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So we were just going to go three minutes back and forth. Three minutes you, you
start off as the pro side. JW and Ty, three minutes. Three minutes you, three
minutes them. Do that for like, you know, four or five rounds, and then take
audience questions.

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Okay, sure.

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Do you think three minutes is too compressed?

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I thought maybe for a...

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If anything, I think three minutes is too long, but I don't really care.

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Let's just do three minutes then. All right. Everybody ready?

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Okay, sure.

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The floor is yours, Paul, for the next three minutes. I'll keep time.

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Okay, great.

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So my name is Paul Sztorc. Many of you know me already. I've presented at many
Bitcoin conferences, including Scaling Bitcoin, Building on Bitcoin, Consensus New
York City, blah, blah, blah.

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And I recently presented at Bitcoin 2021, this BIP300 idea that I've been working on
for a while.

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And I planned on...

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Well, let me tell you the story about how I got to this point.

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So in early 2014, I published this peer-to-peer blockchain technology called
Truthcoin, which was this oracle system.

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And it was favorably reviewed by a lot of people, let's say, including Andrew
Postreau and Adam Back, people who are still popular today.

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And Blockstream published a paper later that year, in October 2014, about this
sidechains idea.

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And I was like, oh, great, finally, because the oracle system was its own
blockchain.

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So I was like, well, okay, I'll use this sidechains idea to connect the oracle
system to Bitcoin, and then people will be able to use it.

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And that'll be great.

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And that was this idea that they called the skip list in appendix B of this paper
they wrote in October 2014.

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And so I sort of finished developing Truthcoin, which is the oracle software.

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And then I started reading through their skip list idea, and I thought that I could
improve it in a couple of different ways.

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So then I published Drivechain in 2015.

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And then I got feedback from it at Scaling 3.

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And then we worked on I Invented Blind Merged Mining in January 2017 at Construct.

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And then that was all idea stuff, basically, that was like conceptual.

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And then we worked on the code from 2017 to present.

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So before then, it was just design.

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And now there is code, and now there's a working Zcash sidechain.

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So that's how we got to this point.

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And then there has been a lot of back and forth on reviewing the design.

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But now we've reached this point where Vake put out a call for anyone willing to
debate.

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And Weatherman answered.

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So I'd like to hear what his complaints are, I guess.

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Got anything else to say, Paul?

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I don't really know. I'm more interested in answering the objections, I guess.

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I just kind of rambled that off.

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Sure. Well, your time is just about up.

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And before I jump to JW, I just want to remind the resolution of the debate is
technically

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BIP300 slash 301 deserves at least as much attention as the Lighting Network.

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A little bit of a hand of a resolution, but it's all we can kind of get to agree to

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because there's a little bit of debate over semantics.

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But I will now turn over the floor to JW, okay?

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And you've got three minutes now.

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Right on. So, yeah, I won't go into my background too much

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because I really want to just focus on context.

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But I'll say briefly that I wrote the Bitcoin threat model.

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And you can check that out if you're interested.

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So there's a few underlying concepts that I think are worth talking about.

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One is that Bitcoin is really critical to human survival.

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We're at this tipping point in history where technology like mass surveillance and
censorship

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is either going to completely or nearly completely eliminate individual freedom

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or technology like the Internet and Bitcoin is going to empower the individual

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like probably never before in human history.

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But Bitcoin is fragile.

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Or another way to say it is we don't know exactly how fragile it is.

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We almost lost the 21 million cap.

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I think that was a year ago when there was an inflation bug discovered.

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Totally could have been exploited.

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But we were lucky it got fixed and found and dealt with.

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Before that, we almost lost our ability to sync the network with the SegWit2x
attack.

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We also don't know how many of the most influential and popular Bitcoiners

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are actually trying to destroy Bitcoin.

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If you look back at the history, we have guys like Gavin and Hearn and Ver.

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And if they're any guide, then a significant portion of the people that are names
now

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that people respect and think are trying to secure Bitcoin are actually trying to
destroy it.

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I don't think it's worthwhile, really, even though occasionally I fall into this

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trying to identify them.

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But it is really important that we all have that attitude and that mindset

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and realize the context in which we're operating.

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Also, if we lose, we might not be able to get this back.

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We might, you know, if Bitcoin's broken in some way,

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we might be able to just agree on previous valid transactions,

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do a checkpoint or something, make a fix and soldier on.

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That's possible. We don't really know.

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Or we might need to wait until the banksters and their intelligence agencies

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forget that this is a possibility, right?

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This could be a once-in-several-generation opportunity to build something like
Bitcoin.

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Because had Bitcoin been recognized for as important as it was when it was first
invented,

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there would have been a lot more resources dedicated to preventing it.

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I think we all can say that with certainty, especially with the recent El Salvador
news.

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So, you know, we have to be careful, right?

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The conclusion then is we have to be careful.

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And to say the fate of humanity depends on us being careful,

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it's not much of an exaggeration.

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I mean, we don't really know, but it is a very important technology

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at a very important point in history.

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So with that said, what's interesting is Paul is not going to argue that Drivechains
are ready, right?

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That's what I wanted the debate to be.

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Yea or nay, Drivechains are ready to go.

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00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:03,000
And he won't debate that because he doesn't think that they're ready.

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So what are we even debating here?

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We had to come up with this goofy phrase.

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Ultimately, I think we're going to be debating, is Bitcoin Core ready to go?

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Okay, your time is up.

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All right, Paul, over to you.

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Three minutes.

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Paul, go ahead.

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Okay, I didn't realize I had to manually unmute.

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Okay, thanks.

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So none of that had anything to do with BIP300 at all.

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So that puts me in a kind of interesting position of having three minutes to sort of
kill.

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I guess he did say that it's not ready yet.

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I don't know.

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Like, it's 99% ready.

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So it's true that it's not completely ready yet.

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We're still tweaking it.

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I've intentionally delayed finishing it for a couple of reasons.

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One is that altcoin developers have told me that they will copy Drivechains into
their projects when it's finished.

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So I kind of have a dread of actually saying it is finished.

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Also, once it's coded, we actually can't stop miners from activating it
unilaterally.

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So if you hate Drivechain, you should thank me for delaying it.

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But it really is 99% finished.

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As I said, we have already the working Zcash sidechain example.

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And you can see the video on the front page of drivechain.info.

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It's mostly finished, but it is definitely not ready to be merged, per se, because
you would want...

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I completely agree that you would want to have a lot of testing and all kinds of
stuff that's not testing the idea,

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but testing just like every line of code, that type of thing.

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I don't particularly understand the complaint.

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I remember that, for example, with SegWit, Peter Weil presented that on Scaling 2,
the morning of the second day.

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That was December 2015.

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And then the code, you know, it wasn't ready, so to speak, until after Scaling 3,
which was October 2016.

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I'm not really sure that BIP300 is in, like, a totally different category on the
basis of how ready it is.

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The presentation that Peter Weil gave was for the express purpose of shifting
developer and user attention towards the SegWit idea.

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So that's, like, what I'm doing now.

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But there would be no reason to say, like, it's ready to be merged tomorrow.

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I've always been very clear that it is not that.

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And it is unfortunate.

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I think some supporters do get a little overzealous, and they say, you know, merge
it tomorrow.

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And I have tried to make it clear that it is not ready to be merged tomorrow, but it
does deserve more attention.

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It deserves to be thought about, you know, something more like the Lightning
Network.

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And so that's, I don't know, like, they literally just sent me one or two messages
about what the topic would be.

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But I do agree that it's not ready to be merged immediately.

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All right.

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Paul, your time's up, and we'll go back to JW.

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Thanks.

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Go ahead, JW.

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Yeah, so what I wanted to debate was if the design is ready.

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Not whether the implementation code and all of that is ready, right?

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Because there are, I mean, ultimately, if the design is not ready, then the design
doesn't exist, right?

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When you're talking about, like, design architectural level incentives, are things
going to break?

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What you mean by it's ready, right?

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What we mean by, like, Drivechains or BIP300 or 301 is not the actual
implementation code, of course.

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What we mean is the idea, right, is Drivechains as an idea, as a design, as it's
described, solid.

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And so ready means that other people, you know, sidechain architects have looked at
it, you know, all the people that Paul's mentioned so far,

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all the people that we respect have looked at it and said, yeah, the design is
solid.

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Then it goes on to the implementation phase where people try to actually write codes
to implement the design.

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So what I wanted to debate is, are Drivechains ready?

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Is BIP300, 301 ready?

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Is it good?

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Is it solid?

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Is it trustworthy?

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And Paul doesn't want to debate that because it's not.

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It's not ready.

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It's not solid.

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And we're going to go into the details of it, but I do think it's worth making sure
that we're on the same page here.

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Because if it's not ready, we don't know if it will work.

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In other words, it could cause damage.

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Paul has argued many times that there's no chance that this could cause any damage
to the Bitcoin main chain, right?

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That all of the risk, if something blows up, is on the sidechain.

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Well, if that was the case, then you could argue that it's ready because then
there's no risk, right?

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There's no risk to Bitcoin.

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Why wouldn't it be ready?

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If it gives us any functionality, no matter how stupid, if it's completely
risk-free, why wouldn't we implement it?

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And if you listen to Paul talk about what it gives us, it gives us everything.

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It gives us utopia, right?

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We can have big blocks safely.

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We can have Ethereum smart contracts safely.

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We can do everything safely and completely obliterate the altcoin narrative.

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So if it's ready and we get all of that, if the design is not flawed, in other
words, we're confident that the design is safe, then we should absolutely implement
it.

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But Paul doesn't want to argue that the design is safe.

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He doesn't want to argue that those BIPs are actually solid.

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It's not getting the attention it deserves, right?

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So the important point there is that he's intentionally moving us away from, is this
a good design that will or will not break Bitcoin and gives us something, to are the
Bitcoin core developers mean to him or cruel or whatever?

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So we've moved from technology to politics.

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If we're not debating whether the design is solid and we're debating whether it's
given enough attention, the implication there, if you peel that back, is, well, why
wouldn't it be given enough attention if it's good?

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And the only answer and the answer that Paul has suggested many times over the years
is that the Bitcoin core developers are meanies in one sense or another.

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So ultimately, this comes down to whether you think that.

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Go ahead.

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You can face your thought.

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I was just going to say, ultimately, it comes down to whether you think that it's
being unfairly ignored.

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OK. All right, Paul.

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OK, great.

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So I think this is a lot of meta talk.

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I am absolutely. First of all, I presume when someone says this bit is some bit
ready, they mean, you know, it's the code ready to be a pull request opened or
something.

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00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:07,000
So if all we're talking about is design, then I'm happy to talk about the design
being ready.

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00:14:07,000 --> 00:14:14,000
The design actually has changed very little from the original November 2015 post to
today.

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It's changed almost not at all.

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So the design is very stable and I'm happy to talk about about the design as for
shifting the conversation from technology to politics.

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I mean, we're I presumed I thought we were going to come here today to talk about
technology.

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So I'm happy to talk about that in any capacity.

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00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:40,000
You know, we have yet to hear any actual objection to the technology.

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00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:49,000
Actually, it's very ironic that what J.W.W. is saying is it only really applies to
him.

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00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:54,000
He's the one who is trying to shift things around to make it sort of interpersonal
or whatever.

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00:14:54,000 --> 00:15:03,000
Whereas I'm happy to talk about anything related to the design or the implementation
of the design or the goals or whatever.

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00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:11,000
So I'm happy to say that that I'm happy to argue and claim that the design behind
the 300 is ready.

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It's been ready for people to talk about it ever since I published it in November
2015.

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So as for there being, you know, it's designed so that it is designed so that there
is no to to make sure that problems on the sidechain do not affect the main chain.

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So that is the that is the design goal. And that is the purpose.

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00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:42,000
So that is, you know, that it's true that that's what I claim.

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00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:48,000
It's also true that I think it if if it's such a great idea, why wouldn't we be
working on it?

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00:15:48,000 --> 00:15:54,000
Well, that's what I've been saying. So I agree with that. And does it promise us
everything?

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00:15:54,000 --> 00:15:59,000
Well, I think it promises us quite a bit. It does have a great deal with.

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00:15:59,000 --> 00:16:16,000
Altcoin competitiveness, privacy, scalability, interoperability, new features for
Bitcoin, good narrative, presenting a good argument to the world as to why they
should pick Bitcoin over the banking system.

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00:16:16,000 --> 00:16:24,000
So I do believe all that. If J.W.W. actually has anything to say about BIP300, I
think he should say it.

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00:16:24,000 --> 00:16:29,000
It's not only that I've said that Bitcoin core developers are meanies.

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I have said that many of them get paid enormous salaries and have basically no one
no oversight on what they do.

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They enjoy that state of affairs. I also published an article called.

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I think it was called Why Drivechain is Harder to Understand than Previous Soft
Forks.

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00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:54,000
And that I enumerated reasons why. So that's not these are my only my only basis for
complaint.

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00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:56,000
Although I have made that complaint from time to time.

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All right, great. J.W., the floor is yours. Three minutes.

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Yeah, so. I am setting up the context here because there's not that much to talk
about on the technology side.

214
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If you understand the open source development process and you believe that the
Bitcoin core developers and, you know, this is not a specific group.

215
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Right. Anybody can become a Bitcoin core developer that has something to contribute.

216
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So there's no there's no gatekeepers here. So if you understand the open source
software development process, you don't you don't get frustrated that something
doesn't get implemented.

217
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Right. And you don't you don't like Paul has done for years in very subtle ways
disparage that that group.

218
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Right. And he just did that. He just said, you know, I have said over the time.

219
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Oh, yeah, I do not understand why it's not getting attention. And the reason that
he's doing that is to create that question in your mind.

220
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Right. This is ultimately a campaign against the Bitcoin core developers to convince
you that they're not giving it the attention it deserves.

221
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And this is not like, hey, I'm putting up a Twitter post. I'd like you guys to look
at it. Let's have a conversation.

222
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This is an ongoing multi-year effort where he's constantly coming back and saying
it's not getting the attention that it deserves to create that that doubt in
people's mind.

223
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And that's where ultimately you end up with, you know, crazy conspiracy theories
around Blockstream and lizard people and all that sort of stuff.

224
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So it is important to have that context. But now we can go into the technology and
talk about why why I don't think it's a good idea.

225
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And I'm theorizing here. Right. All I'm doing is saying this is why I think it's not
getting the attention that Paul would like it to get, because I think it's a bad
idea.

226
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The fact that it's not getting attention is a much better case. If you understand
the open source development process, that it's a bad idea because I'm just one dude.

227
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And as a lot of people have pointed out, I'm by far not the smartest or the most
capable person to talk about this topic.

228
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The reason that I'm here is not, you know, for any other reason than I was trying to
explain to bake why I think it's a bad idea. And he said, hey, why don't we have a
debate?

229
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So let's talk about why it's a bad idea with the context that when we have to be
super careful and to this is really, really important for humanity.

230
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So so here's here's some reasons that it's a bad idea. Drivechains rely on
completely new incentives.

231
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No matter what Paul tells you about how it's there's no chance that this could
affect the main chain.

232
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You have to be an idiot to think there's no chance that this can affect the main
chain. It gives us all of the things that he claims it gives us.

233
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And we have no interest as a community. Right. The open source developers have no
interest in it or not very much interest in it, let's say.

234
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Otherwise, I wouldn't be the one debating it. Right. So miners can steal Bitcoin.

235
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That's what that's all you need to know. With this design, miners can steal Bitcoin.

236
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With this design right now or where we're at right now, miners can reorder
transactions.

237
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That sucks if we could fix it. We would. But it's the best that we've come up with.

238
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That's bad enough with this design. Miners can steal Bitcoin.

239
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All right, Paul, good to go. Sure.

240
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So the whole angle of miners being able to steal from sidechains, it's just a
misunderstanding of the design.

241
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It's really really what it is, is it's it's a question of ethics.

242
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If if SPV proofs are used like in sidechain design, then the sidechains are
vulnerable to theft by miners.

243
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And that was true in the Blockstream paper. And that's true in Drivechain.

244
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And that's true for any SPV proof. But that only affects the people who have chosen
to opt in.

245
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Which, you know, at the time, especially in November 2015, when I wrote that, there
were many large blockers who said that they they would only use SPV mode.

246
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And they they were totally 100 percent happy with that security model, actually.

247
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So but but instead, if you use something like a mandatory extension block, then it
becomes part of the protocol.

248
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And BTC now basically becomes like Bitcoin SV or something.

249
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So so that affects everyone, even the innocent people who may have wanted nothing to
do with all the old rules.

250
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And it gets even worse than that, because technically it's like a developer tyranny
because you always have to run the latest version.

251
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So and then that's only if you want to have some kind of interoperability at all.

252
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If you don't, then you live in the altcoin world where you have altcoins, hard
forks, you have disagreements about activation.

253
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And so people are still affected because some altcoin or hard fork could try to
displace Bitcoin and then and then everyone would be very affected if they
succeeded.

254
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So this is the entire design of BIP300 is for the express purpose of.

255
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Protecting the main chain from people's ideas about what to do with the blockchain
technology.

256
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Let me see, I think I tried to write down what you were saying. Let me see.

257
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OK, so first of all, if it's true that if you think that the Bitcoin core developer
team is infallible, then you can just outsource all of your thinking to them and
then you never need to think for yourself.

258
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And and, you know, some people enjoy that kind of thing.

259
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Others say that. The whole reason that a community is strong and produces the best
ideas is because each of its members thinks independently and challenges the others.

260
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As for relying on completely new incentives, again, it's a question of ethics.

261
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You want who you want to be affected, the people who opt in or the people who are
innocent bystanders.

262
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So that that's the whole point of the miners can steal a thing.

263
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Again, it could be trivially altered to be a mandatory extension block.

264
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It's not as though that is some kind of.

265
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Flaw, in fact, it is the entire.

266
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Is the entire goal to protect the other people on the main chain from the sidechains.

267
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Activity.

268
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All right, JW.

269
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Yeah, so a couple of things, because the real debate here is around how we interact
with core.

270
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I'll address that first. So it's totally fine.

271
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And obviously part of the open source project to suggest ideas and even to say that
ideas should get more attention.

272
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But that's not really what Paul does.

273
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What Paul does is he implies that it's not getting the attention that it deserves,
which, of course, opens the door for people to say, why isn't it getting the
attention it deserves?

274
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It's got to be because people are either incompetent or malicious.

275
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If you understand that anybody can suggest an idea and anybody can work on any idea.

276
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And and what you're saying is that this idea has grossly been underappreciated and
the attention that it deserves has been stolen from this idea.

277
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The only possible solution is either people are incompetent, right?

278
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They're just not smart enough to see what a great idea this is.

279
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And, you know, Paul has just been extremely patient with everybody or they're doing
it on purpose.

280
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:21,000
The third option, which I think is what you can see if you just look into it, you
know, for an hour, is that it's very risky.

281
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Right. He's saying that people, you know, no, they can't. Miners can't steal.

282
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If you after this debate, you just look up the conversations that Paul has had with
anybody.

283
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This is the criticism. Right. Send send Ruben Thompson a DM and just say, hey, can
miners steal Bitcoin?

284
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And he'll confirm to you that absolutely. That's why people are not excited about
it, because miners can steal Bitcoin.

285
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Now, Paul will say they can only steal Bitcoin slowly or yes, they can steal
Bitcoin.

286
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:53,000
But the incentives of wanting to damage the network are so great.

287
00:24:53,259 --> 00:25:20,259
They won't want to steal Bitcoin. But that's not the point. Right. I'm not saying
they can steal it fast. I'm saying that they can steal Bitcoin. And that's enough
for you to know, whoa, this is not completely risk free. Right. It might work. I'm
not even I don't even have to argue that it doesn't work or that it wouldn't be
great. All you have to know is that if we break Bitcoin, we may not have another
chance. So we have to be very careful. And miners can steal Bitcoin. And if you put
those two things together, it's not going to work.

288
00:25:20,259 --> 00:25:32,259
But if you put those two things together in your head, you can see that probably the
reason this isn't getting enough attention is not that these guys are meanies, but
that they're competent and there's better ideas to work on.

289
00:25:32,259 --> 00:25:43,259
And as far as, oh, it doesn't affect Bitcoiners. Look, if Bitcoiners and we have
this sidechain and they put funds into it, these are the Bitcoiners that are going
to be affected. Right.

290
00:25:43,259 --> 00:25:53,259
Bitcoiners. These are not like off-tard idiots that are putting money in here or
losing. These are people, you know, the same people that we're constantly trying to
protect from losing their funds on exchanges.

291
00:25:53,259 --> 00:26:10,259
Those are the people that are going to be hurt by this this flawed sidechain ideal
idea. If miners do as I expect and they steal the Bitcoin, that slows adoption,
especially if it's unclear in the general public's mind whether actual Bitcoin was
stolen or not.

292
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And I think that that will be extremely unclear if these sidechains get popular. So
it will damage Bitcoin adoption. It will take Bitcoiners off the map.

293
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All right, Paul.

294
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in 2015, 2016, to even keep track of what everyone was doing. And the, you know, now
it's like some more complicated than ever. So an enormous number of people are
working on an enormous number of things. And they're mostly interested in what
they're interested in.

295
00:27:12,259 --> 00:27:31,259
And I, you know, it's very difficult for me to keep up completely with everything
that everyone else is doing. So that's really what I think is going on. I do think
there are some some quirks. Once, well, maybe I shouldn't say those things, but I
will say another thing that I do think is irrelevant is this idea of responsibility.

296
00:27:31,259 --> 00:27:55,259
It's kind of like there's a there's a misincentive at the FDA, where if they approve
a drug that saves millions of lives, but like five or six people are misdiagnosed,
or they have an allergic reaction to the substance or whatever, then, then the FDA
will be blamed, but they won't be blamed for the you never see the million lives
that die when the cure was, you know, was being held up by the FDA.

297
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I do think something similar is going on where, with the idea of the theft, where
the developers of Bitcoin are, you know, Bitcoin Core, they don't want to kind of
take responsibility for that, which I can completely understand.

298
00:28:14,259 --> 00:28:34,259
I, my argument is that it's the sidechain developers, it's a transfer of
responsibility from Bitcoin Core out into a different group who is then responsible.
But it's like the free market doesn't guarantee, you know, that everything that you
will escape bankruptcy, it's the entire threat of bankruptcy is what keeps
businesses honest.

299
00:28:35,259 --> 00:28:47,259
So that's something else I wanted to mention, though, is that a 51% hash rate can
steal Bitcoin from the lightning network very easily with impunity, they just censor
all the justice transactions.

300
00:28:48,259 --> 00:29:07,259
So if the criterion, which is the agreed upon debate criterion, and the premise that
JW introduced is that you should never pay any attention to something where miners
can steal the coins, it's trivial in the lightning network for them to do that.

301
00:29:07,259 --> 00:29:31,259
I just open channels with, I open a channel with Vake, and I open a channel with
JWW. And then JWW pays Vake for BTC. And I broadcast the old state with Vake and the
new state with JWW. And then normally, Vake would be able to stop that with justice
transaction, but it was 51% hash rate, you can just censor it with impunity.

302
00:29:31,259 --> 00:29:38,259
So you can steal from the lightning, 51% of miners can steal from the lightning
network. So I don't argue that people should pay attention to lightning.

303
00:29:39,259 --> 00:30:05,259
Okay, so again, Paul is still trying to make very subtle claims that there's a
problem with the Bitcoin core development process, right? That that's really what's
an issue here. Because if, look, if that wasn't an issue, then we would just say,
Oh, well, it's being prioritized correctly. And we're all marching along. It's, you
know, one big happy group, exploring interesting ideas and trying to find what
works.

304
00:30:05,259 --> 00:30:27,259
But you can't claim that something's not getting enough attention for multiple
years, and that the process is working. So he's, he's trying to thread this very
difficult needle, where it actually doesn't exist, right? So earlier, he said they
enjoy a very lucrative income, right? It was one sentence in passing. But these are
the keys that you have to look out for with Paul, because that's actually what he's
trying to communicate.

305
00:30:27,259 --> 00:30:52,259
He wants you to think that there's a problem with the process, and that the
incentives are messed up. But at the same time, he'll say, well, I just think they
don't know how to, they don't have enough time, right? They're, they're just kind of
distracted. You can't say that a development team, whether it's open source, or even
at a company, is completely ignoring the Holy Grail to go work on things that are
not as important, and still say that they're competent, right?

306
00:30:52,259 --> 00:31:12,259
Part of being a competent development team, part of being a competent, lucrative,
open source community building good things, maybe the most important part of that is
prioritizing what you work on. If you're, you know, polishing the hubcaps, when the
engine is redlining, something's wrong, right? That's possibly the worst possible
thing that could go wrong in a development process.

307
00:31:12,259 --> 00:31:34,259
So he's going to do a good job of like planting seeds here and there like that. But
also trying to not be so direct that that you guys realize what's going on. He also
did this when he compared it to bad incentives, right? So we all know the FDA is a
nightmare, and it kills people. And the reason that it does that is a combination of
corruption and sort of disinterest, right?

308
00:31:34,259 --> 00:31:56,259
So when you compare the Bitcoin core development team to the FDA, it has all of
those connotations. So what you have to do with a guy like Paul is you have to stop,
you have to like hit pause on this podcast, if you're listening to it, and go, okay,
what are the implications of what he's saying? Because he'll never say anything
directly. He'll always say it by inference. The core development process, it's open
source, anybody can participate in it.

309
00:31:56,259 --> 00:32:25,259
There is no like manager deciding there's no hierarchy, like at the FDA, if you want
to implement this, and you think it's a good idea, and you have the right skill set,
then you just implement it, right? And worst case scenario, you you know, you fork
off from Bitcoin core and build your own implementation. All of this stuff is
addressed in the process. There is no broken part of this. Otherwise, governments
would be exploiting that like crazy. And we don't we don't see anything like that in
open source projects in general, right?

310
00:32:25,259 --> 00:32:45,259
If they're good, and they're healthy, they prioritize correctly. He's also trying to
be really subtle here and saying that you can steal funds from a lightning
transaction. If you have a 51% attack, here's here's the key thing that you have to
understand. Miners can steal funds versus miners can mess with the order of
transactions. That's a very different thing.

311
00:32:45,259 --> 00:32:47,259
All right, Paul.

312
00:33:16,259 --> 00:33:43,259
in order to steal from the lightning network. And I think the lightning network is
perfectly secure. I'm not I'm not worried about miners stealing from the lightning
network at all. I just bring that up because his criterion is supposedly that if
that's ever the case, then you shouldn't pay attention to it. It's also true that
merely having the ability to sensor messages from the blockchain is actually enough
to just steal layer one Bitcoin transactions.

313
00:33:43,259 --> 00:34:11,259
And I presented about that at building on Bitcoin in Lisbon, Portugal. And I was
invited to come speak there by the Bitcoin core developers that supposedly have all
this animosity with. So that's intriguing. One would also wonder how I ended up on
the scaling committee, the program committee for scaling for if that were the case,
or why I was invited to speak at Bitcoin 2021. But I don't want this to become like
a reputation off.

314
00:34:11,259 --> 00:34:33,259
This whole thing has become you have to notice that he hasn't actually said anything
about VIP 300 or 301. Other than to point out that the miners can steal critique,
which is not really a critique of VIP 300 at all, since it applies to every single
sidechain scheme that is based on SPV proofs.

315
00:34:33,259 --> 00:34:55,259
And as I tried to explain earlier, if you do not, if you do not want that to be the
case, then you the only other two options are much worse. So I think the audience
should challenge JWW to say something actually about VIP 300 or 301.

316
00:35:04,259 --> 00:35:29,259
infallible, or whatever you want to say about that. The only way that people could
know that is if each particular issue is addressed independently. So I will, you
know, again, people should like, ask themselves, you know, how do I know that that
development is working?

317
00:35:29,259 --> 00:35:46,259
And the only way you could know is by actually examining the contents of each
argument. And so, again, I don't know, this debate is not really about anything
other than it's not really about VIP 300 at all. I don't, you know, so I don't
really know what to say.

318
00:35:46,259 --> 00:36:11,259
All right, JW, go ahead.

319
00:36:17,259 --> 00:36:42,259
transactions. They can't actually steal funds. Your funds are secured by your
private key. If you don't sign a transaction, you know, that balance is not going to
move, right? It would be an invalid transaction. If you introduce this VIP, that's
no longer necessary. Miners can actually steal Bitcoin balances. That's
fundamentally different. Very easy to verify that that's the case. And that's the
concern, right?

320
00:36:43,259 --> 00:37:06,259
So we are definitely talking about it. We're not getting into the weeds of the VIP.
We're not getting into all of you know, this Rube Goldberg system of incentives that
supposedly make it so that miners will never do that. Because it's not necessary,
because I don't actually have to prove that it's a good, good design, or it's a bad
design. All I have to prove is that it's an, it's not obviously safe, right?

321
00:37:06,259 --> 00:37:32,259
We wouldn't have activated taproot. We wouldn't have spent a ton of time over it
over the years talking about it and digging into it. If basically the moment that it
was published, everybody said, Yes, this is a safe design. And to contrast that with
BIP300/301, many people have looked at it and said, This is not a safe design.
Now, maybe it is, maybe they're wrong. But it's important to understand that that's
why it's not getting attention that it deserves.

322
00:37:33,259 --> 00:37:53,259
Yes, Paul knows the Bitcoin core developers. He's very cordial with them. You know,
these guys are not. These guys are not like fighting with each other. But the core
issue here is, are they giving this thing the attention that it deserves? Or are
they unfairly ignoring it? So he still wants you to believe that they're not a pain.
They're not paying attention to this, either from corruption or disinterest, right?

323
00:37:53,259 --> 00:38:22,259
So he's not saying like, Oh, they are going to pay attention to it. I just haven't
really promoted it much or whatever. He wants you to start thinking about where
their income comes from, what their incentives are all these sort of things. Because
he wants you to believe that it's not getting the attention that it deserves. Even
the title of this debate is, it's not getting the attention that it deserves,
because lightning is getting more attention or whatever, however, it was ended up
being phrased. That was because he wants it to be about that, right? It's, it's
underappreciated. And

324
00:38:23,259 --> 00:38:31,259
it's, it's an indication that something is wrong here, right? So that's still the
issue. And it just doesn't make sense.

325
00:38:32,259 --> 00:38:33,259
We lost you JW.

326
00:38:34,259 --> 00:38:35,259
Oh, good. I was wondering if it was me.

327
00:38:40,259 --> 00:38:47,259
All right, well, JW's time is just about up unless I hear from him. I'll give him a
few more seconds.

328
00:38:47,259 --> 00:39:12,259
Okay, well, we kind of debated a lot about things around the actual BIP itself, the
incentives of the core developers, the approval process for core, the merge process.
I kind of want to hear a little more about the actual attacks on Bitcoin that are
theoretically possible. I mean, I know JW talks a lot about, you know, the Bitcoin
market, but I want to hear a little bit more about the actual attacks on Bitcoin.

329
00:39:12,259 --> 00:39:32,259
that are theoretically possible. I mean, I know JW talks a lot about, you know, the
miners can steal the money from the Drivechains. But what is the threat to the
Bitcoin main chain to somebody who is completely, let's say, agnostic about this
sidechain existing, just run the basic Bitcoin core full node? Maybe I'll start with
JW. JW, can you hear me?

330
00:39:32,259 --> 00:39:44,259
Can you hear me? Let me invite you back up again. So I want to see if JW could talk
about what the threat to Bitcoin itself would be, and then Paul could respond to
that.

331
00:39:49,259 --> 00:39:52,259
Okay, well, JW, until you get back up on stage.

332
00:39:53,259 --> 00:39:54,259
Paul, go ahead.

333
00:39:55,259 --> 00:40:02,259
For him, I don't. So I don't know if he's connecting down. My assassins found his
ISP.

334
00:40:02,259 --> 00:40:29,259
Okay. Well, Paul, JW did bring up numerous times that miners could steal coins from
a Drivechain. So maybe you could address like, does this have any impact on security
of somebody who is not involved in that particular Drivechain? What are the
potential attacks on Bitcoin itself, the main chain, from miners, I guess, stealing
these coins or any other potential attack that you've heard raised against it?

335
00:40:32,259 --> 00:40:42,259
Well, it's, I just like to point out that it's not as though like the miners just
show up and take the coins in the very next block. And then, you know,

336
00:40:43,259 --> 00:40:48,259
I got dropped there for a second. Don't mean to interrupt, but just wanted to let
you know I'm back. And I don't, I don't know what I got cut off.

337
00:40:49,259 --> 00:41:13,259
Let's just give Paul a few minutes to talk about, well, unless actually, I did want
to hear you first, JW. You said that, so you brought up that miners can steal funds
from a Drivechain. I want to hear a little more about what the attack on the Bitcoin
main chain could conceivably be. So if you want to kind of discuss that for a few
minutes, and then we'll throw it to Paul. Does that sound good? And then we'll do
audience questions.

338
00:41:14,259 --> 00:41:16,259
So just to be clear, when did I get cut off?

339
00:41:17,259 --> 00:41:20,259
It was about the last 20 seconds you had of your last round.

340
00:41:21,259 --> 00:41:23,259
Okay, great. All right. Yeah.

341
00:41:24,259 --> 00:41:27,259
So what would be a threat to the Bitcoin main chain that you'd see possible?

342
00:41:28,259 --> 00:41:35,259
So the issue is that miners can steal Bitcoin. And that's not obviously safe.

343
00:41:36,259 --> 00:41:51,259
So I have written about why, how I think they could profit from doing this. But I
don't even have to, I really don't have to go there to win in the sense that it's
very obvious why this design hasn't been given more attention.

344
00:41:52,259 --> 00:41:58,259
If you dig into it enough to understand that miners can steal balances, they never
could do that before.

345
00:41:59,259 --> 00:42:12,259
And so if it is a good idea, it has to be approached with incredible fear and
trembling, incredible humility. And if it's not getting attention, it's a pretty
obvious indication that a lot of folks don't think this is a good idea.

346
00:42:13,259 --> 00:42:15,259
All right, Paul, so your response?

347
00:42:16,259 --> 00:42:24,259
Sure. Well, I mean, again, this is a lot of meta talk. It's not actually about the
idea. It's about what other people think of the idea.

348
00:42:25,259 --> 00:42:38,259
But I would wonder if JWW is concerned at all for his own argument when, since it's
become apparent over the last 12 months that this idea is rapidly getting more and
more attention.

349
00:42:39,259 --> 00:42:47,259
So now, isn't this circular reasoning now going to cut against his argument, I
suppose?

350
00:42:48,259 --> 00:43:01,259
I mean, this is if he's determined to avoid talking about any actual issue, and he
only wants to talk about how much attention it's getting, which is meta talk that is
not about the subject at hand.

351
00:43:02,259 --> 00:43:11,259
But I just thought I'd throw that out there since this debate has veered so wildly
into that off-topic direction.

352
00:43:12,259 --> 00:43:19,259
Do you think that miners stealing balances from a Drivechain presents a threat to
main chain Bitcoin holders? That's what I want to know.

353
00:43:19,259 --> 00:43:31,259
No, I don't. I don't. And in fact, as I presented, many sidechain designs are such
that they are actually bad for the entire ecosystem as a whole.

354
00:43:32,259 --> 00:43:42,259
You have sidechain designs where people put up a weird contract that they get paid
if some other chain reorganizes, or you have two different name identity chains.

355
00:43:43,259 --> 00:43:52,259
That's no good. You have parasitic oracle chains. So there's many, many designs that
are actually bad, and you need a way to get rid of them.

356
00:43:53,259 --> 00:44:01,259
And so it's actually a good thing that there is something in place to hammer out a
bad sidechain.

357
00:44:02,259 --> 00:44:09,259
So I don't think that's the case at all. I mean, there's always the question of what
affects the market price, but that's innumerable things affect demand.

358
00:44:09,259 --> 00:44:23,259
So none of them is really specific to BIP300 versus the Blockstream skip list versus
any other number of features that could be good or bad or experimental.

359
00:44:24,259 --> 00:44:26,259
If anybody else wants to ask a question, feel free.

360
00:44:27,259 --> 00:44:28,259
So can I respond to that real quick?

361
00:44:28,259 --> 00:44:29,259
Yeah, go ahead.

362
00:44:29,259 --> 00:44:31,259
I'm supposed to get the last word before we go to Q&A, right?

363
00:44:32,259 --> 00:44:33,259
Yeah, absolutely.

364
00:44:33,259 --> 00:44:38,259
Okay, so yeah, the fact that miners can steal Bitcoin, that's a significant change.

365
00:44:38,259 --> 00:44:43,259
And that's really, again, all you need to know about the design for me to be able to
win the debate.

366
00:44:44,259 --> 00:44:49,259
Or at least for you to feel like the Bitcoin core developers are probably doing a
good job, right?

367
00:44:49,259 --> 00:44:54,259
The Bitcoin community is probably doing a good job prioritizing what they work on.

368
00:44:55,259 --> 00:45:08,259
It is very much not obvious, let's say, that if miners steal significant Bitcoin
from a Bitcoin sidechain, that that's not going to be damaging to Bitcoin.

369
00:45:08,259 --> 00:45:11,259
Now, you could argue, I mean, as Paul just did, not a problem at all.

370
00:45:12,259 --> 00:45:16,259
It could affect the market price, but the weather could affect the market price.

371
00:45:16,259 --> 00:45:17,259
God only knows, right?

372
00:45:18,259 --> 00:45:22,259
My point is, one, it's not clear that it's safe.

373
00:45:22,259 --> 00:45:25,259
And two, it's not clear that it's safe.

374
00:45:25,259 --> 00:45:27,259
That's all I can say, right?

375
00:45:27,259 --> 00:45:37,259
If you give miners the ability to steal Bitcoin directly, where they didn't have
that before, the only thing they could do is reorder transactions in a malicious
way.

376
00:45:37,259 --> 00:45:39,259
That's very, very different.

377
00:45:39,259 --> 00:45:44,259
And there's very, very good reason to think that that's unsafe and that it would
damage Bitcoin.

378
00:45:48,259 --> 00:45:51,259
You still got a couple of minutes left, JW, if you want.

379
00:45:51,259 --> 00:45:52,259
Okay, yeah.

380
00:45:52,259 --> 00:45:55,259
I'll just say that, also, that is the BIP, man.

381
00:45:55,259 --> 00:45:56,259
I mean, that is what we're talking about.

382
00:45:56,259 --> 00:45:58,259
You keep saying we're not talking about the BIP.

383
00:45:58,259 --> 00:46:01,259
Unfortunately, the BIP is so stupid that that is the BIP.

384
00:46:01,259 --> 00:46:10,259
And that's the only objection that I've really heard, is that, hey, we're not really
sure that it's a good idea to let miners have the ability to steal Bitcoin.

385
00:46:10,259 --> 00:46:11,259
Maybe it's going to work out.

386
00:46:11,259 --> 00:46:12,259
Maybe it's not.

387
00:46:13,259 --> 00:46:31,259
As far as the details of the BIP, the fact that they can steal it, but they can only
steal it slowly, and other mitigations, it's only worth going into those if you're
really trying to say, okay, it's okay that miners can steal Bitcoin because they
won't want to.

388
00:46:31,259 --> 00:46:32,259
Maybe.

389
00:46:32,259 --> 00:46:33,259
And I'm willing to concede that.

390
00:46:33,259 --> 00:46:35,259
I'm willing to concede a maybe.

391
00:46:35,259 --> 00:46:43,259
But as soon as you say maybe, that's not good enough to be the highest priority task
for us as a community to work on.

392
00:46:46,259 --> 00:46:48,259
All right, Geisler, do you want to ask a question?

393
00:46:49,259 --> 00:46:51,259
Yeah, this question is for Jim.

394
00:46:52,259 --> 00:47:06,259
What would you say if somebody said that miners can currently steal from Lightning
by refusing to mine justice transactions, and therefore Lightning is no more safe
than Drivechain would be?

395
00:47:06,259 --> 00:47:07,259
Thank you.

396
00:47:08,259 --> 00:47:09,259
I presume you meant JW.

397
00:47:09,259 --> 00:47:13,259
So I'll let JW, a couple minutes, and then George Paul.

398
00:47:13,259 --> 00:47:14,259
Okay, cool.

399
00:47:14,259 --> 00:47:19,259
Yeah, so, I mean, what you're arguing there is that Lightning is insecure.

400
00:47:19,259 --> 00:47:20,259
And you could argue that.

401
00:47:20,259 --> 00:47:29,259
And I think it was smart for us to be very concerned about whether Lightning was
going to be secure or not, and whether it was going to damage the network.

402
00:47:29,259 --> 00:47:31,259
It's proven at this point.

403
00:47:31,259 --> 00:47:32,259
It's rolled out.

404
00:47:32,259 --> 00:47:33,259
It's working.

405
00:47:33,259 --> 00:47:42,259
And so what Paul's trying to do is say, you can steal Bitcoin from Lightning, so if
you can steal Bitcoin in this situation, it's also okay.

406
00:47:42,259 --> 00:47:45,259
That's a very big logical leap, right?

407
00:47:45,259 --> 00:47:46,259
That's not necessarily the case.

408
00:47:47,259 --> 00:48:00,259
There's all kinds of reasons that it might not be as bad in Lightning, including the
typical balance size that people have in Lightning, the cost of actually doing a
reorg transaction to screw somebody over, the fact that you have to set up this
double spend beforehand.

409
00:48:00,259 --> 00:48:04,259
All of these things are mitigations that maybe make it safe in Lightning.

410
00:48:04,259 --> 00:48:12,259
But you can't just say, oh, because you can steal from Lightning in some set of
circumstances, it's fine that you can steal in Drivechains.

411
00:48:12,259 --> 00:48:15,259
No, no, it's not fine.

412
00:48:15,259 --> 00:48:22,259
It might be fine if there's all these other mitigations in place, but it's very much
an open question.

413
00:48:24,259 --> 00:48:36,259
Well, I mean, treating it as an empirical question, I think, again, it's just him
disproving his own argument yet again, because he's not allowing the experiment to
even be run.

414
00:48:36,259 --> 00:48:44,259
I would perfectly be willing to say we should try this out, and then in the real
world, we might discover that it never works.

415
00:48:44,259 --> 00:48:47,259
I think that that's completely possible.

416
00:48:47,259 --> 00:48:50,259
But that's not what the questioner asked.

417
00:48:50,259 --> 00:49:08,259
The questioner asked, fundamentally, it is the exact same state of affairs where
miners can steal from it, and yet we're all living with it today, and Armageddon
hasn't fallen upon us all.

418
00:49:08,259 --> 00:49:17,259
So he's trying to treat it like an empirical question, like, well, we don't know if
the reality in the universe is that it's safe or not safe.

419
00:49:17,259 --> 00:49:23,259
But if that's the case, then we should be allowed to run the experiment and find
out.

420
00:49:23,259 --> 00:49:26,259
We do want to have some kind of way of finding out.

421
00:49:26,259 --> 00:49:54,189
The idea that there are a bunch of mitigations in LN and then the insinuation that
there aren't in BIP300 is extremely bizarre, because with BIP300, the miners can
only steal at all, in quotes, very slowly, over three to six months, a few times per
year, with it being extremely obvious to everyone what they're doing, with it all
declared in advance.

422
00:49:54,189 --> 00:50:09,189
With it all declared in advance, there's an enormous amount of anti-spam, anti-DDoS
stuff in BIP300 to make it as auditable as possible for anyone who wants to look
into whether or not the theft is taking place.

423
00:50:09,189 --> 00:50:33,189
It's extremely easy for people to react to the theft in a coordinated way, even
without people talking to each other. So there are an enormous number of mitigations
in BIP300. It is in the exact same fundamental category as lightning in that
regard. And that was what the questioner asked.

424
00:50:34,189 --> 00:50:35,189
All right. Time's up.

425
00:50:36,189 --> 00:50:43,189
Yeah. All right. Ajax, you have a question. Ajax?

426
00:50:43,189 --> 00:51:01,189
Hello. So this is more like a statement, not a question. So I was listening to your
presentation, Paul, on YouTube, and you presented BIP300 as a way to avoid
upgrading Bitcoin ever again.

427
00:51:02,189 --> 00:51:13,189
So if there is an issue with miners being able to steal bitcoins, this is out of the
question because a lot of people will not want to opt in to this.

428
00:51:14,189 --> 00:51:20,189
And so you will have several chains where people will want to opt in.

429
00:51:21,189 --> 00:51:42,189
And there is also questions that it's like if for if Bitcoin Core becomes
responsible for maintaining security on those chains, too, they will have to upgrade
the protocol in a way that does not break security of the sidechains, too.

430
00:51:43,189 --> 00:52:08,189
And this makes the task much more difficult. And also, like, if there is any chance
that Bitcoin can be stolen, BIP300 cannot become a path where Bitcoin Core will be
upgraded in the future because this is not the way the protocol is supposed to work.

431
00:52:09,189 --> 00:52:12,189
Let's let Paul take a couple of minutes and then JW can respond to that.

432
00:52:13,189 --> 00:52:22,189
Well, I would think that Bitcoin Core developers would not take responsibility for
anything other than Bitcoin Core. I think that's very healthy for people to only
take responsibility for what they have control over.

433
00:52:23,189 --> 00:52:32,189
What I was imagining in my head was you'd have the Bitcoin Core we have today, which
is extremely functional and used by many people.

434
00:52:33,189 --> 00:52:37,189
That's what we have now. And many people enjoy it a great deal. Obviously, we would
still have that.

435
00:52:38,189 --> 00:52:52,189
And then I was thinking we'd have like maybe two competing kind of like Bitcoin 2.0
chains or something, and they would be run by people who hate each other, be like
wasabi versus samurai or something.

436
00:52:53,189 --> 00:53:03,189
And then they would compete for adding new features. But I think most people just
want to be able to send money from one place to another.

437
00:53:04,189 --> 00:53:23,189
And so truly conservative users would just use the base chain and the base layer one
chain, and they would not use either of the two Bitcoin 2.0 chains that are
encumbered by the risks associated with the 300, which of course do exist.

438
00:53:24,189 --> 00:53:31,189
But I do think that there is something to be said for the risk of updating the
protocol.

439
00:53:32,189 --> 00:53:39,189
With SegWit, we had a mandatory block size increase that suddenly somehow became
popular among small blockers.

440
00:53:40,189 --> 00:53:50,189
And that was something that was an upgrade to the protocol. And I don't know if we
should keep doing that kind of thing forever.

441
00:53:51,189 --> 00:53:53,189
I think that's its own risk.

442
00:53:55,189 --> 00:53:57,189
Okay, D.W., you can go ahead.

443
00:53:58,189 --> 00:54:04,189
Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. It's very obvious that it's not obvious
this is safe.

444
00:54:05,189 --> 00:54:14,189
And that's the bar that you would have to make for it to get prioritized for a lot
of people to get excited about it and start working on it and volunteering their
time.

445
00:54:14,189 --> 00:54:20,189
There are not misaligned incentives here. We don't have lizard people on Blockstream
controlling Bitcoin Core.

446
00:54:21,189 --> 00:54:28,189
It works. The reason that people aren't working on this, if that's the complaint,
which of course now it's not the complaint, now people are working on it.

447
00:54:29,189 --> 00:54:33,189
But before it was, it's not getting as much attention as Lightning Network, and it
should.

448
00:54:34,189 --> 00:54:37,189
So it's kind of hard to pin Paul down on this stuff.

449
00:54:37,189 --> 00:54:49,189
But as far as the mitigations go, yes, there is the ability to steal Bitcoin if you
can reorder transactions in some very convoluted and narrow ways on Bitcoin right
now.

450
00:54:50,189 --> 00:54:57,189
It's a different set of mitigations in different convoluted, let's say, ways with
Drivechains.

451
00:54:58,189 --> 00:55:00,189
So the question is, are there enough mitigations in place?

452
00:55:00,189 --> 00:55:07,189
Now, Paul hasn't even tried to say, yeah, miners can't steal for this reason or that
reason, which you would think that he would.

453
00:55:08,189 --> 00:55:13,189
Instead, he's just saying, hey, it's completely fine that they can steal because you
can steal on Lightning Network.

454
00:55:14,189 --> 00:55:16,189
It's kind of a ridiculous angle.

455
00:55:17,189 --> 00:55:21,189
At the end of the day, though, what Paul is saying is they can steal. They can steal
slowly.

456
00:55:22,189 --> 00:55:26,189
They won't. And this also requires a change to Bitcoin Core, right?

457
00:55:26,189 --> 00:55:30,189
We got SegWit. It was basically a security fix for transaction malleability.

458
00:55:31,189 --> 00:55:33,189
And then other people were able to work on Lightning Network.

459
00:55:34,189 --> 00:55:35,189
He wants us actually to change Bitcoin Core.

460
00:55:36,189 --> 00:55:40,189
He wants us to change the Bitcoin network so that you can steal only slowly.

461
00:55:41,189 --> 00:55:47,189
And his claim is that if you can only steal the Bitcoin slowly, you won't steal it
because it will hurt the price.

462
00:55:48,189 --> 00:55:54,189
But this is also a very narrow, weird spot because if you can trust miners not to
steal, period,

463
00:55:54,189 --> 00:55:58,189
if you can trust them not to steal quickly, let's say, then we don't need to make
any change to Bitcoin.

464
00:55:59,189 --> 00:56:00,189
And he can just roll that out.

465
00:56:01,189 --> 00:56:04,189
So you have to believe that they will steal quickly, but they won't steal slowly.

466
00:56:05,189 --> 00:56:07,189
Maybe that's true, but it's certainly not obvious.

467
00:56:08,189 --> 00:56:10,189
All right. Joe, you want to ask a question?

468
00:56:11,189 --> 00:56:13,189
Yeah, thanks. This is to both of them.

469
00:56:14,189 --> 00:56:21,189
Is there any risk to someone's Bitcoin if we merge the BIPs and that person doesn't
use the sidechain?

470
00:56:21,189 --> 00:56:22,189
They don't want their coins at risk.

471
00:56:23,189 --> 00:56:27,189
So are they affected at all if we merge the BIPs and nobody uses the sidechain?

472
00:56:28,189 --> 00:56:29,189
To both speakers, please. Thanks.

473
00:56:30,189 --> 00:56:33,189
Let's start with JW and then go to Paul.

474
00:56:34,189 --> 00:56:40,189
Yeah, so Bitcoiners kind of understand that we're playing a bigger game than just
trying to keep our own coins secure.

475
00:56:41,189 --> 00:56:43,189
We need to increase Bitcoin adoption to win.

476
00:56:44,189 --> 00:56:45,189
It's not just about number go up.

477
00:56:46,189 --> 00:56:47,189
It's about human freedom, right?

478
00:56:47,189 --> 00:56:55,189
We don't know how much time we have before the technologies that are being developed
and released into the world are going to create a dystopia.

479
00:56:56,189 --> 00:57:00,189
And so we need to as quickly as possible see things like El Salvador adopt Bitcoin.

480
00:57:01,189 --> 00:57:04,189
So that's the issue. The issue is not whether your individual coins would be stolen.

481
00:57:05,189 --> 00:57:07,189
If you don't use the sidechain, of course, that's the case.

482
00:57:08,189 --> 00:57:15,189
But if people are confused and they believe that the sidechain is secure, which
obviously there's a lot of people that do believe that.

483
00:57:16,189 --> 00:57:18,189
There's a lot of plebs that believe it.

484
00:57:19,189 --> 00:57:24,189
There's probably not a lot of Bitcoin core developers that believe it or Paul
wouldn't have any complaints about their prioritization.

485
00:57:25,189 --> 00:57:30,189
So the issue is, will we have people lose a bunch of money and it slows down Bitcoin
adoption?

486
00:57:31,189 --> 00:57:32,189
That's the concern.

487
00:57:32,189 --> 00:57:35,189
All right, Paul, if you're done, J.W., then Paul, you have two minutes.

488
00:57:36,189 --> 00:57:44,189
Yes, the question I asked, if BIP300/301 are merged and they never use any of
the sidechains, can they ever be affected?

489
00:57:45,189 --> 00:57:48,189
And the answer is no, they cannot be affected at all.

490
00:57:49,189 --> 00:58:00,189
In fact, the way BIP300/301 are designed is that they have an even lighter
touch than SegWit in that you don't even have to run a transaction.

491
00:58:00,189 --> 00:58:07,189
You can run a version that doesn't even have the BIPs merged and it will still sync
to the network.

492
00:58:08,189 --> 00:58:16,189
And the only thing you'll notice is that very mysteriously, a lot of coins are
accumulating in a few UTXOs.

493
00:58:17,189 --> 00:58:20,189
Those are the UTXOs that have the sidechain balance.

494
00:58:21,189 --> 00:58:23,189
And you'll be very confused by that, but you won't be able to spend it.

495
00:58:24,189 --> 00:58:28,189
If you tried to spend coins from there, you would find that you were somehow not
able to.

496
00:58:28,189 --> 00:58:32,189
But you don't even have to run the software code, actually.

497
00:58:33,189 --> 00:58:38,189
And that is because the whole thing is based on this ethical principle of people
opting into things.

498
00:58:39,189 --> 00:58:52,189
I agree with J.W. that there's a lot of indirect things, but the whole point of BIP300 is to massively improve those things.

499
00:58:52,189 --> 00:59:07,189
Bitcoin adoption, privacy, scalability, new features, all of that is the entire
purpose of having BIP300 is so that those new features are available to users if
they want to opt in.

500
00:59:08,189 --> 00:59:16,189
As for plebs being confused, I don't know if anyone here has the power to solve that
any time soon.

501
00:59:17,189 --> 00:59:21,189
All right, if you're done, then let's ask Ruben, go ahead.

502
00:59:22,189 --> 00:59:26,189
And also, Ruben, I'll just leave you on stage since you're sort of knowledgeable
about sidechains.

503
00:59:27,189 --> 00:59:28,189
Go ahead.

504
00:59:29,189 --> 00:59:30,189
Ruben should have really done this, man.

505
00:59:31,189 --> 00:59:32,189
You know this a lot better than I do.

506
00:59:33,189 --> 00:59:38,189
Well, yeah, I'm still on the fence in terms of how secure Drivechains is or isn't.

507
00:59:39,189 --> 00:59:41,189
I really just have one question, mainly for Paul.

508
00:59:41,189 --> 00:59:54,189
I was curious if Paul could kind of explain what he thinks the difference is between
having these Drivechains be purely minor activated and having it be a soft fork.

509
00:59:55,189 --> 00:59:58,189
So the difference, obviously, is that you don't get the slow payouts, right?

510
00:59:59,189 --> 01:00:00,189
And that's something J.W. already said.

511
01:00:01,189 --> 01:00:05,189
But I'm curious, kind of, Paul, what your take is in terms of how that changes the
security.

512
01:00:06,189 --> 01:00:07,189
Go ahead, Paul.

513
01:00:08,189 --> 01:00:09,189
Two minutes and then we'll go to J.W.

514
01:00:09,189 --> 01:00:11,189
Sure. Well, it changes the security drastically, I mean.

515
01:00:12,189 --> 01:00:24,189
You would just need – you would want it to be a soft fork because what the nodes –
when your full nodes do not enforce any of the sidechain rules and you do not need
any sidechain blocks at all.

516
01:00:25,189 --> 01:00:32,189
But what your full node does enforce if you activate BIP300 is it does enforce the
BIP300 rules.

517
01:00:33,189 --> 01:00:37,189
And that's all the so-called mitigations is the word we've been using today.

518
01:00:37,189 --> 01:00:49,189
All the things that – namely, that the withdrawals have to traverse this gauntlet
that's three to six months long and that there's a lot of potential to refute an
erroneous transaction that sneaks in there.

519
01:00:50,189 --> 01:01:00,189
And so if you did not activate it by a soft fork protocol change and instead you
just had miners activate it, then, of course, we could all be using it tomorrow.

520
01:01:00,189 --> 01:01:08,189
But then the coins – the miners could withdraw the coins in the very next block like
at 3 a.m. when no one is paying attention.

521
01:01:09,189 --> 01:01:15,189
And it's unclear exactly how well that would work.

522
01:01:15,189 --> 01:01:30,189
Although, namely, that particular problem of the emergency sudden surprise attack
withdrawal, that was one of the things that I didn't like about Blockstream's 2014
paper that I changed around and I think improved in Drivechain.

523
01:01:31,189 --> 01:01:35,189
But I don't think that's really a good idea. I think it should be a soft fork.

524
01:01:36,189 --> 01:01:38,189
All right, JW, go ahead.

525
01:01:39,189 --> 01:01:55,189
Yeah, so just to recap, what we're talking about here is that Paul can do everything
that he wants to do without having to get Bitcoin to change in any way, except that
would allow miners to steal the sidechain funds quickly.

526
01:01:56,189 --> 01:02:02,189
With the change that he wants to make, you would still be able as miners to steal
the Bitcoin, but you'd have to do it slowly.

527
01:02:02,189 --> 01:02:05,189
So you can think of it as like a really long time lock, essentially.

528
01:02:06,189 --> 01:02:11,189
And so he'll say, oh, there's all kinds of reasons that that is secure.

529
01:02:12,189 --> 01:02:16,189
It's not. It's not secure. At least it's not obvious that it's secure.

530
01:02:17,189 --> 01:02:21,189
It's very, very possible that it could be very damaging.

531
01:02:22,189 --> 01:02:26,189
So Paul wants to say there are all of these benefits to adoption.

532
01:02:27,189 --> 01:02:29,189
It's going to be great for everybody, number go up, all that sort of stuff.

533
01:02:30,189 --> 01:02:33,189
Drivechains are going to accelerate adoption.

534
01:02:34,189 --> 01:02:36,189
But he doesn't want to acknowledge that there are downsides.

535
01:02:37,189 --> 01:02:40,189
He wants to say, hey, there's no risk to the main chain. There's only possible
benefits.

536
01:02:41,189 --> 01:02:50,189
But obviously, there are a lot of possible negatives here, including number go up,
go down, and adoption slow down.

537
01:02:51,189 --> 01:02:57,189
If Drivechains do what Paul says that they will do, we should expect a significant
number of Bitcoin, right?

538
01:02:58,189 --> 01:03:00,189
A significant percentage to move into those sidechains.

539
01:03:01,189 --> 01:03:08,189
And if those are actually insecure and miners wait until there's a nice big fat pot
there to steal the funds from,

540
01:03:09,189 --> 01:03:14,189
that's going to be very bad for all of the Bitcoiners and for the rest of the world
that even has an adopted sound money yet.

541
01:03:15,189 --> 01:03:17,189
So you can't say that there's no risk, only upside.

542
01:03:18,189 --> 01:03:19,189
There's definitely a risk here.

543
01:03:19,189 --> 01:03:26,189
And you also can't say that it's obvious that if miners will steal funds quickly,
they won't steal funds slowly.

544
01:03:27,189 --> 01:03:31,189
And that's the whole premise of BIP300/301 and Drivechains in general.

545
01:03:33,189 --> 01:03:35,189
All right, Mario, you're floor.

546
01:03:36,189 --> 01:03:37,189
Go ahead.

547
01:03:39,189 --> 01:03:43,189
Yeah, so this question is a little not really central to the question of the debate.

548
01:03:43,189 --> 01:03:56,189
But one comment I noticed, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, Jonas Nick had
pointed out that he thinks that Drivechains as a type of hashrate escrow might not
be the best we can do.

549
01:03:57,189 --> 01:04:04,189
I'm wondering if anyone is aware of any research on other types of hashrate escrows
that might be possible improvements upon Drivechain.

550
01:04:05,189 --> 01:04:08,189
Let's start with Paul and then go to JW. Paul, two minutes.

551
01:04:09,189 --> 01:04:22,189
Well, I mean, a very old idea is to buttress the hashrate escrow or the extension
block or whatever you want to call it with some kind of zk-SNARK.

552
01:04:23,189 --> 01:04:26,189
That's one that has been thrown around.

553
01:04:27,189 --> 01:04:36,189
But I have always resisted this idea because the zk-SNARK is a sort of paradox where
the only way to check that it is working is to not use it.

554
01:04:37,189 --> 01:04:48,189
Which is to say you have to have all the messages and you have to check that they
all follow all the rules in order to compute the zk-SNARK to make sure that the
whole zk-SNARK system is working as intended.

555
01:04:48,189 --> 01:05:02,189
And so, therefore, the zk-SNARK scheme isn't really that different from just regular
SPV mode where, again, it's this thing where you sort of think that it is working
until the only way to know that it is working is to check everything.

556
01:05:03,189 --> 01:05:05,189
So it's not that different.

557
01:05:06,189 --> 01:05:15,189
That was the big one. I don't know what Jonas Nick had in mind when he said that.
Maybe someone can find out. I don't know.

558
01:05:19,189 --> 01:05:24,189
Yeah, so there are actually quite a few ideas to improve on that.

559
01:05:25,189 --> 01:05:34,189
As Paul mentioned, this idea is basically, as I understand it, the fundamental idea
behind sidechains in general.

560
01:05:35,189 --> 01:05:40,189
And Blockstream had this idea to do this sort of concept a long time ago.

561
01:05:40,189 --> 01:05:47,189
And they pivoted because they realized, and Matt Corallo, there is a podcast from
way back when Matt Corallo goes into this.

562
01:05:48,189 --> 01:05:53,189
He's the one that came up with this idea of this kind of hashrate escrow concept or
whatever.

563
01:05:54,189 --> 01:05:58,189
And they decided that it wasn't a good idea, that it was too risky from a security
perspective.

564
01:05:59,189 --> 01:06:00,189
They thought that it would blow up and it wouldn't work.

565
01:06:01,189 --> 01:06:03,189
And that's why they moved to a federated model.

566
01:06:04,189 --> 01:06:16,189
A federated model is basically exactly the same, except you also have this
additional layer of security where the members of the federation are also securing
the coins in addition to the hash rate.

567
01:06:17,189 --> 01:06:24,189
Because ultimately, you could just roll this out in a time lock and people could
steal the funds and you wouldn't care about it.

568
01:06:25,189 --> 01:06:30,189
But Liquid, the people that designed it were like, no, this is not a great idea.

569
01:06:30,189 --> 01:06:36,189
Let's make sure that we have these federation members and they're responsible for
securing it.

570
01:06:37,189 --> 01:06:48,189
One of the really goofy things about this is that the mitigation is like, okay,
well, if somebody steals the funds slowly, the ultimate mitigation is that we can do
a fork.

571
01:06:49,189 --> 01:06:50,189
We can just censor that transaction.

572
01:06:51,189 --> 01:06:52,189
But that's the definition of a consensus failure.

573
01:06:53,189 --> 01:06:55,189
And that's exactly what Bitcoin was designed to prevent.

574
01:06:56,189 --> 01:06:57,189
So that's not a fix.

575
01:06:58,189 --> 01:06:59,189
That's not a solution.

576
01:07:00,189 --> 01:07:03,189
That's not a solution of a nuclear explosion.

577
01:07:04,189 --> 01:07:07,189
You don't mitigate a nuclear explosion by getting out a firehose.

578
01:07:08,189 --> 01:07:10,189
You try to prevent that from happening in the first place.

579
01:07:11,189 --> 01:07:13,189
Maybe you can add something here.

580
01:07:14,189 --> 01:07:21,189
Jonas, Nick, I think his post was more about the BIPs themselves and kind of how
they changed Bitcoin.

581
01:07:22,189 --> 01:07:26,189
And I think he was thinking more along the lines of, isn't there a simpler way to
implement the same thing?

582
01:07:26,189 --> 01:07:33,189
So it wasn't directly, I think, whether or not we should do something like Drivechain, but more like, how do we want to do it if we were to do it?

583
01:07:34,189 --> 01:07:39,189
And also related to that, this is something that JW, you're probably not going to
like.

584
01:07:40,189 --> 01:07:45,189
But I sort of kind of looked into how you could potentially do something like a slow
peg out with confidence.

585
01:07:46,189 --> 01:07:55,189
And it looks like depending on what type of confidence we will get into Bitcoin at
some future date, it looks like you can sort of do the slow peg out.

586
01:07:56,189 --> 01:08:05,189
With a confidence structure as well, which sort of means that either we have to
reject advanced confidence from Bitcoin in order to reject Drivechains, if you were
against it.

587
01:08:06,189 --> 01:08:14,189
Or we're going to get something like Drivechains when that time comes, regardless of
whether BIP300/301 make it into Bitcoin.

588
01:08:15,189 --> 01:08:17,189
Can I respond to that real quick? I'll be fast.

589
01:08:18,189 --> 01:08:20,189
Or actually, can I have two minutes and then Paul goes for two minutes?

590
01:08:21,189 --> 01:08:22,189
Yeah, go ahead.

591
01:08:22,189 --> 01:08:24,189
Okay. Yeah, so a couple of things about that.

592
01:08:25,189 --> 01:08:30,189
One is that I also wanted to mention space chains and soft chains, because those are
Ruben's concepts.

593
01:08:31,189 --> 01:08:34,189
And I think those are improvements on Drivechain as well.

594
01:08:35,189 --> 01:08:42,189
So there is definitely, and actually, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Ruben, you
know, my time is up here.

595
01:08:43,189 --> 01:08:46,189
But I believe that you can do everything that Paul wants to do with space chains.

596
01:08:47,189 --> 01:08:49,189
The only difference is you have a proof of burn system.

597
01:08:49,189 --> 01:08:54,189
So if you want to run a bunch of altcoin, you know, stupid experiments and blow
stuff up, you can do that.

598
01:08:55,189 --> 01:08:58,189
But it's going to be very, very clear it's not Bitcoin because you can't move it
back.

599
01:08:59,189 --> 01:09:13,189
As far as trying to prevent Drivechains, if you can implement Drivechains without
making any changes to Bitcoin Core, that's analogous to being able to create a
custodial solution.

600
01:09:14,189 --> 01:09:23,189
I'm not that worried that something like Binance or Binance Chain or even Coinbase
is going to say, hey, we have all these features and you can move your Bitcoin into
it.

601
01:09:24,189 --> 01:09:28,189
Ultimately, my concern is that people will think that they have Bitcoin.

602
01:09:29,189 --> 01:09:31,189
And this has been a criticism of like Liquid.

603
01:09:32,189 --> 01:09:35,189
And I think it's a valid criticism and it needs to be emphasized again and again.

604
01:09:36,189 --> 01:09:42,189
But it gets a lot more difficult, I think, with Drivechains, especially if Bitcoin
Core implements a change to enable them.

605
01:09:43,189 --> 01:09:50,189
It's going to be presented as an upgrade to Bitcoin and people are going to run
around like idiots, you know, and put funds in here and it's going to blow up.

606
01:09:51,189 --> 01:09:55,189
And it's not going to be as easy to explain as when a custodial solution goes under.

607
01:09:56,189 --> 01:09:58,189
So if it's done, that's, you know, that is what it is.

608
01:09:59,189 --> 01:10:03,189
And I think as a community, we'll just have to do a good job of explaining that
you're not on Bitcoin anymore.

609
01:10:04,189 --> 01:10:06,189
Ruben, if you want to jump in.

610
01:10:07,189 --> 01:10:14,189
Yeah, just to react to that, like I don't think like space chains do kind of a
subset of what Drivechains do.

611
01:10:15,189 --> 01:10:23,189
If Drivechains work as Paul thinks it does, then basically that would make space
chains pretty much pointless.

612
01:10:24,189 --> 01:10:25,189
Maybe there are some niche use cases there.

613
01:10:26,189 --> 01:10:34,189
But I would say Drivechains are kind of superior in terms of what it could
potentially do if it actually works as Paul hopes it does.

614
01:10:34,189 --> 01:10:43,189
So I don't think it's quite like, you know, the replacement, but I guess you could
make the argument that at least it makes Drivechains slightly less.

615
01:10:44,189 --> 01:10:48,189
Like at least some of the things we can do with Drivechains, we could do with space
chains.

616
01:10:49,189 --> 01:10:50,189
But I don't think it's a straight up replacement.

617
01:10:51,189 --> 01:10:53,189
Sure.

618
01:10:54,189 --> 01:11:01,189
Yeah, I mean, you get a chain that basically doesn't really have this kind of
Bitcoin store of value token.

619
01:11:01,189 --> 01:11:10,189
So if you have with a Drivechain, you can literally move your Bitcoins to another
chain and then you can use those Bitcoins in any type of smart contract that you
want.

620
01:11:11,189 --> 01:11:13,189
But that's just simply not possible with space chains.

621
01:11:14,189 --> 01:11:20,189
And space chains sort of work around that design limitation and kind of look at what
is possible despite that limitation.

622
01:11:21,189 --> 01:11:24,189
But, you know, Drivechains, in that sense, just have a clear leg up.

623
01:11:25,189 --> 01:11:27,189
Paul, you want to go ahead?

624
01:11:27,189 --> 01:11:33,189
Yes. Anyone who, well, I'd like to thank Ruben for setting the record straight.

625
01:11:34,189 --> 01:11:48,189
And it's fortunate that he did, because what I'm now going to say is that anyone who
could possibly think that space chains could do everything that Drivechain could do
has basically zero technical understanding of what's going on at all.

626
01:11:49,189 --> 01:11:51,189
I said with the exception that you can't move the coins back.

627
01:11:52,189 --> 01:11:53,189
Yeah, well.

628
01:11:53,189 --> 01:11:58,189
So that's exactly what he clarified. So he didn't clarify anything that I didn't
already say.

629
01:11:59,189 --> 01:12:09,189
Right. So you can't do anything with Zcash like coin mixing. You can't do any
betting. You can't do any kind of scalability, transaction throughput.

630
01:12:10,189 --> 01:12:14,189
So anyone who would even suggest that doesn't really know what they're talking about
at all.

631
01:12:15,189 --> 01:12:26,189
And so that's the answer to that. I don't know. It's interesting that then JWW
critiqued custodial solutions and said he wasn't worried about them at all.

632
01:12:27,189 --> 01:12:39,189
But then earlier he was saying that how great the liquid network is, although he did
then say that it was a critique of liquid to point out that it is custodial Bitcoin.

633
01:12:40,189 --> 01:12:44,189
But I don't know. That all seems very poorly thought out to me.

634
01:12:45,189 --> 01:12:51,189
Space chains are basically preemptively destroying all the coins. So you don't have
to worry about miners stealing them, but you also can't get them back.

635
01:12:51,189 --> 01:13:01,189
So if you have a checking account and you think it's better to just destroy the
checking account or exchange it all for Chuck E. Cheese tokens or something,

636
01:13:02,189 --> 01:13:14,189
then to run the risk that possibly something might happen to it later and you may
lose it all, then yes, space chains are better.

637
01:13:14,189 --> 01:13:25,189
Space chains are good if you want to do something like a name system or an asset
system where there's no need to actually have any money come out of it ever.

638
01:13:26,189 --> 01:13:30,189
Okay. Does anyone from the audience have a question?

639
01:13:31,189 --> 01:13:32,189
Can I respond to that?

640
01:13:33,189 --> 01:13:34,189
Sure, go ahead.

641
01:13:35,189 --> 01:13:42,189
Okay, so again, I said that you can't move the coins back. So he's just trying to
obfuscate the whole conversation.

642
01:13:42,189 --> 01:13:48,189
What I said is the functionality. So you can do, from what I understand, and again,
Ruben's the expert, you can do all kinds of stuff.

643
01:13:49,189 --> 01:13:53,189
And if you can't do it with space chains, this whole proof of burn concept has been
around for a long time.

644
01:13:54,189 --> 01:14:05,189
And there's no reason that you couldn't take some Bitcoin, provably lock it up, and
then do whatever you want on a completely separate blockchain that's using the fact
that there was provably destroyed Bitcoin to do that.

645
01:14:06,189 --> 01:14:17,189
So that's the point. And it's true. And so whatever functionality or features that
you want, you can get, you just can't get them in and then back out.

646
01:14:18,189 --> 01:14:23,189
As far as me being okay with custodial or whatever, I'm okay with whatever anybody
wants to do.

647
01:14:24,189 --> 01:14:30,189
But if somebody does something that's likely to deceive a lot of people and slow the
adoption of Bitcoin, I'm not a fan of it.

648
01:14:30,189 --> 01:14:36,189
I'm not a fan of the fact that Coinbase doesn't do proof of reserves. I can't stop
them from doing that.

649
01:14:37,189 --> 01:14:39,189
So what do we do instead? We do the best that we can to educate.

650
01:14:40,189 --> 01:14:51,189
So if Drivechains gets activated in some way or gets deployed in spite of the fact
that the VIPs don't result in any change to the Bitcoin core, then I will do the
same thing that I do with custodial Bitcoin.

651
01:14:52,189 --> 01:15:02,189
And the same thing I do with liquid Bitcoin. I'll say, hey, there's pros and cons,
but you got to be sure that you understand that you don't have anything close to the
security assurance that you have with Bitcoin mainchain.

652
01:15:03,189 --> 01:15:06,189
And as a community, we're just going to have to do a really good job doing that to
prevent that.

653
01:15:07,141 --> 01:15:12,141
We're just going to have to do a really good job doing that to prevent somebody from
thinking they have Bitcoin and having it all stolen, because that's not good for any
of us.

654
01:15:34,141 --> 01:15:52,141
If you have the right to swap your Bitcoin for some altcoin like Ethereum, if you
have the right to send your Bitcoin to an unspendable address and destroy the
Bitcoin, then you as the user and the consumer, you should have the right to send it
to a weird script.

655
01:15:52,141 --> 01:16:17,141
And that is all that BIP300 is at the end of the day. And that is why Ruben
correctly brought up that it may be possible for people to eventually just send the
coins to a script that is so complicated, it just replicates all BIP300, but in a
way that is not subject to any kind of the peer review or import or regulations that
I've put BIP300 through.

656
01:16:17,141 --> 01:16:19,141
But I would like to hear more from the audience.

657
01:16:20,141 --> 01:16:22,141
Okay, go ahead, Ben the car man.

658
01:16:22,141 --> 01:16:34,141
I have a question mostly for Paul. I'm just curious. I think BIP300 301 could
potentially be interesting, but it's just a lot of extra work to do.

659
01:16:34,141 --> 01:16:56,141
And there's already tons of proposals that I think will be a lot more useful today,
like things like Sikash Zenit Preval or OP_CTV or even stuff like Graftroot, which
we know has material, new use cases and things that can add to Lightning or make
everything a CoinJoin or stuff like Covenants.

660
01:16:56,141 --> 01:17:16,141
Versus Drivechain, it adds us the ability to add new sidechains more easily and
different security models. But no one's like, oh man, I would totally build a
sidechain. At least as far as I know, no one's like, I want to build a sidechain,
but I only will do it with BIP300 sidechains.

661
01:17:16,141 --> 01:17:25,141
That's my biggest qualm with it. It's a cool idea, but there's not things that
people are ready to build that are just waiting on this to come out.

662
01:17:26,141 --> 01:17:54,141
I actually have a different project. The original Oracle project called Truthcoin is
such a thing that you suggest. And then the entire reason I created BIP300 at all
or advocate for it at all is because I was interested in doing that project. So you
can go to bitcoinhivemind.com if you would like to learn anything about that
project.

663
01:17:54,141 --> 01:18:16,141
I've also published about other projects that I think would be cool. One that
Satoshi Nakamoto thought was cool was Namecoin. And that would lead to uncensorable
domain names and you wouldn't need – you could just go to whatever it is,
www.anarchy or something, and then no one could ever seize that domain.

664
01:18:16,141 --> 01:18:37,141
You could always message this person. You could always send them money, and that
would be a big human rights advantage. I wrote a post called Thunder about sidechain
scaling. We have the Zcash privacy sidechain already.

665
01:18:38,141 --> 01:19:01,141
The other thing is that the design is sort of like – it's built actually to kind of
steal the altcoin. So if you have an interesting altcoin node, you may be able to
just capture it and run it as a BIP300 sidechain instead. There's a lot of interest
in that kind of thing.

666
01:19:02,141 --> 01:19:28,141
I like David Vork's SIA project. That's one that I bring up. We could do something
with most of the NFTs. Obviously, that's sort of silly, but I think it is annoying
that all of that activity is on Ethereum and not on Bitcoin. And then we have to
have these tweets about how Jack Dorsey is actually using Ethereum and blah, blah,
blah. So I actually think there are quite a few. And some of them are in the talk
from Bitcoin 2021.

667
01:19:29,141 --> 01:19:31,141
Okay, JW. Your response to Ben?

668
01:19:31,141 --> 01:19:49,141
Yeah, so Ben, I think your question is actually wrong. I don't think that there is
anything that could give us more utopia than Drivechains, at least if they work the
way that Paul is talking about. Because he's saying stuff like, we don't have to
upgrade Bitcoin again. It's possible that this is it.

669
01:19:50,141 --> 01:20:15,141
Anything that you can do on an altcoin, you'll be able to do. Any altcoin that's
ever been created, you're going to be able to do on Bitcoin. Any altcoin that's
conceivable, you'll be able to do on Bitcoin. So why would we prioritize something
like taproot over Drivechains? It doesn't make sense. We could have done taproot. We
could have done all of the things that you could possibly imagine on a sidechain.
And all we have to do is implement these two BIPs.

670
01:20:16,141 --> 01:20:32,141
Now, that is, I think, actually true, right? I think all of that functionality does
come along with giving people the ability, encouraging people to move over to a
sidechain where miners can steal funds. But that's the problem. Miners can steal
funds.

671
01:20:32,141 --> 01:20:54,141
So the reason that it's not being prioritized as high as something like taproot is
taproot was super, super safe by comparison. We got some stuff, not a ton of stuff,
really, but it was super, super safe. Same thing with SegWit. We got some stuff, not
much, right? We fixed a couple security issues. And yes, when those went away, it
opened up some doors for stuff like Lightning.

672
01:20:55,141 --> 01:21:19,141
But relatively speaking, compared to something that has all of the amazing promise
of Drivechains, we didn't get much from either of those two. So the pivoting factor
is how safe is it? And it's just not safe. It's got a very critical security flaw in
it that's going to allow people to get really screwed over. And we want to prevent
that when we can. That's the whole point of this process.

673
01:21:19,141 --> 01:21:32,141
Ruben, Mario, you guys want to chime in? Or Ben? Nope. Anybody from our audience
have a question? Otherwise, we'll call it quits.

674
01:21:32,141 --> 01:21:37,141
Right on. Thank you, guys. Appreciate being able to hang out.

675
01:21:37,141 --> 01:21:40,141
All right. Thanks, everyone. Take care.

676
01:21:40,141 --> 01:21:41,141
Thanks, everyone.