:09:04,721
And it's not the worst thing if I can just point in the past and say, listen, I was
I mean, I still do that now.

1717
02:09:04,721 --> 02:09:10,841
I say, listen, this is something that I was saying in 2013 we should put on.

1718
02:09:10,841 --> 02:09:12,721
I'm BTC.

1719
02:09:12,721 --> 02:09:14,721
And so I was right about that.

1720
02:09:14,721 --> 02:09:17,921
I'm also right about Drivechain and BIP300.

1721
02:09:17,921 --> 02:09:19,121
And I'm right about CUSF also.

1722
02:09:19,121 --> 02:09:20,121
I'm right about all these things.

1723
02:09:20,121 --> 02:09:23,321
So it's like, what do you want me to do?

1724
02:09:23,321 --> 02:09:26,321
It's not my fault that everyone else is so slow.

1725
02:09:26,321 --> 02:09:29,721
But the prediction market thing is a great idea.

1726
02:09:29,721 --> 02:09:36,241
There's still if you look at what I present on BitcoinHiveMind.com, I have lots of
presentations and documents and things.

1727
02:09:36,241 --> 02:09:40,761
The version what is done on Polymarket is still only the tip of the iceberg.

1728
02:09:40,761 --> 02:09:42,881
A small percentage of what is possible is prediction.

1729
02:09:42,881 --> 02:09:46,081
And I have mentioned this many times and written about it.

1730
02:09:46,081 --> 02:09:53,201
So there's still plenty of time for Bitcoin to be the better prediction market
thing.

1731
02:09:53,201 --> 02:09:55,161
Prediction markets are the future.

1732
02:09:55,161 --> 02:09:56,081
They are better.

1733
02:09:56,081 --> 02:10:03,321
They're just better at everything because they aggregate information from all
sources and then broadcast it back out to all observers.

1734
02:10:03,361 --> 02:10:09,121
So many such cases, you know, I've been right about lots of different things.

1735
02:10:09,121 --> 02:10:12,121
And I'm right about these things I'm talking about today also.

1736
02:10:12,121 --> 02:10:13,921
So you don't have to wait.

1737
02:10:13,921 --> 02:10:17,321
You don't have to wait 11 years to get on board with CUSF.

1738
02:10:17,321 --> 02:10:18,361
You can just do it today.

1739
02:10:21,961 --> 02:10:23,041
Thank you very much, Paul.

1740
02:10:23,041 --> 02:10:27,601
And thank you to the 850 plus people who listen to this live.

1741
02:10:27,601 --> 02:10:31,361
I hope there will be a thousand more listening offline.

1742
02:10:31,361 --> 02:10:33,721
Not offline, when we go offline.

1743
02:10:33,721 --> 02:10:40,321
And also special thanks to the sponsors, LayerTwo Labs, NoOne'sHodling.ch and
SciTube.ai.

1744
02:10:40,321 --> 02:10:41,361
I'll let you go, Paul.

1745
02:10:41,361 --> 02:10:43,961
And thanks, everyone, for listening.

1746
02:10:43,961 --> 02:10:44,481
Thanks.