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

Welcome to Shitcoin TV.

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

Welcome Paul.

Thank you.

Thank you guys for having me.

It's an honor.

It's great to finally have you on.

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

for us too.

Awesome.

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

but pick your brains about Paul.

Okay.

Yes, we all have drinks.

It's funny.

We all have different colors too.

I just have water.

I mean, vodka.

I've got Red Bull.

It looks like berries.

Yeah.

I have a beautiful burgundy red wine.

It's alcohol glass.

I love it.

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

A festive challenge with the wines.

All right.

Forty bottles of burgundy.

Yeah.

And we're also watching 37 Christmas movies.

37 Christmas movies.

Oh, there we go.

Oh, look at that.

Happy holidays to everyone in the audience.

And Merry Christmas to all.

Yeah.

Happy non-denominational holidays to everyone.

Yes.

Well, with that, we can jump in.

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

Paul is working on called Drivechain.

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

unsee it.

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

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

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

You go down a rabbit hole, right?

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

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

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

to separate it from any individual piece of software technology.

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

Core.

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

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

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

to the original chain or to some different chain.

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

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

and disputes over what exactly the software should be doing.

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

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

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

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

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

But that's kind of a long story.

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

the back.

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

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

demand for people trying out these different ideas.

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

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

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

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

stances on.

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

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

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

it is now, the complicated block weight duality thing.

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

should be extremely high or unlimited.

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

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

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

tokens.

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

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

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

Right.

That's exactly it.

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

I think will remember the announcement of Rootstock.

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

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

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

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

And everyone thought, oh, great.

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

like ancient history.

Nowadays, anyway.

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

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

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

of these tokens, like what a joke.

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

because we just wouldn't have sidechains.

Binance wouldn't even exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it's very funny.

But that was a long time ago.

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

in 2015, 2016.

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

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

cooperating with the U.S.

federal government.

Yeah, we don't know exactly.

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

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

torture dungeon or something.

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

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

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

And there you go.

That's Colorado, everyone.

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

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

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

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

sidechains, but it could have been.

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

complicated and complicated.

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

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

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

competitor to Bitcoin that does things differently.

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

chance on all these weird ideas.

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

people and it's a nexus for gullibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vitalik Buterin in Ethereum.

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

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

stage wearing like a costume.

And that's like considered OK and normal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

little feature doesn't explain it.

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

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

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

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

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

What happened?

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

resent each other.

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

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

anything like that.

And we would look at Ethereum.

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

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

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

that. And that was November 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

And Blockstream was worried about like regulatory questions.

So they were like going a little slow on it.

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

So happy.

How time has changed.

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

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

Kraken. And this is the early Bitcoin company.

The investors are on all kinds of sides and everything.

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

Of course, it's this all this.

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

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

I just think like, listen, this is real.

It doesn't seem real to me.

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

it feels real.

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

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

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

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

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

Don't worry.

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

one. There are quite a few on different sides.

Oh, there's so many of us.

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

me to score points with super prestigious person.

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

this one talent, which is.

The climbers.