Latest / Monero Talk / Bitcoin Drive Chain creator Paul Sztorc on BTC’s stagnation & Monero’s progress | EPI #297

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Bitcoin Drive Chain creator Paul Sztorc on BTC’s stagnation & Monero’s progress | EPI #297 · Monero Talk

• Doug All right, Paul, what's going on? How's it going? Paul Thanks for having me on. Doug I know in the background you're ordering food right now with Monero, which is amazing. I'm just kidding. Paul I wish I would if I could. That would be great. Uber eats Monero. Doug Crypto adoption in general, do you feel like you're able to use it for things? Paul Well, as you may know, I've been a little critical, sometimes in private among my friends, and sometimes publicly on Twitter, in front of the whole world, saying that we don't do enough, we don't focus enough on the user. We are like a CEO that only talks about the stock price every day, but they don't actually go in to the office to say, why don't people like the product? What are we spending too much money on? We don't do things enough. And in that way, Monero is superior than even 90% of the legit, of which 99% of all cryptocurrencies are complete and total garbage. But even among the upper echelon of real ones, Monero is in a top percentile. So that it deserves our respect on that basis. Doug That means a lot coming from you. And, yeah, I totally agree. Right? It is bizarre. Right? That's like, rule number one. If you're running a company, especially a tech company, it's understanding your customer and their needs and what they're actually using it for, and then designing towards that end goal. Paul Right. Doug And I think what you've been expressing of late is, and sounding the alarms on in Bitcoin land is that they're just not doing that. Right. Paul Right. The weird thing is, it is intentional choice. It's not even that anything is going wrong, except the most important thing, which is the culture. But it's like we could decide that we care. It's very troubling, because I think what really is the bottleneck is that people would have to admit to ourselves that we care about competing, and instead, Bitcoin tries to maintain this sort of like, war. Number one, our victory is preordained. Manifest destiny, et cetera. And so since it's a given that we will win and that it'll be $15 million a coin, hyper Bitcoinization, then to bring it from that abstract world down to the details is like you really have to own up to something. You have to own up to being a serious, whatever, seriously delusional frame of mind. So it's kind of like the business owner is losing money or some severe drug addict or something where it's kind of a big pill to swallow, I guess, which is a big problem, because, of course, if you have a big problem, and the only thing worse than having a big problem is having a big problem and being in denial about it. Doug It's like the ultimate form of hubris, right? Paul Yeah. Doug Obviously, all these things you're saying, they mean a lot because it's coming from you. I think we fail to get your background. I mean, you're not just like some guy who got into crypto yesterday. You've been around from the early days contributing to Bitcoin. You have a very high level understanding. Can you give the audience some insight into who exactly you are and why they should even be listening to your opinion and your takes? Paul Well, because I have been around for a very long time and I had been actively involved. So, for example, there were these scaling Bitcoin conferences that were very big. That was the beginning of the scaling war in 2015, and everyone was going to meet and kind of talk. So I was there for all of those one, two, and three, and I was on the program committee for the fourth, but then they started to suck. So then I got off that sinking ship at the perfect moment. So I think that's a short way I present it. Like building on Bitcoin, breaking Bitcoin around the world to go to people's Bitcoin Wednesday event. So I've been to quite a few. I've been invited to quite a few. Extremely technical. I'm always invited to TABConf. In fact, I keynoted twice. So TABConf is a big technical Bitcoin conference, if you didn't know. Doug And are you a dev as well? Have you contributed to Bitcoin? Paul Nothing that I have invented or coded has been merged yet. Although it's hovering around, it's hovering near Earth orbit. It's ironic, one thing I invented this thing called deniability. It's not especially amazing or interesting. It's a very old idea, but me and a collaborator produced this. It's basically just a GUI that just schedules sending money to yourself at random times. And this is so that you go out to the mall and your face is on a security camera and you are shaking hands with a friend, and then meanwhile, your money is moving around like you've pre signed the transactions, but they go out at random times. So then it looks like someone else has that money. It's just called deniability, because you say, I don't own any Bitcoin anymore. And then it looks like since you send it to yourself, it looks exactly like you've sent it to someone else. It looks like other people have it. And it's very simple and you can see there's no controversy about this. You could easily have something else. You could write a program to do this that doesn't have to be in, but it's just better if it's in the graphical user interface of Bitcoin core full node. There's a pull request for that. And it's exactly the kind of thing that they would not merge, though. They don't want to merge anything useful or practical. And they especially don't want to take responsibility for the user experience. They want to drop the GUI completely. They've wanted to do that for a long time and just make it like an industrial piece of high performance software and have other people write the wallet, which is fine, but this is the kind of thing that they're not interested in. And I have these two BIPs. Of course, this is the greatest piece of Bitcoin technology ever created, but it's so good that it's just too much to chew on. But it BIPs 300 and 301, which allow you to basically send Bitcoins to and from other pieces of software, including something that could be an exact clone of Manero drive chains. Doug Now you developed drive chains, you developed that BIP? Paul Yes, I invented this. I wrote the BIP. I formed an organization called Layer two Labs, the founder and CEO of Layer two Labs. You can go to layer twolabs.com and you can see little pictures and infographics. And we have like a video on what BIP 300 does. And you can download our test software. Usually I put it out on releases, Drivechain info first, and then we put it on layer two labs later. We have a new version coming out soon. Doug I've seen you more recently than ever, but I know drivechains has been around for a long time. Paul November 2015. Wow. It had very bad timing because it was around the same time as Segwit. It's slightly older than Segwit even. But Segwit was like the thing and that the community decided to go for in scaling two, which was December 2015. And I was all for doing Segwit. It seemed like most other people were, it was this kind of compromised block size increase. So it placated the large blockers in addition to supercharging lightning and making lightning basically possible in the modern form. But yeah, I think history would have gone much better for Bitcoin if instead we had gone for BIP 300 drive chain type idea. Because what ended up happening in Bitcoin was a total disaster. I think as a result, with Segwit, where it didn't give the large blockers what they want, it wasn't ready. And someone threw out this date. They said, April 1. I don't know where this came from. But people thought, okay, we'll have Segwit. This is December 2015. So this is like the new year is going to start. It's like December 5 or something. And people thought, yeah, we'll have Segwit ready by April 1. But then April 1 came and went and it wasn't ready, which is totally understandable if you understand software. But the whole environment was so contentious already and then ended up not being ready until the hackathon after scaling three, which was October, like mid October 2016. So it ended up being this long period of time and it was this miserable slog, and it was just. No one was getting what they wanted, and it led to the scaling war and the BCH split. The unfortunate thing about that many people, the prevailing view is that small blockers, we defeated the large blockers, and now, because we were victorious, the price went up and everything was great. Doug Right. Paul But that prevailing view misses the most important thing, which is that in order to win, we all became like politicians and became this us versus them tribal mentality. And that, I think, kills the goose that lays the golden egg, which is, in fact, dead in Bitcoin, which is the sort of like the scaling war. The victory in 2017 caused a worse problem than it solved, because the problem that it caused was that it created this attitude that Bitcoin is a finished project and it's already won, and that resisting change is the way to go. Doug That's when I left Bitcoin. And for those reasons, because that was my interpretation at the time. Paul Yeah, but I mean, Samson Mao didn't win you over with his you know...? Doug It came across as troubling to me. Doug I feel like you're more vocal than ever right now on this. Paul Well, that's a good point. A lot of it, I felt for a really long time. So I felt in 2017, and I had said it also, I said, well, is this the beginning of the end? Because we won, but in order to win, the people who are against Segwit didn't know anything about it. But the people who are for it, they didn't really know anything about it either. They just knew the wrong people didn't want it, so we'll support it. So it had become political. I can define that in this context as when you have basically two groups and you know what the other group doesn't want, and so you have this kind of spite based social computation or something. Most of the people I know who are republican, I think they don't really even care about, for example, an issue like a global warming, but they know that it's coded as a left issue. So they're going to buy a Ford F150 and they're going to leave it on. They're going to leave it Hummer and they're going to leave it idling to own the "libs" or whatever and vice versa. I'm just saying this is a part of it, and people have, there's a logic to it. They have a thought that is like, I know those people are wrong, but I'm just talking about how this is very far from what someone would really do, which is know NASA has these satellites that record the surface temperature every day and anyone can look information up about. So, but you don't have to have this. The people who shill global warming, they also don't care about global warming either, because they don't care about nuclear. What they want is to get more political influence, vision of the anointed, like Thomas Soul type thing. So I'm just saying this is a type of thing where people don't really care about the thing. They care about this other stuff, the social baggage. And you could see that in 2017 and more vocal about it now, I think, because honestly, I've really starting to get worried. Like lightning again. I kind of always had problems with it, but it's becoming clearer and clearer that everyone knows that it won't work, but people are still afraid to say anything about it. So I think you can see that the culture has accumulated so much baggage. Like, there's so many things that people know are wrong, but that they won't say. And so that kind of makes me annoyed, and it makes me more willing to say those things because I know that by now, as months and months go by, more and more people now are aware of those things. So, for example, not to go on and on and on, is this too much? Doug Absolutely not. Paul There's at TABConf. There was Matt Corrallo, a leading, leading person, co founder of Blockstream, big lightning person. He gave this talk about lightning being broken a year and a half ago. But then mostly people just they treat it in a very weird way. They treat it like a very academic way. They say, aha, it's broken. And they almost say, good, because now we can give more talks about it. But no one really would like say, it would be like if you were on a ship in the middle of the ocean and someone said, this ship is sinking and people are like, aha, well, and then we'll schedule the next conference. It's not really what you would do if you really thought it was broken, but it is what you would do if you wanted to. Like the whole thing is just about impressing other academics. That's what it's become and it's not practical. And that issue we were talking about previously about Monero caring about the user actually getting something out of it and the darknet markets is partly the key to that insight, is that people actually use it to accomplish a purpose. And that would be like the CEO who does not care about the stock price, they care about the actual product. Doug I love that you're saying that, I couldn't agree with you more, but where do you see this going for Bitcoin? I mean, is it futile at this point? Paul Well, I have discussed... Doug Its in this loop that it can't get out of because of the fact that number go up is the bigger concern and everybody's got their laser eyes on, and as long as the price is going up, everything is fine. Paul Well, it's funny you mentioned that because, okay, so we're trapped in this loop, but we will get out of the loop at some point. The question is just is it like a total death spiral crash landing? Right? Or is it something else? But for example, one of the things that people told me all throughout last year was they said, well, institutions are coming, the ETF is coming, people told me all that. They said like a pension fund is going to be buying BTC. And so they said, they sing this song about Bitcoin will be number one and it's too far ahead. They say it's all going to be Bitcoin (and Ethereum) often they would also say that, but we had the ETF and the price crashed on the news. So it's like when everyone thinks something will be good, it's often bad. Everyone thinks something will be good for the price. That's usually a sign that will be bad for the price. Still no, but I think we will get out of it in some way. So either the price will crash and that will stimulate a frustrated search for creative change, or some people think that the fees will go up. My friend Alex Kravitz, he thinks that eventually the L1 fees will be so high that it will be so annoying for regular users. They will demand a useful L2. Other people say it will just go, it will be mostly custodial and that won't be a problem. Some people say that, or they say eventually it will then go the same way as gold, where since people aren't actually using it at all. But I think that what is the optimistic thing briefly, is to just say that it's all open source software and it is hard to launch a new crypto coin, but it's a lot easier to do that than start a new nation or start a new other currency, like whatever. Start, like whatever. Liberty reserve or something. So as the public just understands crypto better, as people get better at software development in general, eventually there will be competitive pressure in the form of something new. Something new will be launched. That just doesn't suck and that actually does care about the user. That will be. Now, maybe you're going to tell me that that's Monero or something, I don't know. But I think the sidechain idea is... that is a very important idea because people really disagree. You need it to be all different shapes and sizes. You want to have like, privacy, and then you also want to have, like, not. You really want to have all the whole thing and you want them to all be interoperable. Because Monero has disadvantages with the brand and with getting liquidity on exchanges. By actually caring about the real use case of privacy, you actually have some disadvantages. So it would be nice to have the sidechain idea lets you just have Monero when you want it, ring signatures when you want it, bulletproofs, whatever, when you want those. And then you can also have something else, something that looks Utxo. Transparent. Utxo also. Doug Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a great idea to me. Just like confidential transactions also sounded like a great idea. And some of these other things you're talking about, but they just never get implemented. Paul Right. Doug Like we're saying, I think it's the number go up blinders. And people are more concerned about that than anything else. And it's like, don't touch it, leave it be. It's going up in value. It's digital gold. In fact, that's one of the qualities of it, that it never changes. But is there something else that's maybe going on? Is it basically controlled by a group of people that are determining this? Paul I think it's more of like a USSR thing than it is. Well, I mean, it's like a post Stalin USSR thing. It's not really a dictatorship, but instead no one takes responsibility for doing the right thing. So instead it just kind of is a bureaucracy, it's a kafka thing instead, where a lot of the more senior people made a lot of money in Bitcoin, and then they either retired, literally or de facto, like they're just whatever, traveling the world. And the new people are afraid to either contradict them or one up them because they kind of have a relative to where they were before, which was they were total nobodies. Now they're Bitcoin core developers, and so now that's prestigious or whatever. And so they don't want to do anything that. Which will be the mistake, of course, because that's interesting. Doug I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of bureaucracy. I'm thinking, is it like blockstream that's controlling it? Paul And they have an, they have very little formal control, and then they're always quick to jump on that, and then they always follow that truth up was a total complete lie, which is they insinuate that they have no soft control either, which is completely and totally false. They have an enormous amount of chilling effect, like a little comment or a negative email or something is a veto. And the fact that they don't admit that, and that they don't admit that it is not only bad for Bitcoin, but bad for them also, and just bad for everyone. And the fact that they don't fix that is a great moral failure of the whole Bitcoin community. Mostly them, though, that you should really just admit that they or they have several options. But what they currently do is they say we don't really control that much, which is true. There's another company chain code labs, that controls sort of more, but they don't. But I wouldn't think of it in these terms. I would say the reason why many people do believe that their number one job is not to break Bitcoin. So when that's your point of view, like, let's say you're running a restaurant, and maybe you changed the menu, like, every three years in the past, and maybe you had a fresh coat of paint every five years in the past, but now it's your job not to break the restaurant. So now you just kind of look the other way on anything new. You're never really going to do any bold new thing that the actual owner would do. The people in charge now of merging pull requests and stuff. They do not have a lot of upside if something goes really well. So, like, someone, Jeremy Rubin can invent 119. If it's merged, he gets a lot of upside. But the people who merge it do not get the upside. Doug It seems like a story as old as time. Paul It is exactly. Doug In technology, especially the technology space, with competing technologies, you have something that comes along, it does very well, becomes this behemoth, and then it's just not able to pivot anymore. Paul Yeah. Have you read the innovator's dilemma, a famous book on this topic? It's exactly that. It's like the graph with the hard drives or something. They get better and better at making the big heart, but no one wants that anymore because some other thing in the market will change. So for now, the space has moved so quickly that even though it has been like, whatever, 15 years or so, it's a long time, but it's moved so quickly that I think people only just recently have started to really get restless for second guessing. The whole is Bitcoin. I think the other thing is, it's very hard to understand Bitcoin for some reason. It seems like hard drives or something is easier to understand, or even like reusable rockets or something. The core ideas are easier to understand of, just like how much hard drive space, the cost, it's like, so indirect where it's about freedom of speech. So I think this is harder for people to understand why an idea is good. Doug So, I mean, you're, you're running around. You're, you're, you're sounding the alarms on this. Paul Yeah. Doug You think it's gonna, it's going to lead to a change. You think you get it to the point where people are like, all right, let's do it. Let's add drive chains. Paul I think my short term goal is just to try know, you have to break up the stigma a little bit whenever you do something like this, where, you know, most people don't agree. Like, if I go on Twitter with all my Bitcoin friends and audience and whatever, and I say, whatever, Bitcoin is doing the wrong thing, you know, that most people will not agree with that. They only want to hear about how everything's gone great. So you just have to get a couple of people to say it, and then you can get more people to say it, and then there will be more people who are in some kind of position where they're low on the totem pole, but they deserve to rise. And those people need like a mission and a cause. They need something to show their high merit. And people such as yourself or someone who's more on the fringe of Bitcoin in an altcoin land, those people. So I think the short term goal is to kind of just get the ideas out there and just say, listen, I'm not going to go along with this sinking ship, and we need to care about the user. So I think that you just get that out there at first, and then I think we will try to put out. We're working on the software all the time, but it is getting to a point where I think lots of people can use it, like the drive chain test software. So we have like a test signet. I think that will do a lot of the talking. Also, because many, many projects in the space, they don't put anything out. It's just vaporware or stuff is very hard to describe, or stuff is debatable, like in person. But then when the actual software is there, a lot of that becomes like a moot point, because it's like, here it is, here's the software. So I think those are the short term goals and long term, I think something like drivechain is inevitable, actually. I think I just don't know if it will be like Bitcoin, adding it happily or begrudgingly, or if something else will take over the space which will eventually happen. If we neglect the needs of the end user enough, it will eventually lead to the death of the project. I think that is, to me, not only is that straightforward, I think to me it is almost like that's the thing we can be most certain of out of everything. Doug Yeah. I mean, the market is going to react, right? If it's not doing what the market needs, they're going to go somewhere else. Once again, a story as old as time. Paul A lot of people have contempt for the user, and they think they can get away with that because they say store value is used. Investing in it is buying and owning the stock is being a customer of whatever, which is not true, or it's true in a very misleading sense. But that will be really hard when there is something that a billion people in India use every day, and then those people are not going to be listening when you go up to them and you say, oh, you should buy Bitcoin because it has a really high price, and then they'll say, is it like thing that they use every day? Let's say it's Monero, just for fun. Is it like Monero? And they're like, yes, the thing that people use every day, that will be money to them, and everything else will not be money. They are mutually exclusive. So they're all locked in a battle royale. Only one coin will emerge. I think. I'm pretty confident that the others may exist, but they'll exist in the fringe. They'll exist in the same way that tokens on BTC or on Ethereum will exist. They'll have a market cap that is one one-hundred-thousandth, or that is more like something for fun, ithica dollars or something. Doug So you do think it's going to be more of a one coin to rule them all? Paul I do, yeah. Doug Which is why drive chain makes sense, right? Because you have this one protocol and then you have the drive chains coming off of it that are doing all. Paul You have all the different blockchains, all the different protocols, but with just one coin, 21 million coins, but like, as many blockchains as are needed, of all shapes and sizes. I think that what we've had is the demand for blockchains of all shapes and sizes, including a privacy shape. That is what has led to the endurance of the altcoins. So that's what people want, is they want to customize the software and they want to continue to improve and develop the software, make progress with the software. That's why altcoins have hung around for as long as they have, and why we have things, Solana, Aptos, these other. So I think that demand is real, but I just don't think people want to live in a world that has all these different altcoins. At the end of the day, it's not like you go to the supermarket and you take out banana coin and you buy some bananas, and then you take out tomato coin and you buy some tomatoes, right? People just don't like that. They'd find that annoying. That would be like speaking a different language every time you want to buy bananas, you have to speak whatever, like Haitian Creole or something. Doug Yeah. One protocol to rule them all certainly makes sense, especially when it comes to money, right? It makes sense for that more than almost anything else. Paul The fear of losing the investment. Why would you want. You don't want to stick with a very small. If you're in like the lowest percentile of use, you would be afraid. You'd say, this could go to zero, and who would care? Because no one's using it. Whereas if you say, I'm holding the US dollar, you would say, oh, it would go to zero, and who would care? You'd be like, wait a minute. Many extremely important people and the entire US armed forces, like lots of people, would care. So then you think, okay, but if you're in a small one, you think, oh, this goes to zero. Who will shed a tear for me in my feather coin or whatever? Doug And to be clear, while you're one coin to rule them all, you don't think that Bitcoin has proven that it's 100% the winner at this point, that's still up for debate. Paul But again, there's a big current situation. It's a night and day contrast between, I say, one coin to rule them all, but I separate completely the asset from the technology stack. I think they have very little to do with each other. So it's really the Utxo set that Satoshi started. He achieved a minimum viable amount of usefulness that's indisputed. So the technology got us to square one. And then from then on, it was just the Bitcoin utxo set, which is like a binding social glue that held everyone together for a long era. And then as an open source technology, it was supposed to be the case that if people wanted to use Bitcoin a different way, such as Vitalik, with Turing complete scripts, they should have been able, should have been allowed and encouraged to do so. But instead, there was no side chains back then. 2013, 2014. And so the fact that Bitcoin, like Bitcoin right now, it does very well as being the oldest coin it is the one with the most key people, is the US dollar of crypto. In terms of being just the biggest and therefore the most powerful network effect. The tech stack is what you cannot. The tech stack cannot. Yeah. Right now, in its current form, the tech stack will not be. Is not the winning form for Bitcoin because it can't be used by only a small number of people could use it at all, even on the lightning network. Right. Doug And because of that, ultimately it can lose its lead, as being the Utxo set can also end up failing in terms of its social contract. Because at some point, people will just leave the ship. Paul Yes. And of course, it can contain the wrong people. So if the wrong people buy, they will drag it down. The wrong people buy in. Doug Are you currently considering other protocols as perhaps being able to compete with Bitcoin for being the one protocol or. You're not there yet. Paul Anyway, I was hoping that as an impartial, I was a small blocker, but I was hoping that what would happen would be that Bitcoin cash would be a good competitor and that would get BTC to sort of shape up a little bit. It's kind of like if you have someone who's lazy and you want them to compete, then they have a rival. You know what I mean? Maybe they take you in this scenario, the user is like a beautiful woman or something, and then there's only one guy on the island, but then the second guy will show up and then they have to fight. Maybe not each other, but they have to. Doug Like they're both doing pull ups. They're both doing push ups. Paul Exactly, right, exactly. But instead what happened was Bitcoin cash, I think, was not run very well, I think you guys think I'm mean to Bitcoin or BTC or I'm mean to Monero. I'm mean to everyone. I think Bitcoin cash made so many mistakes that were foreseeable and that were just. But nonetheless, they are a competitor, they're another person. But I think so far it has been very weak, is what I'm trying to say. And so I hope that someone arrives who can compete better. So far it's been very weak. Most of the stuff is just either complete scam or it's something like, again, I hate to be whatever you might want to call it with this, maybe I could try to be more indirect about it. But a16z owns like a huge chunk of that out of the gate and stuff like that is like, okay, think about their payoff matrix, their head, like a16z. They want to lock in like a ten x or a 20 x and then get out. So that's why Salana was the way it was. Now it's something where it starts off, they don't care a lot about the long run, full node cost. They want to just blast out a bunch of parties, networking events, which is exactly what they did, marketing stuff. And this is great. And I would even say that the scam phase is almost like a necessary bootloading. It is a kind of stepping stone. But yeah, you can't necessarily trust people who launch an altcoin. But Ricardo Spogni did a great job with Monero, with the whole don't. This is the don't buy Monero. He's the opposite of the CEO. He's like, don't talk about the stock price. And just kicked all those people out of the culture, which is why it at least got some respect for me. I don't know what that's worth in the long run in the grand scheme of things, but I know a lot of people felt that way. The Bitcoin uncensored crew kind of all felt that way, that they were like, this project is about the only one that is about something. But Bitcoin cash was about something too. But I thought they were about the large blocker version of Bitcoin. And it would have been very good for the end user to have two people who each woke up every day to development teams or other leadership teams or just communities, whatever you want to call it. They would wake up every day worrying about, am I going to lose more people to the other? You want two political parties that fight chumpetarian battle, this epic battle, like in whatever. There's another word for it in the UK also, but we have Joseph Schumpeter in the US, so this kind of struggle over the people's opinion, that would be great. But instead, is that making some sense? Doug Democracy created in a furnace? Right? Paul Yeah. Do you think that we have a great. I mean, like, Ethereum is clearly the competitor to BTC, but Ethereum is very weird also. They're trying so many things, it's almost like it hasn't agreed to just nail itself down to one idea. It's kind of just saying we're going to keep changing things until we flip. Bitcoin, I guess, is kind of like the overall philosophy, which I think there's some merit to that as a strategy, but I think it's just, well, Ethereum has a very shady origin. People argue about, to what extent does that matter? I think now, as time goes on, it matters less and less. I think that's clear. It used to matter an awful lot. Doug Yeah. So how about Monero then? Where do you put Monero? Do you see it as a potential competitor to be the global utility for digital cash? Paul I do, but I think the one size fits all thing is tough for anything to work. The side chain idea is the key idea for me because I'm so interested in the side chain really supercharges the competition idea. So like the BIP 300 type idea, it says you can have everyone. You're even more afraid because you run subchain number six, the Manero privacy chain. But then next to you is the zcash chain. And this is all just with BTC, and the user can just move at the drop of a hat and they don't lose any value. There's no exchange rate risk. So I want more competition. I think Monero has. Caring about privacy is an important strength. And I would almost say that every instance where Monero suffers as a result. You could hold it up as saying exchanges and stuff. And you could say this is a real, we don't do what other people want us to do, we do what we want to do, take it or leave it. And that would be like. I think that's actually very attractive in the metaphor of the island. People are simping basically and Monero is just like this. And look, this is what you get, okay, right? Definitely the darknet markets is a sign of hope and also a canary in the coal mine for BTC. The fact that so many people drop that use case and that Monero clings onto it. The challenge is, can you convert that? That's like a wedge you've jumped in. And I think just the timing is difficult, like being an old altcoin, paradoxically is this is where on Monday, Wednesday, Friday I say such and such, and then on Tuesday, Thursday I say something else. But it's like, I think being an old altcoin is kind of tough because Bitcoin has such a center of gravity in the past that now it kind of looks like there's a bunch of people who own a bunch of Monero and it's kind of like, I don't know, it'd be hard to... Doug That tail emission, which kind of... Paul People care far too much about that, but I think that does. People would always be thinking like, will someone fork Monero and just delete the tail emission? And then we'll have to compare... Doug I'm saying the tail emission plays into the "Well, there's always new coins coming out", right? So if you're showing up and being like, I don't want to be part of this project where it's owned, but there's a couple of guys that have all the coins... Paul Miss the boat, the idea of missing the boat, I think that's important. You need more than there's a well known result in game theory and in political science about an interest based coalition usually is not enough. So in other words, if everyone is in the coalition just because it happens to be better for them right now, that usually fails to even form. And what do I mean by that? What am I talking about? The coalition needs like moral glue to hold itself together. So it needs to be based on things that are a large number of people can agree with and understand over a long shifting time horizon where you say something like, people get into the law, they care about fairness, they care about people being treated fair, like the late justice lady with the blindfold and the scales. And it's hard to get everyone to agree. It'll become like Hatfield versus McCoy very easily. If you don't have someone saying, this is what we all, all of us should do, because it's hard enough. There's going to be criminals and defectors, like anarchists of the bad kind, violent anarchists. There'll be people who just. Or just people who are low on the totem pole and they want to shake things up. Like a communist, subversive communist, just anything. Like the chaos climbers they're sometimes called. Ever since, I think. Was it no opinion wrote that post about, like, Peter Baelish from Game of Thrones. The chaos is a ladder guy. Doug I missed that. Paul You have no idea what I'm talking. Like, some people, they know his only chance to take the Iron Throne is if he causes, like, a lot of mayhem indirectly. And then you always have those people. So it's really hard to hold any coalition together. And this crypto blockchain stuff, you have to form, like, a community. And so it's difficult when you have people who feel like they'll never be able to join. They'll feel like it's not fair. And I think people would feel that way for something like Monero. Maybe you disagree. They'll show up and they'll say, Monero. It was so obscure for. So how could I possibly have found out about it? Until now, I only heard about Bitcoin, and now I found out this thing, and now all the coins have been mined already. I would almost say that people need to either do utxo fork of Bitcoin and swap the technology in, or start over completely from scratch. Knowing that, you could say, now, I think there'd be appetite for someone to say something like our number one coin. Bitcoin is sort of failing us. So there's time for a new thing. Of course, when you launch that new thing, then people launch a whole network. Doug That's. That's like, invalidating the concept of network effect, but it's difficult. I get what you're saying, but like I said, I think there's a few things to think about there, right? Like, Monero does have a tail emission, which. So all the coins haven't been mined, right. There's always new coins that are going to be emitted, which I understand that, but I think the other major point is just its utility, right? So you're looking at it from the. Or you're describing it from the mindset of an investment, right? People want to be part of this thing that they join, where if they join early enough, it turns into more money, which is literally what Bitcoin is the only thing it's pitched at at this point, which is becoming troubling, because even if that is the case, it could only ten x so many more times, right when you reach global... Paul I did this math in a blog post once. Doug Why are new people going to enter for making a ton of money off of it if it's only going to two x at some point? Right when we arrive at that point? But with Monero, or just a digital cash, it's not even about what is the price? Is it going to be worth more tomorrow? It's. I need this thing to perform some function on the Internet, and there's nothing else that allows me to do that but this tool. So I think that will overcome this idea of. Oh, wait, but it's an old thing. Paul Well, you're right. It's a mix. The weird thing, it is a mix, and it's very difficult to untangle. So, like, the QWERTY keyboard is not the optimal keyboard layout. It's kind of absurd. But because people got used to it, the network effects won over. In that case, if you think network effects are the most. I think network effects are very important, as we've mentioned, but they can't be totally important, because if they were overwhelming, then the US dollar would just eventually become the currency of everything, which that is slowly happening in the fiat world. But it's also the case that these fiat currencies are all slowly committing suicide, or rapidly in some cases, committing suicide. Doug The other point too is it takes time to. It's not just network effect, but it's also people gaining trust in this utility for the function that it's proposed to perform. If new XYZ coin comes out tomorrow, new fangled technology, it's even more private than Monero. Yes, Monero has a network effect, and it's also proven itself... Paul It has to be known to have that property. Doug Proven to work for those purposes. Right. Paul So, yeah, I think that's perfectly true. I think the advice would be to focus completely on the end user experience and try to dial it up as much as possible, even to the point of, like, the privacy use case is very big because there is a lot of stuff that people would prefer to be hidden, and it's also differentiating because so few people will actually go for it. The main people who do go, so few suppliers, suppliers of crypto. I mean, I'm talking about like Zcash, where it's great technology, but their organization is sort of weird. And so it is an ambiguous state. Doug So back to the drive chains then knowing that these all coins have already blossomed right, because of Bitcoin stagnating and not evolving if drive chains happened five years ago, three years ago maybe it would have stymied some of that development but these ships have already sailed and they're building their own network effects and they're building their own momentum does drive chains adding it to this point at Bitcoin, is it potentially not as impactful as what you may think or originally thought it would? All altcoins then shift over or is there something? Paul I don't think that they would but it's about the usage as you were saying just a moment ago where you would now be able to use Bitcoin for the. You'd have a Bitcoin XMR address or something and if you wanted to send Bitcoin in that format you would be able to and then probably as the new darknet market they would probably like first they'd have support for both XMR it would start to drift back slowly I think most of the big reason why, yeah, people use altcoins is because of their genuine love of novelty and even of technology so many of people are you have like a kind of a barbell where you have a lot of people, the dGen gambler people who are just flipping it and they couldn't care what it does, in fact, if it does nothing almost the better like the NFT, you know what I mean? The dumber it is, the better they want whatever they want it to be like sheep, right? It's a gamble, they're having fun and it is literally entertainment it is literally gambling it's not like a gamble the way most people use the word where they say it's like a rit they say no, it's like literally they're going to the casino and having fun so that you have that on the one hand of the barbell on the other hand you have it just like people just enjoy making things they enjoy making software I don't believe that a lot of these are like someone is tinkering around with the software they think why shouldn't this exist? They make it maybe they give themselves a bunch of coins but I think even that would not those are like the ultra high turnover those are like the terrible coins you pre mine... the coins that actually make it into like the top 50 they have some kind of angle they have some kind of novelty to them. Even something like NXT which is ancient and it had a 100% pre mine, but it was like the first thing to do, you know what I mean? It had a genuine novel. So I think it honestly represents human creativity to some extent. Not as much as I would like, because what I would prefer is that everyone compete in launching side chains. They don't have the baggage of a new coin, and they can just write whatever software they want. So I think, actually, the creativity has been clamped down. We have two huge forces that interact, open source software, allowing enormous creativity. And then we have the network effects of money and the fact that most altcoins are scams. That baggage is the network effects are suppressing the creativity. The network effects is, in some sense, a prison for someone who has a good idea, but they have no way of getting it. What would you do if you had a great idea for improving Monero, but for some reason, it's just not happening? Like, you just can't convince whatever the right four or five people. Well, now the network effect has screwed the world. It makes it worse for the world, because we can't get that idea into the world now. Doug Come build drive chains for Monero, man. Paul Yeah. One thing I'd like to emphasize to anyone who is interested in this topic of, because I get pitched on this a lot, they say, take your drive chain thing. Almost all of the actual computation, like the actual engineering work in the user experience, and the hard stuff that happens on the L2, necessarily. To make it on Bitcoin, the L1 part is very simple, so it's basically an integer that counts to 13,000. It's a little bit more than that, but the l one part is simple, and the l two is the one that watches all these messages and interprets them. So anyone who adds BIP 300 to their L1, they should be able to just copy and paste our entire suite of side chains that we have made and use them on. So if anyone adds BIP 300 to Monero, which is the easy part, I'm saying, I want to stress this is, like, less than 1% of the total amount of software engineering that me and layer two labs has done. If you add BIP 300 to Monero, you can then copy and paste the side chain you can use. We made a fork of zcash. We made a fork of Ethereum. It's just Ethereum, just with the L1 coin. Doug Yeah, but adding that BIP, right? I mean, Monero is a completely different chain than Bitcoin, right? Paul Yes, but there are some smart people that I've known that were associated with Manero, they could read and understand the BIP, which is the actual BIP part, is not that part. Not that hard. All this conversation about BIP 300 is about these indirect effects, which is all just a bunch of either concern trolling or sour grapes or some other kind of nonsense. It's all, take it from me, that's all just. It's just anything that counts to 13,000. And the way it works is by offering miners fees on these chains, they say, listen, you're going to get. Eventually, one or more of these side chains is going to be generating fees. And that's why you should support the withdrawal system. And that's just in a nutshell. That's the idea. The l one part is easy to code, I think. Yeah, I don't know. Doug That might have even been proposed at some point in Monero. I mean, there's like other layer, two ideas that have been proposed. There's merge mining that's taking place with Monero or will take place. Tari is being designed to merge mine with Monero. Darkfi is announced that they'll be merge mining with Monero. But just because something merge mines with it doesn't mean it's connected to it in a drivechain like way. Right? I mean, those are two separate concepts, right? Paul They are. They actually split them into two BIPs because I thought it would make it easier for people to understand. I'm not sure if I succeeded in that or not. But BIP 301 is about a refinement to merge mining, and BiP 300 is the deposits and withdrawals. And these are two completely different things that unfortunately, people get confused an awful lot. But merge mining was invented by Satoshi in 2010, and it has been in continuous use on Bitcoin ever since. Doug Namecoin was the first. Was namecoin merge mined? Paul Namecoin was the first merge mined coin and the first altcoin also. Yes, so invented by Satoshi, the altcoiner. But what I'm trying to say is merge mining just means that when you find a block of one, you find a block of more one or more other chains. That's very easy to do. In fact, it cannot even be stopped. It's one counterintuitive property of merge mining is that it's the new coin that the miners point to, and they make the new block. In a way, that part of that block is a valid block. So there's nothing that you can even do to stop merge mining. It's a fascinating, the fact that this, it's kind of an amazing piece of technology. And the fact that it's even possible is fascinating. And the fact that it is not only possible, but unpreventable is also kind of just one of the great whimsical kind of concepts of Bitcoin. Because it's kind of like you have a train and you clip on more freight train, you clip on more coal, and the train speeds up or something. It's like. It's bizarre. The miners don't do any additional work, and they get all the fees on all the chains that already exists. I have a refinement of it. Blind merge mining. That basically makes it so the miners don't need to be the ones who run the software. A middleman can run the software, and just. They bid. People bid over one transaction. That is the block. And so the entire sum of the transaction fees in the block just becomes one single l one transaction. And that actually includes. Takes care of all this mev stuff also, because the middleman will just do all of that, and you have competition so the miners will never get cut out. Yes. 301 is a completely separate thing. The deposits and withdrawals are BIP 300. Doug Right. Paul BIP 301 is not even that. I don't even think it's that important because I don't even think any of these. The Bitcoin technical community believes a lot of entrenched myths that are not true, and this causes them to like people's view on ordinals and Luke's mining pool and stuff. This unfortunately leads to a lot of malnvestment and a lot of wasted time and concentration, unfortunately. Doug Yeah. The merge mining, I think, is fantastic. I'd love to see more of that on Monero, making Monero more profitable to mine. I mean, that's one of the "problems" in Monero. Right. It's not all that profitable to go mine. I mean, if you can merge mine with a bunch of other projects where there's no skin off your back for doing it, it's like, it's a no brainer. Right. Paul Right. Doug So then back to that question. So why didn't Bitcoin cash adopt drivechains? Paul I don't know. I think they probably would if they certainly people suggested. I think maybe I'm not correctly understanding. To me, it's very easy to just add drive chain to something, I think. But I think a lot of people think that the founder is the only one. Only Jeremy Rubin could add CTV 119 to something. They really think that's the case. Even though all the time you get random 16 year old hacker person can just add x to y. I don't know. I think maybe people don't want to do it. I'm not sure about that. I think with the large blocker people, I think it depends on what you think the problem is. Because if you think I have a problem, there's an infinite number of things you can do about that problem, right? So I think the Bitcoin cash people just thought, these tech people are a bunch of obstructionists, and as soon as we get rid of them, we'll get more merchant adoption, we'll get more people. Raising the block size with the hard fork, they would say, is really not a big deal. So we can just do it again whenever we need to. Longest proof of work. Proof of work will decide, even if it doesn't, the spin off coins just give everyone free money, so it doesn't matter. And I think that that's what they think the problem was. They think the problem was having the obstructionists and sort of bad agents there. I think maybe if I were them, if I were in charge of Bitcoin cash, it depends on what time period am I going to be put in. If I'm going to be put in in 2017, I would have made a lot of changes in the past. I would have said, instead of just stealth launching in August, we'll give people like, six months worth of notice. We'll say, we are hard forking into a new project. Here are the reasons why. Here's what we plan to do in the future. You know what I mean? Basically, you put out a resume, you're going to compete. You say, listen, I will split off from this person, and this is what we're all about. Said it was a little disorganized. If I'm put in charge of Bitcoin cash today, then probably the first thing I would do would be add drive chain, move all the Bitcoin cash stuff to its own chain, move, like downgrade or reshift backwards, shift the L1 to be BTC, and then shrink the block size. I'd say you have a smaller block size on L1 larger block size on Bitcoin cash. I would add all these side chains that I think are great, whatever, zcash, monero, et cetera. I'd add them in, but I would do that. But you see, that's just my view of what the optimal configuration is. So it doesn't really answer your question as to why they didn't do it. Doug Right. I could see Litecoin doing it. Did they add confidential? Paul They added confidential, yeah, they added a mimble wimble extension block. Paul Yeah, I think Litecoin could do it. There is another more practical reason though, which is that not until recently, like we had test software, but it was based on an old version, version 16, and Bitcoin is now on version 25 26. So I never really had something that was very easy to merge, even to BTC. And Bitcoin cash diverged from it. So it wasn't like they could just click. I have test software, but I never really put out something that would be easy for people to just copy and paste. And this is interesting, kind of like why did I never do that? I think it was really because I kind of thought people have to understand the idea first and then they can help write the software. Or where I really thought was back when I wrote the post, I thought I'll just put out this idea in English. I'll say this is what should be done. And then someone who's more of a specialist in c plus plus or more of a specialist in Bitcoin core, they will do it, they will implement it whatever way they think is best. And that's to be the best of all the world. I have this idea, this reasoning for why a counterintuitive idea is in fact the best L2. So I kind of never did that. And even today, what I have is not, but very recent, very soon I have something very special coming, which is the core untouched soft fork CUSF. And this will make it very easy for any l one to add bit 300. Because what it does is it adds it in a way where the underlying L1 software is not modified at all. The 51% hash rate. Run a new program alongside latest version of Bitcoin core. And it's simply once that gets going, it should actually be easy to swap out Bitcoin core for even like Monero full node and then just kind of see what breaks and then tune it up. And then it will be very easy for anyone to add. It should be very easy for anyone to add. I don't want to say very easy, but certain things will change because you have to scan the whole block the second. But other than that, it'll just be someone doing the work of taking the bit 300. It'll no longer be like right now. It's like a lock that's always morphing and a key that's always morphing. They kind of like morph together all the time. Because Bitcoin core is constantly changing, adding new, doing, rebasing and all this other junk in there. It's hard for the BIP 300 pull request into Bitcoin core to also be stable. But when I do this core untouched soft fork idea, it will be independent now of the changes to the underlying L1, and also the amount of the BIP 300 part of that, that will also stop changing. It will be just the Bitcoin version of that. And so then it would be possible for someone to build a Monero version of that, and then you should just be able to plug it all together and then it should work. So there's too many things changing. Another network effect prison is the community of GitHub maintainers or something. You have to deal with whatever changes are made or not made. Doug Would you ever be down to talk with devs in the Monero community about these kinds? Paul Yeah, of course. No, absolutely. Doug I think that would be exciting. Or maybe we could get you to attend a Monero conference and talk in person with. Paul I mean, I don't know, I kind of got a lot on my plate. Doug I'm sure you do, and you're focused. So I just want to get it out there, because I love the direction this conversation has gone and all these things we spoke about. And I think if people really want to get into the nitty gritty with the tech, there's tons of videos of you out there talking about drive chains. So I didn't really focus on that. But if you can just kind of summarize, what is the main argument against Bitcoin core? Adding it other than these? Paul No, they have such a poor understanding of it that I think it's not. I have steel man. There's the two that are most popular, which is this "miners can steal" argument. And then there's this, like, "it affects mining incentives". But those are arguments are so bad that they almost shouldn't be steelmanned, because they are actually. But those are the popular ones. Doug I thought like Peter Todd was making a node argument like that. Paul It's effectively Peter Todd fails to draw the all important distinction between the L1 node cost and the cost of L1 plus L2. It's desired that the people running the side chain, they want to run more software, so they want more. The problem is just that everyone doesn't want more. And if you just let anyone do anything, the problem with Bitcoin Sv, everyone must run the largest block size, in effect, or Solana. Although from what I've heard, Solana has done a very good job of software engineering. And even though they have super large, super frequent blocks, they brought the cost down, but everyone must do the biggest thing. The whole side chain idea is that everyone does the smallest thing, and then people opt into whatever else they want. That's kind of like everyone's going out to eat at a restaurant. Bitcoin sv. It's like whatever food, whoever orders the most food, everyone has to order that, and everyone has to eat all of it and pay for it. Doug I could tell you are very hungry by the way all your analogies involve food restaurants. I so sorry about that. Go ahead. Paul Everyone has to eat the most. And then with something like when you have a very small block l one, but no side chains, it's like everyone can only have the least, so someone just orders soup and nothing else. Everyone has to have that and pay for that. Peter knows that with side chains, you're allowed to go onto networks that have more expensive, you're allowed to order more food, you have the soup, but then you're allowed to order fish and chips or whatever. But then he mistakenly complains, even though he should know better. He complains and says, well, that's bad, because basically his version of the argument is something like, if that's the type of thing most people have for dinner, then it's weird because he draws it into the mining world. He believes multiple self contradictory, wrong things. So even to steel man, him almost gives him too much credit as well. But he thinks something like mining, in order to be competitive, miners will have to run the side chain nodes, which means that each node is net giving more money to miners. But he says that this has increased their costs, even though it increased their profits. If it increased their costs, they just do nothing. They say, like, the optimal miner will shift to one who does all these chains, and the node will be very expensive to run. Like it'd be very expensive to run the solana chain. He's totally uninterested in the fact that BIP 301 means that the middleman could do that for you and then reduce the cost of that to zero. He's also uninterested in the fact that the actual software costs are microscopic percentage of miners total costs to the point where the whole conversation is inane. But he also, on top of that, he believes the falsehood that it's impossible to defer. He actually contradicts himself on this point as well. But he thinks in order to be a new miner, you have to run a node of the side chain, so it's upfront cost. That's not true. But it's also the case that you could defer to a pool that has existed for 30 years that just runs all the nodes. He says that's bad, but he wants to have it all different ways at once. It's bad if they shirk the cost, it's bad if they have to pay the cost. It's bad if they don't have to pay the cost. So it's all just a bunch of nonsense. What it really means is that he hasn't spent any time looking into the idea, just that at Baltic Honey Badger in September, he said no one's written code for this. Even though the software had been out for the zcash sidechain that we had made had been out for two and a half years at that point. So he never visited Drivechain.info. He knows basically nothing about the idea. Before he went on to me to do the debate at TABconf, he tweeted out that he was like, "well, I don't really know how this works, so I'll have to ask Paul some questions." Live on stage or like. But that's like the number one critic of the idea hasn't visited the website and doesn't even know that the software exists. So the whole thing has become kind of a travesty of what should happen. Because then downstream from him, a lot of people assume that he knows what he's talking about, which he doesn't at all. Doug Well, maybe this pushes you into putting drive chains on Monero. Paul I certainly love to. If people want to do it, I will advise. I have kind of a lot that I'm doing. The whole point of eventing drive chain was to make Bitcoin be able to do all the altcoin things so that we wouldn't need the altcoins. So it's a little bit, but that being the case, like I said, competition is good. So if we had Monero out there doing really well, that would be one of the things that would stimulate BTC to say, "why aren't we doing this? We could do this." Doug Drive chains would effectively solve... You could interface with anything else. Paul Right. Doug So that would also kind of eliminate lightning as well. Right. That would be the solution there as well, because now you would be using some side chain for quick, easy, fast transactions. Paul Yeah, I think I've written a post called thunder where I compare lightning to what it would be like if you just had large block side chains, BIP 300 side chains. And I think that lightning has enormous disadvantages that the large block side chain doesn't have, especially because plenty of people are willing to run the node cost is really not even that high for all the transactions in the world. It is high, but it is like thousands, $2,000 a year or something, for like a huge blockchain that has huge numbers of block 1gb blocks, which is, we're nowhere near needing that kind of like that kind of capacity. And there's about a trillion transactions, 1.1 trillion transactions on earth last year. And it grows by, it doubles every five or six years. So if this were $0.10 worth of revenue, be $110,000,000,000 in revenue for miners every year, and that number would double every five or six years, because it's an absolutely huge amount of money. But even that is, we're talking for that kind of money. The node cost is like $2,000 a year. And the bandwidth would be very difficult to hide. So the privacy would be challenging. But you have like zcash, you have Monero side chain for that. You have all these people would move in when they want to mix the coins or whatever you want to call it. For certain use cases, they would use a certain chain, but then for everyday payments, they would use the chain that was just optimized for, you know what I'm trying to say? Optimized for just quick, eaMy usage, or even optimized for some transparency. The key is that it has to be the program that allows people to convert freely from the private coins to the non private. Can't be like an exchange or something where it would be, but as long as you have the convertibility, they're really all of them, they're all private privacy coins that have just chosen temporarily to be in a revealed state. And then they could go back at any time. And that's already what every privacy coin, you could post screenshots of your wallet and say, I have this much Monero, you could always reveal. Doug So you touched on it before lightning, not really living up to its potential as well. And now you're talking about side chain. Potentially a large block, big block. Side chain can potentially do the job of LN better than what LN is doing. Can you just give us more insight there into your thoughts about LN? Paul It has become like a Frankenstein's monster type of a thing, where a lot of people look the other way, or just thought that it would be figured out later? It's funny, lightning is very similar to what Ethereum in 2015 was like, where it was like they had all these very serious problems, and everyone was like. Vitalika said he will fix it. That was the answer. You're always here. I just think most people don't use it. They use custodial lightning, which is not lightning. It's just something else that has been labeled lightning. But when you get to a point where people don't even care about that, it's kind of like, is it even worth it to explain to these people why they are wrong since they're not even at square one? They didn't even realize that they're not using lightning. They just think... Doug What do you see as being the main failings of lightning? Paul I think a problem with lightning is that you need a two of two multi sig output on L1 just to join. So you already need to broadcast a lot of stuff on L1 for every single person who joins. You could say maybe they join, but then they don't need to touch L1 ever again, which is optimistic. But that drawback is big because you need to get everyone in. Everyone has to join at some point. So the biggest scaling bottleneck is the most important one is the onboarding. It actually doesn't matter. It would actually be kind of nice if it was a. It would be good for the project, hypothetically, if you could somehow, if it was some kind of, like, roach motel where you can onboard everyone and then they can't transact, but they're on board, but they're too late. They're already in the network or something. That would be kind of, like, better from an adoption point of view, because you got 8 billion people in somehow. I'm not suggesting that that's possible. I'm just saying trying to draw a contrast on this dimension of not being able to onboard. Well, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play. Doug Critical flaw? Is there any way to overcome it? Paul You think there are ways? Ironically, BIP 300 and CTV are the biggest ways of onboarding people to lightning with fewer L1 bytes, but they are the ones that are the most held up. They're held up for years and years. Both of them were in a quasi published state since 2018. And so I don't know, but I think there is something else, which is that not only do you need L1 bytes, but also your recourse involves touching L1. Not so with BIP 300, you have a market based recourse where you can sell the coins. You can say, I can't get these coins back to L1, but does anyone want to buy them? And you could sell them to people who would be able to get them to L1, and then you would think maybe they'll probably sell for, like, something, and so the whole thing will probably still work out okay, because you can combine them on L2, fuse them, and then have one guy bring, like, 100,000 coins back over so it's a little more loose. And I just think that loose is good, because being tight, lightning is too obsessed with being able to give people their coins back on L1, even if the fee situation doesn't make sense. So the byte cost is a big issue. You can't make it down to l one. So the fact that lightning guarantees you get your coins back on l one, that guarantee doesn't make sense. If the payment is for $7 or $10 and the fees are $10, then it's useless. So that is the core security model, but it does not survive in a high fee environment. HDLCs are useless. Doug Do you think there's also a potential issue with securing the main chain as people move over to LN? Paul Yes. The fees cannot be too mismatched without causing either conflict or vertical integration. So if the miners, like I was saying before, 110,000,000,000 a year in revenue for miners, if you get every transaction and they're all $0.10, which I think is. That's napkin math, but I think that's something. That's some number we can. And that's 110,000,000,000 last year, and then it have doubled to 220,000,000,000 in five years, based on the current trend of just how many transactions there are on earth. So in a world where instead of going to miners, that all goes to, like, ln supernode or the arc supernode or whatever you want to call it, on L2, the miners are only getting less than 1% of that. The miners are going to say, well, we're going to write our own lightning stuff for our own arc supernode. When it's the miners doing it, the security model collapses completely. All these covenants will fall apart, including lightning will fall apart if your counterparty is 51% hash rate. So either they'll vertically integrate or there'll be some conflict, because the miners will say, listen, you guys get all this money? We are the ones we mine with the channel open and the channel closed and the justice transaction. So they'll say, we're going to hold these hostage, or we'll start up our own thing. Either conflict or vertical integration. The vertical integration, both are terrible in the same way. The vertical integration, like I said, the whole model of the lightning network is that you have the justice transaction, you take it to L1. If someone cheats you, if you can censor the justice, 51% hash rate can censor the justice transaction. So at that point, the whole security model of lightning is nonexistent and all the coins are just given to the miners, which is ironic because that's where BIP 300 starts. But then we added a bunch of safety guardrails on top of that to make it work, which you wouldn't have in lightning or covenant. So I think the fact that the fees mismatch if all the fees are paid on the L2 and none of it filters down to the miners, that makes it a huge disadvantage relative to drive chain, where basically 100%, 99.99% of the. Because people could bid. As long as there's two people bidding, and as long as one of them prefers having a little bit of money to having nothing, it will basically just be the cost of doing the bid minus the whole value. So it's like 99.99% of the value will go automatically to the miners on L1 in return for doing absolutely nothing. They just mine the l one transactions that pay the highest fee, they do exactly what they normally would do. So that is another big edge for my project. So I think that my project is the best in that dimension. Also, I think you're absolutely 100% correct that you have to think about the fee revenue. The fee revenue is important. Luckily, before ordinals and before this new price run up, I think many miners, Bitcoin miners, were on the verge of bankruptcy or in bankruptcy. You could look up Marathon's cash balance sheet. You could see it was 300 million, 200 million, 90 million. You could see it's like. But then people, of course, the price is up now. So the ordinal stuff happened. The ordinal stuff screwed up lightning technology, and it also screwed up the social fabric where all these people now hate each other instead of everyone working together to make the project a success, fighting over the fees. So I think that's a very important point. Doug What's your overall take on ordinals? Do you think they don't belong on Bitcoin or let the things play out. Paul The way they shocked that more people don't take it for granted that whoever pays the most for the block space is the rightful owner, right? So that is obvious to me. And if you don't allow them to get what they want via op return or something in a tidy, organized way, I don't even think there really should be standardness rules. If you are standing in people's way, they're going to get what they want in some other way. You know what I mean? Like when did that ever work where they say, well, let them eat cake or something? Especially you either do something about the people's problem. What if a friend comes to you with a problem? You say, listen, you could try to say, listen, I don't want to get involved with that, but maybe all that happens is you just lost a friend. It's like people don't want, they're coming to you because you can't become part of the problem. Then they'll just say, well, I don't like that anymore. So the idea that we had this way opera and we had this other ways of people getting what they want, the fact that that is breaking down is also bad in other ways. I think in a sane world there would just be specialized sidechain that we have made called bit asset sidechain where people issue coins and they just write whatever they have, whatever they want. They have club you and your golf league and make a coin and whatever you give it to your friends. Paul, coin or whatever. So there would just be that, and that activity would just be over there and then there. The fact that it generates fees would be correctly interpreted as making a sale to the customer, like doing what the user wants. So we would be happy about it and it would be giving revenue to miners, you'd be using it. There wouldn't be this tug of war over like, is it a good thing? It would just be. Yes, it is a good thing. And this is the part of this is why the strategy of trying to police what happens on the blockchain is doomed to failure and why it stimulates all the altcoins being created in the first place and why side chains are a good idea. So it's all the same. Doug Yep, yep. Paul, thank you so much, man. Thanks for being a trooper. I know you're hungry. On you hanging in. This is amazing. Really loved it. Greatly appreciate all the work, all the contributions you've made to the space and you take time to be on the show. Thank you. Paul Thank you. Doug All right, man. Anything you want to put out there, any last words? Paul I don't know. Go to Drivechain.info and actually run this test software if you want to comment and if you want to see how just. It's an interesting social experiment. All these people commenting on Drivechain and clearly have no idea how it works. Absurd myths about they have never run the software, they've never visited Drivechain.info, so at least visit the site if you want to read the true star. We'll read the FAQ and then comment about it. Doug If some higher level devs are really interested in what we were discussing here and how possibly drive chains could be implemented on Monero, what's the best way to engage in those conversations with you? Paul Join the Telegram dcinsiders. t.me/dcinsiders. It's a just hang out and discuss it there and wait. I would just wait probably till the end of January we finish this core untouched software, who know software always takes longer than you would think. But I would wait for that and then I would get very cool. Doug Very cool. Paul, thank you so much, man. Paul Okay. Hey, thanks. Doug Cheers. Paul Have a good one.