Title: S15 E40: Rijndael on Taproot Wizards & BIP420
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Rijndael (rot13maxi on Twitter/X; CTO of Taproot Wizards)
Published: 2024-05-31
Duration: 1:46:51
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2024-05-31_s15_e40_rijndael_on_taproot_wizards_bip420.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2024-05-31_s15_e40_rijndael_on_taproot_wizards_bip420.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against the YouTube livestream's automatic captions (word-level diff) and a full local small.en re-transcription with word timestamps, with 98 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; 20 of them re-run with shifted clip boundaries and/or VAD). Restored passages the base transcript had dropped (e.g. "STARKs really only rely on having a good hash function" at 00:32:46 and the "rug pulls ... bridges between layer one Bitcoin and layer two" passage at 01:31:30) and removed a hallucinated "Thanks for watching" at 01:09:56. Speaker labels fixed by hand (Vlad Costea, Rijndael); Vlad reads the sponsor messages live, so there is no Ad voiceover in this episode. Names and jargon checked against the show notes and the web (Taproot Wizards, Quantum Cats, CatVM/catvm.org, OP_CAT/BIP-347 authors Ethan Heilman and Armin Sabouri, BIP420, Udi Wertheimer, Bitkey/Block, Jack Dorsey, Ledger, BitBox02, Coldcard, Wasabi Wallet/WabiSabi/zkSNACKs, JoinMarket, SideShift.ai, Hodling.ch, LayerTwo Labs, Paul Sztorc, drivechains/BIP300/hashrate escrow, fiatjaf, Nostr, zap.stream, npub, RTMP, Mercury Layer/statechains, Nicholas Gregory, Tom Trevethan, Rootstock, Zcash, Foundry, Blockstream, RGB, Giacomo Zucco, Craig Wright, Ethereum Foundation, StarkWare, Eli Ben-Sasson, STARKs/SNARKs, ZKPs, Electrum/SPV, IBD, Brandon Black, Rearden, Casey Rodarmor, Hell Money, vbytes, Chaumian eCash, HTLC, LSP, Stacks/Blockstack/sBTC/Proof of Transfer, Lisp, Polygon, Tether/Bitfinex, Liquid/L-BTC, Liquidium, DLCs, Michael Tidwell/TABConf, CTV, LNHANCE, TXHASH, TAPLEAF_UPDATE_VERIFY, Schnorr, Andrew Poelstra, Bitcoin Cash, Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin Inquisition/signet, BitVM, Rusty Russell, bitcoin++, Great Script Restoration, Ocean, Stratum V2, Bitcoin Mechanic, Bitcoin Knots/datacarriersize, Antminer S19, STAMPs, Bitcoin Purifier/geld.sh, Deus vult, Grubles, ChatGPT, Claude, UASF, Runes, Counterparty, OP_RETURN, ord, Xverse, Leather, OKX, UniSat, Sparrow Wallet, Bitcoin Core, David Bailey/BTC Media/Bitcoin Magazine, Ross Ulbricht, Toyota Supra, Bugatti, confidential transactions, silent payments, Lightning Labs/Taproot Assets, Peter Todd/OpenTimestamps, sign-to-contract, pay-to-script-hash, SegWit, Dogecoin, dogwifhat, BIP341). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken (e.g. Vlad's "1940" for Romania's declaration of war on the United States, Paul Sztorc's "Peter McRetard" joke as read by Vlad). Viewer nicknames read from the livestream chat (AC, Terry M., test, Tiggs, Wartime Psychopath) are spelled as heard. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].

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[00:00:46] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to season 15, episode 40 of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is a very special one because it's the first time when we are streaming this across other platforms. We already were streaming on Twitter/X and on YouTube, but now we have added Nostr so you guys can zap it. We have also added a bunch of others like Facebook and Twitch. And it's a very interesting experiment to see which platform gets most views over the next 90 minutes. The guest today is Rijndael. Rijndael is the CTO of Taproot Wizards and I perceive Taproot Wizards as being mostly a meme factory type of organization.

[00:01:27] I don't know why they need a CTO. I don't know what they're doing out there. It's very obscure and that's why we got Rijndael right here. So it's good to have you, Rijndael.

[00:01:38] Rijndael: Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.

[00:01:40] Vlad Costea: So tell me more about Taproot Wizards. What is this about and don't you think that this is sort of a waste of your talent?

[00:01:53] Rijndael: Yeah, great question. So we do a couple different things. I'd say the focus of the company is we're, you know, trying to help make Bitcoin magical. Bitcoin is already quite magical, but I think we probably think that it can be more magical. We do that in a number of ways. You know, what people probably know us for most of all is we've made two inscription collections. Inscriptions are like NFTs on Bitcoin. So we've made two collections. One of them was kind of about Bitcoin culture generally, and then the other one is really about covenants generally and about OP_CAT specifically.

[00:02:41] So, you know, there's a number of products and protocols and services that we think would really be useful for Bitcoiners. We're interested in building some of those. We think other people are interested in building other of those. We think Bitcoin needs something like a general purpose covenant opcode in order to do that. So right now we're spending a lot of time on research and development of, you know, OP_CAT specifically, but also of like protocols and services that use OP_CAT to do new things that either you couldn't really do before or were too difficult to do on Bitcoin.

[00:03:21] So it's like memes are definitely a big part of it, but I think we use memes as a tool to try to help Bitcoin, you know, kind of push forward in the right direction.

[00:03:34] Vlad Costea: Wait, so are you saying that Taproot Wizards is an attack on Bitcoin because you're trying to change Bitcoin and obviously every attempt to improve Bitcoin is also an attack and therefore you are evil? I mean, that's

[00:03:49] Rijndael: Like, one interpretation of it. I'd say, you know, we think that, you know, the conversation around covenants got stuck a little bit. Like people were having the same conversations kind of in a circle about covenants and we thought that by bringing more voices into the conversation and by like having the conversation in a slightly different way, we could like move the conversation along. Whether or not that's been successful, I think reasonable people could disagree about. But yeah, I think that there's a lot of people who want additional expressiveness in Bitcoin, usually to do something covenant-y.

[00:04:35] We're one of them and we're advocating for it and we're doing a lot of R&D to kind of understand what's possible with those upgrades.

[00:04:45] Vlad Costea: I mean, that's interesting, but at the same time, I don't know what to say. Is it really an upgrade? Are you guys three-letter agents? I have heard people simultaneously call you out for being a very smart Bitcoin developer or being a spook. So I'm very torn on this issue. And while you answer to this accusation, which I just launched, could you please retweet this so more people join and know that we are doing this live?

[00:05:12] Rijndael: Yeah, sure. I mean, for one thing, I'd say, like, being a good Bitcoin developer for, like, whatever good means to you and being a spook are not mutually exclusive. I would hope that the three-letter agencies would hire competent developers and they wouldn't hire incompetent developers. So it's totally possible that I'm a spook and a reasonably competent developer. I could sit here and tell you that I'm not a spook, but that's exactly what a spook would say. So I'll just say, yeah, spook and I'm attacking Bitcoin. And that shouldn't really matter, right? If the incentives in Bitcoin work out, then it shouldn't really matter if, you know, three-letter agencies are throwing developers at it should still work. Or if Bitcoin can be [unclear: beaten by] a small number of developers funded by three-letter agencies, then Bitcoin probably isn't going to stand up to other, like, hard government attacks anyway.

[00:06:15] Vlad Costea: Interesting. So what's your background? Because we know a lot about your work since you joined Twitter as rot13maxi, and ROT13 for the record is also a reference to advanced encryption, which you seem to very much like. But what did you do previously? Like you came out of nowhere, apparently?

[00:06:38] Rijndael: Yeah, so I mean, before I started really tweeting about Bitcoin stuff, my background, like my professional work was a combination of distributed systems, security, some amount of what I would call applied cryptography, which is like not doing the math part, but saying, all right, somebody's already figured out all of the hard parts of cryptography, how do we actually like deploy this at scale and make services that people can use out of it. So, you know, some of that work, a lot of like large scale network security, a lot of very large scale infrastructure automation, which infrastructure problems end up kind of reducing down to distributed systems problems.

[00:07:32] So a lot of like distributed state management and making really large systems that are resilient and scalable. At the same time, I was interested in Bitcoin or doing things that were kind of Bitcoin adjacent. And then I started working kind of full time in Bitcoin a couple years ago. And before that, I just worked at large companies that usually had like really stringent like social media or like PR policies. So, you know, the reason why I started tweeting about Bitcoin stuff as, like, a nym was actually just to deal with like corporate PR policies.

[00:08:14] And yeah, you know, so I've been working in full time now in Bitcoin for golly, probably three or four years at this point. Before that, it was mostly like side of desk, you know, little hobbyist projects like make a little web app that accepts Bitcoin or something that like you can pay with Lightning and get, you know, a server or something, you know, things of that nature.

[00:08:43] Vlad Costea: Interesting. I think it was in the other interview that you did. As far as I know, this is the second one that you do under this name, at least. And you mentioned something along the ways of having worked on a non-custodial wallet previously. So previous to joining Taproot Wizards. Can you name which wallet that was?

[00:09:05] Rijndael: Yeah, I think I've said it publicly. Yeah, I was working on Bitkey at Block.

[00:09:13] Vlad Costea: So Bitkey is that hardware wallet by Jack Dorsey?

[00:09:16] Rijndael: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's from Block, which is, you know, Jack is the CEO of Block. When people say it's like Jack Dorsey's wallet, like he wasn't, you know, writing code for it and soldering components together, but it's the Block hardware wallet.

[00:09:31] Vlad Costea: Oh, so how come you never told the guys that it's a bad idea to not have a screen to verify your transactions?

[00:09:40] Rijndael: So I, you know, at the decision, I mean, I don't want to get too much into, sorry, my dog is throwing up behind me now, so I keep looking behind me. So, you know, I don't want to get too much into like internal conversations and like roadmap and stuff. I think, you know, the general, the idea that the team came to that they wanted to, you know, see if it made sense is that screens on hardware wallets only really protect against a very specific and very like narrowly defined threat, which is, you know, you have malware on your phone or on whatever the host device is, that is able to show you know, one address and send a different address to the hardware wallet.

[00:10:44] And so that's like, that's like not a threat that most people are actually going to be exposed to. Like clipboard hijacking malware is like way more common. And if you're exposed to clipboard hijacking malware, then a screen on your device, isn't actually going to save you because like, you know, if you see the wrong address on your phone and the wrong address on your device, and you just compare the two of them together, and they're the same and you sign, then something doing like clipboard hijacking is still going to take all of your money.

[00:11:20] The class of malware that a screen on the device specifically protects against is one where like the wallet app on your phone is targeted and will show you the legitimate address that you're sending to but will actually sign a different transaction, and then send that different transaction to your device. So it's like a very specific class of malware that has to really like target your wallet specifically. Or that piece of software specifically. And the bar for writing that is quite high, and we haven't really seen it in the wild.

[00:11:59] So you know, one of the things that the team was looking at that they wrote about is there might be options in the future to like use other screens that you might have that have uncorrelated attack surfaces to verify transaction details, or to do that with policy. So that was the idea that like, you know, it's like a very narrowly defined threat that you're defending against. And in order to defend against that, you have to put a bunch of complexity in front of users that they might not know what to do with, like most users don't know, you know, what they're looking at, if you just show them transaction details and say, does this look good to you?

[00:12:46] I think what a lot of people end up doing is like, you check the last, you know, four digits of the address or something. And we've seen attacks where people have like, done, like address grinding, to get the last four digits to be the same or something. So I think one of the things that that project is trying to do is figure out like, what are the right practical measures that make security accessible, and don't just like require the user to do a bunch of things that they're going to get wrong and that that ultimately gives them like a false sense of security.

[00:13:22] I don't know if that answers your question or not.

[00:13:25] Vlad Costea: It's a pretty good answer. But I can argue that with about $5 worth of production costs, you could have mitigated many more attacks with that one device. Because if you look at the history of hardware wallets, you're going to find that the first Ledger made the same assumptions that they don't need a screen. And they ended up releasing all of their subsequent versions with a screen. The first BitBox also did not have a screen, and they ended up releasing the BitBox02, just to allow the user to verify transactions.

[00:13:59] So I don't think it's a very, I don't know, maybe that the screen seemed like something antiquated from the design perspective. The way in which I view the Bitkey is that they approach hardware wallets with this idea that they should disrupt what already exists on the market and start with a new mindset. And I don't think that the screen is such an obstacle in your way, and such a factor that increases the production cost of the device and therefore makes it more expensive for the consumer. I think it's a net benefit, and I don't see why it was not included.

[00:14:37] Rijndael: Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing that's, and like you should really, like the Bitkey team likes feedback, I would definitely send your feedback to that team. I think, you know, my mental model for the Bitkey is that it's not the same kind of device as a general purpose hardware wallet. Like I kind of see it as being more of a replacement for a seed phrase. So like, I think you know, a Bitkey plus the Bitkey app on your phone is kind of between a single-sig phone wallet and like having three Coldcards or Ledgers or whatever, like it's not the same level of security as either of those things.

[00:15:22] I think it's kind of between it. I think in the fullness of time, there probably will end up being some out of band transaction detail verification mechanism. But I think figuring out exactly what that looks like for the kinds of customers that that they're serving is difficult. And I think it's a it's a nuanced thing. And like, I'm also not on that team anymore. So I don't really want to comment on like what they may or may not be doing. Like it's not fair for me to do.

[00:15:54] Vlad Costea: Yeah, maybe I should get an interview with someone from Bitkey. Anyway, we are 15 minutes into the episode, which means I have to present some ads. I think today is the last day when you can coinjoin with Wasabi Wallet with the zkSNACKs coordinator. So you better do that for reasons that you know much better than me. And I don't think you're gonna have the same amount of liquidity on a coinjoin coordinator for a long time. So you better FOMO while the fees are still low.

[00:16:21] You better do that or else you're gonna regret this. And I also have to present this new sponsor of the show, which is called SideShift.ai, which is this place where let's say that you got paid for some reason in stablecoins and you're pissed off and you're like, What should I do with this trusted shitcoin? It's supposed to be backed one to one by something else. I don't know if it's backed. I don't want to hold on to it. What should I do with it?

[00:16:48] I don't want to exchange it for fiat. So you can go to SideShift.ai. There is no signup required. There is no KYC that's needed. You just type your Bitcoin address or whatever you want to exchange your stablecoins for. And you're gonna do the shift for a fee, which is pretty low. And it's very convenient because it's without KYC. So check out SideShift.ai. You can swap between Bitcoin and whatever shitcoin you think you want to speculate on, or you can exchange your shitcoins for Bitcoin.

[00:17:20] I'm not gonna judge what you're gonna do with it, but it's pretty cool. Anyway, did you ever use SideShift or Wasabi?

[00:17:28] Rijndael: Yeah, I used both of them. The last time I used SideShift was, I think it was like a year or two ago, I was spending a lot of time playing with Liquid. And for a while SideShift was like the best way to get Bitcoin between kind of L1 and Liquid. And then I played with Wasabi before Wasabi 2. So when it was still like Wasabi 1.whatever. Yeah, I thought it was nice.

[00:17:57] Vlad Costea: Oh, so you haven't actually tried the WabiSabi coinjoins, which have more than 150 inputs?

[00:18:04] Rijndael: No, I haven't. I moved from Wasabi to JoinMarket for a while. And then I stopped coinjoining things.

[00:18:16] Vlad Costea: Okay, I guess you started spending your Bitcoin on inscriptions.

[00:18:21] Rijndael: Yeah. And, you know, like, that or, you know, I also, I had this, you know, thought that, you know, if you buy KYC Bitcoin, coinjoin it and throw it in a hardware wallet. And then, you know, in the future, you want to do something with it. Like, I don't know what the state of chain analysis is going to be, by the time I actually want to move it. So, you know, using coinjoin methods that are like currently being scrutinized a lot, and then not having any way of like undoing that in the future was something that I just didn't have a lot of utility for like, you know, I'm not, I'm not somebody who, like, has to coinjoin in order to use my Bitcoin.

[00:19:16] So, you know, if I need to coinjoin or coinswap or do something else in the future, I'll do it in the future. But I don't need to like preemptively do it now. It's just, you know, either it's going to sit in cold storage, or I'm going to use it on Lightning, or I'm going to use it for inscriptions. And, you know, I'll do transactions with it, like, when I need to do it. But I didn't see the need to like preemptively coinjoin my stuff.

[00:19:44] Vlad Costea: Okay, I like to take pride in the fact that this show has the smartest listeners. And fiatjaf actually has two questions for you. And he posted them on Nostr because he's such an OG. Of course, he created the protocol, so why not? So he said, ask him about using Mercury statechains to transfer ordinals. What do you think about that?

[00:20:06] Rijndael: I think it's a really cool idea that I would love to see people play with. So the idea with a statechain is you, or like Mercury is the current best implementation of this, but the idea is that you send some Bitcoin into the statechain and it creates this like statecoin. And the idea is that there's an entity called an SP, I think it stands for service provider. And the coin is encumbered by what's basically like a 2-of-2 multisig with like you and the SP.

[00:20:44] And then if I want to send this coin to Vlad, then me and the SP sort of sign it over. And then Vlad can send it to somebody else by like signing it over. And the SP maintains this like proof of publication ledger to prevent people from double spending. But you can do a bunch of off-chain transfers of this UTXO and then you like exit the coin by actually spending it on-chain. And what's cool is you're kind of always moving a whole UTXO around. Like you're not really joining and splitting these coins, you're moving them around atomically.

[00:21:24] So it actually fits the ordinals model really well. Because you can imagine, you know, sending, you know, some inscription into a statechain and then you have that inscription and you can pass it around off-chain with this like SP assumption. And then you can withdraw it and you get the same ordinal out. So it actually fits really well. I know a few people who have talked about looking into it. They were talking about that before. So Mercury went from being Mercury Wallet to Mercury Layer, which is way more like an API now.

[00:22:03] So I think people were looking at it before that transition happened. And I probably need to like revisit it now that Mercury Layer is out in the world. But it's a super cool idea.

[00:22:15] Vlad Costea: I did have an interview with Nicholas Gregory and his friend Tom, who is the CTO at Mercury Layer. It's pretty cool. Go check that out. It's really cool.

[00:22:26] Rijndael: Yeah. And the new, I don't know all the details, but I think they're doing like blinded signatures now in Mercury Layer. So the SP knows less about the coins that it's signing for, which makes it harder for them to censor you, which is great.

[00:22:45] Vlad Costea: Yeah, they're a very cool team. I have no idea why they're so underrated. They don't get much credit. Maybe they should start memeing their work with cats or whatever.

[00:22:56] Rijndael: Yeah, I think they should absolutely meme it more. They're an insanely smart team and they're doing like really interesting stuff. I think it's probably the best L2 that's not Lightning. It's like the only other L2 that's not Lightning right now.

[00:23:12] Vlad Costea: We do have Rootstock. But anyway, speaking of L2s, there's another question by fiatjaf. He says, ask him why he thinks drivechains are the ultimate Bitcoin upgrade with no risks and 100x scaling privacy utility upsides. That's really funny.

[00:23:31] Rijndael: I don't think that. I think fiatjaf thinks that and he wants me to argue about it. I mean, I don't know. I think drivechains, I don't think drivechains end up getting a ton of usage if there's a better alternative available. I think most people don't actually want hashrate escrow. I think most miners don't want hashrate escrow for like compliance reasons. The other thing is, you know, with like the BIP300-style drivechains, you need 50% plus one block of the hashrate to kind of like vote yes to pass a sidechain withdrawal.

[00:24:19] But 25% of the hashrate plus one block can vote no and block any sidechain withdrawal forever. And we currently have two pools that have more than 25% of the hashrate. So I think if you wanted to go and build like the Zcash sidechain with drivechains, then I think it would be really trivial for like a government agency to go to Foundry or somebody and say, hey, you're going to vote no on all these sidechain withdrawals unless you KYC all the withdrawals. So I think it's like, that's a problem.

[00:24:55] I think people probably don't want a bridge that takes six months to resolve. I think, you know, a lot of miners probably don't want to questionably be custodians of sidechain funds. You know, I think that there's been a ton of work on ZKPs over the last couple years and bridges that are secured by like a validity proof or something have a much better set of trade-offs than hashrate escrow. So I don't know, I think drivechains were a really great idea like 10 years ago. But I think in 2024, 2025, if you have other ways of bridging coins in and out of L1 Bitcoin, I think the market's going to pick other ways.

[00:25:42] Vlad Costea: Oh, man, that's harsh. I think this show is very aspirational in the sense that it promotes two different but also hopeful scaling solutions for Bitcoin. So I have a message from Paul Sztorc.

[00:25:57] Rijndael: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:58] Vlad Costea: And this show is also sponsored by LayerTwo Labs. So I got to mention that.

[00:26:03] Rijndael: But Paul's, I think they're great. I think Paul's great. Like, I'm happy to talk to Paul about drivechains anytime.

[00:26:10] Vlad Costea: So he says, "Is Blockstream going downstream? Has RGB getting you down and brown? After a long day of listening to Peter McRetard, why not feel something for a change? Feel alive. Join LayerTwo Labs and make everyone feel sad and frustrated and angry. Our next ritual is at 3 a.m. in the ancient forest. See you there. I'm Paul Sztorc and I approve this message. Or do I?"

[00:26:36] Rijndael: That's great. I think Paul needs to say that message 13,000 times and then people will get it.

[00:26:43] Vlad Costea: Yeah, all we have to do is count to 13,000, right?

[00:26:46] Rijndael: That's right.

[00:26:47] Vlad Costea: But this message says that LayerTwo Labs is making everyone feel sad and angry and frustrated. Isn't that what Taproot Wizard does? Wizards, not wizard.

[00:27:01] Rijndael: No, I don't think we make people feel sad and angry and frustrated. I think we, I don't know, I think we make things fun and interesting. I also don't think LayerTwo Labs makes people sad and frustrated and angry. Their meme game has gotten a lot better lately. It's still not quite where it needs to be, but it's getting better. I mean, it's not all about memes, right? Like, do you think, do you think we made people sad and angry and despondent?

[00:27:32] Vlad Costea: I don't think so. I mean, before Giacomo blocked me, I used to see a lot of that, a lot of cope, a lot of hate against Udi for some reason. For some reason, you have this guy, Udi Wertheimer, who was on the show in Season 2, which was almost five years ago or more. Yeah. I had him when he was still a very nice Bitcoin maximalist, you know, he was not expressing any unpopular opinion. But for some reason, now he's the personification of everything evil. If you see this inscription that's 4 megabytes large in size, people are going to blame Udi.

[00:28:06] If you see a lot of BRC tokens being minted, it's Udi's fault. For some reason, he became the devil, you know? And he is also part of your team, right?

[00:28:15] Rijndael: Yeah, it's really funny, like the number of things that people kind of lay at our feet is impressive. I've seen a lot of people claim that we, you know, like went and raised a bunch of money to just spam the blockchain with BRC-20s for six months or 12 months or however long it was. And then I see people simultaneously claim that we spent all of our money on BRC-20s, but then also we're making all this money by scamming people. I don't know how those things are both true at the same time.

[00:28:53] It's pretty impressive. If you listen to some of the talking heads on Twitter, we are responsible for all of the blockchain activity for the last 12 months, according to some people, which doesn't make any sense. I don't understand what people think the business model is. If you believe that there's no market for any of this stuff, then what's the business model for creating 12 months worth of it? I guess just because Udi's evil, like, I don't really understand what the [unclear: logic] is there.

[00:29:28] Vlad Costea: Of course, he's funded by the Mossad, right?

[00:29:31] Rijndael: Yeah, that's right. He got this money from the Mossad and the Chinese government, and I'm trying to remember who else. Who else were we allegedly funded by? Oh, the Ethereum Foundation. That was another one. I'm trying to remember who else. I had a bunch of people ask if we had taken money from Craig Wright, which is really funny. Yeah, I don't know. A lot of people.

[00:29:52] Vlad Costea: Of course. So you're in the business of losing money, of course.

[00:29:57] Rijndael: Well, yeah, because we're spending it all on all these BRC-20s. That's right.

[00:30:01] Vlad Costea: Exactly. Yeah. You're making people pay more for their honest financial transactions, you know?

[00:30:09] Rijndael: Yeah, yeah, the whole point is, yeah, when I joined the company, I went and met my WEF handler. It's great. They're right across the street from our Mossad office. And we talked about how we were going to raise transaction fees on Bitcoin so that people in El Salvador can't pay for pupusas on-chain. That's the whole plan.

[00:30:35] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that worked because El Salvador is using custodial Lightning.

[00:30:39] Rijndael: Yeah. Yep. And it's, you know, now we're trying to push for covenants to do more, you know, non-custodial Bitcoin activity on other layer twos.

[00:30:50] And that's evil, too. Because like, once we've completely destroyed L1, you know, us trying to advocate for people building less interactive non-custodial L2s is now evil.

[00:31:05] Vlad Costea: And you mentioned the C-word, the magic C-word, which seems to be so divisive, covenants. I have to present this advertisement.

[00:31:13] Rijndael: No, no, no, no, covenants.

[00:31:15] Vlad Costea: I got to present this advertisement from StarkWare, which is this ZK rollup, very advanced cryptographic system. I did an interview with Eli Ben-Sasson, which you can listen to as part of the season. And you can understand more about how this works. The idea behind it is that it's built on Ethereum right now, and they want to bring it to Bitcoin, but they can't bring it to Bitcoin without OP_CAT. So the message is activate OP_CAT so we can have more fun cryptographic stuff on Bitcoin, which some people are going to hate, but I think is very interesting from a scalability and privacy point of view.

[00:31:52] Rijndael: Totally agree. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of all the work that's been done in STARKs specifically, but other proof systems as well over the last couple years. I, you know, I choose to work on Bitcoin and focus on Bitcoin, but I'm happy that other, you know, other networks have been willing to fund the research into making STARKs actually practical. Like the thing that's really cool about STARKs, and I think I heard you guys talk about this in your episode. But one of the things that's really cool is that there's no new cryptographic assumptions beyond what's already in Bitcoin.

[00:32:36] Like, SNARKs are really cool. They give you really succinct proofs, but they rely on like elliptic curve pairings and a bunch of like other kind of more exotic cryptography. STARKs really only rely on having a good hash function, and we have that in Bitcoin. We already assume that SHA-256 is good. So, you know, the thing that's really appealing about a STARK proof is that what you there's like two things that are like kind of cool and appealing. One of them is for like the off-chain bit, if you can go and do a bunch of transactions off-chain, and then generate a proof that all those transactions were valid, and be able to, you know, encumber an on-chain UTXO with that, with a check that that proof is valid, then we can like move a bunch of transaction activity off-chain, still do it in a very verifiable way.

[00:33:33] That's like very inexpensive to verify. And then the other thing that's really appealing about STARKs is, and I know that you guys talked about this is like reducing IBD, right? Like if instead of downloading every single block from Genesis until now, if you can download a snapshot of the UTXO set and a proof that all the blocks from Genesis until, you know, your IBD snapshot were all valid, then you could, you know, have a cell phone that has a fully validating Bitcoin node on it. And you just like download an app, you download a couple megabytes of proof data.

[00:34:04] And now you've got a fully validated Bitcoin node. And I think that's super exciting.

[00:34:09] Vlad Costea: I mean, you've got to think about it, because right now, when you use a mobile wallet, most likely you're not connecting to your node, unless you know how to set up an Electrum server, because most wallets use this SPV system, which is based on Electrum. And you're gonna most likely connect to the developer's Electrum server, they're going to collect data about how you use the wallet. It's not ideal. It's nice for what it is, but we should move on from this model. Just imagine a system where you just download this zero-knowledge proof within seconds, and then you're not going to have to rely on somebody else's blockchain, you know, on somebody else's node, you just have your own from this point onwards.

[00:34:52] And it just works within seconds. It solves a lot of the scalability concerns that we have. It solves all of the concern trolling about making the blockchain too large, because third world countries will not be able to validate a full node to sync up. I mean, it's so cool. You know, it's exactly the holy grail of self-custody, to be able to run your own full node within seconds, without trusting a third party. You just trust cryptography as opposed to another person.

[00:35:25] Rijndael: Yeah, no, it's massive. I think it's, it would be super useful, it would expand the number of places that we can run fully validating Bitcoin nodes. So cell phones, low power hardware, embedded devices, like, you know, we could run more nodes in more places, which would be great. And then, you know, on the flip side, and there's also just like the layer two thing of, you know, being able to say, in order to move this UTXO, you have to satisfy some set of conditions that maybe aren't expressible in Bitcoin script, like Bitcoin script is very limiting.

[00:36:01] So if you want to express like more complex sequences of transactions, or more complex, multi-party contracts, or payment systems, you'd like to be able to implement that off-chain, and then just have like a really cheap and efficient check, you know, to unlock the UTXO that says, Oh, yeah, all this other stuff over there that we delegated to was correct, and not have to have every full node validate all the details of that contract.

[00:36:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and all we have to do is just activate OP_CAT. And we can have that. It's pretty incredible.

[00:36:40] Rijndael: Well, yeah, or something like that. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of folks working on trying to do a STARK verifier only using OP_CAT. It looks like it's going to work, but it's going to be big. So you might still be validating the proof in like, optimistic style, where like you spend the coins. And then there's kind of a challenge period. And during that challenge period, somebody can kind of force you to reveal your proof, and then you actually go through and validate it. It would be really great to be able to get a STARK verifier that's small enough to fit in a single transaction and be able to just do it in like one shot.

[00:37:26] We might be able to do that with just OP_CAT, or we might need some other opcodes as well. But you know, once we have OP_CAT, we should be able to do pretty good STARK verification on Bitcoin. And we should be able to build more interesting, like optimistic spending things. We actually made an illustrated children's book about that called CatVM. If you go to catvm.org, it's like a PDF. And it's about using OP_CAT to do a combination of like a recursively defined state machine, like a recursive covenant state machine, and then Merkle tree verification.

[00:38:05] And you can use those things to build like a interactive challenge response protocol for doing like optimistic withdrawals of smart contracts, which is super cool. So we've done NFTs and we also did a children's book about smart contracts.

[00:38:24] Vlad Costea: That's very interesting that you do children's books because you're dealing with people who say that Bitcoin should not be changed under any circumstances. It's already perfect money, you should not change anything just because they can afford to use it. And it's perfectly fine for their use cases, it should be the same for the rest of the world. And what else? I mean, the average person does not understand the argument for new cryptography, they will say Satoshi was a god who descended upon humans. And brought us this invention, which is already perfect.

[00:38:57] And every other attempt is shitcoiny. If it was tried on Ethereum before Bitcoin, then it's a shitcoin. It's shitcoin tech, you should not bring that to Bitcoin.

[00:39:08] Rijndael: Yeah, I mean, so that argument falls apart in a bunch of places. Like, for one thing, we've changed Bitcoin a bunch since the first release. And I think I think we've made it better. You know, Bitcoin wasn't perfect, isn't perfect. There's this meme that like, we should stop changing Bitcoin, and we should scale it in layers. I think the people who say that don't understand what it takes to try to build new layers on top of Bitcoin. And at the end of the day, like if you want to have new layers that are not fully custodial, then I think you need more expressive scripting in Bitcoin to be able to settle those layer twos or layer threes back down into layer one.

[00:39:55] Like there's not enough block space for everybody in the world to have their own Lightning channel. Like there's not. And so, you know, we can't just say like, all right, we're gonna get more people to use Lightning. It caps the total number of people that can have non-custodial Bitcoin. I think there to your point, there's a lot of people who feel like I've already got my bag, I'm all set. You know, I'll build my fiefdom. Like they're, you know, I have my Bitcoin, I'm not a feudal lord yet.

[00:40:22] But I think if we actually want more people to be able to use Bitcoin non-custodially, then we have to be able to build systems that can handle lots of users off-chain, but still give you the ability to unilaterally spend your Bitcoin on-chain. And for that, we need some upgrades to L1 Bitcoin. There's just like no two ways about it.

[00:40:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and it's interesting that these zero-knowledge proofs are making transactions smaller, so that we can fit more of them into the same small blocks. Or else, if we increase the block size ever, we're still going to get more transactions, more data that is much smaller.

[00:41:03] Rijndael: Yeah, I think that's right. Like a good framing of this that I think a lot of people have thrown around, like I know, Brandon Black has said this a bunch of times is like increasing transaction density. I think Casey Rodarmor said that a bunch of times too. Like the move is that we need to fit more transactions into a smaller number of vbytes. And ZKPs are a good mechanism, but also just, you know, if we could do, some people really, really love Lightning, I think channel-based constructs are just tricky economically.

[00:41:40] But if we can make the economics work, being able to have like multi-party Lightning channels, like with more than two ends of it, right. So something like a Lightning channel with lots of users in it, like maybe that would be better. I'm a big fan of like, you know, ZKP constructions that don't look like channels, but I think, you know, we're gonna have to try a bunch of different things technically and economically to figure out what works. And it's kind of hard to design this stuff in a vacuum.

[00:42:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you said something about Lightning as if other people like it, but you don't. What's your opinion on the Lightning Network?

[00:42:21] Rijndael: I think, so, I like Lightning. It's, the Lightning Network is impressive. It's impressive that it works as well as it does the amount of work that people have put into it has been insane. And like people have done a lot of good work to make it as reliable kind of through the core of the network as it is. I think for a while Lightning was sold generally as the end-user payment solution. And I think like the liquidity requirements and the interactivity requirements in Lightning make it really hard to build non-custodial end user payments.

[00:43:05] Like on your phone, if you want to have a phone wallet that can receive Lightning, you've got this offline receive problem of like you put your phone to sleep and the app no longer gets enough CPU time to settle HTLCs. And so like you have to come online in order to like receive Lightning. A bunch of people are working on that problem where there's going to be a kind of like a messaging protocol between you and your LSP, where your LSP can kind of like hold your HTLC.

[00:43:34] And then when your phone comes online, it messages the LSP and says, "Hey, I'm online now," and you get the payment. But I think there's just a long tail of problems like that make it difficult to do non-custodial end user payments. And then the other part of it is just like the liquidity requirements, I think are hard. Like, you know, you need to kind of have money before you can receive money. And I think when you put those two things together, like I'm skeptical that end users are going to have, you know, non-custodial Lightning wallets on their phones all over the place.

[00:44:06] I think Lightning makes sense for settlement, like between institutions, you know, between, if you're going to use like Chaumian eCash, if that fits your threat model, and you are comfortable with eCash, maybe between eCash mints. If you're running a server that's online all the time, I think like Lightning makes sense. Like Lightning, like settlement between counterparties that need to settle frequently makes a ton of sense to me. And I think the Lightning Network is very good at that. In terms of like, hey, I just want to send you money, like go install this app.

[00:44:43] I think a lot of people have better options than Lightning. And I think that that's part of why Lightning hasn't really found a ton of product market fit as end user payments. I think it's just too hard. And it's also just tough on users like push payments are a different model for subscriptions and billing. Most people use payment systems where like the merchant pays the fee and the user doesn't pay the fee. And so trying to get normies to use like a push payment system has liquidity requirements, liveness requirements, and where they're paying the fees, as opposed to using like custodial payment system, I think is just a tough hill to climb.

[00:45:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and I was just checking out. So when I was looking down, I was checking out my phone. There's this Nostr streaming application. I gotta tell you the name. It's called zap.stream. I'm giving it the first try right now to see if people actually tune in. So far, I didn't get any interactions. It's interesting in the sense that you pay by the minute when you stream and you hope that somebody else is going to pay you for the stream that you're doing. So far, yeah, I'm at a loss.

[00:45:54] I'm not making any money. But I also got to read some messages from the chat because we have this guy, AC, who posted a bunch of wizard emojis and then laughing emojis.

[00:46:03] Rijndael: Wizard and a cat, I think.

[00:46:06] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and [unclear: said meow] and said something about hidden symbolism, which is on point. I don't know. Does this mean 666 or Satan or whatever with an emoji?

[00:46:17] Rijndael: Oh, I thought it just meant okay. Like, I don't know.

[00:46:20] Vlad Costea: And there's Terry M. who says, What did your girlfriend make you for breakfast? It was guacamole bread with eggs. Thank you for being concerned about it. Nice. And he also says sBTC through Stacks. Your thoughts and opinions, please. Yeah, I don't think Stacks gets a lot of credit or mentions.

[00:46:44] Rijndael: Yeah, I don't really use Stacks too much. I looked at it a while ago because I am a fan of Lisp. So like anybody doing blockchain stuff with Lisp, I take a look at, but I don't have strong opinions about Stacks one way or another.

[00:47:01] Vlad Costea: I do remember when it was called Blockstack. And it was a while ago.

[00:47:08] Rijndael: Yeah.

[00:47:09] Vlad Costea: It was vaguely related to Bitcoin at the time. It still had its own token. And then it emerged as this, quote unquote, layer two. It's a very Silicon Valley slash Ethereum style of layer two that's added on Bitcoin. It does have some users. So I'm not gonna hate on it for bringing more people to Bitcoin. I just don't get it. You know, I don't really understand what's the point of it.

[00:47:38] Rijndael: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Like I think the analogy that somebody made to me that that made some sense. And I'm guessing a lot of the audience probably won't get this because it's like an Ethereum reference. But it's like, Stacks is kind of like the Polygon for Bitcoin. I'm not saying that that's like a good or that's true. Or not. But I thought that was like an analogy that that helped kind of categorize it for me. You know, like there's some connections to Bitcoin. I don't know if it's changed with their most recent upgrade.

[00:48:12] But like, you know, they're they were anchoring to Bitcoin with their proof of transfer mechanism. If you were staking on their network, then like you got some Bitcoin and then their smart contract language has a function that lets you get Bitcoin state. So if you want to like do a Stacks transaction, you know, only if some UTXO has been spent on L1 Bitcoin, then that's like the thing that you can do. So, you know, I think in theory, you can build like interesting things where you make a transaction on Bitcoin, then a whole bunch of stuff happens over on Stacks.

[00:48:48] I haven't seen any of that stuff. And I haven't used it. So I don't I don't have an opinion on it. But I, you know, it's cool to build stuff that watches Bitcoin and then reacts to it. Right? Like, we're talking about Nostr. The first thing I did on Nostr was I wrote a little bot that every time a Bitcoin block gets confirmed, it would go through and add up the value of all the outputs in the block. And then say, here's how much Bitcoin got transferred this block.

[00:49:16] And it would like, you know, send it out as a Nostr note. I called it MoE bot. It's like medium of exchange bot. And I was trying to have, you know, like, just this thing on Nostr that would say like, here's how much value Bitcoin just settled in 10 minutes. And it's just fun to write software that looks at a Bitcoin node, grabs block data and does stuff with it. Like I love anything like that.

[00:49:41] Vlad Costea: You did describe Stacks as some sort of Polygon for Bitcoin. But I do disagree because Polygon is funded by Tether slash Bitfinex, whichever. I don't know the difference between the two entities. But I think Polygon has more respect in the Ethereum ecosystem, as opposed to Stacks. So from a reputation perspective, at least, it's very different. Maybe from a business perspective, it's similar. But what I was going to ask you next is you mentioned Liquid and how you are trading with SideShift between L-BTC and BTC. And you also spoke a little bit about Lightning.

[00:50:22] And then what I want to ask you is which one of them do you think has a brighter future in Bitcoin? Is it Liquid? Is it Lightning? Which one do you think we will still be talking about in 10 years?

[00:50:35] Rijndael: Probably Lightning. I think Liquid has a hard problem around bootstrapping. You know, like they've got this cold start problem of there's not really much to do in Liquid. Like, you know, you can't actually do very much with like Liquid Bitcoin once you have it. And so you know, what you want to get to is you want to get to a place where there's like things to do on your network. So users come in to use the network. And then because users are there, that attracts more, you know, developers and entrepreneurs to build more stuff.

[00:51:20] And then that more, you know, now there's more stuff. And that pulls in more capital and users. And then those more capital and users pull in more developers and entrepreneurs. And you get this like nice flywheel this like virtuous cycle. Kickstarting that flywheel is really hard. And I think that that's like the problem that Liquid needs to solve. And I like I don't think they've done it. And I don't see a lot of evidence that they're like about to do it. Coincidentally, that's part of why I decided to work full time on a company that operates in ordinals.

[00:51:54] Right? Because like I saw ordinals as having enough energy to kickstart that flywheel because what happened was when ordinals trading kind of or when inscriptions sort of first hit the market, it was really quiet for a few weeks. And then, you know, a huge rush of users kind of rushed into inscriptions and people were trading on literal spreadsheets in Discord channels. So it was like super trusted, you'd go into a Discord channel, and you'd say like, Okay, this moderator is going to like run a spreadsheet to keep track of these trades.

[00:52:34] And it was like very janky. But there were so many people doing it, that a bunch of wallet developers from other ecosystems like Stacks said, Oh, shit, you know, we can we can go build a wallet here and have users. So people started, you know, porting wallets over to support ordinals. Somebody made a marketplace. And now that there's like a wallet in a marketplace, it's easier for more users to get involved. And so then more users come in, there's more capital in the system, there's more trading volume.

[00:53:07] So then more wallets and marketplaces started coming in. And within, you know, a single digit number of months, we went from spreadsheet trading to the hat that I'm wearing right now. It's from a company called Liquidium. I have no affiliation with them. I just I like the team. You know, they're doing a non-custodial lending system, where like if you have an ordinal and you want to borrow Bitcoin against it, they use DLCs, like discreet log contracts, to do non-custodial on-chain lending against ordinals. And so we've got like borrow lend markets, there's non-custodial trading, there's a bunch of wallet support, people are building like other applications on top of it.

[00:53:49] And so they've got

[00:53:55] Vlad Costea: Hello. I think I lost you for a minute, or at least a few seconds.

[00:54:07] It says that your connection is lost for some reason.

[00:54:12] Anyway, until he comes back. And I hope he does. I'm gonna let him know in a message that he dropped out. Hey, do you hear me now?

[00:54:24] Rijndael: Yeah.

[00:54:24] Vlad Costea: You're back.

[00:54:26] Rijndael: Okay, that was really weird.

[00:54:28] Vlad Costea: Yeah, turn off your video, please.

[00:54:30] Rijndael: Yeah, I'll do that. So yeah, I was just saying that, you know, like, they're they were able to that community was able to kind of kickstart this flywheel. And now it's kind of running on its own. And I think if you build a whole new network, you have to kind of do that. And so I think Lightning, you know, has a better time. And so I think it's going to be more likely to stick around in 10 years.

[00:55:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm happy you're back because I was going to freak out a bit. The guy in the chat, there's someone named test who said RIP, rest in peace. AC also said that sBTC will soon be non-custodial with 5-second transaction times. I don't know, but we'll see about that.

[00:55:21] Rijndael: Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like people can claim whatever they want. Like we'll see what ships.

[00:55:28] Vlad Costea: Michael Tidwell. He's the organizer of TABConf. He's also watching this. I just want to give you a shout out, Michael.

[00:55:37] He told me that the stream on Twitch is bugged.

[00:55:43] Thanks, Tidwell. And he also said, you realize you're never showing his video, right?

[00:55:47] Rijndael: Yeah, that's the point. Yeah, I'm a cat. I'm a cat on the internet talking about opcodes.

[00:55:54] Vlad Costea: And let me read another ad. I'm not sure if you retweeted this video, you retweeted my tweet about the interview, but you did not retweet the livestream, which is why we only had like 257 views so far. And I feel bummed out right now. Not enough people know that this is happening.

[00:56:13] So please retweet. And in the meantime, I'm going to tell you about Hodling.ch, which is a service from Switzerland that helps you with your self-custody. So if you own a lot of Bitcoin, or for some reason, you're part of a company that decided to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet, and you don't know how to manage the keys in a multisig situation, then you go to these guys from Hodling.ch. And they're going to advise you on which hardware wallets you should choose, what kind of setup you should make for yourself, and how to minimize the risks of your setup.

[00:56:46] They don't hold any keys, they only charge you for their consultancy service. And they're based in Switzerland, which means that you get more privacy out of this service. And if you're interested in this, for whatever reason, go to Hodling.ch. And that's the ad. Thank you, Michael. For being concerned about my stream. I hope you're listening to this. And I hope I'll see you in Atlanta this year. And now let's talk about covenants, because I feel like we scratched the surface with OP_CAT, which is not a covenant opcode, but it can become something that can create covenants.

[00:57:23] I think there's this ongoing battle between CTV and versions of CTV, because people said, okay, CTV, at first it was evil, right? We don't want that it can be used for evil stuff. Like locking funds with custodians and stealing and whatever. And then they decided that it's useful. But when they decided that it's useful, they said it's just not powerful enough. So they made stuff like LNHANCE or TXHASH. And all of these are based on CTV, but they're like expansions of it. And it seems like every time there's a new proposal, there's some advocacy for it, but the message gets diluted. We don't get the same, I guess, how should I put it, conviction for a certain proposal. And it almost seems like an attack, because at this point, we seem to agree that Bitcoin needs to upgrade somehow. But we're not going to agree on how it's going to upgrade. And that's detrimental, I guess, to the long-term health of the project.

[00:58:37] Rijndael: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, there's kind of like the CTV family of covenant proposals. There's been a bunch of other ones. Like, there's, you know, another idea called TAPLEAF_UPDATE_VERIFY. There's, you know, a whole bunch. CAT can be used to implement covenants, you can do other stuff with CAT too. CAT is really basic, right? Like you take two elements on the stack, you concatenate them together, and you push it back on the stack. It's like super simple. But there's kind of a trick with Schnorr signatures, where you can basically use CAT and specially crafted Schnorr signature to get elements of the transaction onto the stack.

[00:59:29] And then you can do other script operations with them. So you can like, check that an output is going to a particular address or you can check that an input has a particular amount or do kind of other other like more interesting introspection. You know, I think, you know, we being Taproot Wizards, like, there's a set of capabilities that we think, you know, that we think people building on Bitcoin want, like, we want them and then lots of people that we've talked to, like, we've talked to a lot of stakeholders trying to build lots of different things, you know, on with Bitcoin.

[01:00:09] And there's kind of a common set of things that everybody seems to be asking for. And so we looked at, you know, what are the proposals out there that meet those needs? And then what do we think is the most likely to actually get activated? Because you can have like the best proposal in the world. But if nobody gets behind it, or is willing to advocate for it, then it doesn't really matter. And we thought that CAT would have the best chance of kind of getting through the consensus building exercise, right?

[01:00:43] Because like, it's a very simple opcode, like you can you can explain it in a song. It's like eight lines of code. So it's very easy to review. Like, you know, some proposals that people have are just like these massive amounts of really complex code. CAT is like very simple. So, you know, we thought that between those things, and then a lot of people that we talked to that are advocating for other covenant opcodes would say, yeah, well, like, I really want proposal X, or if we had CAT, I could kind of make do with it.

[01:01:17] So, you know, we kind of looked at all that and decided that CAT was going to be the most likely thing to happen. And then you know, what we saw is there's been almost just a miscommunication between the Bitcoin development community and like the broader Bitcoin community. Like I think when the average Bitcoin holder sees people argue about CTV or TXHASH, they see that argument and they think like, oh, wow, there's like a really serious disagreement here. The devs don't really know like what we should be doing.

[01:01:56] And also, you know, I think, I think a lot of times people feel like they just like need to pick a side, like whether they do or not, like they've got to choose one and then be against the other. Part of it is just like the format of Twitter. Part of it is just, you know, people want something to cheer for. And so CTV and TXHASH are kind of equivalent. There's some differences, but you can like upgrade CTV or, you know, lock down TXHASH and make them identical to one another. And so, you know, like I think, I think a lot of the conversation has just kind of gotten stalled where there's some old FUD about covenants being really bad and dangerous for Bitcoin. There's kind of a group of developers who have been having like the same arguments kind of back and forth for a couple of years, and things kind of got stuck. And so, you know, what we're what we've been trying to do with CAT is we think it's actually a good upgrade.

[01:02:55] We think that people haven't spent the time to understand it and why it would be kind of a no-brainer upgrade. And so we're trying to, you know, help people learn about it in a really accessible and fun way. So that's, you know, there's been a lot we've either made ourselves or had our community help make a lot of like memes and educational content about CAT. And we're just trying to like have people learn about it so that we can we can decide whether or not we want to activate it.

[01:03:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So when I interviewed Andrew Poelstra, I was super surprised to see that he is an advocate of OP_CAT. And I did know prior to the interview that the Liquid sidechain or the federation, call it whatever you want, also activated CAT and also BCH, Bcash or Bitcoin Cash or whatever, has OP_CAT activated. So there's an actual bounty out there. It's on a mainnet. You can actually try to play with it. You can break it. You can see if the FUD is legit and if there is anything evil that you can do to Bcash if you hate it so much.

[01:04:03] And if you can't, then I guess you should think more carefully about whether or not these people are evil, you know, because I think in the mind of the average Luke Dashjr and Giacomo Zucco follower, the association that they make is that, OK, Udi Wertheimer is evil and Udi Wertheimer wants Bitcoin to activate OP_CAT and Udi Wertheimer even created BIP420 as this proposal for OP_CAT. Therefore, from all of these statements, which they deem as being true, they come to the conclusion that OP_CAT is evil because it's being pushed by Udi.

[01:04:48] Rijndael: Yeah, I mean, it's like there's kind of a funny thing in there. Well, so for one thing, you know, the current BIP to activate OP_CAT, we actually had nothing to do with. So two developers named Ethan and Armin, you know, wrote the BIP. I think Armin wrote most of the code. And I say most of like it's very small, like the, you know, and to your point about it being out there and people can play with it. OP_CAT is also now live on Bitcoin Inquisition.

[01:05:22] So if you connect to like the kind of canonical Bitcoin signet, you can play with CAT right now. So if you're convinced that there's like limitless ways that OP_CAT can destroy Bitcoin, that's actually a perfect environment to go build one of them. Right. And like, I've heard people throw this claim out that like, CAT is going to enable unlimited amounts of like badness, but they can't come up with one concrete instantiation. Like, I'm not asking you to come up with all of them, just like give me one of them.

[01:05:55] And nobody seems to be able to. But you know, on the whole, like, Udi likes this, so it must be bad thing. That's a really bad way to outsource your judgment. Because like, all that that means is if Udi wants to control Bitcoin, he just has to say that he likes whatever the thing that's good is, and now you're going to like reflexively turn away from it. So I think you need to evaluate, you know, ideas and proposals you know, regardless of who likes it. I think it's notable that you mentioned Andrew Poelstra, he likes OP_CAT.

[01:06:26] There's Lightning developers who like OP_CAT. There's, you mentioned people from StarkWare that like OP_CAT. There's, you know, lots of Bitcoin developers that are working on whether it's things like BitVM, whether it's things like Lightning, whether it's things like inscriptions. Miners, like there's people that are working in kind of all different corners of the Bitcoin ecosystem who all say, you know, OP_CAT would be really useful. Like in some cases, it might not be the most optimal thing, like there might be other constructions or other opcodes that let you write a smaller script to do what you want.

[01:07:07] But you can at least do it in CAT. And, you know, Rusty Russell had this really great presentation at bitcoin++ about this thing called the Great Script Restoration project, which is about kind of turning on all of the deactivated opcodes, and then also adding some kind of modern flavors of them to address things like Taproot. And, you know, CAT is one of them, like OP_CAT would be included in that. And a conversation I think a lot of people have had is that, you know, what you could do with more opcodes in something like Script Restoration is you could build these CAT-enabled scripts, but now you can do it more efficiently.

[01:07:49] So like, I'll give you an example. In Bitcoin right now, you can't multiply two numbers together. Multiplying numbers together is really useful when you're dealing with money. Like maybe you want to be able to say, I can only spend a certain percentage of a UTXO every 50 blocks or something, right? Like I want to have some velocity control for my money. Or I can't spend the whole thing at once, I can spend parts of it. You can do that by just like adding a number to itself over and over and over again.

[01:08:20] And that's like a lot of opcodes, it takes a lot of stack space, or you just like multiply it, right? So if we can like multiply things, then the scripts get smaller. They're still possible without multiplication, but they're big and nasty and kind of hard to debug. So yeah, I mean, it's, I think if you're if you're somebody who is reflexively, you know, shying away from OP_CAT, because like certain people like it, you should probably dig more into it. Like, Bitcoin is money for enemies. There's probably lots of people who use Bitcoin that you don't agree with, like you still use Bitcoin.

[01:08:53] So I think you have to trust the incentives of the network more than any individual actor.

[01:09:01] Vlad Costea: So what do you think about the fact that Ocean Mining has created their own cult where they have this mining pool, they have their own node client? They have their own ideology, it almost as if they're trying to create their own fork of Bitcoin, except that they're trying to convince themselves that they're the pure ones and everyone else should be censored out of the network?

[01:09:24] Rijndael: Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's gonna work well. You know, I think, like, I'm still kind of cheering for Ocean in the long run, like the thing that they said they were going to do that I hope that they go do is put more control over block construction in the hands of individual miners. Like I'm a big fan of Stratum V2 or other things that let individual miners or, you know, I guess Mechanic would call them hashers, that let individual hashers do their own block construction.

[01:10:03] It seems like Ocean has decided that what they're going to do instead is like really focus on, you know, this like data carrier fight that they're in. I think that doesn't make a lot of sense economically, like both for them and also for Bitcoin. Trying to filter things out of mempool relay policy only works if there's no economic incentive to get those transactions in the block. The thing that I've said to that team a couple times is, you've got to realize that last year, inscriptions paid over a quarter billion dollars in mining fees.

[01:10:46] So if you're able to get, you know, most of the network to implement relay filter policy, that prevents inscriptions from finding their ways to miners, then you're just going to have inscription service providers making deals with individual mining pools to just send inscriptions directly to them and just skip the public mempool. And that actually drives miner centralization. So if your goal is to decentralize mining and make it so that individual miners can do their own transaction selection and have that be economically competitive, then what you want is you want every miner who like plugs an S19 into a waterfall somewhere to have access to the same flow of high-fee-paying transactions as every other miner, and driving things out of the public mempool is counter to that.

[01:11:39] I also think like most people don't actually care. Like inscriptions don't actually harm the network. And, you know, trying to play whack-a-mole with filters doesn't actually keep these things out of blocks. Like, you know, if you run Knots with datacarriersize equal to zero. Yeah, you're not going to relay them, but you're still going to get blocks that contain Runes and inscriptions and STAMPs, all these things, and they're still going to be on your node, they're still going to be in your hard drive. The only way to keep that from happening is to reject blocks that include these transactions.

[01:12:22] So like I wrote a script last year called Bitcoin Purifier that actually does this. And, you know, what it does is it's an 80-line shell script. Giacomo and [unclear: Grubles] and a bunch of other people said that it was malware or that I was like attacking Bitcoin. It's an 80-line shell script. If you can't read shell, I tested this, you can take that shell script and drop it into ChatGPT or Claude and say, what does this do? And it'll tell you exactly what it does.

[01:12:51] And it does exactly what it says on the label, which is it connects to your Bitcoin node. And every time it sees a block, it checks to see if that block has inscriptions. And if it does, it rejects the block. And the idea is that if the economic majority of the network actually doesn't want these transactions to be in Bitcoin, then you should go and convince them to run this script. They'll fork all the inscriptions off the network and you now have clean, holy Bitcoin. But, you know, it turns out that most people don't actually want to reject those blocks.

[01:13:25] Vlad Costea: It's funny, I do remember it was called Deus Vult, if I'm not mistaken, which is Latin for God's will. And you did post that code to make fun of Luke Dashjr's attempts to filter out inscriptions.

[01:13:40] Rijndael: Yeah, it was to make fun of a bunch of people's attempts. Like a bunch of people were saying, these are not valid Bitcoin transactions. And I said, well, if they're not valid Bitcoin transactions, why are they on your node? And they said, well, they're exploiting a bug. And I said, like, here, I'll fix the bug for you. So that's what it does. The name of the script was geld.sh. Geld is a verb that means to castrate. And then, you know, it runs and whenever it sees a block that contains this, it would say something like, scammers are putting their shitcoins in the blockchain.

[01:14:16] And they have to be punished. Deus vult. And reject the block. The other thing that I added that it was a feature that I added to make it a lot easier for people who want to run this is if you run that script and you do -s, s for start, you can give it a block height and it won't start rejecting blocks until that block height. So if you actually wanted to organize people to do like a UASF, you could say, okay, at block, you know, 890,000, we're going to start rejecting these transactions.

[01:14:50] Everybody runs that script with -s 890000. And, you know, you'll have kind of coordinated flag day for when you when you start doing this. And, you know, like the way that Bitcoin works is if you think that the rules of Bitcoin should change, you convince the economic majority to run those new rules. Bitcoin miners need to be able to sell their coins in the deepest pool of liquidity that they can. So if you get, you know, the economic majority of the network to run your rules, then that's Bitcoin now.

[01:15:23] And so if you if you genuinely believe that these are invalid transactions that are harmful to the network, that should be a very easy sell to everybody else on the network. But it is not because it's just not true.

[01:15:36] Vlad Costea: It seems like to an extent Bitcoin is much more about controlling the narrative as opposed to I mean, Bitcoin development is more about controlling the narrative as opposed to actually writing code. And when someone actually writes code and bypasses some previously established conventions, which were mostly social but not technical, they're expelled for some reason. This happened to Casey Rodarmor. I think he aged like 10 years in the last one year. He looks much older. He joked about it in his Hell Money podcast and said that he's like Obama in 2008 compared to Obama in 2016.

[01:16:19] Rijndael: Yeah, yeah, he's had a wild year. Like I cannot imagine what the last year has been like for him. Like it's been crazy like amount of kind of the whole range of human emotion. Like there's a lot of people who absolutely love him and there's a lot of people who absolutely hate him. And like that's just a lot of energy to be focused at like one person. I don't think many people experience that.

[01:16:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it sort of sucks. I did speak with him prior to the release of Runes. He was going to join the show and then for some reason he stopped responding. But I do hope that I'm going to get him and we can talk more about this creation of his, which I don't understand how it's different from Counterparty assets. Because he has Runes, right? You can create as many as you want per inscription. But they use OP_RETURN and they're very similar in design with Counterparty.

[01:17:19] Rijndael: Yeah, I think Casey's definitely the person to talk to about this. You should definitely talk to Casey. He's like one of the smartest people I've ever met. He's also like a really nice guy, very happy to help explain things. And he's just like a very kind human being. But I think he also really understands Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally on a level that like most people never will. One of the things that I think is different about Runes against Counterparty is Runes is a much simpler protocol, which matters a lot for like implementation.

[01:17:59] I think one of the big lessons out of Runes and inscriptions is that protocol simplicity matters because that's what lets lots of people build interoperable software. Like, you know, RGB is another token protocol that lets you do tokens and lets you do collectibles on top of Bitcoin. It has like pretty much zero on-chain footprint. It's a lot more efficient. A lot of developers like it a lot more, but it is so insanely complicated that I think it's gonna be hard for people to build like wallets and marketplaces and things.

[01:18:34] Runes and inscriptions, very simple. So it's a lot easier to get lots of services and like ecosystem around it. So it's simpler. I think it follows the UTXO model better than something like Counterparty does. Like Counterparty is very much an account model that uses UTXOs for message publication. But then, you know, you kind of have this index that maps it against your account. They use that to build a lot of features like there's decentralized exchanges, there's, you know, like dividend functionality, you can build dispensers, like there's lots of really cool things in Counterparty.

[01:19:11] But I think Casey very explicitly wanted to have assets follow UTXOs. Because that way, like they work better for light wallets, you could potentially lift them to like Lightning or other layer twos. And also, you have better incentives to not just create like lots of dust-sized UTXOs that never get cleaned up. Like that's one of the problems with BRC-20s, for example, is you end up with all these like tiny inscription UTXOs that you have no incentive to spend because you just use them to publish a message.

[01:19:44] But then like the value of the token actually follows the UTXO. So it's, I don't know, it's tough.

[01:19:50] Vlad Costea: Yeah, for so for a lot of the people out there listening to this, maybe it sounds obscure. And I think it does because for some reason the ord protocol is still command line. And if you want to use something that's commodified, you pay a fee. But are you aware of any easy way for people to try out Runes?

[01:20:11] Rijndael: Well, so, you know, the reference implementation of ord is still command line, but there's lots of really user-friendly ordinals wallets that, like, you know, run either on your desktop or on your phone. So like, there's a Bitcoin wallet called Xverse, for example, that has really good both ordinals and Runes support, like I've got it on my phone. So I've got a bunch of like inscriptions, like, you know, in my phone. And it feels like another Bitcoin wallet, but you have a tab for your collectibles and like all of your inscriptions go in there.

[01:20:49] So you know, if you want to use the ord command line, there's more that you can do there. It's really like a power user tool. But if you're just trying to like, you know, if you want to mint or trade or collect ordinals, like you can do that all from like a very accessible, easy to use, like phone wallet. And then Runes. Like, I haven't seen any wallets that are only for Runes, not ordinals. All the Runes wallets that I've seen are ordinals wallets that have added support for Runes. So if you're going to be doing Runes stuff, you're probably still using like Xverse or Leather or the OKX wallet or something like that.

[01:21:29] Vlad Costea: So can you mention the names of the wallet once again, for some reason your connection is not very stable?

[01:21:37] Rijndael: Yeah, let me turn off my video again. So Xverse is one of them. I don't have any affiliation with like any of these wallets, but like Xverse is one. There's another one called Leather, like the material. There's another one from OKX, like the exchange, they make a wallet. There's UniSat wallet, there's a whole slew of them. There's like a whole ecosystem of ordinals wallets.

[01:22:05] Vlad Costea: Okay, so there's a bunch of them. The one that stuck out right now when you mentioned them was Leather. Sounds interesting. I think I'm going to check that out.

[01:22:16] Rijndael: Yeah, there's a bunch of them. Xverse is the one that I use the most. Like I just, like, talked to their team and started using the wallet. And like now I've got all my stuff in it. But yeah, they all kind of like, they all work. They all do the thing. And then there's been a really interesting thing that's happened, which is a lot of ordinals power users end up using Sparrow Wallet. Usually with a hardware wallet for like their higher-end inscriptions.

[01:22:51] So like the one that you want to keep kind of in cold storage. A lot of people are using Sparrow because Sparrow has really, really good coin control. And, you know, coin control is super important for ordinals because it's this like optional kind of layer two or overlay that interprets the transaction graph in a particular way. And so order of inputs and outputs is super important. For ordinals. So Sparrow Wallet has some really useful features there. And so a lot of people are using Sparrow.

[01:23:25] And then, you know, the ord command line tool, it's command line, but it gives you like all of the features and it talks to Bitcoin Core and it actually uses like Bitcoin Core wallet. So if you're like automating stuff, that's a good way to go. A lot of the software we've done at Taproot Wizards for inscription stuff, like when we made the Quantum Cats collection, we actually wrote a ton of software for making a bunch of like pre-signed transactions in this acyclic graph and then signing them all. But we actually used the ord wallet to handle like the ordinals-specific part of it, which was really helpful.

[01:24:05] Vlad Costea: I gotta give a shout out to Rearden who just liked our stream. He's one of the proponents of this script restoration project. And I did speak with him. He might join the show in a few weeks, hopefully. And I was going to ask you since...

[01:24:26] Rijndael: I was just going to say like, yeah, he's really tweeting a lot about Script Restoration. I know that he's really excited about it. He's got a lot of good thoughts on it, I think.

[01:24:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, he even unfollowed me, possibly because of some of my opinions. But this is fun. I'm also canceled from a couple of conferences. It's been a wild year, but interesting. It's getting wilder.

[01:24:50] Rijndael: Yeah, I haven't been canceled for many conferences yet, but I'm sure it's coming. Maybe after this show I'll be canceled. That'll be good.

[01:24:57] Vlad Costea: I mean, that's sort of part of the agenda of the show. I was, I did this interview with David Bailey, the owner of BTC Media and Bitcoin Magazine. And we did this ordinal inscription on livestream where we put the thumbnail for the episode for about $600 in Bitcoin. We put it forever on the blockchain. And we challenged everyone to filter that one out. And it was a lot of fun. And we even said that, OK, we're going to sell this for 3.125 BTC.

[01:25:26] And we even said what we're going to do with the money. We're going to buy one Supra for each one of us and give the rest to Ross Ulbricht.

[01:25:33] Rijndael: Amazing.

[01:25:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. You get canceled when you join the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I'm sorry you were not aware of this prior to joining the interview.

[01:25:41] Rijndael: That's fine. I've gotten canceled by enough people on Twitter. I feel like if you're, if nobody's accusing you of being an attack on Bitcoin, you're probably not doing Bitcoin right. I think that's all part of it. And, you know, like this stuff, like you're going to inscribe your episode thumbnail and then go try to sell it for Bitcoin and buy a Supra. Like, I don't know, that's fun, right? Like Bitcoin can be fun.

[01:26:09] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I think I set up a discount, which was about 50 percent during the episode. And now I'm going to set up another discount. So if you buy this after the next halving, it's going to be 50 percent off. But until then, it's 3.125. Then it's going to be 1.6 whatever. I'm not going to do the math right now. But you get the point.

[01:26:32] Rijndael: Yeah. I mean, so the other thing you should do, right, is maybe say you can either do it that way or you can buy it in Supras. So actually just like denominate the price in Supras and then over time, you know, increase the price of it because, you know, there's only one of this inscription, but Toyota is going to make more Supras every year. So, you know, every Bitcoiner knows that like if there's something that's scarce and something that's not scarce, like the value only goes in one direction.

[01:27:05] So the Supra-denominated purchasing power of your thumbnail should only ever increase over time.

[01:27:12] Vlad Costea: I mean, yeah, there's only one of it, right?

[01:27:16] Rijndael: Yeah, exactly. So in the limit, it should be worth infinite Supras.

[01:27:21] Vlad Costea: Anyway, it's interesting how this works and how this mentality has penetrated the culture. Penetrated, that's a nice verb. Anyway, people believe in absolute scarcity and believe that everything is going to be divided by these 21 million coins. But Newsflash, they're also going to be divided by these ordinal inscriptions that people seem to like.

[01:27:46] Rijndael: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like I've got a low-numbered inscription that I offered to sell to Bugatti for, originally it was for two Bugattis, but now the number is up to four because they haven't taken me up on it. And like they keep making more Bugattis and there's only one of the inscriptions. So, you know, eventually it's going to be five Bugattis because like that's just how this works.

[01:28:13] Vlad Costea: Okay, so I set up a trap and you fell into it because I said that these assets, the infinite amounts of stuff existing in the world is also going to be divided by the ordinal inscriptions, which by the way are satoshis, they're part of the 21 million supply. So of course, you're going to have that divided by, or you're going to have everything else divided by it. So good luck with that. You know,

[01:28:39] Rijndael: That's true. And well, and you know, if you think about it this way, right? Like if you're able to sell that episode thumbnail for, you know, two Supras plus a nice donation for Ross's clemency fund. Like that means, you know, if you don't believe in ordinals, if you think that they're made up, or if you just don't know about them, then you know, what Vlad just did was he just sold one satoshi for two Supras. And a bunch of legal aid, right? That just, like, reprices Bitcoin. Exactly. One satoshi is worth that much.

[01:29:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think that's great. I'm here for it. One Satoshi should be worth like $200,000, which means that one Bitcoin is going to be like 2 trillion or whatever.

[01:29:24] Rijndael: I mean, I'm perfectly okay with that math. If you can find a buyer, let me know.

[01:29:30] Vlad Costea: Yeah, if you're listening to this, DM me and I'm going to send you that inscription. I still have it. For whatever reason, it's a symbol, you know, it's something that shows you that Bitcoin is not fungible. If we're going to get privacy in Bitcoin, all of this is going to go away. So think about it. If you want to make all of this disappear, it will not work with filtering, but it will work with confidential transactions. Make that happen. Give us some ZK proofs or whatever. Give us some very cool cryptography.

[01:30:00] Rijndael: If we got CT, CT would actually break inscriptions and I would gladly throw all of my inscriptions in the fire if we got CT tomorrow. That'd be great. I'm here for it.

[01:30:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah, think about it. I was going to ask you, what else does Taproot Wizards do? And let's assume that this mission of pushing OP_CAT gets fulfilled. What's next?

[01:30:24] Rijndael: Well, so next is, you know, we've got some ideas around layer twos that we think, you know, should be in the world and should be available for Bitcoiners. And we're going to go build them on top of OP_CAT. So, you know, I mentioned before, we wrote a children's book called CatVM. And it's, you should really check it out. It's fun. It's a PDF. I read it to my kid. If you want to read it to a small child, you have to do different voices for different characters.

[01:31:03] Like I did like a big booming voice for the ghost of Satoshi. But there's like these different characters. And what it describes in the book is that if you only have off-chain, you know, bridges that rely on like pre-signed transactions, then you end up having liquidity requirements that make them difficult to scale economically. If you do like multi-sig bridges, then you end up having these things that are like susceptible to operator failure or like regulatory issues or [unclear: rug pulls]. So, you know, what we really need are bridges that can let you move assets between layer one Bitcoin and layer two that don't have these things and can instead let you do like optimistic verification of like the off-chain consensus rules.

[01:31:54] So there's a bunch of cool ideas that we have for like what those off-chain systems could look like. And we want to go build them. And so like, that's one of the things that we want OP_CAT for. And like, you know, the thing that my North Star that I ultimately want to get to is, you know, if you if you think about the perfect way to send somebody Bitcoin, it's like, you know, they install wallet, they get an address. And it's like a static address that they can use over time, right?

[01:32:27] It's kind of like a silent payment, payment code, or it's something that like, you could put it on your website, you can put it on your business card, you can, you know, have it be static. It's not like per transaction, you've got like a static address. And then when I send you money, it just shows up there. And it's fast, it's cheap. It's private, you didn't have to like open a channel, don't have to worry about is there enough liquidity in the right direction between my wallet and your wallet?

[01:32:56] Like, you know, the layer one Bitcoin send and receive experience is actually very good. Other than privacy and kind of like address reuse, like, you know, anybody can download a wallet, send you an address, and people can just send you money. There's not like all this interactivity and liquidity requirements. It'd be really great if we could have that experience, but with, you know, kind of the speed and privacy that you can get in like a layer two. That's a direction that I think we want to head in the long run.

[01:33:26] There's a lot of bootstrapping and kind of cold start issues along the way. I think that there's also more things that people want to be able to do with other assets, right? So like, there's, you know, ordinals, you've got Runes, you've got like other assets that people are working on, like Lightning Labs is working on Taproot Assets, there's a bunch of people working on RGB. I think that one of the things that's nice about having other asset types on Bitcoin is it gives you things that you can, you know, use your Bitcoin for, that you can do atomic transactions with, like you can't actually do an atomic swap with a Supra, right?

[01:34:05] Because like, I can just take the keys. So, you know, having other assets that you can build, exchanges, and, you know, borrow-lend systems, and swaps, all these things for, I think is, you know, useful. And it's a way of building that ecosystem that kind of gets us toward the all Bitcoin economy that we eventually want. Like, I think a lot of people have this idea that in the future, we're all going to wake up and the whole economy is going to be on Bitcoin. But in order for the economy to be on Bitcoin, you need software and financial services.

[01:34:42] And like, you know, there's like all these other systems and products and services that kind of have to be there to support the economy. And those things don't get built unless there's users actually willing to pay for them. And I think right now, there's not, you know, a lot of mainstream users willing to pay for those kinds of protocols and services in like just plain Bitcoin, but they are willing to do it for like Bitcoin assets. And so I think it might be something where we can use, you know, these Bitcoin asset economies to sort of build our way towards like a Bitcoin native economy.

[01:35:22] So that's kind of a long-winded answer. To answer your question directly, what we're gonna be doing is like building, you know, off-chain products and services that use a CatVM or CatVM-like bridging mechanism to settle things to layer one Bitcoin using OP_CAT. That's the plan.

[01:35:43] Vlad Costea: That's interesting. It seems like Taproot Wizards are not going away anytime soon, which is strange because people want you guys to just vanish and not appear on the stage of Bitcoin 2024 once again and dance with those stupid robes.

[01:36:01] Rijndael: Yeah, I don't know why we would vanish. Like we, you know, we haven't actually even distributed the main Taproot Wizards collection. Like we did a mint of the Quantum Cats collection, but like Taproot Wizards haven't actually gone out yet. So we still have at least that to do. But we've also got bigger plans. I'm hiring right now. Shameless plug. Like if you're a Bitcoin developer and you want to work on things that will have actual users. Like, feel free to reach out to me. Yeah, I don't think we're going anywhere for a long time.

[01:36:37] We're definitely going to be at Bitcoin 2024. We're definitely going to be in wizard robes and it's going to be a really good time.

[01:36:47] Vlad Costea: Okay. How can people find you at conferences this year? How can they recognize you? Are you going to be in your robe all the time?

[01:36:55] Rijndael: Probably not all the time, but I'll probably be in it for part of the time. I'll probably be wearing a wizard hat at some point. I'm giving a talk at the conference. I haven't decided what my talk is going to be. I just gave a talk at bitcoin++ in Austin. I gave a talk about OP_CAT and like the mechanics of how CAT covenants work. I'm debating whether or not I want to give a really technical talk like that. Like that talk got into how Schnorr signature construction works and how BIP341 signatures are constructed.

[01:37:29] It was a fun talk, but it was like definitely a technical talk. I'm debating if I want to do something like that or if I want to do something, you know, more approachable and kind of more whimsical. I haven't really decided yet. But yeah, we're definitely going to be there. There's also an inscription conference like the day before and I think a bunch of us are speaking there. So we'll be around. We'll be very easy to find.

[01:37:53] Vlad Costea: Yeah. I was going to ask you, what's your message for the people who want to soft fork to remove both Taproot and SegWit?

[01:38:02] Rijndael: Does anybody actually want that?

[01:38:04] Vlad Costea: There were a bunch of people saying this, that all hell broke loose when those two soft forks emerged. And they want to go back to the Bitcoin the way that they knew it back in the day when obviously it was not possible to do OP_RETURN to add data.

[01:38:20] Rijndael: Yeah, right. Or I mean, even before that, like, you know, Peter Todd had a script from before SegWit to embed arbitrary data in pay-to-script-hash script witnesses. So like he does OpenTimestamps, right? Yeah, OpenTimestamps right now, I believe, still uses an OP_RETURN. But he's also like, there's a really cool construction called a sign-to-contract where you can basically like tweak, I think you're tweaking a nonce with like the timestamp. So you're going to be able to fit data into Bitcoin transactions no matter what.

[01:39:00] The STAMPs project actually, they went whole hog, and now they're using fake pay-to-witness script hash outputs to embed image data. So you know, unless you're also going to fork out pay-to-script-hash, which I don't think anybody's going to do. And even if you did that, you could still have like known public keys that you just tweak with, you know, image data or whatever you want. So data embedding is impossible to get rid of. If you got rid of SegWit, then you're also like, throughout the Lightning Network, you're gonna have less economic density per transaction because like you know, the reason for the witness discount is, well, there's a bunch of reasons for it.

[01:39:50] But you know, one of the things that's nice about the witness discount is it frees up more space in the block for, I guess, the nice thing about the witness data structure is that it frees up more space in the block for more transactions. So if you want to have like less dense blocks with no Lightning Network, no ability to do like multi-party pre-signed transaction protocols, get rid of Taproot, which Taproot is a phenomenal upgrade, like Schnorr signatures are the bomb. Merkleized script trees are dope.

[01:40:20] If you actually want to get rid of those things, like I don't know why you're using Bitcoin at this point, like there's other, you know, there's other blockchain networks that you could use that might be more suited for your purposes. And maybe you should go use those. If you want to get, the thing is anybody can fork Bitcoin. So if you want to fork Bitcoin, and, oh, actually, you should use Doge. Dogecoin doesn't have SegWit. So if you're like super mad about SegWit, just go use Doge.

[01:40:51] They don't have SegWit. And they're like a top 10, you know, market cap coin. So you're not going to have the problem bootstrapping wallets and liquidity and miners that you would have if you made your own fork. Yeah, go use Doge. That's actually the right move. I'm going to tell people that from now on.

[01:41:09] Vlad Costea: It seems like the cat chain is telling people who don't like it to go to the dog chain, right?

[01:41:16] Rijndael: That's exactly right. If you don't like the cat chain, go to the dog chain.

[01:41:20] Vlad Costea: This is so funny. And it goes back. I think there was this viral video that I watched on Twitter, with some guy who was walking down the street asking people, hey, what would you prefer, the dog with hat, which is just a dog with a hat, or this very complex layer two of Ethereum that's called I don't remember what.

[01:41:43] And it does smart contracts and blah, blah, blah, hundreds of transactions per second. And people were like, I like the dog.

[01:41:51] Rijndael: Yeah. Well, I mean, like, that's part of why we thought that CAT might have an easier time in consensus building than more complex covenant opcodes, right? It's like, you know, if you understand what these things do, then you can kind of have like a nuanced discussion about like, oh, yeah, it's more efficient in this case, it's more efficient in that case, whatever. But also, you know, the internet likes cats, and people like cats. And you know, sometimes people just want a thing to get behind and signal, and like, it's called CAT, right?

[01:42:27] It's really easy. It's a no-brainer.

[01:42:31] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And right now I just checked the zap.stream situation. It seems like two people zapped me. So thank you, guys. I'm still running at a loss. But it was a lot of fun to do this also [unclear: on Nostr]. So thank you, Tiggs and Wartime Psychopath, you guys are heroes, you made it, you proved to me that this was not a waste of time to set this up, because it was not easy to set this up. But it's fun. So basically, you have to pay, first of all, you have to pay for every minute in which you're streaming. And then you have to go to the streaming software that you're using and add a custom RTMP. I think that's what it's called. So basically a different source, and you have to copy your information and also put your npub in there.

[01:43:27] And I did some testing prior to this. Seems like I got three viewers. It's something I guess. I'm not accustomed to using this. I just found it on zap.stream.

[01:43:40] Rijndael: Yeah, it looks like now there's three viewers. Oh, no, I need to mute it, otherwise I'm gonna like hear it at the same time.

[01:43:50] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there we go. Huh. It feels like I'm trying something new because there are like five or six live streams going on at the same time. There isn't much choice to be. Oh, there's someone playing Pokemon Blue. I think I would watch that. So much fun. Let's see if we can zap this. Yeah, I'm gonna turn into a Lightning Network bull right now just because I can zap someone playing Pokemon Blue. Anyway, how can people follow you and keep up with your work?

[01:44:25] Rijndael: Twitter's probably the easiest. I'm rot13maxi. You know, I'm like a ROT13 maximalist on Twitter. Follow me there. Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats are like the two kind of company accounts. So I retweet stuff from there a lot. But yeah, just rot13maxi. I usually am talking about CAT or covenants generally or ZK stuff. Happy to talk about any of that stuff. Any, anytime for anybody.

[01:44:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I'll see you I guess either in Nashville or in Atlanta if you're coming to TABConf.

[01:45:04] Rijndael: Yeah, I'm gonna come to both of them. So it should be a lot of fun.

[01:45:07] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm gonna try to come to at least one of them because I have to get travel visa. And it's not easy. For me, I come from a place that declared war to the United States in 1940. Fun trivia.

[01:45:21] Rijndael: And I'm sure the border authority hasn't forgotten.

[01:45:28] Vlad Costea: Of course not. They learn history, right?

[01:45:31] Rijndael: That's right.

[01:45:32] Vlad Costea: When we actually bought F-16 airplanes from you as NATO allies, US senators actually had to vote to determine whether or not we are a threat to the United States. So it's a lot of fun. We give 2% of our GDP to NATO, but when we have to buy airplanes, we have to go for a Senate vote. Gotta love it. I love my country. And its leaders. Anyway, I'm not gonna turn into a political commentator here, even though during the bear market, I did see a couple of Bitcoin podcasts switching to politics.

[01:46:11] I don't want to do that. Thank you very much, Mr. rot13maxi, aka Rijndael. Did I say that correctly?

[01:46:19] Rijndael: Yeah, that's perfect.

[01:46:20] Vlad Costea: Because before that I was reading it as [unclear: Rizhondyle].

[01:46:24] Rijndael: Yeah, a lot of people say that. So you've got it. The J is silent.

[01:46:28] Vlad Costea: It was a lot of fun talking with you. I did learn a lot of stuff. And I hope that everyone listening to this found out something new. Taproot Wizards, they're not really attackers of Bitcoin. They do have a plan behind all of the memes.

[01:46:44] And you should keep an eye on what they're doing.

[01:46:48] Rijndael: Awesome. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.