Title: S12 E7: Dr. Maxim Orlovsky on RGB Layer 3 Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea) Guest(s): Dr. Maxim Orlovsky (LNP/BP Standards Association; principal designer of RGB) Published: 2022-11-02 Duration: 41:31 Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2022-11-02_s12_e7_maxim_orlovsky_on_rgb_layer_3.mp3 Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2022-11-02_s12_e7_maxim_orlovsky_on_rgb_layer_3.mp3 Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against the YouTube video's automatic captions (word-level diff) and a full local small.en re-transcription with word timestamps, with 103 doubtful, dropped, truncated or looping stretches re-transcribed locally from short audio clips (small.en, because the transcription pipeline running on the same machine left too little memory for medium.en; 43 of them re-run with shifted/tighter clip boundaries, VAD and/or a custom prompt). Removed a hallucinated "Thanks for watching!" over the intro music. Speaker labels fixed using local speaker-embedding similarity scores (TitaNet) and by hand (Vlad Costea, Maxim Orlovsky; the pre-recorded sponsor reads, including the Vaultoro customer testimonial, are labeled Ad voiceover). Several short turns the base transcript had merged were split out (e.g. Vlad's "Save the children" and "Philosopher's stone" interjections, his Counterparty/Omni question at 00:02:51, the Taro question at 00:25:40, and the closing "It scales all the scams" line, which is Vlad's, not Maxim's). Names and jargon checked against the title, the feed metadata and the web (RGB, client-side validation, Peter Todd, Giacomo Zucco, LNP/BP Standards Association, Hojo Foundation, Storm, Bifrost, Prometheus, Lightning Labs, Taro/Taproot Assets and its CMYK internal name, LND, PTLCs, Schnorr signatures, Taproot, Counterparty, Omni, ERC-20, Rare Pepes, Ukrainian Bitcoin Foundation, Baltic Honeybadger (Riga), tail emission, Vaultoro, Wasabi Wallet/WabiSabi, Maison Maachi). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual and wording slips by speakers are kept as spoken (e.g. Maxim's "LNP/BP Standards Foundation", "block subsidiary", "the ancestors" for descendants, "Riga Honeybadger" for Baltic Honeybadger). Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess]. ================================================================================ [00:00:50] Vlad Costea: Hi there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I'm sitting here in Riga in the working space next to Dr. Maxim Orlovsky. And he's doctor-doctor because he has two doctorates and one is in actual medicine, right? [00:01:04] Maxim Orlovsky: Yes, correct. [00:01:05] Vlad Costea: And what's the other one? [00:01:07] Maxim Orlovsky: And the other one is the PhD in neuroscience. [00:01:12] Vlad Costea: Impressive. Yet he is working on RGB, which is something that's built on top of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin. And it's something that can bring all the stablecoins, all the Rare Pepes, all the what some people call shitcoins on top of Lightning. [00:01:27] Maxim Orlovsky: Hopefully not. Yes, well, theoretically, it could, of course, people if they want that. The market, as Giacomo said, who is one of the ideologies behind the RGB, the market asked for the scam. And so we are here to deliver. [00:01:44] Vlad Costea: The market asked for the scam. Okay. What does RGB stand for? Is it red, green, blue? [00:01:52] Maxim Orlovsky: Oh, no, no, no, absolutely not. Yeah, it's clearly the really good thing for Bitcoin. RGB really good for Bitcoin. Nothing to do with the colors. Nothing. [00:02:04] Vlad Costea: But I guess you can do an RGB logo for it and have neons. They're pretty fashionable today in computer parts. [00:02:11] Maxim Orlovsky: I was joking. Of course, it's about RGB. The original thing was about the colors. [00:02:16] Vlad Costea: Colors. [00:02:17] Maxim Orlovsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but later people were asking what it's about, what RGB means. Like RGB, you don't know, you're in the computer world, you don't know what RGB means. Like red, blue, red, green, blue. Yeah, red, green, blue. And people know, well, what is it? Like really good for Bitcoin. Yeah, that's how the meme begins. So you can think about RGB being really good for Bitcoin and not the colors as a kind of joke. [00:02:46] Like, yes, obviously it's about the colors. [00:02:51] Vlad Costea: How is RGB different from something like Counterparty or Omni? [00:02:56] Maxim Orlovsky: Hopefully it's absolutely different. But the reality is that it's not. So, well, the whole idea probably I would take this question as a chance of telling the story about the RGB, how it started. And the whole idea of RGB started with, well, there were several sources. The main route which we all consider the main route is the Peter Todd's research on timestamps and how actually the blockchain is bad. Many people understood that quite quickly, even before the blockchain was extracted from Bitcoin as a meme for everybody starting doing blockchain to solve all the world's problems. [00:03:39] For instance, you can, for instance, treat cancer with blockchain. And of course, you can explore external planets with blockchain. And also the blockchain is kind of, yeah, it's ultimate power. [00:03:54] Vlad Costea: Save the children. [00:03:55] Maxim Orlovsky: Yeah, ultimate power. So Bitcoin was really bad for everybody. And if you extract blockchain from out of Bitcoin, it becomes like the source of the pure light that can, like a philosophical stone, that can treat... [00:04:10] Vlad Costea: Philosopher's stone. [00:04:12] Maxim Orlovsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can treat people, can like build a better future and everything. So that was the core concept those days. We are talking about 2014 up to 2016, this emergence of the idea of blockchain changing the world. [00:04:29] And at the same time, Peter Todd, who is a great skeptic of our times, I would say, and he was thinking that the blockchain is the source of the, I wouldn't say evil, because I like evil. It's a source of all the bullshit, literally what it is. And he was looking into because blockchain, in fact, in a scientific way, it has a lot of problems. The main problem is scalability. The whole idea of blockchain that everybody does everything and that everybody does everything doesn't scale. Literally, you reduce the number of everybody or you reduce the number of everything. [00:05:10] So otherwise, you wouldn't be able to run this system, as Ethereum has shown successfully. And one of the main successes of Ethereum is actually showing this, that it's not the case that everybody can do everything. You will just reduce the number of everybody's, which is what Ethereum does today. Or previously, they can try to reduce the number of everything that can be done with Ethereum. But anyway. And Peter said that, like, forget about blockchain. The blockchain is just the needed bad thing to doing good things. And we have to reduce the use of blockchain as much as possible. [00:05:54] And he invented this concept of client-side validation. And that's a really great concept. Is it okay that I'm elaborating? Client-side validation, yes. Client-side validation. And the concept is very beautiful. He never formulated like that, because Peter Todd is not just about being skeptical. He is also about formulating everything in the least understandable way. And he formulated that in mathematical terms. But the attempts to understand what really Peter Todd meant led the people, like me and Giacomo and others, to say that client-side validation is about that only parties involved in a certain contract have to validate that contract. [00:06:43] And that's pretty simple. Like, if we have an agreement of something, like, I owe you a coffee this evening. Why people around us have to validate that proof? That's bullshit. Like, it's a contract between us. I owe you a coffee. You have to trust me that I will fulfill my promise. Or you can say, oh, I don't trust you. Can you give me a stake? Like, give me a cost of coffee right now. And then I will use it to pay for the coffee. But in fact, it would be you buying me a coffee, which would be an escrow. [00:07:15] Not an escrow. It would be a staked contract. Or we can choose an escrow. Like, I gave him five bucks because I trust him. You trust him. I gave him five bucks. And he will pay for the coffee later when we will have it. So that's a smart contract, actually. Well, it's not a smart contract. It's a contract. Because it's not yet smart. And neither of us are smart, anyway. [00:07:43] Otherwise we wouldn't be born as humans. [00:07:49] And that actually does not require blockchain. We don't need the smart contract between us to be put on the blockchain. And Peter was the first who understood that, actually. Well, why Bitcoin is then on blockchain? Well, the reason is that money is the smart contract across all the people. And that's why you need, actually, blockchain. And blockchain is a really bad thing. Like, very nasty. But because we need it for common good, let's use it, as always. Like, we always do the nasty things for the common good. [00:08:25] And that was the case how blockchain appeared in Bitcoin. I deliberately do that in very, like, I'm joking. I'm kind of putting the things that people believe to be the other way into the form that will shift their understanding of the core concepts in these kind of jokes. Of course, Bitcoin is a very good thing, a very advanced thing. And blockchain in Bitcoin is quite useful. But I would like you to start thinking that, in fact, blockchain is not something that strengthens Bitcoin. Bitcoin needed blockchain to have its qualities, censorship resistance, and being a contract across all the people, across the economy. [00:09:14] That's what the monetary system is. And there was no better way than blockchain. But if there were a better way, of course, it's better to use the better way than the blockchain. Because the blockchain is really non-scalable, public, non-really preserving privacy, and it has a lot, a lot, a lot of drawbacks. So Peter thought, like, let's remove everything that we can remove out of blockchain and make things a little bit better. So that's the concept of client-side validation. So if we have a contract not involving all the parties, let's have this contract only between the parties. [00:09:50] Vlad Costea: Is Lightning client-side validation? [00:09:52] Maxim Orlovsky: That's another, like, Lightning is a bit different, but it follows the same line of thoughts. So again, Peter, he contributed a lot to the early development of the ideas behind the Lightning Network. And the idea is pretty much the same. However, I would say that Lightning still relies on the global consensus. While with the client-side validation, you may even remove the whole concept of the global consensus, theoretically. So it's a bit different. Lightning uses client-side data, not validation. Because the validation fails back to the global consensus. [00:10:36] Here in client-side validation, you have client-side data plus client-side validation, where you validate. The idea is not that we just keep the contract between ourselves, which is called client-side data. The idea is that we validate the contract between ourselves. So if you see that I violated the contract, you don't need any other party for you to prove that I violated the contract. Like, if I didn't pay for your coffee, you don't need to tell the whole world about that unless you would like to have a PR. [00:11:07] But basically, for you, the fact that I violated and haven't paid the coffee is your knowledge. You don't need blockchain for that. Unlike in Lightning Network, if I violated the channel between us, you have to appeal to the court or the blockchain, to the whole world to settle the violation of the contract. So Lightning Network is not exactly client-side validation. It's based on the similar ideas, but it's client-side data plus blockchain global consensus-side validation. [00:11:38] Vlad Costea: That's good. [00:11:55] Ad voiceover: After Mt. Gox collapsed, that was really the precipice of me saying, right, this has to change. We need a totally transparent exchanging system and base it on gold instead of fiat. Vaultoro is the hard money exchange which helps you beat inflation with instant swaps between the best stores of value known to man, gold and Bitcoin. Unlike most exchanges, Vaultoro understands the importance of transparency and security. All gold holdings are secured in top-tier Swiss private vaults and fully insured against theft, fire and more. Maximize your purchasing power today by going to vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover. [00:12:42] This is not financial advice, but gold has been humankind's most reliable store of value in the last 6,000 years. Do your own research. Use promotion code TAKEOVER for a one-time bonus of 1 gram of gold for the first 50 new customers buying gold with Bitcoin. [00:13:09] Are you concerned that your friends, neighbors or KYC exchange might know how much Bitcoin you own? It is time to take your financial privacy seriously with Wasabi Wallet. A free and open source wallet solution which makes use of mega CoinJoins to mix your coins with those of hundreds of other strangers. Thanks to the groundbreaking WabiSabi engine, your coins get divided in smaller untraceable units which grant you great anonymity for both hodling and spending. Download Wasabi Wallet 2.0 today at wasabiwallet.io and take advantage of the mega CoinJoins. [00:13:55] It's free and it's open source, so don't trust, verify. [00:14:18] What are you going to wear when Bitcoin hits $1 million? The same old $20 t-shirt? Try Maison Maachi, the designer clothes made in Paris by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. They're not your average mass-produced sweatshop clothes. Maachi will ask for your measurements and tailor every piece of clothing according to the shape of your body, so you always look and feel great in your t-shirt, hoodie or dress. It's all made in France by real artisans who also happen to be Bitcoiners. Which is why Maison Maachi only accepts Bitcoin as payment for their clothes. [00:15:02] Get a Maison Maachi t-shirt or hoodie today, it might even help you find a girlfriend. And once you do get a girlfriend, you can also buy her Maison Maachi dress. Stop having fun looking poor and check out maisonmaachi.com. That's m-a-i-s-o-n-m-a-a-c-h-i dot com. [00:15:33] Vlad Costea: Once again, what is RGB? [00:15:36] Maxim Orlovsky: And RGB is basically Giacomo Zucco, he saw all these Ethereum guys making shit a lot ton of money on the Ethereum. He saw that, like, I'm Bitcoin maxi, I have to do some money, so I need to invent a way how I can bring the shitcoins and ICOs to Bitcoin, while at the same time criticizing it. And that's how RGB appeared. Sorry, of course I'm joking. And the reality was a little bit different. So there is a clear demand, the market gave a clear demand for, one may say for a scam, but the reality is that the market has demand for financial contracts. [00:16:20] So that's my take on what Giacomo Zucco, it was Peter Todd as a primary father of the idea, and then Giacomo Zucco came and shaped it into a product-type protocols thing. And they did a prototype in 2016 and the idea was at that day that we will make colored coins on Lightning. So Peter Todd with a client-side validation, Giacomo Zucco, who actually is very good at business analyst and everything like that, he was constantly asked how we can do proper coins on Bitcoin, proper tokens on Bitcoin. [00:16:55] And he said like, okay, if you need it, that's the way to do it. So he invented this concept of RGB, which is a colored coin, so that's why RGB is a colors, but on the Lightning. How to do it properly? Of course, nobody will care and will do a scam using that technology. He understood that, but at least he can describe how to do it properly. And they did a prototype and in 2019, I discovered, like we knew Giacomo for some time, but I needed a smart contracting system that can scale. [00:17:33] So I decided to join that project and the funny idea why I needed a smart contracting system that could scale is because of my medical background. And my medical background was always combined with [unclear: information] technology, so I was looking into artificial intelligence and my idea. I was also very excited with Bitcoin. I was trying to extract blockchain out of Bitcoin, so I came to Bitcoin in 2013. And we did a Ukrainian Bitcoin Foundation those days, working with the government and saying that yes, Bitcoin is cool, but let's extract blockchain from Bitcoin and do some governmental registries and the rest of bullshit, which is much worse than ICOs and shitcoins. [00:18:14] But I was really believing into that. And eventually I came to the understanding that the real value proposition is censorship resistance. And soon we will be all doomed because all the computation is monopolized by large cloud companies like Amazon and Google and IBM, Microsoft. So they will be censored. Eventually they will be censored. And we need not just Bitcoin as money, but we need a distributed computational system that can run very high load computing like machine learning. And because I was very interested in artificial intelligence, I thought those days, it was 2017, let's put machine learning on blockchain. [00:18:56] That's a pretty cool idea. And I even thought of doing an ICO on that. I was stupid. I was really thinking about implementing the technology with the [unclear: four] funds I will raise from ICO. And at the end of the day, I met Giacomo, and he explained me why this is a bullshit of doing ICO and raising the funds. He said, you can raise like 10 millions and that's all, like maybe 50 millions and that's all. You need billions, so let's do something larger. I'm joking, he didn't say that. [00:19:29] But it was the way I was getting it. And I understood that, yes, you can do something that wouldn't work once and then you will struggle to do something more large scale. And I have very large ambitions on that. So those days I was doing the machine learning on top of Ethereum. I was serious about that. We did the protocol. It was called Prometheus and it's still called Prometheus. So on Ethereum, it didn't scale. You can serve like two or three clients. And I understood that censorship resistance, first of all, is not about Ethereum. [00:20:01] And the second, you can't do something scalable on Ethereum. So I started looking for different things and I found this RGB concept of Giacomo. And Giacomo said, it's just about colored coins on Lightning. Like, we can put coins on Lightning. But I wasn't interested about the tokens on Lightning because he already RGB-pilled me about the stuff that you can't do in ICO. Like, that's a bullshit. The ICO is a bullshit. So you have to do something larger. Why do you need to bring this kind of tokens to Lightning? [00:20:31] Let's do a full smart contract so now you can fool people not just into doing an ICO but into doing a DeFi on Lightning. That's much more interesting. You can raise much more money. You can do larger scam. So we decided to make scam scalable. So that's the RGB. And bringing the ability of smart contracts to Lightning is about scaling the scam. Much larger than you can imagine with Ethereum. Sorry of being constantly mixing the serious stuff with the jokes. [00:21:05] Vlad Costea: [unclear: You used RGB-pilled] and I was thinking, what do you get when you combine red and green and blue? I think you get a shade of blue. So you got blue-pilled. [00:21:13] Maxim Orlovsky: Yeah, something like that. Yes, yes. How to use the humanity's race to the stars. And if the humanity is [unclear: fool], just take all the money and use them to build the ships. [00:21:26] Anyway, coming back to the serious matter. So I thought that it is possible to do the smart contracts with RGB, with this concept of client-side validation. I didn't know how this is exactly possible, but I had those feelings. And I didn't have a technology that allows you to do the scalable computing on top of Bitcoin and Lightning, which is the only way of doing it censorship resistant. So you have a censorship resistant system, but you don't have a scalability when you need a Turing completeness. And that's why I said, let's do the RGB. [00:21:59] Let's put my time and everything that I have into trying to convert RGB into a smart contract system, not just coins on Lightning, which is not interesting at all. So in 2019, we reshaped it together with Giacomo into what we call LNP/BP Standards Foundation. We claim that we are not doing just RGB. We are doing an ecosystem of layer two and layer three technologies on top of what exists today, on top of Bitcoin as it is, on top of Lightning, maybe modifying Lightning, but not requiring any soft forks from Bitcoin. [00:22:40] We take it as granted what it is there, and we try to do as much as possible complexity in layers above. Layer two, layer three, and designing those layers up to running the full-fledged computational system storage, decentralized storage and everything, without introducing tokens when it is not needed. And the fact that it is always not needed, literally always. [00:23:07] So in 2019, probably I already have the authority to say that the RGB was transformed. And of course, this idea had a very strong opposition from many in the Bitcoin sphere, including Giacomo himself. He admits that. Because the only thing they need is just bringing tokens, some tokens like stablecoins, into Bitcoin to solve certain temporary needs. And at least not doing that with a Counterparty, but at least doing that over the Lightning in some scalable and reasonable way. Well, I wasn't interested in that. And for the first year, we had very good funding. [00:23:47] We had very good funders, which provided funding. Nothing to the scale of ICO, but still funding to this open-source initiative of nonprofit LNP/BP Standards Association. [00:24:04] But, like, the initial concept at that time, I'm taking over the development of the thing, and I'm doing it the way that I see a future. And the future is smart contracting on Bitcoin. And in one year, we came to the crisis where I was continuing doing it as a smart contracting thing, but nobody actually needed that. So we switched to a different model where I was funding it from my pocket for another year or so. And then we got other guys from Bitcoin ecosystem called Hojo Foundation who provided the funds to... [00:24:41] They recognized the need of smart contracting and they provided the funds for another year such that we ran to the position where we are today. And that position is a shift of the original concept of bringing colored coin to the Lightning, to the concept of bringing full-fledged smart contracting to the Lightning. And it's not only about RGB, which is a client-side validation, but it's also a combination of RGB with a data storage and propagation layer on top of Lightning Network, which we call Storm. [00:25:10] And the upgraded Lightning Network itself, supporting Taproot, multi-peer channels, and everything, Schnorr signatures, pay to elliptic curve point, PTLCs, and everything of that sort, which we call the Bifrost. So taking this together, you finally can do everything that you can do with Ethereum, and even more, in a scalable way on top of Lightning, on top of Bitcoin, without introducing a new token. So that's what RGB today is about. [00:25:40] Vlad Costea: So I know that Lightning Labs introduced Taro, which I heard is very similar with RGB. And Taro seems to have more funding or something, it seems to have better financing. [00:25:51] Maxim Orlovsky: Yeah, it's a bit out of the way. [00:25:53] Vlad Costea: I need to ask you, I don't want to know too much of the background stuff, but technically, how are they different, RGB and Taro? [00:26:01] Maxim Orlovsky: Well, the internal name for the Taro was CMYK, "smick", the different color scheme. And it says more than anything that I can say. So internally, the Lightning Labs named, you can see in the public document, the Taro protocol as CMYK protocol. And we've been in talk for more than a year, they showed interest to RGB, they were really looking into putting it into R&D until they just eventually disappeared. They came with this CMYK protocol, renaming it last moment into the Taro and raising 60 millions for that. [00:26:35] Well, I haven't seen no code. We released the protocol with a reference implementation and so on already. So I think that says everything. This is the full answer to your question. They raised 60 or 70 whatever million funds on the idea that we had. Not citing, not referencing to Giacomo, to Peter Todd's work they used, not saying about my stuff. And raised millions on that, called it Taro and now trying to do something but still not having a single line of code. Pretty normal to Lightning Labs, I would say. [00:27:12] Vlad Costea: That's so mean. Even though I think Peter Todd likes Lightning Labs because they did LND and he runs that, but that's a different product. [00:27:20] Maxim Orlovsky: I wouldn't say that he likes Lightning Labs. The fact that he's using their software is not express of his emotions regarding them. [00:27:28] Vlad Costea: Okay. So, what's going on? Why doesn't it get any traction right now? What doesn't it? RGB. Does it need to have a good user interface or what do you think it needs to replace Counterparty, to replace ERC-20 tokens, to get that kind of mass adoption? [00:27:47] Maxim Orlovsky: I have no idea. Like, I literally is not interested in that because, like, are you satisfied with the interface of TCP/IP? Like, it's really very user interface rich, user experience nice thing when you specify the IP router, DNS servers in the IPv6 addresses. Like, do you satisfied with that? When the last time you did that? What I mean is that the protocol level... [00:28:19] Vlad Costea: [unclear: 2004] or something. [00:28:21] Maxim Orlovsky: The protocol level is not about the user interface, user experience or anything like that. It's about scalability, privacy, censorship resistance and not about user interface. And I'm not any moment worried about the adoption rate, users using it and everything like that because I was doing this system for myself. That's why I put my money into this as well. Oh, actually my money at the end of the day. And I just need a censorship resistance system where I can express more complex thing than just a Bitcoin as a money. [00:28:58] Because I'm not satisfied with just having Bitcoin as a money. I need contracts. I need contracts. I need shares of the companies. I need loans. I need [unclear: bonds]. I need investments. I need future contracts. I need options. And you can't do that with just Bitcoin as well as you can't even at the time. So the gold standard, he was not able to do the same thing with the gold. If you have a merchant, if you have a guy who do the bread and he needs corn or [unclear: weed]. [00:29:33] No, no, no, not [unclear: weed], wheat. He also needs wheat probably. Yeah, that's the thing. And if he sell the bread today, he need to be sure that he would be able to buy this wheat tomorrow at the price that contains his margin. And that's how future contracts appeared. Can you do that with the gold? We can try. Now you need a contract additional to gold. Bound to the gold, but it's a contract. It's a financial contract. It's called futures. And in the same way you can't do that with the Bitcoin. [00:30:05] And if you are going to run the economy, the circular economy, whatever the name is given by the community to this thing, you wouldn't be able to do that without the smart contracts. And today there are no smart contracts capable of doing such things on Bitcoin. Not saying about Lightning. And this is the only way of doing the smart contracts is the stuff that we did with RGB as of today. If Taro will do that, but even the claim that they have, they are actually doing some Taro assets, like not smart contracting, like something. [00:30:37] At least they are probably doing what they have already understood and learned from us. So that's okay probably. But it is not the solution to the problem I am talking about. And that's basically why I did this RGB smart contracts. And we have a great panel on this conference, Riga Honeybadger, the last one where we had Giacomo, Peter Todd and others. [00:31:03] Vlad Costea: You mean this year or the previous edition? [00:31:06] Maxim Orlovsky: No, no, this year. This year. Where they discussed unpopular opinions about Bitcoin. And what I like is that Giacomo said exactly what I mean here. Is that the whole question about tail emission or total supply or fees or block subsidiary or all these questions. The only thing that is important. Is there a market demand for censorship resistant solution? Not just money. Censorship resistant solutions. If there is, the Bitcoin block space will be used and paid for. If there is no, we can't do anything about it. And it's done. Like the world will never be a world of sovereign individuals or anything like that. [00:31:58] There is no demand for that. You have no demand for paying for your sovereignty. You have no demand for paying for your freedom. And that's why you wouldn't have a sovereignty and freedom. No, not yet. Well, then the ancestors will have to invent something new probably and fight for that with their blood to get that freedom and get that censorship resistance. But for Bitcoin it's done. Not for Bitcoin. For all the people who trust it and to Bitcoin it's done. The same applies for RGB. If there is no demand for censorship resistance, neither censorship resistant money will be in demand nor censorship resistant smart contracts or contracts or financial contracts will be in demand. [00:32:38] And it's all done. So I don't need to build an adoption of something that is not required. Either people do need it and there is no other way of doing that, like Bitcoin or RGB. Or they would like to speculate that Ethereum is the perfect example and then eventually there will be a guy with a gun coming to them and saying that that's all. And they say, okay, yeah, of course it's a governance. On-chain governance projected into a physical world. We are fine with that. And that's all of the story. [00:33:06] Vlad Costea: So I have to ask you, is there documentation about how to use RGB and issue assets on it or is it ready to be used by users? [00:33:15] Maxim Orlovsky: No, it's not ready to be used by users. We released the protocol and the reference implementation this July after three years of development, the final stage of development. And from now on, we are starting building tools for the users to use it. So the protocol is finalized. But it's about protocols. You can think about it as a Bitcoin Core, even without the [unclear: wallet and the] user interface. So it's nothing that can be used by the end users. So the next layer is to build the user ability to use that. [00:33:50] And we will try to do that in the way that will promote the proper usage and increase the threshold which is required to issue an ICO on this. [00:34:01] Vlad Costea: What is the best way to follow the development and figure out when this is ready to be used by the average token creators? [00:34:10] Maxim Orlovsky: Well, the best way is to go into GitHub, read the code, submit issues, PRs, get into reviews and all that stuff. But I assume it's not working for everyone. So probably the Telegram group we have, which is called RGB something, and YouTube channel. We have developer's calls each two weeks. We had them until August, where just we have a small break and then these conferences happen. So you can join the developer's calls which are announced on Telegram and then they are recorded on YouTube. And there is plenty of YouTube videos explaining all the aspects of RGB which can be also watched. [00:34:55] We will work on the documentation and more user-facing stuff this autumn. Or if we will get some funding because we all run out of costs and we are actually looking for the funding. And this is a thing that is not an investment. It wouldn't pay for itself. It would just support the further advancement of RGB but will have no other return to the people who gave money other than the satisfaction that they contributed to Bitcoin being developed. [00:35:30] And we have, like, yesterday I thought about having this as a joke, but it's not a joke. It's a sad reality. I would like to use RGB to... The first asset I would like to do on the RGB would be a fungible collectible. Let's do these two bullshits, like tokens and NFTs, together and do something intermixed. Everybody who contributed financially to doing RGB, they get this financial collectible. It says that your funds will be never returned back. So it's collectible. It's not an investment. [00:36:05] But it is fungible across those donors. So I, for instance, contributed $100 or $100,000. And now I am in need. I don't have money. I can sell half of that for the nominal price to another guy. And he now can say that he contributed to the development, but much later, but still contributed. So that's probably one of the last things we will do if we would have any funds to complete this story. We will just do this as a jokingly scam. You can invest with a guaranteed non-return on investments into NFT, which is not NFT, but an ICO, which is not an ICO. [00:36:49] Like, the actual, frankly speaking, the situation is really not happy because literally to complete what we did, the technological level is completed, we need some interest from Bitcoin community and industry supporting this while it shows no interest at all. [00:37:08] Vlad Costea: Well, after this podcast, maybe some VCs are listening and they're going to be like, client-side validation. This sounds good. It scales. It's fast. It's inexpensive to transact. It scales all the scams, like, it's really good. Okay, Maxim. Thank you very much for this interview. I look forward to seeing the future of RGB. [00:37:29] Maxim Orlovsky: Thank you very much for inviting me here. [00:37:31] Vlad Costea: And I look forward to creating Rare Pepes on it. [00:37:33] Maxim Orlovsky: Thank you. That would be the second asset we will do. [00:37:53] Ad voiceover: After Mt. Gox collapsed, that was really the precipice of me saying, right, this has to change. We need a totally transparent exchanging system and base it on gold instead of fiat. Vaultoro is the hard money exchange which helps you beat inflation with instant swaps between the best stores of value known to man, gold and Bitcoin. Unlike most exchanges, Vaultoro understands the importance of transparency and security. All gold holdings are secured in top-tier Swiss private vaults and fully insured against theft, fire and more. Maximize your purchasing power today by going to vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover. This is not financial advice, but gold has been humankind's most reliable store of value in the last 6,000 years. Do your own research. [00:38:50] Use promotion code TAKEOVER for a one-time bonus of 1 gram of gold for the first 50 new customers buying gold with Bitcoin. [00:39:07] Are you concerned that your friends, neighbors or KYC exchange might know how much Bitcoin you own? It is time to take your financial privacy seriously with Wasabi Wallet. A free and open source wallet solution which makes use of mega CoinJoins to mix your coins with those of hundreds of other strangers. Thanks to the groundbreaking WabiSabi engine, your coins get divided in smaller untraceable units which grant you great anonymity for both hodling and spending. Download Wasabi Wallet 2.0 today at wasabiwallet.io and take advantage of the mega CoinJoins. [00:39:53] It's free and it's open source, so don't trust, verify. [00:40:16] What are you going to wear when Bitcoin hits $1 million? The same old $20 t-shirt? Try Maison Maachi, the designer clothes made in Paris by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. They're not your average mass-produced sweatshop clothes. Maachi will ask for your measurements and tailor every piece of clothing according to the shape of your body, so you always look and feel great in your t-shirt, hoodie or dress. It's all made in France by real artisans who also happen to be Bitcoiners, which is why Maison Maachi only accepts Bitcoin as payment for their clothes. [00:41:00] Get a Maison Maachi t-shirt or hoodie today, it might even help you find a girlfriend. And once you do get a girlfriend, you can also buy her Maison Maachi dress. Stop having fun looking poor and check out maisonmaachi.com. That's m-a-i-s-o-n-m-a-a-c-h-i dot com.