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Hey guys, so I've got a really interesting guest today. I've probably followed him
for the better

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part of a decade, but he's a Bitcoin OG. As far as OGs go, he's definitely a real
one.

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And he's just recently come out with a really controversial announcement saying that
he's going

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to hard fork Bitcoin. You know, everyone's looking at Michael Saylor as sort of the
chief bullhead

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honcho to lead Bitcoin into the next major bull market. But I think everyone's
looking at the

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wrong person. I think it might be Paul Sztorc. And decentralized money, censorship
resistance,

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and peer-to-peer payments, basically eliminating the whole banking layer, the whole
financial

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system. Bitcoin was designed to be a better functioning replacement of that. So Paul

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originally made a proposal for sidechains, I think it was 2013 or 14, I can't
remember.

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What this would do is really interesting with Bitcoin because with sidechains, it
makes it

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possible for Bitcoin to be sort of a gas layer for smart contracts, privacy, NFTs,

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like faster transactions, experimenting, innovating, basically everything we did in
crypto could be

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done on Bitcoin. And that's his whole thesis. So again, I think we're about to go
into a really,

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really interesting, a very euphoric sort of tulip mania season for cryptocurrency
and Bitcoin.

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And I'm very, very excited to get into it. Anyway, here's my short interview with
Paul.

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Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Take care and I
hope you enjoy

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it. All right, everybody. Today's going to be a very interesting conversation
because right now,

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there's probably nobody in Bitcoin more controversial than Paul Sztorc. Did I say

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Sztorc, right? It is Sztorc, but not a lot of people know. It's been pronounced
Sztorc before,

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but in Polish, the C is a different letter. It's a TS. Sztorc. Okay, got it. I'll
try to get that

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right for the rest. Okay, so it's a real controversial moment. Why? Because he's

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just announced a brand new hard fork of Bitcoin called eCash. It's happening in
August. So if

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you hold Bitcoin, you will receive the equivalent amount of eCash. There's a lot to
dive into,

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but first, let's meet the man behind it all. Paul, great to have you, man. How are
you doing?

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I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. All right, can we just start simple for
people?

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You're probably tired of doing the same old intro, but for people who may not fully
know

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your background, can we get a quick overview of who you are and sort of how you
became this season?

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Yeah, okay. I joined the Bitcoin community a long time ago, like 2012 or something,

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and I was always interested in prediction markets and sidechains. I'm the author of
BIPS 300 and

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301, which are basically drive chain. The second one, blind merge mining, has been
used in a couple

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other theoretical things. These are BIPS for Bitcoin. Those were from like 2015,
2017, so

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they're very old. In 2022, I started this company, Layer 2 Labs, and we produced
software that uses

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BIPS 300 and 301 for a lot of stuff. In particular, it can bring planetary scale to
Bitcoin and it can

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bring Zcash-level privacy to Bitcoin. But more importantly, it lets anyone launch
their own L2

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that does whatever they want over there. So it kind of cuts this problem of
governance

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and innovation into pieces, and it flips a lot of stuff around. Now, the Bitcoin
core developers have

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to think about and approve every new BIP, but with this, you just have BIPS 300 and
then you have

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your own L2. We have competing dictatorships, basically. In my view, it can't
possibly pose any

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risk at all to anything. I think it's literally not possible. People have been
talking for years

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about it. So it has a lot of upside and zero downside. So the question is, why are
we all

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doing this to ourselves? Has everyone gone crazy? And unfortunately, the answer is
yes. But that's,

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I guess, what we're here to talk about. Yeah, that's why I wanted to have this
conversation,

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because it's not like you're some griff that's coming along for attention or some
self-serving

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capitalist that's trying to monetize some special event. Fine. People are interested
in Lightning

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and people are interested in this other stuff. So, yeah, I've just been waiting
patiently. And,

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you know, things have done very, very well in Bitcoin. You know, overall, if you had
to give

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Bitcoin like a pass-fail or something, you'd give it like an A++++. I know people
who got

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coins out of Gavin Andreessen's faucet, his free Bitcoin faucet back in the day, you
know,

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when it was 10 cents and they sold for $100,000. So they got literally a 99 million
percent ROI.

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So this is the greatest performing asset in the history of capitalism, hands down.
The important

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question is, is Bitcoin going to make it? Because if Bitcoin makes it, it will be
$25 million per

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coin and it will be used everywhere in the world, like every day by everyone. But if
it doesn't

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make it, it will go to zero and it will be a huge embarrassment to everyone who, you
know,

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threw their weight behind it. Yeah. So that's that's the question. Yeah, I see. So
the intentions

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are really clear to me, which is why I was very I mean, I mean, I'm never surprised.
Obviously,

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there's always going to be controversy around this and there's going to be people
that hate it,

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but it just seems a lot of people are reacting very emotionally to this fork
announcement and

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sort of just either not understanding or not acknowledging the sort of underlying
frustrations

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that sort of led here. And it's almost like it's more of a philosophical
disagreement than an

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engineering one these days. And I feel like that's kind of where it changed in 2017.
Yeah,

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absolutely. We won the block size war, but we kind of killed the goose that lays the
golden egg

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because what the lessons that people took from the block size war was stuff like

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the people who try to change Bitcoin will be made fun of and humiliated and then
suffer and then

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fail. That was like the lesson that one of the cultural lessons that people learn.

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So these are all the cultural lessons that were learned. All the stuff like, OK, we
don't need to

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like lightning will fix it. It was like a battle between large blocks and lightning.
And it was

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like lightning is just going to win. So you still to this day hear people saying on
like on the main

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stage, like on the big stages and with big platforms, they still think, you know,
lightning

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is going to scale Bitcoin. Then people say, you know, you have like these lines from
people like

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Michael Saylor, these really unbelievably silly lines or lightning and these other
layer two and

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layer three and layer four protocols. He's just like throwing out these like, you
know,

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these were like, why not layer five or why not like why not like layer like

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fifty five or something? So it's like you hear this stuff. But actually,

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you know, as I did this lightning debate recently, none of the actual people working
on lightning,

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the technical people actually believe that lightning will scale like in the general

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common knowledge. This is another thing with the operatron thing. The operatron

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thing is totally fake. And every single one of Luke's points is bizarrely wrong,
wrong,

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not only wrong, but kind of bizarre. But but there's a core truth to it, which is
that Bitcoin

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core is corrupt and Bitcoin core doesn't care about doing the right thing either. So
this is

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the this is the problem is actually really, really big. And it may be already be
unfixable. It may be

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too late. But I think with the hard fork announcement and with the project, it will

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shine a lot of light on all this stuff, which is, again, this is like super, super,
super important.

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People talk about layer zero is the culture or something. The culture is in very,
very bad shape.

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Do you think it's sort of protect my bag bias over truth or over innovation?

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People have been sold this idea that. Like being toxic is good for the asset because

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it resists the spread of FUD. So, yeah, people have been trained thanks to years of
bad FUD,

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you know, like Greenpeace saying that Bitcoin mining is like bad for the environment
or whatever.

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A lot of people just parrot that. And that was kind of never really true. And it
kind of didn't

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wouldn't even matter, even if it was true, because it was like, you know, like how
much

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electricity does the regular banking system or the NFL or the cosmetics industry.
It's like you

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could go down the line. So all this stuff is ridiculous. But yeah, there's been like
a core

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of people trained to just say any criticism of BTC is FUD. And, you know, you get a
lot of

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extra points if you can say, oh, that person is not only wrong, but they're a liar
and a scammer

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as well. And, you know, there's like it's a whole little like food chain of like
podcasts and stuff.

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And a lot of money can be made. Like you can get a lot of like OpenSats grants or
you can get

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on the right stage at the right conference and you can raise money if you just say
like people

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just, you know, for a while people just put lightning stuff in their name and you
could

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raise a lot of money and then you could you have this money to spend however you
like.

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Yeah. So that's my bag. Yeah. I never understood the sensitivity to FUD or the
sensitivity to fear.

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I mean, if you if you really are a Bitcoin and you call the whole anti-fragility of
the whole

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asset sort of comes with the territory. So being tested or challenged should never
be a problem.

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But also that rolls over into, I don't know, innovation and experimentation, which
is kind of

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what you're up to, right? It's I want to do more with Bitcoin. It's kind of as
simple as that. And

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if I do, I can just experiment this way because you guys didn't want to do it. So
here's my fork.

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I'm going to go give it a try. What have we got to lose and why the contention?

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I think one important thing to point out is that back in the day, like in 20, maybe
14 or 2015 or

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so, it was possible for everyone, like everyone on Bitcoin Talk. There were plenty
of people who

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had read. You've been a member of the forum for a long time. And instead there
wasn't a lot of

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podcasts back then. So you would read the forum, which was a text medium, which is a
much better

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medium, you know, because it's much more serious. You're like writing for a
timeless, faceless

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audience. And it's text is very, very serious. But the point is, you could have read
the whole

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forum, like the entire history of it, because you go back and read the old Satoshi
posts and you

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read the whole Satoshi threads and you just catch up on it every day. And so
everyone knew there

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was a time when everyone knew what everyone was working on and they knew a lot about
it as well.

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So they knew a lot of stuff didn't work and people would make fun of certain ideas
that

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have been tried many times. A lot of people would like make fun of proof of stake.
Everyone knew

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everything. But at this point, we've reached a situation where there is so much
experimentation

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and there are so many people tweaking these ideas. And the world overall is a
dynamic place.

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No one even knows like what people, the idea that Luke Dash Jr. knows what's going
on in Solana

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or even that Greg Maxwell knows what's going on in whatever, like all that is zero
percent

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accurate. No one has any idea of which ideas will be good. So the innovation and
experimentation

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points have taken on enormous new relevance, I think. If we do sort of a comparison
between

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those two dates, it's not just how it's socially and culturally changed. It's the
funding. The

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venture capital funding has changed as well, which means the incentives have changed
a lot as well.

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It's like monetizing the information asymmetry today. We blur the waters more so we
can do all

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these things and capture some capital this way. It seems accurate to you. It's
impossible to over

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it. Tons of stuff has changed. Back in the 2013 era, I think a lot of the developers
believed

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that they would be thrown in jail. They thought what ultimately happened to

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a Tornado Cash, a Samurai type people, to Ross Albrecht. A lot of them, I'm pretty
sure,

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probably people like Greg Maxwell and maybe even Peter Vuela, these other people,
they kind of

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thought this is a very real possibility. So not only was there no money, but there
was like

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a real risk. That does cause a different type of person to show up and do a
different type of work

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because obviously you're filtering out all the scammers at that point because
there's no money

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and there's enormous risk. You also added another element that I actually felt and I
found quite

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disturbing. If we look at a scale where as Bitcoin became more socially ossified,

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it kind of started delivering its cypherpunk values along the way as well,

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sort of in the same trajectory, which was kind of the most disappointing element to
me.

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Gosh, we could go off on a tangent here. Let me bring it back because I want to come
back to

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e-cash. With the big cultural shift, I don't really see why, I still don't really
understand

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why people are so scared to just see experiments happen because experimentation
should be pursued,

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especially if you want Bitcoin to exist as more of a monetary product because it's
not

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technically impossible to change, but it really does seem socially impossible.

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So technically, drive change could work. Socially, Bitcoin is sort of rejected
automatically.

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Just for context, let's just quickly flip it into the tech side.

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In your view, what's wrong with Bitcoin as it is today?

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Just purely on the technical protocol level, you mean?

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As a product and as far as survivability is concerned, because is that sort of the
underlying

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issue with you is that you genuinely think it's at risk?

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Yes. Okay. So I think as a product, I think is a good way of phrasing it because,

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yeah, I think we've had a lot of great things happen in Bitcoin, undeniably, as I
said.

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But really, in 2014, we had a window when we were on the beginning of financial
times.

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And then in 2017, we had a window where this is the highest we got on Google trends,

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in December 2017, after the block size war. I think most normal people have kind of
made

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up their mind about Bitcoin now. You know, it had this thing before where everyone
thought,

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like, what is this? And people came at it with an open mind. And they were like, oh,

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and people are kind of confused about it a lot. But if you tell them, if you tell
them like,

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oh, it's this blah, blah, blah, they won't understand about hash functions or
whatever.

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But if you tell them something like, hey, you know, do you really think the
government or do

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you really think Jamie Dimon, if you have a checking account at Chase, do you really
think

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Jamie Dimon's looking out for you? Or do you think he's looking out for himself? How
much do you

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actually know about how much the banking system works? So if you hit people with
questions like

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that, they would be like, oh, and then you could say, yeah, this is an open source
money. Treats

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everyone the same on the Internet. Doesn't matter, you know, how old you are, what
race you are,

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what country you're in. This is an open source piece of software. You could
basically email

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someone money. And then people would be like, whoa, like people kind of like be into
it.

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Now everyone has just decided. What has everyone decided? First of all, we totally
lost the whole

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like Bitcoin, not crypto thing. But really, everyone has decided that this is just
like a

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bunch of shady stuff that normal people don't use. And it's not for normal people.
It's for

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like young men who are gambling. It's for, it's like for some kind of weird, you
know,

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people think that it's for some kind of weird tax evasion or some kind of weird,

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something nefarious, like some kind of crime. And that's what people have made up
their mind.

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So as a product, I think it's actually, it's really bad sign when we've had these
bursts of

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interest. But now I think, because it's very hard to get people to reconsider it a
second time.

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Yeah, I'm worried about, I'm very worried about that. I mean, so we don't have
something that

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scales, scale is more than just a feature. But a lot of things are like that a lot
of things

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have network effects, like a lot of people, they like their iPhone people, and they
don't want to

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switch away from an iPhone, because this is the user experience they're used to.
And, you know,

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people don't want to switch from like a QWERTY keyboard to something else. And so a
lot are the

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USB to switch from USB A to USB C, and then the versus the Apple cable. So yeah,
these things have

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network effects. And it's, it's really scale is the kiss of death. Yeah, it's like
more than just

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like a little bullet point on like a PowerPoint slide. It's pretty important. Yeah,
I can actually

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relate to that. So I was really driven by all the original Cypherpunk principles, I
was really big

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on the idea of privacy coins, was kind of my whole thesis coming into the space
originally.

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And when I look at Bitcoin, I treat it as I'm kind of okay with the way it is right
now as a user,

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I treat it as like a savings vehicle, right? And it protects me from inflation,
everything else,

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where I see, and I've gotten used to using stable coins, for instance, as sort of my
medium of

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exchange for paying bills and things like that. Where I see the issue is that
Bitcoin no longer

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works as an inflation hedge, if government starts taxing me every time I need to
swap into

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stable coins, because they capture the inflation gains they would normally get
through that

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transaction, and I lose it, essentially. So Bitcoin loses its quality as an
inflation hedge,

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if I get taxed on every time I need to port into a cash. So with what you want to
like, we'll jump

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into drive changes really quickly. But with what you want to solve, the underlying
idea is to

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pursue Bitcoin as more of a monetary product as well, and scalability.

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Well, okay, I'm glad you brought up stable coins, because I have like a couple like

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lists of things where we've lost. So like when Bitcoin first became big, and privacy
coins,

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you know, the first real customer for Bitcoin was Silk Road, the website, that was
the first

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like place where it was like you actually was being used like for something to
achieve a task.

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And then we've lost all that to Monero now. So that is like the canary in the coal
mine,

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it happened a long time ago. But then stable coins also like I remember when I went
to,

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I went in 2015 for Scaling 2 to Hong Kong, everyone was obsessed with stable coins
in

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like in basically in Asia, and in Japan also. So where they're just a little bit
further away from

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like the toxic maxi, whatever, there's like zero, like Bitcoin maxi, and they're
like,

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Bitcoin maxi. So there's all the stable coins were very big there. And now stable
coins have

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gotten super, super big tethers super big. When Trump did his Trump coin, that is
that was on

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Solana. So you can go down the list of like a couple things where it was like, I
just speaks

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to the earlier question about from a product point of view, I really think
especially with

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something with network effects, which money has extreme network effects, is, which
is to say,

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you want to be using the same money that your friends are using. And money has this
property.

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And for something like this, you're either growing or you're dying, I think. So when
you see the

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stable coins growing, and when you see darknet market of Monero growing, you know,
that's it,

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Bitcoin's dying. That is that is the death of Bitcoin. We can see it happening. It's
happening

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right now. So yeah, yeah, I see it as a threat as well. I've kind of viewed it
through both lens.

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I see it as a threat, but I also simultaneously see it as everyone's just taken one
step away

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from fiat to come on chain essentially. And that means they're one step away from
realizing that

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holding on chain fiat still presents the same inflation issues. So you're one step
away from

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going into Bitcoin. But before sort of addressing that, when you talk about stable
coins and Monero

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as a sort of monetary unit, do you think velocity matters for Bitcoin? Because for
me,

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for instance, I don't mind having Bitcoin just sitting there. I don't want to
transact my Bitcoin,

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you know, most of the time if I can use other ways to pay for stuff. But if I start
getting

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taxed, that's when it becomes an issue. Every time I need to move out of Bitcoin
into cash,

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it becomes like a UX hassle and a cost. So that's where I see the issue where
velocity will matter.

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If Bitcoin was that currency, then it wouldn't be that issue. I wouldn't have that
hassle.

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Well, I think it's actually a nuanced question. And you have to say the nuanced
answer is that

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it's sort of sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't. It's hard to kind of
explain,

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but it's kind of like, okay, what if you had like everyone's buying a car

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and the car and you're in Singapore or something. So the car has air conditioning,
but no heat.

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But you don't really need the heat in Singapore because it's hot.

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Yeah.

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Now, that's one tiny facet of it. But now if this car also has network effects and
it's like,

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you know, one person is going to sell the same car, like we have some magic machine

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where it's hard to set it up. But once you do, it makes a perfect copy of the car
for free.

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It's like the replicator in Star Trek or something. But we have to pick the same car
for

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everyone. So we'll have the people in Russia and the people in Minnesota and
whatever, they're

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going to want heat in the car. So the car's dead. With no heat, the car's dead. And
so that's kind

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of like, is it a store of value or is it a medium of exchange? We really want it to
be good at

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everything. It's a very interesting thing when people say this about the store of
value. Well,

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hey, it works as a store of value. But again, the goalposts keep moving because what
it used to be

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and what I absolutely signed up for and what I completely 100% endorse, and I always
have

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endorsed and I always will. And even the Layer 2 labs, BIP 300, all this stuff, I
endorse the

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scaling in layers. So everyone always said, listen, this is a new type of thing.
Layer 1 can

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only do a few transactions. We have to make sure we protect store of value. But then
we'll get the

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medium of exchange later with technology. So everyone was like, OK, we store a
value.

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And then BIP 300 is basically, all BIP 300 is saying is instead of using

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USDT on Ethereum, you would just use like BitEthereum. You would use like a quasi
thing

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with no ether and all just with Bitcoin. And you would use the USDT like on that. So
that's all

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that BIP 300 says is that all these projects just be converted into Bitcoin
projects. You know,

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Solana, Ethereum, whatever, everything. So that's the idea. So it's extra bizarre
and suspicious

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that everyone should be out in the streets marching for BIP 300, you know, like
shouting

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for it at the top of their lungs. But it's, you know, I don't say that out of
vanity. I just say

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that I think it's more of a symptom of just like how everyone has been trained to
have an opinion

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that is popular instead of, you know, like one that's actually reasonable.

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Yeah. So I actually believe that the current issue is really just an infancy

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problem and sort of hyper Bitcoinization is inevitable. But I suppose a critic or an

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opponent would say to you, using your car analogy, for instance, it's great to be
sort of a jack of

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all trades, but you're compromising something on some end, like you can't have
everything. For

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instance, with a car, you can't have a supercar that outpaces everything else if you
also give

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it the luxury interior and all the bells and whistles that go along with it because
you

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compromise on speed, right? And that's sort of core to a lot of the debate. Is that
right?

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Well, it's a good point, but it's actually not true because the question of which
things are

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traded off against which things, that is a technical question. And so it may be the
case,

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for example, sometimes an idea is just better. So maybe they discovered, hey, if we
build the

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exterior of the car out of this material, it will weigh less and have better fuel
economy and it

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will be safer in a crash and it will, whatever, I don't know, reflect heat or light
or something.

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It can be better in many ways. So sometimes an idea is just better and there is no
tradeoff.

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Yeah, I agree. I think the narrative, it's really similar to when, you know, war
takes off,

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everyone becomes like a military strategist. I agree when these sort of contentious
Bitcoin

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ideas come up, everyone becomes technically proficient all of a sudden.

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So assuming the engineering physics is exactly as you say, and just, I want to come
back to the,

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I want to come back to the political side of this, to be honest, to finish up. But
can we just quickly

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and using your car analogy, probably the easiest way, would it be easy to say for
drivechains, it's as simple as understanding, you know, Bitcoin's like the highway,
drivechains would be when you want to go to a specific destination off the highway,
which removes the congestion that you get if you just had one entrance and one exit.
You have lots of little side streets.

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Well, from a security point of view, it has a big advantage, which is that you can
onboard people directly to the L2 without the person leaving L1. So with Lightning
and with almost everything else, the person has to get coins on L1 and then like
open a channel on L1. But a drivechain is a little more loose. So you can have one
guy, like a super rich person, like a Roger Ver or whatever.

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They could send with one transaction, like 50,000 coins from L1 to L2. And then
those 50,000 coins, you could onboard people there and the coins could circulate
over there with nothing happening on L1. And that gives it an enormous advantage.

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So I don't know if that is the best, if that helps with the highway car analogy. But
a lot of other stuff is dead on arrival because it cannot do that. A second thing
that's much better about it is in my conception, all these L2s are merge mined. The
drivechain idea is that all the fee revenue would just go to miners.

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That means that there's no conflict of interest between the miners and the L2. And
in fact, far from being conflict of interest, I was kind of imagining in my head
like 10 years ago that maybe like miners would, they would like be funding the L2
development and stuff because they get all this money feeding back to them, like a
huge amount of money in fees.

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And they benefit as a result. In other cases, the fees go to different people. For
Lightning, they go to like the routing nodes or the LS Lightning service provider,
LSB. For Liquid, Blockstream, Sidechain. They put sidechain in quotes because it's
really not a sidechain. It's just a multi-sig address controlled by them. And they
get the transaction fees are hard-coded to go to them.

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It's the kind of thing we would make fun of. We make fun of that in Zcash and the
altcoin and other projects. We make fun of that type of thing, but that's how it
would work in Liquid.

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If you have a situation like that, if Liquid became super popular, then you would
have miners who are supporting the L1 earning very little amounts, and then the L2,
the money being collected by a different person, and this would set up a conflict of
interest between the L1 miners and the L2. And none of the L2s can survive a battle
with the L1 miners because the miners control the on-ramp and the off-ramp to every
L2, not just the 300.

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Because they control every message that appears in the L1 blockchain. So they can
censor or hold anything hostage.

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So with your drivechains, there isn't decentralization issue? That's the primary
distinction that there's no central control that has authority over the capital
that's moved from the L1?

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I would say that, yeah, it's miner-centric. So it says each block, you can have
messages in there that govern which sidechains are on, what name do the sidechains
have, what software are they pointed at, and the deposits and the withdrawals.

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So each block can do this. There's no single person deciding that. So in that way,
it's much more decentralized. And in particular, decentralized development, which is
a phrase that I don't think people have really wrapped their head around what it
would mean because people think, oh, there's a lot of different stuff.

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But it's like, yeah, Bitcoin Core is one website. There's one GitHub repository with
maintainers who merge. They publish the official version. People are very, very,
very hesitant, very reluctant to run any version of Bitcoin that's not the official
version.

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They really want to make sure the exchanges and stuff, the miners, they all want to
run the same version everyone else is running. So it's extreme network effect
situation. And yeah, people try to put out other clients. I don't know. I don't
think they've had any real success in terms of adoption.

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Although they have proven, sometimes they've proven their point. Like Bitcoin proved
that you could do it all in JavaScript. And of course, Eric Voskuhl, he proved that
he's a much better software engineer than everyone at Core combined. But that
doesn't mean, and this is the problem. It has nothing to do with Eric. This is the
problem is that you can be the best, and it doesn't matter.

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So that puts us on a ticking time bomb, because it means we're not absorbing all the
best ideas as quickly as we possibly can. And that means if you just add time to
that equation, it means eventually there'll be something that's much, much, much,
much, much better.

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Something that is better ideas as quickly as possible. So that is the issue. That's
the problem with you. You just say, well, innovation is not that important. But you
can only say that for a short amount of time. If you fast forward 10, 15 years,
suddenly it becomes the only thing that matters. And it's like the samurai getting
mowed down by machine guns or something.

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Yeah, lightning has become a deranged, this is really an enormous source of
derangement. Because people don't, they don't want to face the fact that it, they
put a lot of time into like the brand and like even all the stuff like the Nostra
zaps and stuff. If you zap someone, if there's a primal to primal zap on Nostra, it
uses the lightning icon.

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And it, it, it, you know, purports it show it masquerades as if a lightning
transaction took place, but there's absolutely zero lightning transaction, none
whatsoever taking place. But this is exactly what I was talking about at the
beginning about the metastasization of like the cancer, where it's very easy. Oh,
should we tell the hard truth? Or should we tell a comforting lie?

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And the comforting lies they breed, it's like, you know, your house getting infested
with rodents or something. And they, it's not just the one, it's the termites, you
know, they are eating the walls and they multiply. So it's like the broom, the broom
in Fantasia, you know, with Mickey Mouse, and the broom, and he chops it up, and he
makes a million brooms. I don't know, I don't know if this reference is landing.

290
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You know, it's like, trust me, it's bad when they start to multiply. So lightning
has caused all kinds of related false ideas to spread.

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Doesn't that give you a lot of confidence in the success of your fork as far as
engineering community rallying behind you?

292
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Well, this is the magic of competition is that anytime anyone, anywhere makes a
mistake, that is a gift competition to the competitors. So yeah, we want to maximize
competition. Unfortunately, the hard fork is a very difficult venue for competition.
It has a lot of late, it's laden and burdened with all these disadvantages of like,
you have to have a new, because everything is kind of saying, Oh, start your own
country.

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And it's like, well, you know, with no, no electricity and no airports, and you
know, so you need a lot of stuff. It's very, very difficult. If the sidechain world
is better, because once you start it up, you can just, this is like, we're all in
the same food court.

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So instead of like having to walk across the Sahara Desert to get to, you know,
whatever, Sbarro pizza or something, they're all like right next to each other. So
you want to reduce the cost to switching to a new idea that maximizes competition.

295
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So yeah, that does, that is exactly what makes me think is viable at all, is the
fact that the mistakes are so big. But that's part of my message is that the
mistakes are not just technical mistakes where people will see, oh, once everyone
sees BIT300 is a good idea, they'll just turn it on in BTC.

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I think like, you know, even if it will be confusing to most people, even then, even
as it's happening, because it's like it's been happening with the stable coins and
with all this other stuff.

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So it's not like I want, but you know, the Trump and the Melania coins being on
Solana, like that is supposed to be our bread and butter, like weird, absurdist
corruption and bizarre, you know, like weird, weird financial transactions.

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Everyone would have thought back in 2014, everyone would have thought, oh, if you
said, fast forward in like a long time from now, there's going to be weird digital
assets on the blockchain that like the president will be an extremely controversial,
but very opinionated and effective person and kind of quasi corrupt.

299
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But with like a kind of a cat who ate the canary grin, like a kind of like trolling
level of corruption. Everyone thought, oh, this would be these would be like
Bitcoin. Of course, this is going to be like he's a Bitcoiner, which is sort of it.

300
00:34:02,097 --> 00:34:18,097
But it's like he's also like a Solana pump that fun meme coiner, you know, and it's
like that's supposed to be our thing, really. But now everyone's just decided it's
all sour grapes through and through Aesop's fable about people say, I can't reach
the grapes.

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00:34:18,097 --> 00:34:36,097
We said we never wanted privacy anyway. We never wanted a lunatic dictator, quasi
people to just like issue like a billion dollars of like something they just
invented, like a Hayekian, like just do whatever they want on a different
blockchain. We never wanted that on Bitcoin anyway. We said all this weird stuff
that we would never have said.

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Yeah, right. That's kind of a very interesting take on, I guess, the viability or
success of this fork. And it makes it very intriguing, I guess. Do you think we're
going to see a lot of public support behind it as it goes out?

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I have no idea, honestly, because I can see it going several different ways. One way
is there could be like a like the dam could just burst at some point where all
enough of this stuff, like evidence of these huge mistakes is like collected in one
place by a few people who can kind of like just keep hammering it out.

304
00:35:15,097 --> 00:35:29,097
And so eventually there's like an emperor has no clothes moment where everyone kind
of realizes or everyone's finally ready to accept like this has kind of happened a
little bit with lightning where, but not quite. There was a time when lightning was
totally infallible and you could not criticize it at all.

305
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So it was completely uncriticizable. And then there was kind of like a little blip
and then people started to talk about lightning's limitations and problems. But that
kind of settled down into something where it's just you're allowed to talk like with
this extreme jargon and this technical language.

306
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And you can talk about like extremely obscure flood and luge and you can say all
this weird stuff. And then you're supposed to, but the conclusion is supposed to be
smart people will take care of it later or something. So it's kind of like been put
in like a little bit of a box, the criticism.

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So yeah, maybe the dam will just burst and there'll be this emperor's new clothes
moment and everyone will just like realize that there's all this extremely serious
issues. But I think it's also possible that like we'll, this project will have to
like go through a similar like trial by fire that like Bitcoin because Bitcoin first
came out like everyone hated it at first. So it might be the same for this. I'm not
sure.

308
00:36:33,097 --> 00:36:37,097
Does that also count on because the network won't be stable initially, will it?

309
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No, it won't. The first like week or whatever, it'll just be like complete chaos.
Yeah. Maybe even afterwards. It won't be stable. It'll be really weird.

310
00:36:46,097 --> 00:37:01,097
I mean, that volatility is kind of fun. I feel like I'm from the traders
perspective. To be honest, when you first announced, there was another reason I was
so shocked by everyone because I felt a warm sense of nostalgia when you brought up
a hard fork at first.

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00:37:01,097 --> 00:37:21,097
I was like, oh, that's probably so, you know, the narrative behind Bitcoin has been
so dry. It's just all regulation, institutional capture. And yeah, as you said, just
Michael Saylor bouting out all these buzzwords. But the idea for fork was, yeah, it
was kind of, oh, here we go. We get something interesting for once. Bitcoin's moving
forward, maybe.

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00:37:21,097 --> 00:37:47,097
Blood pumping through our veins and we're still alive, you know, like, yeah, it was
kind of like an autopilot. And yeah, it's annoying. I don't like it at all. Well,
you know, we're not this. It would be fine if it was just harmless, but it's not.
This is the trade off is that you get these people in and then they're weighing in
on stuff. And it's like, it's just really weird.

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Again, I don't even think they know what they're saying. Like, I don't even know the
pro ossification people. I don't think they actually know like how to achieve
ossification. They don't, you know, it's apparently they don't realize that the
Bitcoin core organization, they put out a new version every six months. So it's not
like literally ossified at all, in any sense, not in the slightest.

314
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And there's secret bugs, CVs, you know, critical vulnerabilities, and there's
mistakes. So, so I don't know, like a lot of these, we have these people weighing
in, and then they're supposedly like the cultural spokesperson. But yeah, that does
crowd out. If you have people on stage, then other people are not on stage. So,
yeah, like the free samurai should probably be more a little more important.

315
00:38:40,097 --> 00:38:53,097
Versus the Bitcoin treasury companies. You know, I think these are very silly idea
where you are giving away your Bitcoin, really, because you have money that you can
invest in Bitcoin, you pay the opportunity costs of owning Bitcoin.

316
00:38:54,097 --> 00:39:15,097
So instead of owning Bitcoin, you buy shares of stock that MicroStrategy can print
at any time, or any of the rest. And what they have done is layered in all this
extra complexity, where they said they have preferred shares that are even ahead of
you in line.

317
00:39:16,097 --> 00:39:35,097
And convertible debt that's ahead of you in line. So these people get paid before
the class A shareholders get paid. So they're at the bottom of the totem pole. And,
you know, when they say convertible debt, what they mean is the debt converts into a
bunch of extra shares being printed.

318
00:39:36,097 --> 00:40:01,097
So it's like everything that people hated about central banks rolled into this
thing. And this is presented as a Bitcoin project. So it's a big, it's all a big
distraction as well. Like we should be talking about improving the software, making
it easier to run a full node, doing more stuff with Bitcoin, you know, whatever
vaults to help protect people's, you know, every time.

319
00:40:02,097 --> 00:40:23,097
So Jamison Lopp has this database of like physical attacks on Bitcoin. It's like
when they like break into your house, torture you and your family, your coins. But
yeah, if we had vaults, we could deter this, it would be much harder to do. They
wouldn't be able to get away with it. And then of course, if they stop getting away
with it, they're going to stop attempting it in the first place. So that's the ideal
situation.

320
00:40:23,097 --> 00:40:52,097
Where's all the conversation about a vault? Zero, absolutely zero, negative, in
fact. And instead we talk about BIP 110 or this other stuff. It's all a distraction.
So yeah, when we allow this stuff in, it crowds other stuff out. And there's no
getting around. I think knowledge is the ultimate arbiter. It would be the ultimate
like, you know, what's true and false will mean the difference between death and
survival, I think.

321
00:40:53,097 --> 00:41:10,097
Yeah, that's another reason I don't really understand the outrage is because, I
mean, and it's what I like about what you're doing, I guess, is it's kind of more
free market. I mean, we get to hold Bitcoin in eCash and just see what happens
essentially from here on out as Bitcoin holders. So yeah, I really don't get it.

322
00:41:10,097 --> 00:41:12,097
Everyone's getting free money. Everyone gets free money.

323
00:41:12,097 --> 00:41:14,097
Yeah, if it works, it works. If it doesn't.

324
00:41:41,097 --> 00:41:57,097
Like a treasury company that you have to buy. You have to buy, you know, shares of
MicroStrategy. But at the hard fork, you just get all this stuff for free. So it's
kind of like, why would anyone ever criticize it under any circumstances? Of course,
there is like about network effects and about brand dilution and stuff.

325
00:41:57,097 --> 00:42:14,097
So in the Bitcoin Cash days, one of the number one things that people hated about
Bitcoin Cash, and kind of rightfully so, was that it was like reusing the Bitcoin
name. And now there's two things with the name. And so people didn't like that,
which I understand. But that's not the case with this.

326
00:42:14,097 --> 00:42:36,097
Something else about this project was that one thing that people reacted to was the
fact that Satoshi doesn't get all of his coins. And some of the support inside
supporters of the company and of the software and investors, you could pre-invest in
eCash, you know, before the fork happens. And then you can hit the ground running
when it starts.

327
00:42:36,097 --> 00:43:03,097
So a lot of people hate that. But actually, they shouldn't hate that either, because
that gives people an incentive to launch more hard forks of this kind, which all of
which give you more free money. So that is the key. That's like the key to the
circuit. In fact, like all this stuff is like, just like, these are just like
really, really good ideas. The fact that people don't like the ideas, it's just very
suspicious. And I think it actually outs them as having no clue about what's going
on.

328
00:43:03,097 --> 00:43:18,097
Because if you think about it like this, the people who are complaining about
Satoshi's coins thing, simultaneously they're saying two opposite things. They're
saying, this is a terrible project and it'll go to zero. And everyone associated
with it is an idiot and whatever.

329
00:43:18,097 --> 00:43:39,097
But then they're saying, depriving Satoshi of his full thing of eCash will result in
substantial, like financial harm to him or some kind of horrible damages, you know,
he'll be in pain and suffering, because he'll only get 600,000 eCash instead of 1.1
million.

330
00:43:39,097 --> 00:43:41,097
Of this token there.

331
00:43:42,097 --> 00:43:57,097
It's a contradiction. They can't have it both ways. They can only complain about the
theft if they think the project is really, really, really valuable. And that it's
like, it's this enormous threat and it's very likely to become like the number one
currency of the world and displace Bitcoin and all this stuff. So they really can't
have it both ways.

332
00:43:57,097 --> 00:44:18,097
And this is part of just how crazy everyone has become, that they latch on to like
these weird parts of it, purely because it's like a word association game and they
could just say, oh, Satoshi is good. Like theft is bad or whatever. They just stitch
all these ideas together. But actually, if you look under the hood, it doesn't make
the faintest bit of sense at all.

333
00:44:19,097 --> 00:44:47,097
Yeah. And I find that's actually a very common pattern when you see them sort of
picking and choosing which cypherpunk principles they like the most. You know,
pro-decentralization, but love these big Bitcoin acquisition vehicles, whatever
pumps. There's lots of contradictions in that page. And I completely agree. I saw it
the same way. Like, it's weird to say, hey, this fork is shit. Don't ever buy it.
But hey, make sure you save Satoshi's coins. That's not cool.

334
00:44:47,097 --> 00:45:10,097
It makes no sense. You brought up a really interesting point that I in fact, because
I mean, when I first heard about it, I straight away thought the Patoshi proposal
would obviously trigger outrage because it kind of sets maybe, I don't know, the
idea that it sets a precedent, questions the whole social principle of it all. But
it does incentivize a lot of other people who will probably follow your lead after
this.

335
00:45:11,097 --> 00:45:38,097
Yeah, I'll give you like, there's more nuances to it that I think people are sort of
grasped at like a subconscious level, which is why they're so upset, which is that
the thing is, it's kind of like people don't want, they need to be able to win
something. They need to be able to like humiliate innovation or something. So if the
idea is a good idea, it will be very embarrassing for them for it to be tried
anywhere and then succeed.

336
00:45:39,097 --> 00:46:02,097
And if then all the people who supported it earliest get extra money, that's like
rubbing salt in the wounds. You know what I mean? Now it's like they're really like
they could have. So you see, this is like a huge like, it turns this shame machine
upside down, actually, because now all these people criticizing it, it was like they
could have got it at immediately at a lower price.

337
00:46:03,097 --> 00:46:21,097
It could have been involved earlier. And now they are the, you know, they're like
the people who are like making fun of Bitcoin when it was like 10 cents or
something. So they look around and say, hey, you're going to criticize this. Now
you're responsible. But if it's a pure hard fork, they can criticize it all the way
up until the moment of the fork, they can drag their feet the whole way.

338
00:46:22,097 --> 00:46:43,097
Then they get the same as someone who is a supporter and who stuck their neck out
and sacrificed for it. So they intuitively understand that the pure fork gives an
edge to the critics over the risk taking entrepreneurial innovator and that this
thing upsets that.

339
00:46:44,097 --> 00:47:03,097
And so they want, of course, they want to have all their free, they want to have
their cake and eat it too. They want to have, they want to take all the coins and
they want to say the coins suck. They don't want to, they want to be able to say,
because then it might fail. Think about it. If it fails, they win because the coin,
because it failed and they were right when they criticized it. But if they were
wrong, they still get all the coins. So of course, they're still taking all the
coins.

340
00:47:03,097 --> 00:47:13,097
So the last thing they want is to be held responsible for their view. And this is
because we've shut off the knowledge circuit where people, as I said, people don't
look into it anymore.

341
00:47:14,097 --> 00:47:26,097
Now here's the situation with the hard fork. How can anyone, why would, if you're
asking people to do all the work upfront, see Satoshi is kind of a hero because he
did all the things on the bot, but most people can't even do one or two of these
things are not realistic.

342
00:47:27,097 --> 00:47:39,097
It's like you do all the, put in all the work to make sure that the software works
and exists and has pretty good user experience. You have to pay the cost upfront to
do all this work.

343
00:47:40,097 --> 00:47:50,097
Then at the moment of the hard fork, you're rewarded the same as, you know, one of
the, one of the, someone who did nothing or someone, a critic who fought you every
step of the way.

344
00:47:51,097 --> 00:48:03,097
How is that desirable? And how much innovation are we really going to get in the
world where that, where we rely on altruistic people who are independently wealthy
to just shoulder the burden?

345
00:48:04,097 --> 00:48:14,097
And well, we're just not going to get as much innovation as we would get in one
where people can actually go to, there's a business model that compensates you if
the idea ends up being good.

346
00:48:15,097 --> 00:48:18,097
Because of course the idea is terrible and you can actually get those to zero and it
was a big mistake.

347
00:48:18,097 --> 00:48:36,097
But of course the value is that maybe I'm right about a lot of things I'm saying, or
at least that a viable competitor to Bitcoin would actually help like everyone
overall because it would get everyone focused on delivering stuff that actually
matters and actually caring about stuff that people say is true.

348
00:48:36,097 --> 00:48:49,097
So I'm not exactly comfortable, the relationship that we have with Satoshi, where
Satoshi does all the work up front and then he mines millions of coins that he
abandons and then leaves selflessly.

349
00:48:50,097 --> 00:48:54,097
Well, I mean, obviously I appreciate that. Of course, we all appreciate that.

350
00:48:55,097 --> 00:48:59,097
But is that really the relationship we want to have with the next Satoshi out there?

351
00:49:00,097 --> 00:49:04,097
Actually, I would say no, I don't want, that's not how I would like things to run.

352
00:49:05,097 --> 00:49:19,097
I think it would be better if there was some way where that person could walk into
either a room with some kind of capital raising apparatus or maybe just a room full
of OG Bitcoiners.

353
00:49:20,097 --> 00:49:24,097
And then to say like, this is the idea. And then there's this vehicle now.

354
00:49:25,097 --> 00:49:36,097
There's this process where, OK, if they do a good job and the idea is good and the
execution is good and the software is good and it's all ready, then it will be ready
on the day of the fork.

355
00:49:36,097 --> 00:49:46,097
Because, of course, the day of the fork, this is yet another, a third facet of it
all, really, which is there's lots of news every day.

356
00:49:47,097 --> 00:49:53,097
And why would anyone pay attention to the fork? Why would anyone pay any attention
before it's actually happened?

357
00:49:54,097 --> 00:49:55,097
Because maybe it won't happen.

358
00:49:56,581 --> 00:50:03,461
But people's attention is part of what makes the Bitcoin project a success because
it has to be a recognisable project.

359
00:50:04,021 --> 00:50:10,061
And again, I would prefer to be doing the one, a third, yet another irony is I would
prefer not to be doing this at all.

360
00:50:10,101 --> 00:50:19,581
The BIP300 part, that part was produced like by me for free, and that is the free
and that doesn't touch any of Satoshi's anything or anyone else's.

361
00:50:19,581 --> 00:50:22,901
And it's the opt-in, ignorable, reversible soft fork.

362
00:50:22,941 --> 00:50:25,661
So you could do, we still do BIP300 at any time.

363
00:50:26,661 --> 00:50:35,221
BIP300 actually doesn't require any lines of code to be changed in Bitcoin Core
because it's encoded in the second thing, this is the activator that just runs next
to Bitcoin Core.

364
00:50:35,501 --> 00:50:37,701
So it doesn't even have to get through their weird pull request.

365
00:50:37,701 --> 00:50:49,701
But still, I'm telling you, we will never do that because the culture is deranged
because they didn't care before about how every soft, every op-nop, soft fork is
100% safe and reversible.

366
00:50:49,701 --> 00:50:51,701
So they didn't care about that. So they're not going to care about this.

367
00:50:51,701 --> 00:50:55,461
It's all, it's all Greek. It's all indecipherable to them anyway.

368
00:50:55,981 --> 00:51:00,621
And, you know, where everyone still thinks lightning is going to save the day and
all that sort of stuff, that's not true.

369
00:51:00,621 --> 00:51:02,301
So that's already what everyone believes.

370
00:51:02,301 --> 00:51:10,141
Yeah, I feel like that makes your fork even more compelling is that you've, this
isn't something that you just like decided to do in a huff.

371
00:51:10,141 --> 00:51:13,581
You've essentially had your proposal queued for like 10 years.

372
00:51:13,581 --> 00:51:16,301
Right. And I was not even that unhappy about it.

373
00:51:16,301 --> 00:51:18,021
I wasn't that unhappy about it.

374
00:51:18,021 --> 00:51:22,261
I was just thinking like, OK, because Bitcoin was doing very well.

375
00:51:22,261 --> 00:51:24,661
And so, you know, Bitcoin's doing great.

376
00:51:24,661 --> 00:51:28,021
And I'm very happy about how well Bitcoin has done.

377
00:51:28,021 --> 00:51:30,981
But then, yeah, like I started looking into other stuff.

378
00:51:30,981 --> 00:51:35,181
Like in 2022, it was like really like the like lightning doesn't work at all.

379
00:51:35,181 --> 00:51:41,661
I did a tab conf a few months ago as just another data point in this vein.

380
00:51:41,661 --> 00:51:46,741
But I did this debate against the entire room of lightning devs.

381
00:51:46,741 --> 00:51:49,701
And they basically all agreed with me that it would not work.

382
00:51:49,741 --> 00:51:58,781
And everyone was basically just agreeing with me that they're like, yeah, it was a
mistake to sell this as the thing that will scale Bitcoin to a billion people and it
will not.

383
00:51:58,781 --> 00:52:02,821
And so and then people wanted to try back in the day.

384
00:52:02,821 --> 00:52:07,221
I pitched DriveChain informally to the large blockers.

385
00:52:07,221 --> 00:52:09,101
I said, hey, you can get everything you want.

386
00:52:09,101 --> 00:52:10,381
You can get large blocks.

387
00:52:10,381 --> 00:52:17,421
You can get a lot of blocks.

388
00:52:17,981 --> 00:52:19,461
You can get large blocks.

389
00:52:19,461 --> 00:52:23,181
And they wanted to do Bitcoin Cash, which they did.

390
00:52:23,181 --> 00:52:27,821
And they learned they they suffered enormously in some respects.

391
00:52:27,821 --> 00:52:30,701
But also they had they got to create their project however they want.

392
00:52:30,701 --> 00:52:36,821
And it's Bitcoin Cash is pretty high on the coin market cap rankings on a relative
basis.

393
00:52:36,821 --> 00:52:43,141
It did go to number two, like in that one November when it debuted, it was like one
day.

394
00:52:43,141 --> 00:52:44,781
And there's the famous Vitalik tweet.

395
00:52:44,781 --> 00:52:46,861
He said, congrats on this seriously.

396
00:52:47,101 --> 00:52:48,621
And people turned that into an inside joke.

397
00:52:48,621 --> 00:52:51,181
And they would say, congrats on this seriously about like all kinds of stuff.

398
00:52:51,181 --> 00:52:53,941
Yeah, that was like a funny little joke.

399
00:52:53,941 --> 00:53:00,261
And so the Bitcoin Cash people and the Lightning people, they've had like their
little bit of success.

400
00:53:00,261 --> 00:53:06,181
But no one has seriously scaled Bitcoin to two billions of users every day.

401
00:53:06,181 --> 00:53:10,741
And I'm not saying that we would do that overnight or even that BIP300 would do that
overnight.

402
00:53:10,741 --> 00:53:14,781
But this is what I'm saying, because you brought up that it's been waiting for 10
years.

403
00:53:14,781 --> 00:53:20,221
And it's like, yeah, I know all about the whole lay of the land and what everyone's
working on.

404
00:53:20,221 --> 00:53:26,421
And this BIP300 idea is significantly better than a lot of the other ideas that get
more attention.

405
00:53:26,421 --> 00:53:33,341
So again, now we have this hard fork and it's sort of like there will be people
using it firsthand.

406
00:53:33,341 --> 00:53:38,701
And then it won't just be about whatever people say on Twitter, because any random
user would just be able to be like,

407
00:53:38,821 --> 00:53:43,341
post a screenshot and they'd be like, this is how it works over here.

408
00:53:43,341 --> 00:53:44,901
So there it is.

409
00:53:44,901 --> 00:53:49,061
I'm really interested to just see the conversations that spark from the fork,

410
00:53:49,061 --> 00:53:51,621
because it's not just a fork, right?

411
00:53:51,621 --> 00:53:55,101
The sidechains get deployed, your drivechains get deployed straight away.

412
00:53:55,101 --> 00:53:59,821
Right, we have like seven or so that are basically finished.

413
00:53:59,821 --> 00:54:02,781
They're in various states of, some are like rock solid.

414
00:54:02,821 --> 00:54:11,741
So we have the one type, which is just an optimized sidechain with large blocks,
basically.

415
00:54:11,741 --> 00:54:13,381
So it's like very, very fast.

416
00:54:13,381 --> 00:54:16,741
And it's just pared down for it's like for transacting.

417
00:54:16,741 --> 00:54:18,941
So we have that's one style.

418
00:54:18,941 --> 00:54:23,901
And but that if you copy and pasted that like 14 times to have like some math about
this,

419
00:54:23,901 --> 00:54:28,381
you could scale to the entire transaction throughput of the planet Earth.

420
00:54:28,381 --> 00:54:31,941
And all the fees would go to L1 miners and it would just work.

421
00:54:31,941 --> 00:54:33,741
There's no liquidity like enlightening.

422
00:54:33,741 --> 00:54:38,221
You don't have to be online and sign a message with your hot wallet to receive
funds.

423
00:54:38,221 --> 00:54:40,101
This is like many, many, many benefits.

424
00:54:40,101 --> 00:54:41,421
So that's just one type.

425
00:54:41,421 --> 00:54:49,261
And then we have one that's based off of the technology and it pulls the orchard
crate from zcash, the altcoin.

426
00:54:49,261 --> 00:54:51,181
So we call it zside.

427
00:54:51,181 --> 00:54:52,701
And so that gives you a z address.

428
00:54:52,701 --> 00:54:56,461
So you have privacy, the sender, the receiver and the amount are hidden.

429
00:54:56,461 --> 00:54:59,421
And you're mixed with everyone in the whole chain.

430
00:54:59,421 --> 00:55:02,541
So with CoinJoin, you just mix with four other people.

431
00:55:02,541 --> 00:55:05,061
You're one of five.

432
00:55:05,061 --> 00:55:11,461
You have to keep doing rounds and you can you have to there's a coordinator and you
have to all these are on chain transactions that you have to sign.

433
00:55:11,461 --> 00:55:13,621
You have to have your computer connected and stuff.

434
00:55:13,621 --> 00:55:17,901
But of course, the Zcash technology is superior, vastly superior.

435
00:55:17,901 --> 00:55:20,981
But you have one reusable Z address.

436
00:55:20,981 --> 00:55:24,341
No one has any idea how much you're sending and receiving, et cetera.

437
00:55:24,341 --> 00:55:27,181
So and then we have others that do other stuff.

438
00:55:27,181 --> 00:55:28,981
We have like one that's based on Namecoin.

439
00:55:28,981 --> 00:55:32,101
We have one that's like kind of based on it's like an assets thing.

440
00:55:32,101 --> 00:55:37,701
So it would do like this Ordinals, NFT, like Solana, Memecoin type.

441
00:55:37,701 --> 00:55:38,981
That would be like that.

442
00:55:38,981 --> 00:55:40,501
I call that bid assets.

443
00:55:40,501 --> 00:55:44,901
I have one about prediction markets, which is my original interest.

444
00:55:44,901 --> 00:55:46,421
And so we have we have actually a few.

445
00:55:46,421 --> 00:55:51,861
And you can try if you go to layer2labs.com, you can try them with fake SIGNET
testnet coins.

446
00:55:51,861 --> 00:55:53,301
So you can try them all yourself.

447
00:55:53,301 --> 00:55:57,101
And they're all some of them are more ambitious.

448
00:55:57,101 --> 00:56:01,821
And so they're not really reliably they're not reliably working today.

449
00:56:01,821 --> 00:56:08,181
But yeah, the the scaling and privacy, those are those work really, really, really
well.

450
00:56:08,181 --> 00:56:11,181
You're going to be so busy from August onwards.

451
00:56:11,181 --> 00:56:13,261
You're going to get swamped.

452
00:56:13,261 --> 00:56:17,621
It just kind of dawned on me not to be the money hungry capitalist here,

453
00:56:17,621 --> 00:56:24,941
but you could be responsible for triggering quite a strong quite a strong bull run.

454
00:56:24,941 --> 00:56:27,701
I hope so, honestly, because, yeah, we're paying them dividends.

455
00:56:27,701 --> 00:56:30,461
And we're also like we're flipping the script on.

456
00:56:30,461 --> 00:56:32,701
Oh, should you like when they came out with Solana?

457
00:56:32,701 --> 00:56:37,981
It was like you got a 16 Z and then they they keep like whatever it was,

458
00:56:37,981 --> 00:56:41,261
20 percent or something of the whole thing or even like Ripple.

459
00:56:41,261 --> 00:56:45,021
And there's like this weird shenanigans where it's kind of like this is way better.

460
00:56:45,021 --> 00:56:54,101
The you know, the the Satoshi half airdrop or Shad sometimes called or this like
semi private hard fork

461
00:56:54,101 --> 00:57:01,541
or it's like a hard fork, but it's like there's like insiders who are owners of the

462
00:57:01,541 --> 00:57:05,021
they take responsibility for creating it and shipping it out there.

463
00:57:05,021 --> 00:57:06,981
Yeah, I think that's isn't that way better?

464
00:57:06,981 --> 00:57:08,181
It's way better than anything else.

465
00:57:08,181 --> 00:57:12,661
Like, I don't know what everyone I think what everyone else is working on is really
boring.

466
00:57:12,661 --> 00:57:15,541
And what we do is really cool.

467
00:57:15,541 --> 00:57:22,501
So, yeah, that's not just what you're doing either, but what you're going to invoke
and other people.

468
00:57:22,501 --> 00:57:27,621
Surely other people are going to copy and come up with their own folks during this
period or relatively quickly,

469
00:57:27,621 --> 00:57:29,981
because, I mean, it's very socially unacceptable right now.

470
00:57:29,981 --> 00:57:38,181
But then when you make it real and exist and people have a pathway or roadmap to
actually finance their fork,

471
00:57:38,181 --> 00:57:41,701
I think you're right. Lots of people.

472
00:57:41,701 --> 00:57:46,301
Yeah, yeah, because not only we could go like everyone makes money at the moment of
the fork,

473
00:57:46,301 --> 00:57:51,341
but with the the Satoshi half airdrop privatization, it travels back in time.

474
00:57:51,341 --> 00:57:54,901
So now you can raise whatever it is, three million or something.

475
00:57:54,901 --> 00:57:58,341
So you and your friends can create the forks that gets people thinking, oh, what
could I create?

476
00:57:58,341 --> 00:57:59,901
Yeah, what could I do?

477
00:57:59,901 --> 00:58:04,701
And then so then that yeah, I think that's that's ideal.

478
00:58:04,701 --> 00:58:09,621
That's we're talking we might go into a sort of era of fork wars for a period.

479
00:58:09,621 --> 00:58:14,581
Essentially, I think we need some we need we've had very low competition.

480
00:58:14,581 --> 00:58:20,621
So part of Bitcoin cash is it was a very feeble competitor and it did not compete.

481
00:58:20,621 --> 00:58:22,701
And it was too easy for BTC to stay on top.

482
00:58:22,701 --> 00:58:27,821
And same with Ethereum was a much better competitor than Bitcoin cash.

483
00:58:27,821 --> 00:58:29,181
But still, it's like too weird.

484
00:58:29,181 --> 00:58:34,581
You know, it's not like I don't think it's that good.

485
00:58:34,581 --> 00:58:38,021
You know what I mean? Like how strong is the competition band, really?

486
00:58:38,021 --> 00:58:45,101
But I think if we had more competition and then notice what would happen in this
world of technical competition is,

487
00:58:45,101 --> 00:58:49,581
yeah, there would be no more of this like stupid people just talking on Twitter
about nothing,

488
00:58:49,581 --> 00:58:55,341
because everyone would everyone would think, OK, everything is really up for grabs
now and everything could have to be rethought.

489
00:58:55,341 --> 00:59:01,181
So then it will reorient everyone to thinking like, well, how does all this stuff
actually work anyway?

490
00:59:01,181 --> 00:59:04,901
So then so yeah, that's the you know, that's exactly what I'm trying to achieve.

491
00:59:04,901 --> 00:59:07,701
So, yeah, you you get it now.

492
00:59:07,701 --> 00:59:10,941
I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, that's got like it.

493
00:59:10,941 --> 00:59:13,901
Yeah, it's got. Yeah, that's fantastic because you're right.

494
00:59:13,901 --> 00:59:16,341
It'll it'll it'll very quickly.

495
00:59:16,341 --> 00:59:25,541
All the big money players, all the power structures will very quickly have to rally
behind tangible mechanics or something that works because they'll lose the
narrative.

496
00:59:25,541 --> 00:59:30,701
They'll lose spin control, essentially, which is great for Bitcoin regardless.

497
00:59:30,701 --> 00:59:34,621
Yeah, competition is the one true God.

498
00:59:34,621 --> 00:59:36,581
It's cures, cures everything.

499
00:59:36,581 --> 00:59:41,541
Well, it converts every mistake into a benefit for someone else or anyone paying
attention.

500
00:59:41,541 --> 00:59:45,181
So it gobbles up all the mistakes, all the errors.

501
00:59:45,181 --> 00:59:48,061
It gobbles it all up. Really insightful, man.

502
00:59:48,061 --> 00:59:50,341
Look, I feel like I've held you too long already.

503
00:59:50,341 --> 00:59:52,701
Yeah, I gotta go soon. Super, super.

504
00:59:52,701 --> 00:59:55,621
I'll come back, though, anytime. Yes. Great, great conversation.

505
00:59:55,621 --> 00:59:58,061
I'd love to. That was great and really insightful.

506
00:59:58,061 --> 01:00:01,021
And you just made me have a total eureka moment there, by the way.

507
01:00:01,021 --> 01:00:03,821
I was like, holy shit, he's right.

508
01:00:03,821 --> 01:00:07,981
I'm really excited to see this. Look, can I just just one closing question?

509
01:00:07,981 --> 01:00:09,861
I think, like, let's just see your vision.

510
01:00:09,861 --> 01:00:14,021
Like, if you're right, what does what does this all look like in 10 years?

511
01:00:14,021 --> 01:00:19,541
I think 10 years. Well, Satoshi had his quote about in 20 years, there'll be high
transaction volume or no transaction.

512
01:00:19,541 --> 01:00:34,421
You know, if I'm actually right about like everything that I believe and suspect,
then, yeah, in 10 years, we would be looking at a world where the fiat currencies
are, you know, they have collapsed due to like national debt, like related stuff and
just printing.

513
01:00:34,421 --> 01:00:39,381
And maybe they haven't collapsed, but there's digital currency like in every
country.

514
01:00:39,381 --> 01:00:42,061
So everyone like knows there's like maybe two prices for everything.

515
01:00:42,061 --> 01:00:44,461
I don't know if we'll be like a transitional period.

516
01:00:44,461 --> 01:00:58,341
But on top of that, we would go through like this revolution in the sovereignty of
computing where everyone would know how like the 12 words works, like the BIP39 word
list, like how people can drive a car.

517
01:00:58,341 --> 01:01:02,221
In America, almost everyone can drive a car, which is a hard thing to learn how to
do.

518
01:01:02,221 --> 01:01:03,341
And it's dangerous.

519
01:01:03,341 --> 01:01:07,541
But people would actually know about the 12 word list.

520
01:01:07,541 --> 01:01:14,101
They know about like how to make sure that they're downloading like real software
and there would be real actual users of this software.

521
01:01:14,101 --> 01:01:24,341
And they would actually that would change a lot of things, because I think it would
change even like the way we the way we do stuff today is you like log into Twitter
or you log into StreamYard or whatever.

522
01:01:24,341 --> 01:01:33,821
But we could flip the whole thing could actually be flipped around where it's like
you have your own files and you have like your config files for like this is how I
want Twitter to work and you have your own keys.

523
01:01:34,221 --> 01:01:38,061
And we could flip there's another weird is kind of a harebrained thing.

524
01:01:38,061 --> 01:01:44,781
But we could flip from like this logging in client server thing to where you just
sovereignty, you have your own files.

525
01:01:45,021 --> 01:01:50,781
And then when you want to go when you go up to the airline, you don't have to log
in.

526
01:01:51,341 --> 01:01:54,181
They like look up your name on the blockchain or something like that.

527
01:01:54,181 --> 01:01:55,461
This is like the name coin vision.

528
01:01:55,501 --> 01:01:58,621
They look your name up and then you get a little thing on your phone and you sign
in.

529
01:01:58,621 --> 01:02:05,501
But there is no account like you have you have everything you have like your name,
you own the name and you buy a plane ticket for the name.

530
01:02:05,861 --> 01:02:07,901
I'm also a huge proponent of these prediction markets.

531
01:02:07,941 --> 01:02:10,461
I've been a huge proponent of prediction markets for a really long time.

532
01:02:10,821 --> 01:02:13,301
You go to BitcoinHiveMind.com and watch my little video.

533
01:02:13,301 --> 01:02:16,541
I have a 20 minute video that I did in Acapulco one year.

534
01:02:16,981 --> 01:02:24,581
And the prediction market utopia is it's only barely begun.

535
01:02:24,861 --> 01:02:28,261
We currently have markets where you just bet on whether or not something will
happen.

536
01:02:29,021 --> 01:02:37,901
But I have a completely different paradigm involved where it's like you would bet on
if we did this, then what would happen?

537
01:02:37,901 --> 01:02:42,101
So it's like if we change the Federal Reserve policy, what would happen to
inflation?

538
01:02:42,821 --> 01:02:51,301
If we fired one political party, if we fired the left party and replaced it with the
right party, what would happen to GDP or all this other stuff?

539
01:02:51,581 --> 01:02:53,181
And that can go down in every direction.

540
01:02:53,181 --> 01:02:57,981
Like if we fired the mayor or if we fired the CEO, what would happen to the stock
price?

541
01:02:58,381 --> 01:03:00,181
Or you can go down the line.

542
01:03:00,501 --> 01:03:06,021
And so I have a huge visionary on that front as well.

543
01:03:06,021 --> 01:03:08,981
And I've been a proponent of these prediction markets for a really, really, really
long time.

544
01:03:09,541 --> 01:03:13,781
And I have written stuff that's like made it to the top of Hacker News and stuff
like 10 years ago.

545
01:03:13,781 --> 01:03:14,741
And a lot of people are like it.

546
01:03:14,901 --> 01:03:21,861
So people go to BitcoinHiveMind.com and they can see one of the L2s that we're
shipping.

547
01:03:21,861 --> 01:03:23,621
And it's a very complicated one.

548
01:03:23,621 --> 01:03:25,701
So I don't know if it will be 100% ready by August.

549
01:03:25,741 --> 01:03:27,821
But you can use it now.

550
01:03:28,661 --> 01:03:31,621
And it's called TruthCoin DC right now.

551
01:03:32,021 --> 01:03:35,661
But you can test it out with the demo software from Layer 2 Labs.

552
01:03:35,901 --> 01:03:37,381
So I'm a huge prediction markets guy.

553
01:03:37,741 --> 01:03:42,821
So, yeah, I think Namecoin, prediction markets, Bitcoin adoption, all these things
can be really, really big.

554
01:03:43,661 --> 01:03:44,181
I like that.

555
01:03:44,341 --> 01:03:45,781
Yeah, that's what I'm really into.

556
01:03:45,821 --> 01:03:52,621
I think if we don't, we're either going to win or lose big on this whole like
sovereignty thing.

557
01:03:54,741 --> 01:04:01,141
So like either people understand what the full node does and why they need to
operate it or they won't.

558
01:04:01,181 --> 01:04:03,101
But I think we can win that battle.

559
01:04:03,101 --> 01:04:06,981
We just have to make it easier and more fun to use the full node.

560
01:04:07,261 --> 01:04:12,061
So if you download our software, I have like Bitcoin Core, like running in a little
box out of the way.

561
01:04:12,941 --> 01:04:22,941
So when the node does a bunch of stuff and it's easy to use and it's fun and it
looks sort of nice and it's fun to click on, then more people actually do it.

562
01:04:22,941 --> 01:04:24,221
They'll run it to actually, you know.

563
01:04:24,861 --> 01:04:33,661
So now this opens the door to like Steve Jobs type person or someone to just
completely change the user experience because I don't pretend to be a great user
experience.

564
01:04:33,741 --> 01:04:37,021
But I think what we currently have is terrible, like Bitcoin Core and other stuff.

565
01:04:37,021 --> 01:04:40,461
So we're going to have to round to this man for sure.

566
01:04:40,501 --> 01:04:41,821
Yeah, I have to go.

567
01:04:41,861 --> 01:04:42,741
This has been great, though.

568
01:04:43,021 --> 01:04:44,061
But no, it really has.

569
01:04:44,101 --> 01:04:45,541
Thanks for your time so much, man.

570
01:04:45,581 --> 01:04:46,701
This is really eye opening.

571
01:04:46,901 --> 01:04:47,621
I really appreciate it.

572
01:04:48,141 --> 01:04:48,781
Real pleasure, Paul.

573
01:04:48,781 --> 01:04:49,301
Thanks for your time.

574
01:04:49,541 --> 01:04:50,581
Thanks for catching up again.

575
01:04:50,741 --> 01:04:51,061
Thanks.