Where's Henry?
of the last part you heard.
You've been muted since I got in here.
maybe that was a little glitch.
was just saying that it would be great for Bitcoiners to have the option to use the
Drivechain
arrangement where the control the through hash rate escrow instead of
being forced to only have the option as they do now which is the federations
control the various sidechain pegs.
So that was one thing I was curious about when I read that.
Another person wrote something quite curious which was they wrote yesterday or today I
saw someone on Twitter write that trustless sidechains are perpetual motion and I was
like what? Come on perpetual motion.
That's what we heard in like 2016 2017 people were saying Oh proof of stake is
perpetual motion
sort of like, we're back to like, you know, like hundreds of years ago with people
talking about Newtonian physics and wondering if something is perpetual motion.
feel like this perpetual motion smear is like a hand waving nonsense.
If someone has a coherent criticism, they
should make it.
just the trustless sidechains, perpetual motion, is like the biggest hand wave.
So I thought that was kind of funny.
And I hope that that Drivechain critic can develop a more articulate framing
for his view.
Or just join the winning team.
mean, the sooner someone gets interested in chain the better in my view because this
idea has the truth behind it, has the science behind it.
It's much better for Bitcoiners to be able to choose.
It's potentially a way for like billions of dollars to accrue to Bitcoin through
better sidechains. So this is a way for Bitcoin to win, to win the contest, what
everybody ultimately wants, which is a valuable and successful sustainable project
Bitcoin.
And then another,
the third of my various grievances is that the third argument I heard lately, I read
online, someone was like, with a federation, can sue, you can use the legal system, can
sue the people who were the signers of the federation.
Whereas with Drivechain, you've got all these anonymous miners out there, how can you
sue them? This is an argument straight from BSV, the idea that the blockchain
should be understood as the subject of the state of the legal
system, even though Satoshi explicitly wrote, it's not about recourse, all prevention.
He wanted a purely volatile
voluntarist, emergent economic design, not one where like Craig writes law and order
police come down to decide who owns what Bitcoin.
So I thought that was kind of funny.
Just to wrap up, those are the three things I didn't like lately.
Someone said the trustless sidechains are perpetual motion.
Someone else said that multisig is potentially more
The last thing I to say
is
that the Bitcoiners choose which model
they want. Give them a second option.
Right now, there's almost no use of Bitcoin sidechains.
It's like $100 million.
It's less than 1 % of all Bitcoin value is in these sidechains.
If we have a different sidechain model, that's probably much better, at least I would
agree with that, then maybe there'll be like
a huge amount more demand, which means higher Bitcoin value, higher Bitcoin price, more
miner income, higher Bitcoin value.
Everyone's a with a more like a higher rate of value accrual.
Teddy, welcome to the stage.
Teddy, one of my frequent conversation partners from Cafe Bitcoin
in the Clubhouse app.
to see you here.
What's on your mind?
Please share your thoughts about anything.
Yeah, I don't know.
just thought I'd join to listen in, see how the conversation goes, if there's anything
new in the Drivechain world.
When are these BIPs 300, 301 getting pushed through?
I guess that's really the question.
Well,
I think that it draws closer day by day.
It could be a matter of months
or very few years away.
It really depends on what the community wants.
Unlike, you know, the presidential
quadrennial cycle,
with Bitcoin BIPs,
there's no way of being sure
when the next one might come.
With, you know, we got
SegWit 2017,
Taproot 2021.
So that was like four years,
or roughly four or five years,
depending on how many months there were involved.
So the next one could be
2023, 2024.
I saw a tweet from
one of the leading thinkers in sidechains,
Sergio Demian Lerner,
and he wrote that
probably 2023,
4 or 5, like in that range,
we'll get drivechain.
I forget exactly which years he said
would be the drivechain years
in his model of the future,
his expectation, but, you know,
he's one of the leading thinkers on this topic.
He is emphatically in favor
of drivechain, if I'm not mistaken.
He even recently commented in a tweet
that it is the objective
of the Rootstock Bitcoin
sidechain community to
develop into a drivechain
as soon as it is available
on Bitcoin to do that.
This is one of the top two sidechains
on Bitcoin currently. The top two are
Liquid and Rootstock,
and he would like Rootstock to become
a drivechain, which would be
very cool.
That's just one person's outlook on when
this might happen. I would say lately
there have been multiple drivers
for greater interest in drivechain.
Multiple people have commented
that they're seeing a great uptick,
uptick in the level of energy
and interest in drivechain.
So maybe in the coming months
we'll see significantly more
momentum across the community
as the blockchain
community, you know,
Bitcoin and others, explore
the crypto-economic potential of
layers, developing layers
on Bitcoin. You know, it's something that
even the
critics of drivechain, some of the most
vocal critics of drivechain, still
do assert that Bitcoin
must become more layered.
So there's a question of, do we
want layers? And then, if we're going to have
layers, should a drivechain
sidechain model be one of them?
So those are some of the factors
that are pushing greater attention
to drivechain. Like, you could come to
drivechain directly, or you could start
just looking around, like, how can we make Bitcoin more
layered? How can we have more extensibility
for Bitcoin? Give people
more options, different ways to
build and use on top of
Bitcoin in ways that internalize
the value of that development
to Bitcoin and its block space.
Drivechain is one way to do that. I think
a very compelling way, and I feel that
over time, as Bitcoin grows,
the need and pressure for
that development will grow.
A person
can get interested in drivechain if they think
fees are too low.
A person can get interested in drivechain
because they think fees are too high.
So whichever way we go, it'll
cause interest and studying
of drivechain.
And a person can get
interested in Bitcoin if they think that
Bitcoin should have more extensibility.
In other words, make it
easier and more possible for
people to build different kinds
of applications and customizations on
Bitcoin. Like, use
Bitcoin in a way that's more
scalable, like lower fees, higher
throughput. Use Bitcoin in a way
that's more private. So
different exposures are
possible on sidechains
that aren't possible on layer 1.
And that's what extensibility
means. It's creating
different kinds of customizations and
developments and applications on top
of Bitcoin in a manner
that brings more value to Bitcoin.
Rather than, for example, building
on an altcoin.
Let's say you want max privacy.
You go to Monero. You go to Zcash
or TornadoCash or
whatever used to be out there. There's different
things people have done.
It'd be better if they could just build on
Bitcoin rather than sell their Bitcoin
and buy an altcoin. Or if you want
max scalability, instead of going
to Solana or Ethereum, it'd be
better if you could, instead of selling your Bitcoin,
keep your Bitcoin and use it on a
sidechain. So that way, you're not
reducing Bitcoin's value.
So that's what extensibility
is this word I've been lately
trying to develop,
a vernacular for. And I learned
from Adam Back, because when he talks
about drivechain,
which he has in many tweets,
Adam Back, the leader
of Blockstream, the CEO,
he likes drivechain and
has said and talks about it, this word
extensibility. And I've been finding
it very useful to become more
familiar with that word, because I feel like
it really does capture
the essence of what drivechain is about.
It's about increasing Bitcoin's
extensibility.
Do you think,
follow-up question,
do you think that
what we're seeing with ordinals and
inscriptions are
a potential
roadblock
for
drivechains due to the fact
that Taproot
was pushed through
and now it seems like some people are
regretting the Taproot upgrade
because it has allowed
for this discounted block space
and ordinals
running wild and bringing
that trading of
JPEGs over to Bitcoin.
Do you personally think
that that might be a speed
bump in the road or the plan
for drivechains
moving forward, because the community will be
much more
careful with what they put
through next?
That's a great question.
I do feel that there's
a very good chance the community
will achieve the best
possible understanding,
which I think would
be not to never
change again, but instead
to make a change
which would reduce the need
for changes in the future.
It's kind of like if you have a pattern
of needing something
and that thing you need is a problem
or creates problems, it'd be
great if you could do something that would
eliminate that future problem,
but you have to make one final change.
One of the thinkers who talks about this very well
is Eden Iago.
Eden, in multiple tweets, has said
what Bitcoin needs is to stop
changing so much, because that
can be disruptive and create
unintended problems
like exploits and new uses
of the code that weren't intended or
contemplated, but
what we need, Teddy, in my
view, I feel personally that
the drivechain view is that if we do
drivechain, changes like
SegWit and Taproot in the future
wouldn't be necessary possibly
because we would have made a change
by doing drivechain
that enables all these
uses to occur on the second
layers, so experimentation
and changes can happen there in a
partitioned context, which
if they fail, do not affect
mainchain users and mainchain
stability. So
what drivechain does is, yes,
it's one more change, that's true,
but
it would enable us
possibly to achieve a higher
level of ossification, meaning
a much higher level of feeling
that we might never have to change
or if we do, it might be very
far in the future instead of every five years
like SegWit, Taproot,
you know, drivechain, that could be
the last one, and maybe
if we had done drivechain
before Taproot, we
could have done drivechain,
we could have done Taproot on a drivechain
and then we would have been
able to find out more about how
it really works, because
when you're running an experiment live,
that's a great way to see how things really
work, and if we had done
Taproot on a drivechain,
then we would have been able to see
possibly this kind of thing,
like ordinals, and then we would have
been able to make a more informed
choice about whether to bring that
Taproot technology down to layer
one. So what drivechain does
is it enables different
development proposals
for Bitcoin layer one to operate
in reality on a drive
chain first, where it's
safer than doing it on layer one,
and those ideas can compete
because let's say we did Taproot on
one drivechain, and on a different drivechain
we do something else. Well, if the
Taproot drivechain accrues
$10 million of value
and then the other drivechain accrues
$10 billion, well, we know
which one is more worth doing.
So drivechain allows
for Bitcoin development
to evolve into
a superior dynamic, where
instead of it being one of deliberation,
it's one of competition,
because there can be multiple drivechains
and we can easily see through capitalism
which one has the greatest
value, which one has the greatest
users, which one is bringing
the most fees down to layer one.
So it enables ideas to compete
and competition is
better than deliberation. Like in
Soviet Russia, the way they would make
ideas in the government
was like, in society, was
primarily government deliberation
and decree.
But with a more
capitalistic system, you have competition,
which is what America is more so about,
which is like, lots of people
have businesses, and the businesses
that are really good get very big.
And they have a larger
influence on society.
Like McDonald's, it's like all over the place
because people want it.
So that's more like drivechain, where
we could have
200 different drivechains
and we could see which ones are really
successful and which ones aren't stable,
which ones have good code, which ones
don't. So that
is what drivechain enables. It enables
more competition among ideas
for Bitcoin. And all
of them will create higher value
for Bitcoin. It will send
the Bitcoin price to the moon, in
my view, because
when you're demanding
the drivechain native token, you're
demanding a synthetic Bitcoin. The only
way to create that Bitcoin on the
drivechain is to
build up Layer 1 Bitcoin in the
Hashrate escrow. That's the nature of the
two-way peg. So when people
pull value into the drivechain,
they do it by sending Layer 1
Bitcoin into the Hashrate escrow, which
takes Bitcoin out of circulation, which
causes the Bitcoin price to go up.
In other words, if there's a ton of demand
for these drivechain native tokens,
that's a ton of demand for synthetic
Bitcoin. It's like wrapped Bitcoin.
Right now, there's $4 billion
in wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum.
If that number were to go to $10 billion,
that means Bitcoin's price will
have risen. Because
the only way to create that wrapped Bitcoin
is, presumably, by locking
up Layer 1 Bitcoin
in that federation,
in that company's multisig.
So what we want is for
these two-way pegs not to
be federated, but instead to have
Bitcoin users have the option
to use a miner control peg.
And then we think, as
drive chainers, if we are, I am,
that there'll be much more
demand for them, because people will understand
them correctly to be a more reliable,
a more secure model, more
Bitcoin-y, right? It's more Bitcoin-y
to have a peer-to-peer mechanism,
where the order
is emergent from
anonymous, self-interested,
mutually distrusting parties,
the miners, to do what's
in their best interest, which is to secure the peg.
That's how Bitcoin works,
and that's how the pegs will work.
So, ultimately, it's about
number-go-up technology.
That's like the simplest case for a drivechain,
is that it'll make Bitcoin more valuable.
It's also, to me, much
more interesting and superior.
A system, like you raised the issue of
taproot, unintended consequences,
the hazards of a development.
In Bitcoin, and those are great thoughts. So, yeah, drivechain is a change, but it's a change designed to be perhaps the last change, or maybe at least the last change for a long time, which increases the degree of ossification afforded to the Bitcoin community, which allows for a stronger narrative of sort of stability and digital gold, which is an important part of the value accrual narrative.
Did you fall asleep? What are your thoughts on that?
No, I'm here, yeah. Sounds like what you've been saying for the last year. So, interested to see how it plays out. I do think that we might already be at a state of ossification and don't have a need to make any more changes, personally, but drivechain does seem to have some sort of value add.
You've heard me say that before, but yeah, gotta, I guess, wait and see if everybody else feels the same way.
Maybe it's a good idea, as far as marketing is concerned, to copy and paste the BIPs as the new BIPs, not BIP300, 301, and call them the last BIP, just for marketing purposes. I'm kind of joking, saying this right now.
But yeah, anyways, I think it's all good and well, and drivechains could be valuable. I think that we've seen fees go up, you know, because of this Ordinal stuff. This meme posted at the top is pretty funny there.
Yeah, there's a lot, you know, we need consensus. I think that a lot of people are probably like, well, do fees really need to go up right now, or is the security budget good, and it's because of this recent spike in fees. But yeah, I guess we've got to kind of wait and see.
Totally. I've noticed that some of the leading thinkers in Ethereum are quite confident that Bitcoin is on a road that leads nowhere, in terms of economic security.
They look at the fee market, and they look at the halving cycle, and the inevitable nature of the halvings. Every four years, you know, the march of time, is it in Bitcoin's favor? And they FUD Bitcoin. There's one person, I don't want to name, who has over 100,000 followers, and all the time, he's saying jokes and sneers about Bitcoin needing to have inflation in the future.
And it's not only Ethereum altcoiners who say this. It's also some of the highly respected intellectuals within Bitcoin's community. A couple of them think that it'd be quite acceptable, if not best, for Bitcoin to seriously contemplate inflation.
So, I am personally trying to steer away from the security budget side of the discussion for Drivechain, and steer toward the value accrual to the token, because the token is so much more relatable for everyone. Almost everyone can relate to the token's value, and very few people are interested in the academic subject of the value of the block space.
But, with regard to that matter, among the people who are interested in this, you know, sort of public good of the value of the block space, and the network security, the security of the UTXOs, I do think that these altcoiners, in the worst case, would be vindicated.
I think that, like, perpetually low fees on layer one would be a problem. I mean, almost all of the miner income right now comes from the coinbase, right, the inflation or subsidy. Well, probably the least controversial word to call it is just the coinbase. People sometimes get triggered if you call it the subsidy.
Satoshi called it the subsidy in the code, literally, called it subsidy. But, at least I've seen a screenshot of that.
You want to get somebody triggered, Henry, you just got to call it the gas fees.
Oh my god, gas.
And, yeah, he's not optimistic about Bitcoin's long-term economic security. So, I imagine that's one of the reasons that perhaps led him to be interested mostly in Ethereum.
Although, I don't want to speak for him. I haven't spoken to him in a couple of months, but he's a nice guy.
But, when I asked him once about, are you interested in drivechain, he wasn't familiar with it much.
And, I do feel that these altcoiners could, if drivechain's adopted, be blindsided by its performance.
The performance of drivechain could blindside them.
It could really surprise them because Vitalik is on record saying, Vitalik and others, who probably are just parodying his ideas, are on record saying that because of Bitcoin's fixed issuance in the long term, because of Bitcoin's reliance on a transaction fee economic security model, Bitcoin will have to resort to inflation, have to violate its monetary policy.
And, I think they're wrong. And, I think they're wrong for reasons that have been known from the very beginning.
Satoshi wrote at the very beginning, well, not at the very beginning, in August 2010, he wrote in the BitDNS thread that all the networks in the world would be merged mine with Bitcoin.
He wrote that exactly. Or, I'm quoting almost exactly, just from memory.
But, it was unambiguous what he meant there. He said all the networks in the world.
And, he was talking about every single blockchain protocol being merged mine with Bitcoin.
And, drivechain is that ambition.
That is what drivechain aspires to be.
It aspires to be the technology that facilitates the conglomeration of every protocol that has any value at all to be a Bitcoin merge mine sidechain.
And then, we would over time march back to 100% dominance, not just of blockchain token value, but of block space value, which is the security budget topic.
If Bitcoin could magnetize all of the altcoin projects onto Bitcoin in that manner, then we would have 100% dominance.
And, we would have all of the fees paid to Bitcoin miners.
It would be phenomenal.
Right now, there's about 15 times more fees paid to altcoins than Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin had all those fees, which of course is a projection, so we can't assume that would exactly occur that way mathematically.
But, if Bitcoin had 15 times more transaction fees, absolutely nobody would be talking about inflation for Bitcoin.
The miners would be getting millions of dollars and more than they do now per day.
We would have a ton more assurance that the long run fee-reliant economic security model is intact and perfectly viable.
So, that's what we want.
We want every transaction fee to be a Bitcoin miner receipt.
And, that would be awesome.
There would be no more security budget FUD.
I think Drivechain has the potential, in my personal view, to completely end all security budget FUD and return our block space dominance to 100%.
And, of course, more notably, send the Bitcoin value up.
Because, if there's only Bitcoin instead of all these altcoins, we'd be at 100% dominance.
We'd be at a price probably at least double what we have right now, if not much higher.
Because, there'd be so much more understanding and confidence in Bitcoin as the dominant project.
Rather than having all these altcoins vying for world domination as Bitcoin's dominance declines.
They're all hoping to be the next big one.
And, that leads to all this adversarial mindset among the altcoin projects.
They're all competing and there's all this nasty, mean-spirited competition and rhetoric among the projects.
Rather than having everyone get along.
If you're the kind of person who likes to fight with a fake wrestling mindset, then the altcoin stuff, not you, but anyone, might be for them.
But, if you're the kind of person who wants to see all of humanity collaborate and cooperate productively in a mutually beneficial arrangement,
then the use of a single protocol that is optimally configured would be ideal.
And, that's what Drivechain tries to do.
It tries to make Bitcoin the layer one for every single blockchain.
Every blockchain is a protocol.
Every sidechain is a protocol.
And, every single altcoin could be cloned into a drivechain.
And then, they would use Bitcoin.
They'd all be Bitcoiners.
And, we'd all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
And, the lion would lay down with the lamb.
And, Jesus would come back with the Mashiach.
And, everyone would be happy all the time.
There'd be constant rejoicing and partying.
It'd be great.
Unlimited sex with no venereal disease.
It would just be nirvana.
People would be ecstatic.
I think about it all the time.
Drivechain truly is the future.
Teddy, are you fired up?
So fired up right now, dude.
You are the most energized Twitter Spaces host on this platform.
Can't go a day without listening to you chat.
So, great stuff.
Is there a block explorer for Drivechain out there right now?
Does it work?
We have a thumbs up from a leading Drivechain thinker in the audience.
So, I think the answers to those things are yes.
You should go and check it out and report back.
If you have any questions about any specific content on the layer2labs.com website or drivechain.info website,
please engage by sharing your thoughts and questions in the Drivechain Talk Telegram group.
It is constantly monitored and people participate in it 24-7.
So, the Drivechain Talk Telegram group, you can easily find it if you're not already involved by going to drivechain.info.
That's drivechain.info.
And then click on the right-hand links list.
Click on Telegram.
And when you do that, it will take you to the Telegram app.
You'll see the Drivechain Talk group.
It has 728 members.
Right now, 74 are online.
That's how obsessed people are with Drivechain.
They can't peel themselves away.
Seventy-four people are discussing Drivechain on Friday evening.
That's how hot this is.
That's how sexy the topic is.
Maybe they're on there with their date.
Maybe they meet up with their date like, hey, Sarah, do you want to do the Drivechain Talk group again?
Sure.
Let's do it, Billy.
And then they're on there, and they're asking questions about the Block Explorer.
There's different subgroups you can get into.
There's the general.
There's the off-topic.
There's the prediction market hive mind group where they talk about the peer-to-peer Oracle network, which is going to be an extremely exciting Drivechain, probably the most exciting of all.
It's kind of like a supercar.
This Drivechain is like a supercar.
You can buy the Ford Mustang or the Ford Bronco, but they have a supercar called the GT40.
You're the kind of guy who knows fancy cars and watches and things.
You would know this.
The GT40, it costs like a quarter million dollars or something.
It goes like zero to 60 in one second.
It's a crazy powerful car.
It's like a flying gas can, like 12-cylinder monster.
Almost no one buys one, but it does increase the brand value of Ford a lot.
Hive mind is going to be like that.
Its market cap might just be a few hundred million dollars, which isn't going to be much when Bitcoin is like a trillion.
But it'll be the most exciting and cool thing ever in the history of the world.
And therefore, it'll be like the supercar in the lineup.
So people will buy more ordinary Fords because Ford has that race car, that supercar.
Similarly, Bitcoin, if it has these awesome Drivechains, these very cool protocols attached to it, like a barnacle on a whale.
Although it's small, if the barnacle is very interesting, it makes the whole whale cooler.
So Hive mind might be like that.
So I think some of these Drivechains might be huge.
Others might be small.
But all of them potentially would be so interesting and cool that it would make people know that very cool things can be built on Bitcoin.
And that is a very important part of Drivechain.
Even if the Drivechains aren't that large economically, there is a potential that in terms of narrative, they strengthen Bitcoin immeasurably.
Just like how, as I said, Ford doesn't sell that many GT40s, doesn't sell that many supercars.
They probably lose money on that thing.
But it increases the brand value a lot to have that supercar in their lineup.
Just like the Dodge Viper.
They don't sell that many Dodge Vipers.
But it is one of the coolest cars.
It makes the whole Dodge lineup cooler.
When people pull into the dealership, they see the Viper up on the platform.
And they're like, wow, cool, Dodge.
Let me go buy a minivan.
But the Viper is out there signaling coolness.
So Bitcoin can enhance its coolness a lot by having these high-tech advanced projects that are only possible in a Drivechain.
And that's a big part of what Drivechain is all about.
Because narratives in blockchain are very important.
It's very important to have your blockchain be the one people think is going to deliver really interesting, important things.
So Drivechain helps with that narrative a lot, potentially.
It's all about the future.
So nothing is certain.
I can't promise anything about anything.
I can't say with absolute certainty, if we don't do Drivechain, the world will end.
And if we do do it, then we all are good-looking, you know, and perfect.
Like I can't promise those things.
But the truth is likely somewhere in the middle, which is like it's an important consideration, needs to be studied carefully.
And the benefits are both technological and economic, as well as psychological.
As I'm describing, for example, HiveMind, this peer-to-peer oracle network.
Very important, Bitcoin has that.
If something like that were built on an altcoin, it would make the altcoin much cooler, potentially.
So it's important we have these very, very smart people who have innovative ideas.
It's important they do it in Bitcoin.
We need to enable that kind of extensibility for Bitcoin.
And that way, these cool ideas can be done on Bitcoin.
Well, yeah, I just joined the Telegram chat group, and I made a joke that apparently the admins didn't like.
So I've been banned from the server, so I won't be participating.
Oh, Teddy, you weren't banned.
You weren't banned.
Let me explain.
How does it work?
There's an interesting situation where people very often, when they join the Drivechain Telegram group, are booted by a bot.
The bot asks you a CAPTCHA, but it asks you the CAPTCHA, I think, only in the general thread.
So if you go looking in one of the other threads, you might miss the CAPTCHA, and then it boots you within 30 seconds.
Because we had problems with spam, so we had to have this bot filter out the people who aren't real.
But sometimes there's a false positive, so it's not your fault.
Many people have reported this problem.
What we need is a better bot for the Telegram group, I think.
So, yeah, you can try again in some amount of time.
Maybe it's like five minutes.
You can just enter again and go to the – yeah, I see you there.
Teddy Bullish AF is typing.
Okay, are you in now?
Is it working?
Yeah, you wrote maybe.
Okay, cool.
I'm glad it appears to be working for you.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because other people probably had the same experience.
They figured that they joined and they were booted because of lack of sexy photo.
But in reality, it was just the bot.
So, yeah, don't think anything of it.
I was going to say, trigger-finger hungry on that ban there.
So, yeah, glad to hear that I'm welcome from the Drivechain community.
Thanks, Henry.
And you're lucky I'm here.
Otherwise, if I didn't join the stage, you probably would have been on mute for a good hour or two talking to yourself there.
Well, yeah, who knows how long I could have gone before I realized I was on mute.
That would have been quite an uninteresting show that we would have recorded.
Well, maybe it'd be great, in case anyone's kind of new, to just review some of the very basics about Drivechain.
So Drivechain is two BIPs.
One is BIP300, and the other is BIP301.
BIP300 is Hashrate Escrow.
BIP301, Blind Merged Mining.
Both are important.
Hashrate Escrow, I've been told by one of the co-authors of the BIPs, Hashrate Escrow is the most important of the two BIPs.
That's really the king.
And then the queen is Blind Merged Mining.
They're both very cool, and they're intended to both be adopted.
But the authors felt that if the community decided for some reason to only do one at a time, that way, by splitting the BIPs into two BIPs instead of all in one, it gives the community the option to contemplate them separately.
But they are intended to be adopted together.
That's the view.
And almost everyone I've spoken to ever about Drivechain who liked the idea liked both of them and the idea of doing them together.
A person can read about them directly on GitHub.
You can also read, if you're not like a programmer, you can read summaries of them written by many
different people. As I mentioned earlier, Fiatjaf has a great essay about Drivechain on his
website, fiatjaf.com. Go there, F-I-A-T-J-A-F.com. He's the creator of Nostr. He, on his website,
if you click on Bitcoin and then click on Drivechain, you'll see his essay. It takes only
five minutes to read. Very well-written, very, very, very clear, well-written essay on Drivechain,
both addressing its benefits as well as addressing the most frequently raised questions and
criticisms. And he defeats those criticisms convincingly, in my view, in his essay.
And there's other great people who've summarized it, like the lightning and Bitcoin developer,
SuperTestNet, and the researcher at Sovereign, John Light. And I mean, I've written my own essay. So
if anyone happens to like the way I think, they can go to my Twitter, which is Henry Magram,
and then they can easily find in my bio the link to my little Substack article called
Why I Support Drivechain for Bitcoin, the Crypto-Economic Potential of Peer-to-Peer Side
Chains. And it's like a one-minute read, very down-to-earth, because I'm more of like a
philosophy and economics guy. So it's pretty simple for me. I'm not going to get into the
deep technical software engineering questions. I mean, I feel that Drivechain is mostly about
economics. It's mostly about making Bitcoin more valuable and more viable from like a kind of top
down economic perspective, more extensibility, more development, more value accrual,
more fees, more value. That's what it's all about. Making Bitcoin healthier, stronger, bigger,
more stamina, more performance, more excitement.
Very personal in nature.
How would you respond to J.W. Weatherman's response to Fiatjaf, where he says it's a
security disaster to vote with hashrate? In Bitcoin, we use hashrate only to order transactions,
but we don't trust it to enforce rules, or we'd all have B-cash now.
11 of 15 federations are far superior to Drivechains.
Yeah, I'm familiar with J.W. Weatherman's thoughts on this topic. I've read many of his tweets
over the last year, and I've listened to him speak in multiple interviews and debates,
and I've also talked to him directly once about a year ago in Cafe Bitcoin.
I think J.W. Weatherman is a very smart and intelligent guy who likes Bitcoin a lot and has
devoted tons of time to Bitcoin. He's a very well-known Bitcoiner, and he's very good at very
carefully examining self-custody, and he has created a widely recognized and quite distinctive
perspective on the nature of self-custody, the importance of open-source code in self-custody
technology. And he speaks very convincingly and with authority on the topic of self-custody and
related matters. So while I don't share his view on Drivechain, I do appreciate his contribution
to Bitcoin generally. So I want to first mention how much I respect and appreciate the fact that
there's no doubting, there's no doubting that J.W. Weatherman is a very smart person
who knows a lot about Bitcoin, especially the topic of things like self-custody and private
keys, open-source technology, and personal security, which is a very hot topic these days.
So that's the first thing, is I think he's cool and I think he's smart. Now, on the topic of
Drivechain, I respectfully disagree with him, and I mean respectfully, sincerely. I'm not
joking about that. I really mean it. I listened to his debate with Paul Sztorc, his debate against
Paul Sztorc. I don't remember which podcast it was on, but I remember distinctly listening to the
whole thing carefully and completely. In my opinion, in that debate, he seemed to me to
demonstrate a lack of familiarity with how Drivechain works and the arguments in favor of it.
I felt in that debate, listening to him for an hour, that he didn't provide a sophisticated
response to any of the points that were raised against him.
So my overall take is that J.W. Weatherman, for some reason, doesn't like Drivechain,
but I do not find that his articulation of his reasoning to be compelling, to be comprehensive.
And I would look forward to actually discussing with him myself directly sometime,
and we could chat about it. I feel that people who care a lot about Bitcoin would agree with
many of the things that Drivechain is intended to improve. So I would have loved in that debate
for it to hear him begin in the style of the great philosophers, which is to first acknowledge
the strengths of one's opponent's view. I would have loved to hear him say, for example,
that Bitcoin over time in the future needs trustless second layers. And I would love to
hear him say what he thinks trustless means and the extent to which a miner control two-way peg
could be thought of as a trustless two-way peg, could be thought of as a peer-to-peer technology.
And then I would have loved to hear him say the benefits of having certain Drivechains,
like would it be good for Bitcoin to have, you know, a scaling layer, like a large block
sidechain, a privacy sidechain, a sidechain that offers greater Turing completeness.
I would have loved to hear him talk about those things. And then after doing that and
acknowledging the strengths, hear him raise questions and skepticism about his concerns,
which I think, if I'm not mistaken, are mainly could be summarized as concerns around
the nature of merged mining and whether merged mining leads to a negative change in the nature
of the incentives for Bitcoin miners. But I didn't hear all that in his debate with Paul.
So I found the debate kind of not like a very good one. I wouldn't even recommend it to people
interested in Drivechain unless they're interested in seeing an example of someone who doesn't
understand Drivechain very well debate the topic. But just to wrap up, like I think that he's a
cool guy and I would definitely enjoy having the opportunity one day to like talk with him
over the Internet or in person about the topic and to hear his view, because he certainly is
an expert on some things in Bitcoin, if not many things. So, yeah, that's my view on that cool dude.
Hiro Gamer, welcome to the stage. Hiro Gamer, Stacks fan. Welcome. What is up?
Thanks for joining. I like your McDonald's hat.
Yeah, thanks for the space. So, yeah, I've been following Drivechain for a while.
So I like to ask, so I don't have anything fundamentally, I don't have any fundamental
problem with Drivechain. But my sort of, I just like to ask, how can we get Drivechain to a
practical state where you can demonstrate the actual benefit that you're saying you are doing
or you're saying that it can do? Because there's a lot of talks about the positive and negative,
but a lot of positive side of Drivechain. But how are you going to be able to demonstrate that
in practice? That's more what I would like to see and what I like to not just hear,
but see in practice playing out. Is there a way to demonstrate? And I have mentioned that
in your Telegram too at some point. And yes, so I just like to see something
live somehow in the works and be able to see the actual benefit that you're saying that
it can do. So when I see something that actually working and brings the benefit Bitcoin,
as you say, it can do, then I think I'll be more convinced. And I think I'm not the only one who's
sort of would be more convinced just by your words, but by seeing the actual result.
So that's what I'm more would like to see. So I don't know if you have any comments about that.
Totally. Those are great thoughts. You are totally right. It is imperative that people have
a real live way of touching and feeling this technology. So what is available right now
at drivechain.info is the ability to download testnet software and experience drivechain that
way. And one of the goals that we have at LayerTwo Labs is to make that testnet software even better,
to make more people interested in using it and to make it easier to use. So work is underway
to make it even better and easier to experience a real live drivechain experience as a test.
So that way Bitcoiners can really relate to how it works, why it's cool. So you're totally right.
You're totally right. People need a way to kind of interact with it, touch it and feel it,
you know, so to speak, and not to have these be purely theoretical discussions.
So right on. I agree with you. Let me know if you have any questions. You can go to drivechain.info
and download some stuff. And if you have questions about it, you can join drivechain talk,
which you have. And in the subgroup called technical support, you can find people getting
questions answered about the software. Yeah, I agree. But a testnet is a testnet. It's not
a mainnet. So is there a way to... I understand you need a BIP pass in order for this to be a
mainnet, but or to have actual functionality to be a mainnet. And I've raised it in the past.
Is there something that you can do without the actual approval of the BIP and you can still
push it to a semi-mainnet, you know, like something that you can actually demonstrate
that's a level up from just a testnet? That is a very good question. I think that's a great
question for the drivechain talk group. You could go in there and ask. And I think some of the
most well-known thinkers on drivechain will comment on the possibilities for different ways
of interacting with this idea in a way that's more materialized than the testnet, you know,
to your question. You have a great question. It's a sophisticated question for the group.
Because over there, you get 700 people thinking about it. Here, you just have me. And, you know,
I know only so much. So please bring your question to the group. Hopefully, it'll be a cool answer
for over there.
Cool. Thanks a lot.
Sure. Teddy, did you have any follow-up thoughts on your questions and thoughts?
No, I think you answered them well. Yeah, I think even about JW, I think he's a bit ridiculous.
So I was just wondering what you thought about that point he had made. But other than that,
not really anything else.
You know, Teddy, one of the most interesting things for me in this space is trying to look
at every major thinker, of which JW Weatherman certainly is one, and appreciate the best of their
ideas. There are interesting overlaps, interesting commonalities among these thinkers,
even though they disagree on hot topics. So as you correctly pointed out,
JW Weatherman is not a drivechain proponent at this time.
But he does have an interesting commonality with Paul Sztorc. They are both in the minority
on the topic of these self-custody devices. I don't think this is something Paul talks
about a lot, and I hesitate to speak for him because he no longer is in the audience.
But I have heard him say once or twice in a podcast that he's not a huge fan of these treasures and
Coldcards and whatnot. He's more of a fan of open source technology that you can have
on your phone or laptop. And again, this is my recollecting from memory,
so I could be saying it wrong. I don't want to put words in his mouth.
But I do believe that his views on the hardware devices used for Bitcoin,
like I have a couple of treasures myself, I think his view on those things is somewhat
harmonious with, is somewhat resonant with the views of JW Weatherman. I think those guys,
those two guys actually perhaps agree on a view, which is not the dominant view in Bitcoin,
on that. Because they're both very sophisticated people who have an interesting view on whether
these devices are on net good for the Bitcoin community, to be going all in on this idea that
everyone should buy one, if not five of these devices. So some people have a different view
that the future of Bitcoin is not one where 8 billion people are buying devices, but instead,
it's cheaper and easier and that Bitcoin should orient itself towards developing better software
for phones and laptops than having everyone buy a device. So again, I don't want to put
words in Paul's mouth or in JW's mouth about their views on that. But it does seem to me like
if they had debated that topic, they would have been agreeing. They would have been on the same
side of the debate, I think, if I'm not mistaken. Again, if I'm wrong about that, I apologize
for assuming things like that. Another interesting commonality among thinkers across Bitcoin's
intellectual kind of landscape is like Luke Dashjr., awesome thinker. He has a view on the value
of shrinking the block size. And he has said in tweets and comments that it could be, again,
this is like my paraphrasing, that I think that he views that it would be perhaps quite beneficial
for Bitcoin to have a smaller block size than it does today. This is something Paul has tweeted
about explicitly. He has said Bitcoin's block size must shrink. So I have found it very interesting to
spot among the Bitcoin thinkers, whether they are in favor of drivechain or not,
the ways that they agree on other topics, like just to summarize, like with Luke and Paul,
they both like smaller block size, even though Luke isn't a drive chainer.
Although he also said to me in the drivechain space two weeks ago that he, I don't want to
misquote him, but he seemed to say he's not for it or against it. He's kind of neutral,
he's kind of like, he's like, it's okay. Either way, he doesn't have a strong view,
which I totally respect. Ruben Somsen, very sophisticated person, also doesn't have a strong
view either way. Some people are kind of neutral on these topics because they're so complicated.
I respect their neutrality. Not everyone has to be like a fanboy like me.
But I just think it's so cool when thinkers who disagree on one thing agree on another,
especially if that thing they agree on is like a minority view, like shrinking the block size.
Paul Sztorc and Luke Dashjr. both like that idea. And then again, not being a big fan of
cold wallets, devices commercially made, I think that's a JW Weatherman view. And I think it's
also a Paul Sztorc view. They're both not big fans of those products. So I think it's very
interesting how, while they don't agree on drivechain, among those three thinkers, they have like
commonly held views on other things. And those views aren't very popular. Most Bitcoiners aren't
saying let's shrink the block size today. So these are minority views that Luke and Paul agree on.
And then again, with the wallets, I think JW and Paul agree on that minority view. So I find that
very interesting. And I wish that in that debate between Paul and JW, I wish they had touched on
that more. Because it's just so unfortunate when these great thinkers have like an adversarial
conversation in some debate. Like why do that? Why not just like have a more collaborative discourse?
Like it may just be my nature. Like I don't like conflict. I don't like it when people are like
arguing and like, you know, calling each other intellectually dishonest and stuff like that.
It's so much better when people can come to the table and be like, let's talk about what you think
and what I think and try to fit everything together in a very scientific, academic way,
you know, on the same team. Because that's what's going to promote the most understanding.
So I really, I'm very hopeful that Bitcoin can improve because right now it feels like there's
been kind of this, this like kind of trend toward toxicity and stuff like that, that to me personally
is kind of a newcomer to the space. Like I've only been obsessed with crypto for about a little
over like a year, year and a half, two years. And like the whole toxic thing, it feels like,
I feel like it's kind of a result of the lack of adoption of drivechain. Because if we had
had drivechain years ago, possibly a lot of altcoin development could have been occurring
on Bitcoin. And therefore there would have been far few people to like yell about, right? Because
they would have been Bitcoiners. So instead of like denying the validity of these protocols that
have, in addition to their monetary issuance, interesting technology, those technologies
would have been built onto Bitcoin. There wouldn't have been the competition going on between Bitcoin
and those altcoins. Bitcoin and altcoins compete existentially for monetary premium. And the result
of that protocol competition is the adversarial rhetoric. So it's kind of like battling religions,
they're, they're incommensurable, right? You're never going to have a merger between like
you know, let's just say Judaism and Islam, right? They're not going to merge. So there's like a,
there's kind of like a competition there, right? Like a zero sum thing of like competing.
And it's unfortunate in the protocol space when all the development could have been just built on
Bitcoin. Maybe if we'd had trustless sidechains, we could have maybe just had all the development
on Bitcoin and dominance could have been like a hundred percent Bitcoin and Ethereum could have
been like a sidechain of Bitcoin and it just would have been so great. Everyone would have
gotten along. Is that nuts? Maybe that's just ridiculous. They've been just, they've been just
like a sort of a dreamer, everyone being friends and none of this like competition and toxicity
stuff because it's just so embarrassing when there's people saying like the altcoins are
completely a scam because I don't think that's correct, right? It's like denying reality.
There is some obviously legitimate technology on altcoins and the reason why it's on altcoins
is because it's not easy or it's impossible to put those technologies on Bitcoin in a manner
that is arguably peer-to-peer. So with Drivechain, we have peer-to-peer sidechains
made possible. Right now, all the sidechains are federated. With Drivechain, you get a
peer-to-peer two-way peg, miner controlled two-way peg. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer. Therefore,
Bitcoin mining is peer-to-peer. Therefore, a miner controlled peg is peer-to-peer.
So those are the benefits I see to the narrative as well as the underlying technology.
So I think a lot of altcoins could have been built on Bitcoin. Is it so crazy to say, I mean,
just read the first page of the Ethereum white paper. The whole first page is about like the
shortcomings of Bitcoin for platforming technology. Vitalik just walks you through like different
projects that try to expand on Bitcoin's extensibility and their limitations that
they encountered. So the whole raison d'etre of Ethereum was that it was impossible or difficult
to build it on Bitcoin. But if Drivechain had been invented early enough and adopted early enough,
then even if those altcoins had been created, they wouldn't have benefited from the availability of
the rationale that building on Bitcoin is hard or impossible. They would have had to explain their
issuance, their money creation, their seniorage some other way. So Bitcoin would have rugged
from these founders their rationale. So there would have been less altcoining, I think,
maybe much less if Drivechain had been adopted. And as soon as Drivechain is adopted, if it ever is,
as soon as it's adopted, nobody will be able to say it's hard to build on Bitcoin. I think it'll
be much harder to make that claim. And in this space, narratives are very important.
What do you think of that? Is that a compelling story or is that just a
kind of a biased one?
Time to bring the shitcoins to Bitcoin, Henry.
The whole idea of shitcoin, I just don't really buy because like,
let's say 1% of all altcoins are legitimate. Well, then if the definition of shitcoin is
any token other than Bitcoin, the definition is wrong to have a negative
word attached to it. I don't think it's right to say they're all shitcoins if 1% of them are not.
And just to review, the valid altcoin technologies out there include big blocks,
include ring signature privacy technology, include greater Turing completeness technology,
include peer-to-peer Oracle technology. Those are just some of them. Satoshi himself
countenanced BitDNS explicitly, which is a blockchain protocol for DNS.
So since August of 2010, we had the creator of Bitcoin saying that BitDNS was fine and good
and that it should be a merged mined blockchain with Bitcoin and that all the networks in the
world should be like that. So the creator of Bitcoin felt, I mean, I know this is an appeal
to authority, right? This is an appeal to authority, but the creator, for what it's worth,
if it's worth anything, Satoshi fucking Nakamoto wanted there to be many blockchains that all
are merge-mined with Bitcoin. He never said Bitcoin should be the only one.
He was a builder. He was an innovator. He was an experimenter. He was a developer.
He wasn't a toxic maximalist. Bitcoin has lost its way, if I may presume to say so,
and it would be great if the narratives changed. So that's one of the major headwinds for drive
chain, Teddy, is the notion that, well, it brings shitcoins to Bitcoin. What it does
is precisely what Adam Back described, which is, let me find the tweet to put up.
It's like the best tweet ever. It's like five words. It's just so pithy and effective.
Let me find it. Here it is.
There it is. I put it in the nest. It'll show up in a second for all of you.
Adam Back wrote just recently in a thread about Layer 2's drivechain and Blockstream's
liquid technology. He wrote, innovation maximalist altcoin seniorage critic.
What he means there is very resonant. His meaning there is very resonant with the drivechain view,
which is that what drivechain enables is the quality of Bitcoin to change while the
quantity remains the same. So preserving Bitcoin's monetary policy while enabling
greater extensibility, while enabling greater variety of software, while enabling more building
and development and experimentation. So I think the essence of a shitcoin, Teddy,
is that it involves issuance. This is an idea from Gavin Andresen long ago
that he once wrote on Bitcoin Talk or maybe SourceForge. He once wrote, every altcoin is a
way around the 21 million limit of Bitcoin. So he was lamenting the fact that when altcoiners
build an altcoin, they're creating more tokens, which increases the quantity of money out there.
But the problem with that view is that if the altcoin is created because of a limit on
Bitcoin's extensibility due to a lack of drivechain, then the altcoin has a rationale that's
legitimate. They wanted to build something, they couldn't build it on Bitcoin, so they made a new
token. That's exactly what Vitalik wrote in the Ethereum white paper. He wrote the word freedom.
He was like, doing an independent blockchain gives you the freedom to do whatever you want.
Yeah, let me just finish. He wouldn't have been able to write that had drivechain been created.
He would have had to contend with the fact that Ethereum, in the way it was launched,
could have been launched as a drivechain if drivechain had been available at that time.
So what drivechain would do if adopted today is for all time in the future,
it would make altcoin founders much more likely to build on Bitcoin. And if they were to build on
an altcoin, a new altcoin, they would have less justification for that decision. It would be more
starkly laid bare that they were doing it for purposes of reaping the seniorage profits of
monetary issuance, rather than doing something that's technologically necessary.
HeroGamer, please chime in. Thank you.
Yeah, so in Ethereum's case, they've made a shitcoin and they made an altcoin and they're
building on a completely separate blockchain and benefiting their ecosystem.
But I feel like, because I come from a Stacks playground world, but I'm a Bitcoiner first,
obviously. But Stacks is doing something semi-altcoin, shitcoinary, if you like,
because although it has an altcoin and it has a pre-mine, but at its core, it's to benefit Bitcoin
and it's to further Bitcoin. It's not to further its own token, but its own token is capable of
speculation. But it's not to benefit an Ethereum blockchain. It's not to benefit
a Solana ecosystem. It is to benefit Bitcoin because it has now funding to fund builders
to build around Bitcoin. I wouldn't want to say on Bitcoin because some people get triggered.
Let's just say proximity of Bitcoin. So at its core, it's not launching for the sake of launching
and to benefit other shitcoins. It's to benefit the Bitcoin. And without Bitcoin, Stacks would
be nothing. So how do you reconcile with that? I do not believe that Stacks is economically
aligned with Bitcoin. Stacks is not a merged mined sidechain or altcoin of Bitcoin. It is
not a merged mined sidechain of Bitcoin and it's not a merged mined altcoin of Bitcoin.
So Namecoin, you know, BitDNS has been a merged mined altcoin.
Rootstock RSK is a merged mined sidechain. Stacks is neither of those. There is no merged mining
of Bitcoin on Stacks. This means that transaction fees on Stacks are not paid to Bitcoin miners.
So that's one way in which Stacks is not economically aligned with Bitcoin.
Another way that Stacks is not economically aligned
with Bitcoin is that Stacks introduces a speculative token, STX.
In the case of Rootstock, the primary native token of Rootstock is a synthetic Bitcoin.
So when people use Rootstock, the main token that's involved is a synthetic Bitcoin that,
you know, its issuance is generated through the locking up of Bitcoin in a federated two-way peg.
This creates demand and value for Bitcoin. It creates value accrual to Bitcoin when people
demand the Rootstock primary native token, which is RBTC. Just like on Liquid, where the primary
native token is LBTC. The only way to make more of that is to send more Bitcoin into the two-way peg.
In other words, when the primary token of a blockchain is a synthetic Bitcoin,
demand for that synthetic Bitcoin is demand for, is indirectly demand for Bitcoin itself
on layer one. And this creates economic alignment of the protocols.
So what I like to see in a protocol that is claiming to be economically oriented with Bitcoin
harmoniously is I like to see their primary native token be a synthetic Bitcoin like Liquid
Bitcoin or RBTC. And I like to see merged mining as we see on RSK. RSK is so economically aligned
with Bitcoin that they wrote into the white paper of Rootstock RSK. They wrote into their
original white paper that they will become a drivechain once drivechain is possible.
Yeah.
Let me just finish one more thing with Stacks. I would like to see from Stacks,
which I think is a project run by very smart, cool people. I would like to see from Stacks
a statement that they're going to eliminate STX token from the ecosystem entirely and rely
entirely on SBTC, which they advertise as a trustless two way peg. So if they have this
synthetic Bitcoin SBTC that they're building, then I would like to see them eliminate the need for
the STX token, right? Because it's not great to have a speculative token
on the blockchain. It'd be better. And also they should adopt merged mining,
in my view. It would be great to see them do that. That way,
all the transaction fees can be paid to Bitcoin.
Yeah, I think obviously that's the most idealistic world that we want to aim for, right?
However, I think there's practical intermediate steps to get there. I don't know if we will ever
get there like you wish that we will get there. It's just SBTC. But what I can say right now,
because you're saying, just going back to some of your earlier points, that
you're saying the gas fee doesn't benefit the Bitcoin. It's somewhat true, but somewhat not
true either, because every transaction is set up in Bitcoin. If we do not have Stacks transaction
set into Bitcoin, we will not generate Bitcoin transaction for every block. But currently,
it is contributing to Bitcoin on the base layer in terms of fee because every block of Stacks
is settling into Bitcoin, generating a Bitcoin transaction. Every mining transaction
that the miners bid for Stacks, because miners use their BTC and bid for the Stacks token,
every transaction from the miners is actually a Bitcoin transaction. So you have two Bitcoin
transactions going on. The miners sending Bitcoin transaction to bid, and you have
the transaction settlement every block as a Bitcoin transaction. So I would somewhat agree
with you that not the gas fee is benefiting the Bitcoin, but at least from a settlement
perspective, from the mining and every Stacks block, it is sending a Bitcoin transaction.
Bitcoin transaction therefore has some contribution towards the gas on the Bitcoin layer.
But in terms of the speculative token, yeah, that's something like,
you know, it's a trade-off, right? You don't want the token? Fine. Go for merge mining.
You don't have the pre-mined token, but where are you going to attract the people to come together
and secure your security? Where is that going to come from?
It should come from the utility of the protocol. It shouldn't come from the speculative mania
of people buying the token.
How are you going to attract the builders? You need some funds, right? You're not just
going to launch a chain and expect people to come to you because they're building cool stuff.
Yes, you can. In theory, that might be the best practice, so to speak.
I mean, that's how Bitcoin is, right? There is no ICO for Bitcoin. It's the most successful
blockchain.
Yeah, but people come there to build on Bitcoin because there's incentive to
build on Bitcoin. Because there's a speculative token. Let's just take a speculative token
out of Bitcoin. Are you saying that builders would come to Bitcoin without the speculation
of the Bitcoin price?
I don't quite follow. I didn't really follow anything you said in the last 10 minutes,
but I do appreciate you sharing your view. I think it's very cool, everything you said,
and maybe it's just because we've been going on for an hour and a half now.
Yeah, sorry, I came in at the end.
No problem. It's great to have you here. I think that Stacks, once again, let me just
say, I'm not a fan of the project, but I do think everyone in the community of Stacks is cool.
And I think I've heard Muneeb talk a lot on Twitter spaces. I think he's cool, very smart.
I have read every tweet he's ever written about drivechain, drivechains, BIP300,
and sidechain or sidechains. So I've done that search for those five or six words
for hundreds of people, and he's one of them. And I remember what he wrote. He has described
drivechain very carefully in terms of, he has never said he's against it.
He has characterized it as a theoretical possibility for Bitcoin. I think he's very
smart. And he knows, I think, in my less, I mean, he's more technical than I am by a thousand times,
but I do have a suspicion that he knows that if drivechain were adopted tomorrow,
Stacks token would not be a good investment. So I do think he has arguably an incentive
to not emphatically call for drivechainization of Bitcoin, because it does conflict with the
economics of his project. And that's my rough kind of understanding of what's going on in Stacks.
And I just think that Rootstock, to their credit,
is aligned with BIP300% in the sense that their merge-mined,
their main native token is a synthetic Bitcoin.
That is exactly the drivechain vision.
And they can't wait to have their federation disband
and be a miner-controlled peg.
And they can't wait to have their mining
be blind merge mining.
In regular, ordinary merge mining,
the miner is paid in the token of the sidechain.
In blind merge mining, BIP301,
the miners are paid in Bitcoin layer one.
So it's a cooler arrangement.
And I think it's cool that they have that view.
And I feel like with Stacks,
there's kind of like a not so clear economic alignment
between Stacks and Bitcoin.
So there's kind of like,
what I'm sensing from Munib is like,
he knows that drivechain would be good for Bitcoin,
but I would just like to see him tweet
that he's unambiguously in favor of it.
And I would also like to hear him talk about
what would happen to Stacks, STX token,
if drivechain were adopted.
Does he think Stacks would appreciate or depreciate?
See, I feel that every single altcoin
is threatened by drivechain.
Every single one, Ethereum, Monero,
all of these goods, economic goods,
that is these protocol tokens,
would devalue to zero in the long run
as a result of drivechainization.
All of the software on these tokens,
to the extent the software has value to anyone,
would potentially be cloned into drivechains.
So I think in the future,
what we'll see is that there are approximately
10 or 20 legitimate altcoins in terms of their technology.
And those tokens would go to zero,
absolute real zero value.
But the technology would live on,
on Bitcoin in a drivechain.
So you would see the technology of Monero and Zcash.
You would see the technology of large block Bitcoin clones.
You would see the technology of Ethereum
with its greater Turing completeness than Bitcoin.
And you'd see the technology of things like Chainlink
or Hivemind.
So there'd be a bunch of drivechains out there,
maybe 10 or 20.
And that's like less than 1% of all altcoins.
But I don't think you'd see the technology of STX.
I don't think there's stuff that's special going on there
that would be cloned in.
Maybe I'm wrong.
You can respond to that,
whether you think there'd be like a STX drivechain.
But I've never seen Muneeb talk about it
because I think he knows that if he boosts drivechain,
then it might happen because he's a big voice in the space
like many others.
And I think if he accelerates drivechain,
it's not great for the STX value of that altcoin.
That his community has made, what,
hundreds of millions of dollars from that,
which is good for them.
But I'm not sure that it's economically aligned
with Bitcoin.
Right?
I mean, if a person has $1,
they can either put it in STX or Bitcoin.
They can't do both.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Every single token competes existentially
for monetary premium against Bitcoin.
So what drivechain aims to do
is devalue all of those tokens to zero,
including STX.
That's like my honest take on it.
But again, I think like Stacks people are cool.
Their Twitter spaces are very intelligent and friendly.
I just think that the project
is not as economically aligned with Bitcoin as RSK.
RSK is kind of like a pure sidechain like Liquid.
Liquid is fully aligned with Bitcoin
in the sense that their token is a synthetic Bitcoin.
You can't, it wasn't minted in an ICO.
Go ahead, Hero Gamer.
I'll give you the last word on this little debate.
I appreciate you being here.
Yeah, so-
And then we'll go to Homer.
This is a drivechain space that I don't know,
I do not want to make it about Stacks at all.
So the last word and question is more like,
I'm a Bitcoiner first.
I want Bitcoin to succeed
through whichever chain that may be,
or multiple chain that may be.
If drivechain proves to be the one,
I will sell my SDX
because Bitcoin at the end of the day needs to win.
And if Stacks is not the one to push it further
and it's not incentively aligned,
that's fine.
And I will just sell whatever I have.
So what I'm trying to say is,
I'd like to see more practical stuff from drivechain
to convince me that that is the solution to everything else,
to every other altcoin.
Then I'll be convinced that Stacks is not necessary
and it will go to zero.
But yet, I have yet to see something practical
or more tangible that I can see from drivechain
to make me believe that is the only,
that is the solution to everything else.
Yeah, I got it.
You've made your point very clear and well said.
Oh, we lost our speaker who was on stage, Homer Simpson.
He's a listener now, Homer Simp.
Well, you can come on back up, Homer, or we can wrap up.
I agree with you, Hiro.
I mean, we've got a BIP, two of them.
So you say they're not practically available.
Of course, they were upgrades for Bitcoin.
They haven't yet been adopted.
So as long as they're not adopted,
they're theoretical and exist in a testnet.
So I mean, it'd be great to have it be,
it's kind of like getting married, right?
Like, you can't feel what it's like
to be actually married while you're single.
So it's kind of like you're saying like,
you're thinking about marrying the girl
and you're wondering like, do I wanna be married?
Will I like it?
How will I know that I'm happy married?
Well, the only way to know for sure is to go fucking do it.
You have to go do it.
You have to just put a ring on it,
do the honeymoon, move in together, start arguing.
You hate each other.
And now you know that it wasn't a good idea,
but you won't know that for sure until you do it.
So that's what life is like.
You have to just plunge in and try things.
Now with Stacks, they-
Would you say the same analogy holds true for being gay?
Like you don't know if you're gay unless you've tried it?
No, Debbie.
I mean, you know, if you haven't tried it,
can you even be sure you're straight?
Yes.
You sure?
Yeah, like more than 100%, yeah.
Well, how could you logically be more than 100% sure?
Wouldn't that begin to be less than 100%?
Like you would have an absolute value.
Like if you went to 110% certainty,
I think mathematically that would equate to a 90% certainty.
Because you overshot, so you're no longer at 100%.
So then you're kind of like at 90%.
So you could be at 200% certainty,
which is really 0%, which is totally gay.
So I think you, you know, that's what's going on.
And that's fine.
I respect and tolerate that.
You can be how you are.
I happen to be married to a woman, very happily so.
We have multiple children,
and you know, it's great and fantastic.
Totally shakshi, yeah.
But you might be different.
And I appreciate, you know, your lifestyle choices,
and you can be however you wish to be.
And that's fine.
We're very tolerant here in the drive-dean community.
We don't discriminate based on race, sex,
national origin, ethnicity, personal preferences,
you know, whether you're a vegan, a vegetarian, carnivory.
It's all fine.
Yeah.
Well, anyone else have any questions?
This has been quite a conversation.
I guess we're wrapping up.
Teddy, it's just you and me now.
We've got Porkchop in the audience.
Let's see, Richard Ross in the audience.
Some familiar faces.
Toaster, new blocker era.
We've got these people who tweet about Drivechain,
some of our biggest fans and supporters.
I want you all to know that we have a new,
awesome Drivechain fan out there.
I recommend Mr. Finn Davidoff.
I just put in the nest one of his tweets.
Check it out.
He makes tweets.
Sometimes I'm in the tweets, as is the case today.
So we've got me here running a train.
Oh dear, what have I said?
Now that's gonna get,
it's gonna end up in Raphael's little audio clips.
But yeah, is that the intent of this meme?
Am I supposed to be doing that?
So what should we say?
Now in these spaces, should I just close the room
or should I talk for like 10 hours at a time
and just see what happens?
Like what, how should we?
I think 10 hours at a time probably best.
All right.
Well, let's see.
What can we say about Drivechain
that would somehow cause thousands of people
to come into this space?
Like what can I do?
What is the way to get attention in today's world?
What I want is for every Bitcoiner to be fully informed
and excited about the prospect of DriveChainization.
You know, this is all about Bitcoin dominance at 100%.
It's all about, oh, we got Hero Gamer, 21 BTC,
Stacks super fan.
He's back on the stage.
Welcome back, Hero Gamer.
You have so much cool stuff to say
that you left and then returned.
So that's cool.
I'm just trying to contribute towards ideas
of what you just said.
How can we get people here?
I think really funny memes will help.
I think that if you guys hired Hero and myself,
we'd come as a package, 900K per year.
I know it's pricey,
but we would definitely help blow up
the Drivechain community for you.
Henry, talk to your uppers and get back to us.
I will do that without a doubt.
I think that if Drivechain were adopted,
some of the coolest things that would happen
would be the actual Drivechains that are implemented.
Somebody once told me, don't sell the stadium,
sell the sports game, sell a football game.
So Drivechain is an architecture like a stadium,
but the cool thing that happens with Drivechain
isn't the architecture, it's the actual Drivechains,
the MergeMind peer-to-peer sidechains
that would happen as a result of Drivechain.
So some of those include HiveMind,
Thunder, BitAssets, BitNames,
EthSide, Zside, and others.
There would also be TeddySide.
Obviously, you're probably wondering, what is TeddySide?
TeddySide is a TeddyBitcoins-focused Drivechain
where people can have the full Teddy experience
in a Drivechain context.
And it's peer-to-peer in the sense that Teddy
is your peer in that Drivechain.
And what happens is you go into the Drivechain,
you peg in, and then Teddy pegs you, and it feels great.
Teddy, are you on board with that or no?
Not really?
Yeah, I'm gonna have to pass on that one,
but maybe it could be a Teddy Drivechain sidechain
where Henry pegs you if you peg in.
Sounds like he's open to experimenting.
I'm now beginning to see why the spaces
run by Magoo and Shinobi are so raunchy.
Now that I'm doing this, I understand that after an hour,
the brain begins to fatigue and the mind wanders
into the realm of the raunchy and the humorous.
And that's why when you go in there,
everyone is just like letting it rip.
I used to go in there, into those spaces,
and I'd be like, why aren't they having
an academic discussion about the need
for greater extensibility on Bitcoin?
And then now I see that it just becomes
like an all-out sort of like just comedy fest,
because why not, especially late at night
as the candle burns low, the mind wanders,
the wine bottle, the level goes lower and lower,
and the intoxicating aromas of the candle
and the wine, the cigars and whatnot,
they all mingle and we enter the realm of the imagination.
And that's where we contemplate the combination
of the natural phenomena of the flickering candle
and the aroma of the smoke with the elevated consciousness
and the perception of beauty.
And that is the sublime in art and nature.
That's the experience of the sublime.
Do you agree?
All right, we got the thumbs up.
So welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces.
We have tons of people in the audience.
We're well into the double digits.
Welcome everyone who's joined.
Feel free to come up and do a little rant.
Say whatever you're thinking.
Maybe you're wondering, why Drivechain?
Maybe you're thinking, why not just Bitcoin?
Why can't we just have Bitcoin?
After all, isn't Bitcoin gonna take over the world?
Don't we just, we don't need to do anything.
We can just free ride, buy Bitcoin,
maybe lever up, cash in, get on the money bus,
and we're going to money town, lever up,
and can't we just do that?
That's what you're probably thinking.
Why do we have to build anything?
We shouldn't have done Taproot.
Now we have all these dick butts on the blockchain.
We should have just stuck with what we had
and just ride that out 21 million to infinity.
Everything's cool.
Maybe that's what you're thinking.
Maybe you're thinking we could have just done that.
Why do we need to have whatever Thunder and Hivemind is?
Why can't we just do Bitcoin?
Well, here's the thing.
It's not so simple.
It turns out that there's a ton of interest
in doing all kinds of valuable things on blockchain
other than just money,
and it would be very good for Bitcoin
to have greater extensibility.
As I mentioned earlier,
extensibility is this Adam Back word.
I had to look it up.
I literally Googled the word extensibility,
and it said it had a sub-definition
in the realm of computing,
and the definition was something like
extensibility refers to a greater level
of customization and development being made possible.
So I think if we increase Bitcoin's extensibility,
extending Bitcoin into different realms,
then that is what creates a lot of value.
Like this peer-to-peer oracle stuff,
the kind of stuff they talk about at Chainlink
where they have these economists and mathematicians
trying to develop ways to have an emergent order
for the adjudication of smart contracts,
in a blockchain context,
having people write to the blockchain reliably
and accurately to adjudicate the smart contracts,
that I think is what Chainlink's trying to do,
this peer-to-peer oracle network,
having people in a multitude participate in that,
kind of like Bitcoin miners,
even though they're self-interested, anonymous,
and mutually distrusting, they all do the right thing.
They make Bitcoin run.
There's an emergent order.
Well, you can have the same thing for oracles.
So the whole oracle problem really isn't a problem.
And I think what Chainlink is trying to do is interesting.
Now, I think it's not going to work out that well
because they have some differences that are fundamental
with what Hivemind plans to do.
So Hivemind is Paul Sztorc's sidechain project
for peer-to-peer oracles,
which I think is a much more potentially powerful design
than any other kind of oracle network
that's ever been attempted.
So we'll get the real deal.
We'll overcome the oracle problem on Bitcoin with Hivemind.
And that'll be really cool.
Once Drivechain's available,
this Hivemind thing will launch,
and it'll be like the coolest blockchain project ever.
And all of the demand and activity for it
will be on Bitcoin, making Bitcoin more valuable.
It'll be very interesting.
But my point was that peer-to-peer oracles
is one category of development on blockchain
that is potentially very interesting and valuable.
And we want it to be on Bitcoin.
Same thing with big blocks,
same thing with smart contracting
or Turing-complete protocols and privacy protocols.
We want that whole privacy community in Bitcoin.
That was the cypherpunk ethos, private,
libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, voluntarist.
That's the ethos for Bitcoin from the outset.
It wasn't about partnering with nation-states
and having government approval,
which is the narrative today in Bitcoin.
It's like, oh, which government can we get
to applaud Bitcoin?
That wasn't the cypherpunk ethos.
The whole cypherpunk ethos was like,
try to avoid government attention.
That's what Satoshi said,
is let's keep the heat off as long as we can
and just develop the project.
And he said six different times
that people can be anonymous.
He was all about privacy and anonymity.
And he also wasn't anti-gambling.
He wrote poker code for Bitcoin.
It's like in the first version of Bitcoin,
there was this code for call, fold, raise,
double down, whatever.
That's blackjack.
But he didn't dislike gambling.
So the whole terminology today of shitcoin, casinos,
that kind of anti-altcoin stuff,
he doesn't resonate with Satoshi's words.
He wasn't anti-gambling.
He also didn't have this monetary maximalism. He didn't think blockchain was only for Bitcoin
because he clearly endorsed and countenanced DNS, which was a separate protocol. But he wanted it to
be merge-mined with Bitcoin. And had he known how to do a trustless two-way peg, I think he
would have done it. I really believe that Satoshi would have done drivechain had he understood how
to do it. And that's the only reason why he would have approved of a merged mine altcoin.
The only reason why someone like Satoshi would have approved of a merged mine altcoin is he
didn't understand that there was a way to do a merged mined two-way pegged sidechain controlled
by miners. Had he known how to do that, I think he would have done it. I really believe that
Satoshi would have loved drivechain. He would have said, yes, this is great. Let's do this.
And that way Bitcoin can grow in a way that doesn't affect the main chain,
except positively by boosting main chain value and fees.
I think he would have done that. I think that drivechain just maybe,
maybe could be like the final change for Bitcoin.
And from there on out, it can grow and conquer the whole world.
Well, HeroGamer, you're back for the third time. Wow. You just can't get enough of drivechain talk.
What would you like to say?
The mic is yours, HeroGamer.
Oh, just, yeah, I hear everything you're saying and a little bit of a
side topic or, well, it's just all the ordinals talks right now. It's pretty hard. So I just
wonder if there's any, what's the general sentiment in the drivechain community about ordinals?
Yeah, just like to sort of understand.
Shout out to Nakamoto's on Bitcoin.
I think that the drivechain take on ordinals is that drivechain is very much aligned with ordinals.
So the ordinals philosophy is that using the block space for something other than just payments
is appropriate and is good for Bitcoin. And this is, you know,
in my view, what can be called platform maximalism.
Pete Rizzo, editor of Bitcoin Magazine, has written very well on the topic of platform
maximalism and related issues. So platform maximalism, in my view, is this idea that
all kinds of uses of blockchain are appropriate and they enhance the value of blockchain.
And they enhance the user base. The number of people using Bitcoin increases when a new
category of utilization of Bitcoin's blockchain is discovered.
Ordinals is one example of that, and it is fully aligned philosophically with drivechain.
I do believe that the drivechain community is very much aligned with ordinals.
It is fully aligned philosophically with drivechain. I do believe that if drivechain
is adopted, things like ordinals will exist in much greater number and will be done primarily
on sidechains, not on the mainchain. So I think it's a win for everyone.
The activity moves to the sidechain that is designed to facilitate that category of activity
most efficiently and productively. And it moves away from the mainchain.
So the users get lower fees and they're not affecting the mainchain in the way that they
are now. And it's a win for everyone because then there's more people using Bitcoin,
more activity on Bitcoin, more value accrual to Bitcoin, more value accrual to Bitcoin's
block space by operation of merged mining. And there's more users of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin has
a larger community, more political support for Bitcoin. It's just good in every way.
Everyone in this room is listening. If you like what you're hearing about drivechain,
the way to proceed is to educate yourself by going to a drivechain focused essay or video.
You can find them on drivechain.info. You can go to the drivechain talk telegram group,
which is available as a link on drivechain.info. There's also LayerTwo Labs, YouTube channel,
and there's many videos on there. There's over a hundred hours of videos on there, I believe.
Lectures and talks about drivechain at various conferences.
And there's also the software you can download in the testnet. So if you're technically inclined
or if you're just ambitious, you can get involved at a technical level as many people have.
So yeah, Ordinal's is cool. I have looked for a comment by Ordinal's creator Casey Rodarmor
about drivechain and he has never tweeted about either drivechain or drivechains, BIP300. And
I've also looked for his comments on sidechain or sidechains and I do not think he's ever tweeted
about them. So he hasn't yet commented. However, he did have a recent interview on Fiatjaf's
podcast, which I think exists mainly as a YouTube channel. But yeah, if you go to Fiatjaf's YouTube
channel, his most recent talk was with Casey Rodarmor and I didn't listen to all of it yet,
but I wonder if they discussed drivechain because Fiatjaf is a huge drivechain fan.
Fiatjaf is the creator of Nostr and maybe it came up. I would love to know what Casey thinks.
I would suspect that like Fiatjaf, Casey is a drivechain fan or if he were to become more
acquainted with the project would express support for it, perhaps. So I'd love to know what he
thinks. Having listened to him a little bit, he sounds very smart and very cool.
And as I say, it seems to me the fundamentals of Ordinal's are entirely aligned
with the philosophy of drivechain. Making Bitcoin more useful, exciting,
and popular and valuable. That's what drivechain is about and that's what Ordinal is about.
As we talked about earlier in this meeting, this Twitter space is some of the
possibilities for drivechain interest growing in the future could be low fees
perceived as a threat to Bitcoin's fee-reliant economic security model.
Fee-reliant economic security model. But another potential impetus for drivechain interest would be
high fees which would drive interest in developing scaling layers for Bitcoin that have low fees
such as a large block sidechain. So whichever way the fees go because of Ordinal's or anything else,
if fees stay low, there could be more interest in drivechain. If fees go high, there could be
more interest in drivechain. So either way the fees go, we could see more interest in drivechain.
Another issue with Ordinal's is the perceived increase in the rate of data accrual to the
blockchain called bloat. So there's this perception that Ordinal's involve a relatively low
compensation to miners in proportion to the data attached to the blockchain. So in Bitcoin,
so in Bitcoin, there's a complex dynamic where miners are paid for their services
to find the nonce and do the mining, but the node runners are not compensated
in return for the amount of data that they have to download and store. So they have costs of
bandwidth and hardware for storage, but they're not paid for that. So if the rate of data accrual,
if the rate of data accrual to the blockchain increases, that is effectively a tax on the node
users. People who have like a node in their home, a Raspberry Pi or a laptop. So
there's like a higher tax on them because they have to buy
that hardware and they have to deal with that bandwidth issue.
So that's one of the topics that's interesting that is growing on this Ordinal's matter.
And that's one of the topics which can lead to greater interest in drivechain
is this question of, should we shrink the block size to reduce the rate of data accrual
to the blockchain? And as a result of that, we would see more use of the scaling layers.
But whenever people are talking about scaling layers, they're talking about
drivechains or something similar to it, because of course we don't want to see the scaling layers
be all federated. We'd like to see them be peer-to-peer in nature, which a federation is not.
So why don't we address what the difference is between a peer-to-peer
architecture and a non-peer-to-peer architecture?
When something is peer-to-peer, in my view, it has only economic barriers to entry for specific
roles. Whereas when an architecture is not peer-to-peer, there is a privileged party
that has a socially approved role. So for example, to be like on the board of directors of McDonald's,
that would not be peer-to-peer arrangement because you were socially selected to be on the
board. You can't be on the board without that social approval, like being president of the
United States. It's a socially appointed position. You can't simply raise enough money and be in that
role. Whereas in Bitcoin mining, it's peer-to-peer because anyone can permissionlessly involve
themselves as a Bitcoin miner. There's only an economic barrier, not a social barrier to entry.
So Bitcoin is peer-to-peer. In fact, that's the very beginning of the title of the white paper.
It's a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. And because Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, the parts of
Bitcoin's operation are peer-to-peer, such as mining. Mining is peer-to-peer. Anyone can be a
miner. All it takes is some money to buy the ASICs. And you might say, well, they're not your peer.
If they're a billionaire and you're not, they're not your peer. But that's a misunderstanding of
the word peer. In this context, I believe, in Satoshi's context, in the blockchain context,
peer-to-peer refers not to equality in every sense, but they're your peer in the sense that you could,
except for economic barriers to entry, have any role in the system you want. You can be a user,
a transactor, a node runner, a miner, anything. So no one is privileged socially above anyone else.
That's what peer-to-peer means. So since Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, Bitcoin mining is peer-to-peer,
and therefore the miner-controlled two-way peg of a drivechain is peer-to-peer.
And don't take my word for it. Adam Back and others refer to drivechains as peer-to-peer
sidechains. There are tweets of his where he says peer-to-peer or P2P, referring to sidechains in
threads about drivechain. So he understands that it would be cool. In fact, that's the word he
uses. He says pretty cool. When talking about drivechains specifically, he calls it cool,
which I like because, you know, it is cool. So it'd be great to have these peer-to-peer
sidechains made available. That's what we want to see.
Well, we've been going for two hours almost exactly. Maybe it's time to wrap.
Anybody want to close us out with a little song and dance? Should we do some music? Have a little
like drivechain to the moon? Yeah, totally. Well, it's coming, Teddy. Day by day, we're getting
closer. So there are various ways that like interest in drivechains can skyrocket.
There could be low fees. There could be high fees. Either one can lead, as I mentioned earlier,
to more drivechain interest and support. Another is flippening. So if Ethereum were to like accrue
value at a higher rate than Bitcoin, then eventually there would be the market cap
flippening. So that's another thing that could perhaps stimulate interest in drivechains.
Another thing that could perhaps stimulate interest in optimizing Bitcoin. And among
the contenders for the upgrade, drivechain is one of the well-known, well-established
ideas out there. Drivechain is in fact older than most altcoins. Drivechain was
first conceived and published as an idea in 2015. It's seven years old.
And in addition to low fees and high fees and flippening, there are other things that could
lead to interest in drivechain. For example, there could be just more support for it among
some of the most influential people out there who are curious about how Bitcoin works and who
talk about it. I do believe that we're seeing that happen. The intellectuals in Bitcoin,
the influencers, are increasingly attuned. They are increasingly attuned to the value
of developing greater extensibility on Bitcoin. Some of the most famous thinkers in Bitcoin,
like Greg Maxwell, have been talking for years about the possibility of
sidechains being valuable for Bitcoin. Now, he in particular, I do not believe,
as far as I know, I do not believe he's an explicit supporter of drivechain.
I haven't seen any tweets by him. I don't think he's on Twitter. I did do a review of his Reddit
comments and I didn't find one on drivechain, although I'm not sure if this Reddit comment
searching tool that I used is reliable, but I need to do more reading of Maxwell.
I went to his personal website looking for an essay on drivechain. I couldn't find it. He
has a great personal website with pictures of his library and pictures of the stars. He's
like an intro photography. He's like astronomical photography. Very cool guy. Very excellent beard
and just overall cool guy. But he has this comment from 2016 on the value of sidechains,
which I think is a very cool comment. I could find it and pull it up
in case our audience is interested. Let me quickly find it here.
All right, I got it. So this is not a statement in favor of drivechain, to be clear. I'm not saying
Greg Maxwell supports drivechain. I actually don't know what he thinks, but he wrote the
following in Bitcoin magazine. This was an interview with him long ago, years ago. He wrote,
our greatest motivation for the sidechain concept in Bitcoin was being able to better satisfy
mutually exclusive objectives for the system. However, sidechains by themselves do not
fundamentally change the scaling limitations of a global broadcast system, though they should
provide security partitioning if an experimental chain should fail. So this is his very sophisticated
comment on sidechains. Because I've scoured the internet looking for his thoughts on sidechains
and drivechains. So far, I've just found that one comment. And it's a very sophisticated way
of speaking and writing. So my point here is just that this is a thinker interested in sidechains.
And I think that over time, we're going to see more people like that who are thought leaders
in Bitcoin. I think over time, they're going to gravitate toward trying to develop on Bitcoin
better layer twos. Because right now, we mainly just have the federated sidechains, which have
proven to be not so popular. So we have to do something better that will accrue billions to
Bitcoin, not just like $50 million, like Liquid or RSK, we got to upgrade them so that they can
fulfill the vision of building on Bitcoin in a huge way. That would be cool. Well, everybody,
it's just me on stage now. I guess we'll wrap. It's been two hours. This has been this has been
quite a epic drivechain Twitter spaces. Thank you for those who've listened. For those listening
on demand after the recording is done. Thanks. You know, this recording will be available
on Twitter forever until Twitter is destroyed by the Nosterization of the internet. Nostr
is a protocol that competes with Twitter. It is very cool and was created by a
emphatic drivechain supporter Fiatjaf. You know, I talk about him so much and I always say
how he supports drivechain. I wonder if I do it too much. You know, it's almost like an affinity
thing, like an affinity scam, as the Bitcoiners often call many different projects. Like they're
just talking about Bitcoin and it's like I talk about Nostr to shill drivechain. It's just it's
funny. But I hope he doesn't mind because, you know, he's very cool and Nostr is cool. And as
Nostr becomes massively successful, maybe we'll see more support for drivechain just because the
creator of Nostr is a drivechain supporter. I mean, Fiatjaf is becoming famous. Nostr has
like thousands and thousands of people joining Nostr every day or something like that. It's like
very rapidly growing all over the world. It's growing so much that like China banned Nostr
from like the app store in China. So like entire countries are taking action over Nostr. It seems
like it's going to be huge. So maybe maybe Fiatjaf will become like among the most famous
Bitcoiners and then he will continue to advocate for drivechain and then drivechain will eventually
get more support that way, perhaps. And that would be cool. That'd be great for Bitcoin and good for
Bitcoin hodlers. I mean, ultimately, the biggest group of people who benefit from drivechain are
Bitcoin hodlers. If you're someone who just holds Bitcoin and you want to see Bitcoin's value
persist and grow, in my personal opinion, drivechain has a very real possibility
of contributing meaningfully to that growth trajectory. I'm not guaranteeing
drivechain will make Bitcoin go up and I can't guarantee that. No one can guarantee anything
about the future. But I believe that if Bitcoin develops greater extensibility, it's very possible
that that will, in the future, be understood to have been an important part of the growth story
of Bitcoin. And with that, we will close. And I hope to see you all again soon. We do this twice a
week, Mondays in the morning Pacific time and Thursdays in the evening Pacific time. So the next
one will be Monday. And I hope you all be back for more drivechain. Please go to drivechain.info,
read about it, bring your questions and criticisms and skepticism and arguments here. We welcome
debate and criticism. We welcome it. You know, this is an open intellectual project in the drive
chain community. We absolutely believe that the truth is on our side. So we welcome people to bring
their questions and criticisms because we have answers to all of those. So it's not like a cult
where it's like, oh, you have to believe this. You have to accept these tenants as truth. No,
it's really the opposite. It's like we are the one project that has none of that. In my view,
we're like nothing to hide. So I'm very excited about that. That's why I love this opportunity
to be a part of this movement, because if it succeeds, I expect total vindication. In other
words, enormous value accrual to drivechain or in some other sense, some form of confirmation
that this project was powerful, such as a great diminution in the proliferation of altcoins as a
result of the drivechain narrative that Bitcoin is more extensible than it used to be. Alternatively,
if drivechain is not adopted, unfortunately, regrettably, I think that vindication will also be
achieved by the drive chainers because the lack of drivechain adoption,
the lack of drivechain adoption would unfortunately, I think, be deleterious to
Bitcoin's long term growth trajectory. So either we get drivechain and it works well, or we don't
get drivechain and things don't go so well for Bitcoin. That's my personal opinion. So I think
whatever happens in the future, I will be able to enjoy vindication in a sense. Now, of course,
I much prefer that drivechain be adopted and then Bitcoin win. But if it isn't, then the way
that the drive chainers would be undermined is if Bitcoin does very well without drivechain.
But at the moment, I personally don't really envision that happening. I mean,
like the flipping is coming closer and closer. The Bitcoin fees are very low. I feel that
the way things are going right now aren't isn't so rosy. Like Bitcoin is still number one by
market cap. So people feel pretty comfortable. They're kind of like resting on their laurels.
They're, you know, resting assured. But actually, like tick tock next block. Yeah, that's great. But
like tick tock next having, you know, like the march of time is inescapable. Time and tide wait
for no man, as the bard says. What's happening here is with every successive having there is
a greater reliance on the fees and the fees are low. So I feel that we're like up against the
clock here. You know, we're living on borrowed time. I do personally feel like we need to embrace
merged mining immediately. We have to start growing Bitcoin's value and miner revenue
through drivechains, through merged mine sidechains as soon as possible. I don't want to see
Bitcoin's dominance fall any further. I don't want to see a flipping permanently diminish the
narratives of Bitcoin as the number one, as the king, as the largest network effect. You know,
one of the most popular maxi narratives is that money moves to one. Network effects are powerful.
Well, as soon as Bitcoin isn't the largest network effects, network effects aren't on Bitcoin side
anymore. So I feel there's an urgency. There's a great drama afoot. We must embrace drivechains
soon. Otherwise, we could be risking a lot. That's my personal opinion. Maybe I'm just too
zealous. Maybe I'll be completely disproven, right? Maybe 10 years from now, there's no drive
chain and Bitcoin is better than ever in terms of value and dominance and everything. Maybe that'll
happen and then I'll have to learn why. What did I not understand correctly and scientifically?
But as far as I can tell, there are many signs that this upgrade is needed and it's needed as
as soon as reasonably possible would be ideal. So I encourage all of you who are listening
to read about it on drivechain.info and elsewhere. Read the criticisms that you can find on the
internet as well as the advocacy for it and then discuss it at your local Bitcoin meetup
or among your friends who are Bitcoiners. This community is smaller than you think
and every additional voice is helpful. So get involved and you can like and retweet things.
You can post things on Reddit. You can share things on Telegram and Nostr and Twitter and
everywhere. Get the word out and spread the good word if you'd like to. All right. Well,
I'll see you all on Monday. Thanks for listening and thanks to those who spoke. It was great.
Bye.