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Warning, the following content is not advisable for 2017 ICO cooks.

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Welcome to Shitcoin TV.

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Today, Andreas and I are joined by none other than Paul Sztorc, creator of
Drivechain.

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Welcome Paul.

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Thank you.

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Thank you guys for having me.

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It's an honor.

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It's great to finally have you on.

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I know Andreas and I have been talking about it for a while, so it definitely is an
honor

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for us too.

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Awesome.

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So, I guess today, the main thing we really wanted to, I know this is an annoying
phrase,

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but pick your brains about Paul.

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Okay.

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Yes, we all have drinks.

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It's funny.

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We all have different colors too.

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I just have water.

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I mean, vodka.

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I've got Red Bull.

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It looks like berries.

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Yeah.

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I have a beautiful burgundy red wine.

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It's alcohol glass.

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I love it.

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Aren't you doing a little challenge this Christmas, Andreas?

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A festive challenge with the wines.

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All right.

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Forty bottles of burgundy.

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Yeah.

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And we're also watching 37 Christmas movies.

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37 Christmas movies.

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Oh, there we go.

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Oh, look at that.

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Happy holidays to everyone in the audience.

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And Merry Christmas to all.

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Yeah.

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Happy non-denominational holidays to everyone.

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Yes.

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Well, with that, we can jump in.

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So I guess today, the main thing we really want to talk about is an awesome project
that

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Paul is working on called Drivechain.

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And I guess one phrase that I think really sums it up is, when you see it, you can't

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unsee it.

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So that's one thing I've been thinking about.

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But yeah, that puts it in a very distinctive category.

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No, I think as soon as you know that, that's it.

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You go down a rabbit hole, right?

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But Paul, I'd love to just kind of have your take on a little bit of a breakdown of
just

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what you think, how you would describe Drivechain and what it does.

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Well, it tries to separate the investment Bitcoin, the token, you know, the money,
tries

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to separate it from any individual piece of software technology.

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So Drivechain lets you send Bitcoin from some base chain, which would probably be
Bitcoin

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Core.

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It lets you send that to a different piece of software, where it can change owners
or

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be used in some kind of smart contract or weird other thing.

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Any weird, crazy idea that the developer has over there, and it can then be
re-transplanted

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to the original chain or to some different chain.

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So it lets you send Bitcoin among completely different pieces of software.

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And that's especially important these days because there is a lot of tremendous
contention

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and disputes over what exactly the software should be doing.

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Most obviously the block size debate, but also stuff like Turing completeness and
privacy

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features, like should we have large ring signatures like Monero?

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Should we have something like ZK-SNARKs, like Zcash has this very, very slow, kind
of difficult

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to compute system, but it's much more private.

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And so there's all these trade-offs and people don't really know what to do about it
really.

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But that's kind of a long story.

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So the short version is just, you can send Bitcoin to different pieces of software
in

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the back.

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And I do think that it's important because we are seeing this explosive kind of
shotgun

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style innovation in blockchain space, where most of it's nonsense, but there's a
market

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demand for people trying out these different ideas.

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And inside the nonsense, there are a few legitimate ideas.

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I think definitely like the ERC20 token or the counterparty style token or something

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like that, there's something real there amid mostly nonsense.

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And certainly the block size debate is something that many people have taken a lot
of different

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stances on.

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Some of which seem to be, at least more than one, seems to be rational.

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I mean, you have at least Luke Jr. who wants it to be 350K, and then you have some
people

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who just go along with the crowd and they say one megabyte or 2.2 megabytes or
whatever

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it is now, the complicated block weight duality thing.

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And then you have other people who want it to be higher, and then some people say it

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should be extremely high or unlimited.

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And I think at least two of those perspectives are rational.

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If we just pretend that we could go back in time and we had a Drivechain, then we
could

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have things like Ethereum and Monero and Zcash without pre-sales and ICOs and all
these

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tokens.

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So we could all just be owning Bitcoin, but we could also have these experiments and
you

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could send your Bitcoin into the experiment to get the futures or not.

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And if you don't, they wouldn't hurt you.

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Right.

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That's exactly it.

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And in fact, I think, you know, it was very, anyone who's been around for a long
time,

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I think will remember the announcement of Rootstock.

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That was around the same time that Ethereum first started to get a little, when I
first

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started to make it onto the front page of r slash Bitcoin on Reddit or something,
Ethereum

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was sort of starting to get talked about a long time ago, like 2015.

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And then our Rootstock showed up and said, oh, we're just going to copy that.

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And everyone thought, oh, great.

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And of course, none of that panned out because that was, it may have been 2014, that
was

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like ancient history.

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Nowadays, anyway.

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And I mean, one thing is, one thing is you can say these, a lot of these tokens are
pre-mines

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or ICOs or scams, and they lead to all kinds of just unwanted outcomes for everyone.

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But if you even ignore that, just the amount of fucking time we're using, juggling
all

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of these tokens, like what a joke.

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ShapeShift is a business and Binance is a business that exists only because we
can't,

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because we just wouldn't have sidechains.

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Binance wouldn't even exist.

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Someone wrote me an email and they ended up seeing Eric Voorhees, actually.

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They were in an email complaining about sidechains and they said, whatever.

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And they said, I'm an investor in Facebook, not Facebook, oh my God, he may have
been

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in Facebook, but he's an investor in ShapeShift.

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And they're like, my investment is going to be ruined.

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You know, what are you doing about this, Eric?

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And it's very funny.

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But that was a long time ago.

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But of course, Eric got the last laugh because very little progress was made on
sidechains

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in 2015, 2016.

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And very much progress was made as far as chipcoin trading and demand for
ShapeShift.

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So I'm sure he did okay, even though we can only imagine the extent to which he's
currently

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cooperating with the U.S.

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federal government.

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Yeah, we don't know exactly.

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When there's an exchange running an exchange that has no KYC and it suddenly has
KYC,

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it's like you could make a movie about it because you probably have your child in
some

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torture dungeon or something.

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Yeah, I don't know, like, probably like they just Xeroxed it.

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They probably have all these hard drives and like every corner of his house, they
have

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cameras like every, probably with all these emails and Google searches from ever.

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And there you go.

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That's Colorado, everyone.

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You don't run your non-KY, leave the United States if you're going to do something
like

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that. It's kind of a kind of a no brainer.

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Oh, certainly. And so, yeah, what I was saying before is I was thinking Ethereum
would be

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a sidechain, but it probably wouldn't because there's a lot of undesirable things
about

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sidechains, but it could have been.

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So I'm not saying like we would have kept Ethereum as a sidechain because it's way
too

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complicated and complicated.

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Yeah, Ethereum is it contains not only a technical idea, but it contains other
things in

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it as well. And the technical idea, I think, is almost one of the least important
things

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of it. One second thing that it contains is just the idea that there should be a

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competitor to Bitcoin that does things differently.

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And like reversing the Dow hack and just in general being extremely liberal and
taking a

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chance on all these weird ideas.

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But also what Ethereum is, it's kind of a it's a giant, it attracts all these
gullible

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people and it's a nexus for gullibility.

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And that's part of what how the ICO is kind of this multidimensional pyramid scheme
of

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this part of why the ICO crowd was drawn to Ethereum, because it was created by a
sort

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of a scammy ICO and then it gave birth to many scammy ICO children.

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And but there's so much more to it than that.

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Ethereum is like it's it's like a projection of the desire for I mean, I think the
idea

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that it just should compete with Bitcoin and that it should be have a differentiated

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product. This contains a lot of it that there's no leader in Bitcoin, but there's

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Vitalik Buterin in Ethereum.

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Bitcoin is sort of dirty and it doesn't play nice with anyone.

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But Ethereum is like super friendly and you can do like a fun, nonjudgmental dance
on

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stage wearing like a costume.

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And that's like considered OK and normal.

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It's like so there's like every just the desire to just sort of be different.

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That kind of captured Ethereum and it's but yeah, there's many, Ethereum is many

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things and it's not merely people wanted to turn complete scripting language.

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And anyone who thinks that that's all that it is.

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Has never looked at never looked at like Ethereum.com or like the just met Ethereum

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people because there's so much so much more packed into that train wreck that just a

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little feature doesn't explain it.

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I do remember that we used to have we used to have quirky memes and dances and

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Christmas parties in Bitcoin before we all became, well, we're all enemies now.

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But before that, we used to actually have a lot of fun.

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A lot of people don't know this, but it used to be a bunch of fun, actual Christmas

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parties where you could go and have a drink with Sipa.

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What happened?

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The block size debate happened and now we all hate each other outright or we just

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resent each other.

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And it's also kind of a reaction to all the Ethereum and other things as well, where

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it's like, oh, if they're going to do something like that, we have to can't do

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anything like that.

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And we would look at Ethereum.

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I remember I have a funny story, which is that when I first invented my other
project,

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which used to be called Truth Coins is now Bitcoin Hivemind.

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There was actually kind of Blockstream wanted to form like a partnership to develop

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that. And that was November 2014.

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And then I just happened to meet Roger Ver in December, the next month, December

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2014. And Roger was like, oh, yeah, you know, I'll fund it or whatever.

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And Blockstream was like, oh, that's perfect.

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Great. You know, they're all like everyone's like this.

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They're all like everyone knew each other and they're all happy about this.

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And Blockstream was worried about like regulatory questions.

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So they were like going a little slow on it.

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And they're like, oh, that's so great that Roger funded that.

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So happy.

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How time has changed.

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I think a lot of people will notice that if you look at the early companies, you'll
find

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the investors, for example, as far as I know, Trace Mayer and Roger are both
investors in

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Kraken. And this is the early Bitcoin company.

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The investors are on all kinds of sides and everything.

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Right now, everyone used to be on the same side.

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Of course, it's this all this.

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In fact, I still kind of remember it that way.

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So it's difficult for me to believe when I see the fights on Twitter.

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I just think like, listen, this is real.

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It doesn't seem real to me.

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I'm just like, oh, this idea that they're the mortal enemies and they hate each
other is

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it feels real.

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I do think, you know, certain people, I hesitate to name any names, but there are
some

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people who are like professional, they are professional climbers of the hierarchy
and

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they really made a career out of, they made a career out of kind of being a jerk on

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Twitter and taking advantage of people's, I don't know, emotions.

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I mean, I can absolutely save Gmax and Fondaze for you.

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Don't worry.

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Yeah, I was thinking of, I was thinking of that was one of the many names that you
hit on

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one. There are quite a few on different sides.

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Oh, there's so many of us.

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I mean, and they did kind of like they were like, oh, this would be a really easy
way for

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me to score points with super prestigious person.

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And and even though I had, you know, even though there's no legitimate talent, they
have

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this one talent, which is.

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The climbers.