Title: S16 E27: David Seroy on Alpen Labs & ZK Rollups on Bitcoin
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): David Seroy (@david_seroy; runs everything non-technical at Alpen Labs; co-host of Stratacast)
Published: 2025-05-27
Duration: 2:28:56
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2025-05-27_s16_e27__david_seroy_on_alpen_labs_zk_rollups.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2025-05-27_s16_e27__david_seroy_on_alpen_labs_zk_rollups.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, given global name/jargon fixes and a full read-through, then reconciled against a full local small.en (int16, VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps; paragraphs re-segmented on the small.en word timings, with a three-way comparison (draft vs small.en vs YouTube auto-captions of the livestream) over the whole episode (259 disagreement spots reviewed, about 230 fixes). 26 doubtful stretches were checked against short audio clips re-transcribed locally with medium.en (int16, VAD), including the Greg Maxwell / Pieter Wuille / Poelstra OP_RETURN passage at 00:21:31, the Jeremy Rubin / CTV passage at 00:28:44, the Karate Combat exchange at 00:48:12 (dropped sentence restored), the PGP passage at 01:25:01, the Las Vegas (Bitcoin 2025) panel with Paul Sztorc and Willem (Botanix) at 01:41:40 and the Bitcoin-backed borrowing passages around 02:02-02:05. Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (two reference voices, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop) and short turns re-attributed where the scan or the audio was unambiguous. Sponsor reads (SideShift, Citrea, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com, Hodling.ch) are read live by Vlad. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the feed and the web: Alpen Labs, Stratacast, Liam Eagen, John Light, BitVM, Citrea / Talip, StarkWare, Succinct, Robin Linus, OP_CAT, CTV, Jeremy Rubin, OP_RETURN, Knots, shielded CSV, Winternitz / Lamport signatures, Zcash, Monero, Tether / Paolo Ardoino, Jeremy Allaire, Strike / Jack Mallers, Unchained, Fedimint, Ribbit Capital, Nic Carter / Castle Island, Hoffman, Giacomo, Karate Combat, Permissionless, BitBoy, Eric Wall, MicroStrategy, Botanix, Paul Sztorc / drivechains, Amir Taaki, PGP. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; spoken phrasing kept. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:48] Vlad Costea: The Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 16, Episode 27. This episode is sponsored by SideShift, Citrea, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com and Hodling.ch. And did I mention SideShift? I think I mentioned SideShift. And we are live with David Seroy, who is doing everything non-technical at Alpen Labs. If you haven't heard of Alpen Labs, it means you haven't listened to the previous episodes, which I have done with Liam Eagen and also with John Light. And I'm not sure if I've had anyone else from your team, but it's interesting how we're seeing this renaissance of trying to use Bitcoin as money in a time when even the president of the United States is telling you to never sell your Bitcoin.

[00:01:35] Vlad Costea: It's good to have you, David. Let's rock.

[00:01:38] David Seroy: Thanks, Vlad. I'm stoked to be here. I'm excited, but also kind of like, dang, am I not getting one of the eight hour episodes like Amir and Paul Sztorc?

[00:01:46] Vlad Costea: Oh, we can aim for that. Definitely. I've just had lunch. I think I'm good to go.

[00:01:53] David Seroy: Awesome. Well, I'm excited to get into it.

[00:01:55] Vlad Costea: So tell me more about Alpen. Let's start with that.

[00:01:58] David Seroy: Sure. I mean, I think we're mostly known for pioneering the concept of ZK rollups on top of Bitcoin. Nowadays, I feel like that's not just novel of a concept. Everybody's like, I'm doing a Bitcoin side system or rollup or whatever. But years ago, it was kind of considered an impossible task. And then there were really a few researchers, John Light in particular, who published a paper showing like, whoa, you could actually do this. And then shortly after that, the four co-founders of Alpen who are all from MIT and they're actually all from Nepal and they went to MIT and MIT takes in like one person from Nepal per year.

[00:02:36] David Seroy: So they have like a monopoly on Nepalese MIT people. But they wrote like a detailed kind of paper building on John's work about how you can build these ZK rollups on Bitcoin. That was kind of like the foundational work for everything that's happening now. And then, you know, inscriptions came out and then Robin Linus said, hey, you can hack in a ZK verifier. And then it was kind of the culmination of Alpen's initial research with kind of Robin cracking open BitVM to now, hey, we can actually build, you know, these quasi-ZK rollups on Bitcoin.

[00:03:09] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but what's up with the names, right? You have so for a while when lightning was the thing, you had companies naming themselves every synonym for lightning and bolt and whatever in all of the languages possible. And now we have ZK rollups and they're called Alpen, which I guess stands for Alps or something and refers to mountains. And you have Citrea, which is about lemons and oranges. And I'm like, why? Well, what's happening with the names?

[00:03:38] David Seroy: Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. The Alpen name was a little bit before my time. And actually, if you rearrange the letters, it spells Nepal. The founders say that they didn't even think of that, but it seems like too odd of a coincidence. And then, you know, just being from Nepal, you have Everest out there. It's a very mountainous terrain. I think it feels strong. And then Citrea, I think because those guys are from Turkey, like I think Citrea actually translates to like orange and Bitcoin is orange.

[00:04:10] David Seroy: So, yeah, naming is not easy. It's easier to build the tech than, you know, to name something.

[00:04:18] Vlad Costea: I remember reading the work of John Light, which was mostly about sovereign rollups. This is something that he came up with, if I'm not mistaken. It was a research which I think he said was funded by the StarkWare people. I don't want to mess this up, but I think it was. And for its time, it was pretty groundbreaking. I remember hearing about it in 2023 or something, and I thought to myself, well, this is definitely something we thought we could not do on Bitcoin. And it's beautiful that someone figured out how we can have this on Bitcoin.

[00:04:50] Vlad Costea: So my question for you right now is, what are these ZK rollups for the newbies who may be just tuned in and they have no idea how these work? And what are the advantages of a ZK rollup as compared to, let's say, a sidechain?

[00:05:10] David Seroy: Yeah, so for context, you're right. I think it was back in 2022, John Light received a grant from StarkWare and then also the Human Rights Foundation, so like with Alex Gladstein, to write a paper about whether it's possible to build these ZK rollups. And the conclusion of that paper is we could build at a minimum this thing called a sovereign rollup, so it doesn't have the ZK component. But if we had some sort of soft fork, then we could make them like we could upgrade these from the sovereign rollup to a ZK rollup.

[00:05:40] David Seroy: But for people that aren't aware, you know, we've been talking about scaling Bitcoin for I don't know, over 10 years. And one of the earliest ideas was this concept of like sidechains where you can have completely separate independent blockchains from Bitcoin, but you can bridge your BTC asset from the layer one, the Bitcoin that we know and love. Into these other blockchains that could, you know, maybe one has big blocks, maybe one's privacy oriented, like they can all have specializations. And this allows us to not change the Bitcoin layer one, but to add all this additional functionality.

[00:06:12] David Seroy: And that sounded like an amazing, conceptually cool idea. The problem is in order to bridge your Bitcoin, the asset from the layer one into these different side systems, you had to use what's called like a federation or basically a multisig where, you know, I would have to give my Bitcoin to some person or group of people like Vlad or, you know, Liquid, and then they represent that token, not Vlad, but, you know, you would essentially have to give up your Bitcoin to someone else.

[00:06:43] David Seroy: Yeah, but and then they would represent this token on like their their side system. And that kind of defeats the entire purpose of Bitcoin is if you're just giving up your custody, your money to the other people. And then so it was many years later where, you know, the sidechains idea never really took off on Bitcoin. We pursued the path of lightning and payment channels. But in the Ethereum ecosystem, they explored these concepts of ZK rollups, which is very, very similar to the idea of sidechains, except you don't have that trusted intermediary that is kind of responsible for for bridging your Bitcoin into these other ecosystems.

[00:07:20] David Seroy: And frankly, like that was a really cool and powerful idea. And so now we can kind of reignite that idea originally spurred by sidechains, which is like we can scale Bitcoin with these separate side systems that can add any sort of expressivity or custom functionality, but we can do it without a centralized intermediary in between. And that to me is like a pretty profound breakthrough.

[00:07:41] Vlad Costea: Right. So two of my show sponsors are basically competitors to Alpen. So how would you distinguish between Alpen Labs and Citrea and Alpen Labs and drivechains?

[00:07:55] David Seroy: I'll start with drivechains first. Paul's one of my favorite people. I think he's been like incredibly brilliant and ahead of the curve. But in drivechains, you have these separate blockchains, but then you're it's more of like what's called like an economically secured bridge where you're kind of trusting, you're giving up your custody of your Bitcoin to the miners and then the miners are minting these kind of new BTC derivatives on these sidechains. And Paul would say, yes, like the miners could, in theory, steal your Bitcoin.

[00:08:25] David Seroy: He's like, but they won't because it's game theory and it's incentives. And I think he probably has like a lot of legitimacy to his his argument. I mean, I think drivechains is an idea that I do support, but, you know, you would prefer to have something that's more closer to what we call cryptographically secured, where you just eliminate the ability for someone to steal entirely. And that's where ZK rollups use this fancy, you know, math that kind of eliminates this idea of where we have to be like, all right, we trust Paul's economic analysis is right and the miners won't actually steal.

[00:09:01] David Seroy: And so that brings us closer to what we're doing at Alpen and what Citrea is doing, which I think both of our teams would agree, like are conceptually quite similar over time, over the years. I think you'll see some of our architecture and like our design decisions start to diverge. But from like a very simple perspective, you have Bitcoin layer one, you have some sort of like ZK verifying bridge, which is BitVM, and then you have like an EVM compatible layer two. That general stack is going to look very similar with us and Citrea.

[00:09:30] David Seroy: Long term, you'll probably start to see some differences, though.

[00:09:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think I have this conversation. I've had it with what's his name? I don't want to mess up his name. It was someone from Citrea. And I feel sorry for not mentioning his name right now. Orkun? No, it wasn't Orkun. I know that one. It was Talip. So Talip from Citrea basically told me a couple of weeks ago that if you have free ZK rollups on Bitcoin, you're going to end up having another scaling debate because they're going to put so much data in the blocks that a lot of people will be unhappy.

[00:10:09] Vlad Costea: And right now, it seems like Citrea and Alpen are closest to deploying and launching this year. And if there's going to be a third one, hopefully one that focuses on privacy, then that's pretty much the entire Bitcoin block space. It's going to be used by ZK rollups. And I was wondering what you think about this issue, or if you think about it at all?

[00:10:32] David Seroy: Well, so the kind of family of like rollups, it can have different sets of trade offs. Like you could have one pure rollup where you're kind of what you're alluding to. You're performing transactions on the layer two, and then you're posting a compressed version of the data onto the Bitcoin layer one. And if you have that, then yes, like we will start consuming a lot of block space on the Bitcoin layer one. And because there's only with the SegWit discount, you know, four megabytes every 10 minutes, then fees on the layer one are going to start going up very, very high.

[00:11:07] David Seroy: Like that is valid. But you could also structure a rollup to where people can be performing these transactions on the layer two. And if they're fine accepting a little bit higher trust assumptions, they can post it anywhere else. They can self custody it like they would on lightning. They could post their data on Ethereum. They could post it on Solana. They could post it on a Federation. Like there's many different ways that you could, in theory, post this data from the layer two into. And so the rollups framework kind of provides these different options where it says, look, if it's cheap enough and you want the highest level of security, you can post that data onto the Bitcoin layer one.

[00:11:47] David Seroy: And like this issue that Talip mentioned to you, this could push up Bitcoin layer one fees. But you have the optionality to use a different data solution, which can give you unlimited amounts of throughput. So it's very hard to have these discussions because it's not either or. It's not you either have a trusted Bitcoin bridge and it's cheaper or you have a trustless bridge and it's very expensive. Like users will be able to kind of choose whatever they want here.

[00:12:17] Vlad Costea: Right. But the people who are now arguing against OP_RETURN data at all and they're into filtering, they're not going to be happy with, I guess, what we're going to have on Bitcoin in the next six months or so.

[00:12:33] David Seroy: Well, I think there's nuance there. The whole OP_RETURN thing, we can go into that if you want, is different. The data that would be posted in OP_RETURN is different from what we're talking about, which would be kind of like the partial, the compressed version of the transaction data from the rollup. Now, if we ignore the OP_RETURN issue for now and we just say, look, we're going to be doing these transactions on the rollup and we're posting pretty heavy amounts of data to the Bitcoin layer one, I would argue that those are very much monetary use cases.

[00:13:05] David Seroy: Like we are able to scale payments. We're able to add like non-custodial financial solutions. We're able to add, you know, in theory, you know, perfect privacy to payments. Like these are admirable goals that while I have my disagreements with the kind of like Knots camp and like the anti-spam people, I would say, you know, from my subjective point of view, this is not spam. This is scaling Bitcoin as money. So I think a lot of them, when they understand that, would actually say, OK, we're actually kind of fine with this use of the block space.

[00:13:38] Vlad Costea: Well, I sure hope so, because this whole OP_RETURN drama was started by a GitHub pull request that was posted by Peter Todd, and it was in favor of removing the OP_RETURN limit entirely. And the argumentation presented was for Citrea, actually. And it's sort of funny that they found themselves in the middle of this drama. But at the same time, it seems like the conversation was not about Citrea at all. And the guys who are into running Bitcoin Knots and also filtering and I guess also mining with OCEAN, they haven't mentioned Citrea per se.

[00:14:20] Vlad Costea: They're just more aggressive than ever trying to filter out transactions that they don't like. And I don't know where this is going to end, but it's definitely not the permissionless Bitcoin that I've been hearing about for many years.

[00:14:34] David Seroy: Yeah, I mean, I think probably the reason they haven't gone hard into targeting the Citrea situation is because if you have a strong or even like moderate technical understanding, you'll see that what Citrea wants to do is pretty much an absolute nothing burger. And if anything, removing the OP_RETURN limit actually reduces the UTXO bloat and reduces this kind of unnecessary spam. So it's kind of like contradictory to what OCEAN's kind of mission and Knots says they want to do. And I think the vast majority of people that are technically competent in Bitcoin are kind of supportive, in my opinion, of removing the OP_RETURN limit.

[00:15:13] David Seroy: I mean, you have people like Luke Dashjr, who is like extremely technically competent, but frankly, like at times, maybe a little bit like deranged. And everyone else, you know, kind of like understands the argument to, like, remove the OP_RETURN limit. Yeah.

[00:15:33] Vlad Costea: On the topic of Luke and also grass-fed Bitcoin and Chris, I don't know. Yeah, it's very strange because they are technically competent enough to understand what's happening, but at the same time, they're either ideologically opposed or else they have different incentives to not enable this on Bitcoin. And for a lot of people, this seems like the block size wars of their generation. You know, they haven't been around for the block size wars. They don't know what this was really like. And they're finding a cause to fight for.

[00:16:11] Vlad Costea: They're like, yeah, I'm going to run the software and maybe it's like UASF back in 2017. Maybe I'm protecting Bitcoin. I feel so strong and sovereign. And look, BTC Sessions just posted a new tutorial, how to set up Knots. I'm so smart. Oh, no, these multimillion dollar companies are not going to succeed in putting data on Bitcoin. No, keep your dick pics away from my node, you pedo or whatever. It seems like the discourse is at a very low level, even though the intentions are very technically, how should I put it, meritorious.

[00:16:50] Vlad Costea: There is a lot to it. There is a lot that can happen to Bitcoin. To Bitcoin as money, you know, it's not just putting data on Bitcoin, it's not scaling ordinals or whatever. It's enabling different use cases for borrowing your Bitcoin, for having all of these financial services that were not possible on Bitcoin before to use Bitcoin as money. But the people who oppose them are saying that they're trying to protect Bitcoin as money. And to me, it's a very strange paradox.

[00:17:22] David Seroy: Yeah, you know, and to be clear, if people want to run Knots, run Knots. And I support their desire to kind of promote a different implementation from core. I don't necessarily agree with their rationale, but yeah, I mean, if they want to run a different implementation and promote that to the community and the community starts running it, I mean, that's Bitcoin. But I mostly see this as like a guerrilla marketing tactic rather than a competent technical argument.

[00:18:00] David Seroy: I think while I'm sympathetic to their perspective that Bitcoin is money, I radically agree with that. You know, I'm in this for money and not for, you know, NFTs or, you know, Dick Butts or, you know, like random tokens. I think that, you know, what is money is like rather a subjective point of view, like Chris Guida and like one of his podcasts said, well, you know, like Bitcoin is permissionless, like if the use case is something that like we as Bitcoiners agree with. And he's kind of saying, well, like, you know, what Bitcoiners agree with is his perspective of what is money, which is just like opening and closing lightning channels.

[00:18:40] David Seroy: But it's like, isn't there some way for us as Bitcoiners to come into consensus as to like what we think is like a valid use of the Bitcoin blockchain? And the answer is yes, it's literally the Bitcoin consensus. And so this isn't like, you know, what Luke and Chris Guida and the Bitcoin Mechanic say is like Bitcoin is money. It's like we've already had this discussion and we've kind of agreed on what the current Bitcoin consensus is. If you're trying to post a transaction that is within the consensus, then that is a Bitcoin use case.

[00:19:10] David Seroy: And I know that they would argue that the whole kind of like ordinals and the inscriptions thing was like a bug and it's a hack and it wasn't actually what Bitcoiners agreed with. But the reality is like that is the current state of consensus. And if they truly want to make a change here and they say, hey, the vast majority of the Bitcoin community agrees with us, agrees with like what the Knots people are saying is Bitcoin is money, then you're going to have to fork it.

[00:19:30] David Seroy: You're going to have to change the consensus code of Bitcoin. And so my advice to them is if they want to do that, you know, put a fork out there. That's like a little bit of a precarious and tenuous thing to say, but that's just kind of the state of the matter right now. Like if they truly want to prevent this this spam, it has to go beyond filters. Filters are only a half measure, which may have some impact. But when it comes to people that are economically motivated and say, I want to get things in that are outside of the filters and that can fit in Bitcoin consensus, people can very, very, very easily do that.

[00:20:06] David Seroy: So it's a much deeper issue than what the Knots people are saying. And that's ultimately why I just think a lot of this is like guerrilla marketing tactics.

[00:20:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but at the same time, you have to think about it in this way. If you filter out ordinal inscriptions, which is arguably the most efficient way to put data into Bitcoin, you're going to be able to put data using multisigs, or stamps, or BRC-20s, or ways which are not on the witness side, so you cannot prune them, which bloat the UTXO set, and which can be very easily, how should I put it, lost in a crowd. So you can't necessarily tell if that's a legit multisig, or that's actually data that's coming to the Bitcoin blockchain.

[00:20:56] Vlad Costea: So they can fork away, they can create their own version of Bitcoin, but it doesn't mean that they will not enable any sort of data to get inserted into the Bitcoin blocks. And also, transaction data is data. And these are transactions that pay transaction fees to the miners. And proof of work was created as a way to prevent spam by paying for the spam. So you can argue that as long as you pay for it's not spam. And that's the filter in and of itself.

[00:21:31] David Seroy: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm in total agreement with you. To your point, it'd be like a cat and mouse game, but ultimately, people can just tweak the UTXOs, embed data arbitrarily in there. And the people like Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille, these OG [unclear: prolific] Bitcoin developers have [unclear: pointed this out] as much as this is. And even Poelstra have all said, look, like, in order to actually make this effective, you would have to radically reform and strip out Bitcoin. And it wouldn't even be Bitcoin. It's not just a simple change we can do here.

[00:22:04] David Seroy: And then it's like, oh, we can eliminate all this spam.

[00:22:11] David Seroy: It's pretty deeply embedded in Bitcoin, its ability for people to start posting data in spam ways.

[00:22:19] Vlad Costea: Well, they're smart because they remember colored coins, which arguably were very much similar with ordinal inscriptions. They remember Counterparty, they remember Mastercoin slash Omni, which was a big deal for its time. That's how Tether came out on the Bitcoin blockchain. So they do know that you can create random tokens on Bitcoin by inserting data. And what it takes is just some third party computer to interpret this data in a certain way. And that's how you get basically another layer to Bitcoin. And UTXOs get a whole new meaning of which the miners are not even aware, or the nodes.

[00:23:01] Vlad Costea: So you can play this game for as long as you want. You're just going to name certain UTXOs something and then create a protocol on top of it, which recognizes that identity. And that's it. You have a new layer for Bitcoin, which does something that you don't like.

[00:23:18] David Seroy: Yeah, I'm in total agreement. I'm starting to get to the point where I'm getting past the conversation. I'm [unclear: now] ready to move on to other things in Bitcoin to continue actually scaling and building out and not getting caught in these petty marketing dramas, in my opinion.

[00:23:36] Vlad Costea: Now, you mentioned something about deploying Alpen as a multisig, because there is no mechanism to do it without any sort of trust assumptions involved. And that would require, I guess, a covenant soft fork. And I want to ask you, which are the covenant soft forks that Alpen Labs advocates for? And what what would help you basically to deploy a much better and more efficient layer for financial services on Bitcoin?

[00:24:07] David Seroy: Well, to be clear, we're not deploying with any sort of like multisig or trusted multisig. Like the whole breakthrough of this BitVM setup is you can create this bridge that has a 1-of-N trust assumption, or as long as like one person or one party is honest, then this kind of bridge is secure. So we would not go to mainnet or put a live product in production that doesn't at least meet those criteria. In terms of soft forks, like we don't need any sort of soft fork whatsoever, but it could make what we're building more efficient or cleaner.

[00:24:43] David Seroy: So I think at a minimum, something like CTV and CheckSigFromStack, which is gaining some traction would be very beneficial. I think CTV is kind of being recognized like, while it is very simplistic, It's kind of like an like, I think James O'Beirne calls it like elemental in a sense where it seems to be at least somewhat beneficial to everyone in some small capacity with like minimal risk. CheckSigFromStack would be very beneficial for BitVM based bridges. Right now, in order to like create a BitVM style bridge, you have to do these things that were formerly called Lamport signatures.

[00:25:19] David Seroy: Now they're called Winternitz signatures. The bottom line is like you kind of have this signature scheme that is a little bit clunky. It's like very data intensive or like it requires like a lot of off chain communication. And if we had CheckSigFromStack, you could probably reduce that by 10x. So for many of us in the BitVM world, we say, okay, great CTV would be beneficial if we had CheckSigFromStack. Also, that probably makes the BitVM style bridges, you know, 10x, 10x better.

[00:25:47] David Seroy: But even then, BitVM, the best you can get is this like 1-of-N trust assumption that I mentioned that it's not perfectly cryptographically trustless to be able to bridge your Bitcoin into these side chains or ZK rollups, but it's it's pretty dang close. Now, if we took it one step up on soft forks, having something like OP_CAT, you could create, this is what StarkWare guys like Eli Ben-Sasson and all of them want, is you can create something called like a STARK verifier, which is like S-T-A-R-K.

[00:26:15] David Seroy: And that would give you, that would remove BitVM entirely. And it would remove this kind of 1-of-N trust assumption. And you can have a true, like trustless ZK verifier. Like we can have this trustless, no 1-of-N trust assumption bridge. So we'd also be supportive of CAT. And then I think Liam who's our founding cryptographer slash chief scientist who you've had on here previously, he simply just wants like multiplication. Like right now you can't even do multiplication in Bitcoin script simply like adding that functionality would be a pretty like material breakthrough for what's possible on a ZK side of Bitcoin, because.

[00:26:52] David Seroy: Verifying zero knowledge proofs in Bitcoin or verifying zero knowledge proofs in general, very simply it's just like performing multiplications, many, many, many, many multiplications, but that's like the core primitive right now in Bitcoin script, like to try to do multiplication. It's like, you have to like hack together, like addition, OP_ADD, OP_ADD, OP_ADD, you know, a bunch of crazy stuff. So simply just saying, Hey, we can like multiply two really big numbers together. That would, you know, be pretty significant breakthrough. So just to recap: CTV, CSFS, CheckSigFromStack, we'd be happy with, we'd be happy with OP_CAT.

[00:27:30] David Seroy: And then we'd also be happy with like multiply.

[00:27:34] Vlad Costea: It's sort of ironic how CTV started out as this proposal that came out right after taproot. I think less than a year later, Jeremy was pushing for activation. And then he hit the ceiling and he got a lot of hate. And he went through this process where he felt like it makes no sense to continue working on this anymore. And there's no support for it. And you had LNHANCE and you had a lot of, sorry, I knocked something on my desk. You had a lot of proposals that seemed to be more powerful than CTV.

[00:28:10] Vlad Costea: And then it came back full circle. And now we all agree that, okay, CTV might just be the best option. Of them all. They were saying, well, it's non-recursive and it cannot do this and it cannot do that. Maybe we should think of something that helps lightning also. Maybe we should get together at a conference and say, well, let's package these opcodes and call it the Great Script Restoration as Blockstream did. But right now, there seems to be a lot of consensus for CTV, whereas last year I think it was for OP_CAT.

[00:28:44] David Seroy: Yeah, I think, I don't love in Bitcoin that like, just how like radically strong, people are opposed to like any sort of new change whatsoever. I do think that over time the Overton window's shifting. I think it was really unfortunate that Jeremy was almost like a sacrificial lamb where it's like, we have to make this guy's life miserable and make him feel like he's, you know, trying to, you know, steal the identity of Bitcoin. But then somebody else like picks up his proposal and it's not like Jeremy pushing it also.

[00:29:12] David Seroy: And it's like, Oh, this is actually like kind of interesting. So, I mean, Jeremy is like crazy brilliant. He's, he's been extremely beneficial to Bitcoin, but whatever, like if we end up getting CTV and CheckSigFromStack, despite how long it's taken and like all the hurdles, I think that would be great. With regards to like OP_CAT, I don't know if it was ever, it just opens up too many, like. Potential, trap doors for a lot of people in particular, like MEV.

[00:29:44] David Seroy: I don't think that there's any credibility to the MEV argument, but I think that's the main barrier. People are like, we just don't even know how to like, think about this. And so therefore, like, we're just gonna, you know, push OP_CAT off to the side. And just so people like are aware, MEV is this idea of like either miner extractable value or maximal extractable value. It it's basically like if you added some sort of programmability to Bitcoin with like a soft fork where you could build these like, you know, AMMs or these kinds of like trading platforms, or just like ways to introduce tokens, like more broadly on Bitcoin, then certain miners could run like these quantitative strategies and extraction.

[00:30:26] David Seroy: They could reorder transactions in a certain way so that, you know, they essentially extract like more value than they should have from people. And so then maybe you have an entity like you know, Marathon who they have some secret MEV strategy where they can double the amount of revenue they're making as mining versus like, you know, some individual miner in Africa. You know, like they don't have the resources to do this quantitative trading analysis. And all of a sudden, because Marathon or whoever, whichever entity is making more revenue from MEV, then they can expand their mining operations and it can centralize.

[00:30:57] David Seroy: So like MEV really is like a very, very, very dangerous and like very, very scary thing for the decentralization of Bitcoin. And some people suspect that you could in theory, introduce MEV with OP_CAT. I think there's a couple of reasons to believe it would not actually do that. In particular, if you tried to build things like AMMs or DEXs or MEV strategies on Bitcoin layer one, they would never actually be able to gain much scale because we have the 10 minute block times and the limit on block space and just like everything else about it, like these things, you want to be able to generate like things at scale enough for MEV to be impactful in my humble opinion.

[00:31:36] David Seroy: And then even if CAT enabled things like a trustless ZK verifier for us on the rollup side, you know, it's kind of been shown, in the Ethereum ecosystem that all of the MEV gets captured essentially on the layer two, and it doesn't bleed down to the L1. So the miners [unclear: won't] capture it. Therefore they wouldn't kind of be susceptible to this centralization risk and therefore CAT, in my opinion, probably feels safe, but just given that we have CheckTemplateVerify, CTV, and CheckSigFromStack, it feels like that's where people are leaning rather than like taking the risk with CAT.

[00:32:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So for people who are unaware, OP_CAT is basically an operation code for concatenation, which means you take two different pieces of data and you put them together. It's something that you cannot do currently in Bitcoin without a lot of code. As you said, you do a lot of additions to basically make up for the lack of multiplication. The concern I think is that you can generate these loops or you can write very inefficient code, which basically is very hard to read. You can concatenate a lot of elements and then you're looking at it and you're not even sure what the code does.

[00:32:49] Vlad Costea: But for these concerns, I tell people, well, there's OP_CAT on Liquid. And if you don't like Blockstream, maybe you like Bitcoin Cash because they also have OP_CAT. And if you don't like Bitcoin Cash, maybe it's time that you destroy it, right? If you're so concerned that OP_CAT is going to destroy Bitcoin, why don't you destroy Bitcoin Cash? It has large block size. It has OP_CAT. Try it. Try to destroy Bitcoin Cash if OP_CAT is so harmful.

[00:33:20] David Seroy: Yeah, I tend to agree with that sentiment. You know, people like the StarkWare team, to their credit, they put out a $1 million grant. They said, hey, you know, like, yes, we would love to see OP_CAT, but here's a million dollars if you can kind of propose these ways of how you could, you know, break Bitcoin with OP_CAT or even just like put it in a precarious situation where it messes up the incentives. So, yeah, I mean, I think the window to collect that 1 million is over, but Hey, if somebody has a suggestion, like I'm happy to, you know, go to the StarkWare team and be like, open this back up, you know, let's do a million dollars.

[00:33:54] David Seroy: Like somebody has a really compelling way of how to, you know, break it. So I tend to agree with your sentiment. Like there's a lot more complaining and fear mongering about it than there is actual evidence that this stuff would be dangerous.

[00:34:10] Vlad Costea: Well, but it has to be a conspiracy, right? Because nobody wants to destroy Bitcoin Cash. That's the attack on Bitcoin. And they're waiting for the real thing to get deployed on the real Bitcoin, which is gonna basically how should I put it, make everyone's generational wealth vanish overnight. And that's why you should activate OP_CAT. But I was gonna ask you, why don't you guys build on Bitcoin Cash? Like is there a stigma that's associated with it? It can be a very good way to prove how the technology works.

[00:34:42] David Seroy: Well, I mean, we can now build what we want to do on Bitcoin. Like maybe a couple of years ago, that would have been like a decently compelling argument where it's like, we didn't have things like inscriptions. We didn't have BitVM. Like we literally just like couldn't do it. And so maybe it makes sense to say, let's, you know, show, we can do this on Bitcoin Cash. And then we pitch it to the Bitcoin community, but now it's like, we don't need to ask for permission.

[00:35:04] David Seroy: Like we have everything we need to build. Would it be beneficial if we had more soft forks and it makes the process like more efficient and cleaner? Yes. A hundred percent, but like we're chilling, like we're doing the research, we're engineering, and we're moving forward with Bitcoin. So there's really no need to do it on these other, you know, kind of Bitcoin forks. And also like, I mean, I don't want to speak for any teams, but people are kind of embracing and like aligning around orange coin good.

[00:35:32] David Seroy: Like even historical, I think Bitcoin Cash advocates are, you know, maybe moving more towards orange coin rather than green coin. I think like we're kind of past the whatever it's called, you know, event horizon or we're at escape velocity with Bitcoin.

[00:35:51] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah. But at the same time it's open source software. So rather than running on testnets, which are limited and have no normie users and also no incentives to break, you can try to break one of these altcoins, alt chains that have been around for a long time. They have all the tools that you need and who knows, maybe you're going to make money breaking them.

[00:36:16] David Seroy: Maybe. Yeah, I guess it's worth consideration. It just hasn't been a priority for us, for us, you know, we're aligned on Bitcoin and that's just like where we started building everything.

[00:36:27] Vlad Costea: Anyway, it's been about 36 minutes into this interview and we haven't mentioned the price at all and we are at an all time high of $109,000 and let me plug a couple of sponsors. I've been telling people for the past few months that if someone wants to pay you in stablecoins, you should not hold onto that and swap that for Bitcoin. And if you did that, I guess today you would be very happy. So check out SideShift. That's where you can do this.

[00:36:58] Vlad Costea: You basically paste your Bitcoin address in there and then you have a USDT address that you can copy. You send that to the partner that wants to pay you in some stablecoin. They're going to pay that to you, but what you get to your wallet is BTC. And of course there is a small fee involved and yeah, it's pretty cool. Try it out. It doesn't require registration. It's fast. I've used it before and I would not recommend it if I didn't like it myself. And also check out Bitcoin.com News on the topic of Bitcoin Cash because for a long time, and I guess it's been like seven or eight years, they have been the hub for BCH stuff and now they rebranded completely.

[00:37:43] Vlad Costea: If you look at their website, they know which is the real Bitcoin. They have some solid journalism there. You can find some geopolitics and some gold news and some Bitcoin news. And it's honestly in some ways more useful to me than Bitcoin Magazine, which seems to be way too political and way too Trump leaning. It's a bit more balanced and I like it. So if you get the chance, go to news.bitcoin.com and I think they're doing a pretty good news. And I think I've already mentioned Citrea and LayerTwo Labs, but I want to give them another shout out because their software is available for testing today.

[00:38:20] Vlad Costea: So if you go to layertwolabs.com slash download, you're going to find versions for all the drivechains. And then you go to Drivechain Talk, which is their Telegram channel. And there are some guys there who can send you some free testnet coins so that you can make transactions around. Try that zSide, Zcash sidechain or try to do your own ICO on this fork of Ethereum. It's interesting. And also for Citrea, it's citrea.xyz and they have a download section that gets you to their testnet version of the software.

[00:38:53] Vlad Costea: Does Alpen have any testnet version that can be tried today?

[00:38:58] David Seroy: Yeah, we're on a private devnet right now. You know, hopefully we'll probably be having our public testnet in the next few weeks or month here, just kind of whenever we push go on the button. But yeah, you can either hit me up if you want to see the documentation or just wait a couple more weeks or whatever until we make the formal announcement. And then, I don't know, fun fact, you mentioned bitcoin.com. Our head of marketing is Andrew. He was the former CMO of bitcoin.com and he was the guy that came up with the green Bitcoin logo.

[00:39:34] David Seroy: You know, that's his claim to fame. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what actually an example I was alluding to where, you know, bitcoin.com, they're kind of aligning. They're coming back. They're saying, hey, you know, orange coin good. I don't think they are like, you know, disavowing Bitcoin Cash by any means. But yeah, I think people are just kind of like embracing Bitcoin as a whole. And we're seeing that trend play out.

[00:40:00] Vlad Costea: If you go to bitcoin.com today, you're going to see that they're orange. They're not green anymore. Exactly. Exactly. They have a different logo. They have a different layout. It's very orange all around. It's not green. But yeah, I think it's a historical contribution, the fact that he made the green logo, which for a long time has been such a massive trigger within the BTC community, just seeing that. Or the BCH please T-shirts. Like, those were fun times.

[00:40:35] David Seroy: It's absolutely part of the, you know, Bitcoin lore definitively.

[00:40:40] Vlad Costea: So I was going to ask you technically, what are the differences between Citrea and Alpen Labs? Because you're building a ZK rollup, which tries to build some of the same services and uses some of the same assumptions.

[00:40:55] David Seroy: I think for what we've kind of announced publicly, I think these things are going to look very similar. You know, I'll give some alpha leaks here, whether I should or should not. But, you know, I think eventually these teams are all going to want to expand beyond the EVM. And you're going to want to offer the ability to maybe have an SVM, maybe to have shielded CSV, maybe to have whatever Zcash style or Monero style or, you know, something that's custom built for trading. Like you're going to want all of these different, what we call like custom execution domains, and you're going to want all of these to interoperate with each other.

[00:41:33] David Seroy: And I think the way that we're kind of architecting that from the ground up a little bit more from scratch probably varies from what Citrea is doing. So I think if and when everybody expands to this multi execution domain, like beyond the EVM, I think that's when our architecture will start to look a little bit different than what they're doing. And then, you know, right now everybody is kind of aligning on like the same BitVM type setup. I think that there is some very novel research that, like research, it could literally fall apart tomorrow and we hit a blocker and we say, well, we missed this part, it's a nothing burger.

[00:42:09] David Seroy: But there is, you know, some research that we're pursuing that could be a 100 to 1000x improvement to the current state of the art of BitVM. And if that becomes viable, then I think you really start to see these bridges diverge.

[00:42:26] David Seroy: So those are kind of two conceptual or two things that maybe you could start to see a difference from. Aside from that, I think a lot of it will come down to the ecosystem and the partners. You know, it's one thing to have an EVM compatible layer, but it's all right, who's your lending market? Who's your DEX market? You know, do you have Bitcoin backed stablecoins? Like, do you actually have distribution? You know, the technical stack only gets you so far.

[00:42:51] Vlad Costea: OK, so who is behind Alpen Labs? Because in the case of Citrea, they came up with all of these conspiracy theories saying, well, the same guys who tried to destroy Bitcoin in 2017 are now paying for Citrea to get built. No, this is another attack on Bitcoin. What kind of attack is Alpen launching?

[00:43:11] David Seroy: Oh, got it. You're asking, like, who are our backers? Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's all public. You know, Ribbit, who I think is, like, maybe the single most successful, like, fintech investor in the world, is kind of our lead investor. You know, we also have [unclear: Nic Carter] with Castle Island, who's backed us. You know, in terms of, like, seed investors or angel investors, we have, like, Wences Casares, who, you know, may be the single largest Bitcoin holder aside from Satoshi on the planet, who was like patient zero in Silicon Valley.

[00:43:49] David Seroy: I don't think he's made any Bitcoin investments in, like, over eight years. So we're really stoked to have Wences. And then, you know, people may not know these names, but, like, in Ethereum, there are some, like, major researchers like Uma Roy from Succinct, who's kind of, like, at the bleeding edge of ZK. She's, like, the founder and CEO of Succinct Labs. John Adler from Celestia, who invented the concept of optimistic rollups and, like, data availability. We have, like, Hasu, who's, like, a pretty prolific researcher. We have the family office of Lido, which is, like, the single biggest, you know, application on Ethereum with, like, staked ETH.

[00:44:25] David Seroy: So, and then I'll add one more, like, Neha Narula, who, and Jeremy Rubin. Jeremy's an angel, I think I can say that. You know, these are people who, like, founded MIT DCI, like, digital currency initiative. So, yeah, I mean, I think we have, like, pretty respected investors. I'm sure somebody on Twitter will find something wrong with all of those people and say how they're an attack on Bitcoin. But, yeah, they're pretty legit, I think.

[00:44:53] Vlad Costea: Jessica, hello. I would actually love to have Nic Carter on the show, if you can connect me with him. That can be fun. I was the first guy who high-fived him before his fight. Okay, I was there next to the stage. I extended my arm. He high-fived me. He was so pumped, so hyped, and then went on to kick that guy's ass, and I was like, yeah. I feel like I was part of it.

[00:45:17] David Seroy: That's awesome. I was actually at that event as well. And I talked to Nick about that fight on, like, my little Stratacast, like, on the small podcast that we do. And I thought it was an awesome moment. I loved his follow-up post about, like, his [unclear: white pill] moment. And, you know, he was kind of diagnosed with, you know, I think some sort of disease, and maybe it was, like, an autoimmune condition. And then he's like, hey, I'm a, you know, Twitter personality and a Bitcoin guy, but, like, why not?

[00:45:42] David Seroy: Like, why can't, you know, he just, like, go out and train and get fit and, like, you know, go inside the ring and just, like, you know, feel a little bit of, like, primordial, you know, sense of fighting. Like, you don't have to do this at a UFC, a professional level. And I'm just like, hell yeah, Nick, that was cool. So I'm stoked for him.

[00:46:00] Vlad Costea: But he still hasn't had the original opponent, which was supposed to be David, what's his last name, Hoffman? That's right. The guy from the Bankless podcast who broke his ribs or something just before the fight. So it wasn't what we wanted. It was, like, you know, the Nic Carter fight we have at home, not the one that we want.

[00:46:24] David Seroy: Yeah, I'm actually buddies with Hoffman as well. But he had a fight recently against somebody named Kain Warwick, who's, like, runs another application on Ethereum. And Hoffman won that fight. So I would love to see, you know, the Nick and David Hoffman fight happen. And it'll be, like, the battle for, you know, the flippening for Bitcoin versus Ethereum.

[00:46:50] Vlad Costea: Yeah, what's up with fights, by the way? I've seen BitBoy going into fights. I've seen all of these podcasters realizing, OK, I look like a sissy or something, sitting here all day talking to people, just being on the Internet. I've got to show them that I'm a real man or whatever. And what does that mean? Well, I'm going to train for six months, get ripped, and then get inside the ring and make people money because they're betting on my fight. I don't know. It's very strange to me.

[00:47:18] Vlad Costea: And when I was there, I was even considering it. But I think right now I'm a heavyweight and there's no way I would be paired with Nic Carter or whatever.

[00:47:29] David Seroy: Well, I think the rules are probably flexible. And since these aren't, like, exactly sanctioned fights.

[00:47:35] Vlad Costea: I'm 6'4", 200 pounds. I don't think I would get that. It's not fair. Yeah, you're probably right.

[00:47:47] David Seroy: But, yeah, I don't know.

[00:47:49] David Seroy: I mean, I go back and forth. Some of the fights I see or I hear about on Twitter, I'm like, this is just so [unclear: cringe] and so embarrassing, some of the BitBoy stuff. But, yeah, I don't know. Maybe because it's some of my buddies with Nick and Hoffman, I just think that stuff's a little cooler. They're just doing it with the acknowledgement that it's not serious for them. They're not trying to become fighters. It's just something personal for them to do. That's all I have to say about it.

[00:48:12] Vlad Costea: And there's that company Karate Combat and they're monetizing this. Just all sorts of celebrities getting into the ring to see who wins the fight. Like, it's so stupid, but it works for them.

[00:48:27] David Seroy: Yeah, yeah. I'm more on the, like, I went to Permissionless and they had a betting market set up for a pickleball tournament. And we took that down and we took first place in the pickleball tournament. So that's the extent of my athletic endeavors in crypto conferences. I don't think I'll be entering the ring.

[00:48:46] Vlad Costea: I mean, why would you kill your brain cells and potentially not have children just because you want to flex on some random people on the Internet who are making money off of your fight? It's silly.

[00:48:59] David Seroy: It's a good point, the trade-offs.

[00:49:01] Vlad Costea: I don't know. I don't feel like I have that much to prove to get into a ring and fight someone that I don't even hate. Like, if I got to fight, let me think of someone I actually hate. Giacomo Zucco. I would destroy that guy.

[00:49:18] David Seroy: Well, he's not getting put in your weight class. I think you have, you know, probably a full-foot advantage. Giacomo is closer to my height, you know.

[00:49:28] Vlad Costea: I know, I know. I met him. Just for the lulz, that would be epic. Anyway, let's go back to Alpen Labs and talking about technology because that's why we're here. You mentioned Ethereum a few times, like some backers of Alpen Labs are into Ethereum and have built stuff on Ethereum. The question is, and a lot of the filterers would say this, are you trying to bring Ethereum to Bitcoin? Are you trying to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum? Is Bitcoin just a data availability layer for Ethereum stuff?

[00:50:06] David Seroy: No. I mean, I think the vast majority of things on Ethereum really have no benefit to Bitcoin as money and really don't have much product market fit aside from issuing tokens. I think a lot of the major loud critics, I think they have validity to that argument. But there is a subset of things on Ethereum which have true real-deal product market fit and are kind of an extension of Bitcoin as money. One of them, in my opinion, is some things like DeFi in particular, just simply being able to borrow against your Bitcoin.

[00:50:43] David Seroy: Right now, most Bitcoiners are telling us, hey, go put your money in, I don't know, whatever, name your favorite application. I don't want to throw names out there. Pay 12%, 13%, 14%, 15% plus annual renewal fees and origination fees and administrative fees and KYC. Now we have Jack Mallers with Strike and he's like, we can maybe get it at 10%, best case scenario, 50% LTV. And it's like, well, no, you can just go to Morpho and borrow at 4.5% without any of the other hassle instantly.

[00:51:13] David Seroy: These are products that were built on Ethereum rails with DeFi that are truly significantly better than what the kind of Bitcoin alternatives are. And they're not custodial. So those are the types of things where I'm like, even that one single use case is well worth us bringing Ethereum type use cases to Bitcoin. Aside from that are things like privacy. I don't know, something like Zcash or Monero, I would love to see that for Bitcoin. Our head of research, Aaron, he was a co-author on ring signatures, which are used in Monero.

[00:51:53] David Seroy: Liam, who you have on here, was a co-author on Shielded CSV, which in my opinion is probably the current state of the art of bringing perfectly private payments to Bitcoin. Was that stuff born in Ethereum? I mean, ZK was funded mostly by Ethereum research. So if people are going to push back on me and say, oh, you're bringing Ethereum stuff to Bitcoin, I'm like, yeah, yeah, so what? So there's some really god, horrendously bad things in Ethereum, but there's also some god-tier good things that Ethereum has brought.

[00:52:24] David Seroy: And I think for us at Alpen, we're more focused on obviously the things that benefit Bitcoin as money and things that can be done non-custodially and without token incentives. The reality is, like, if you want to bring that stuff, you in theory open up the door for some of it to exist on the rollup.

[00:52:42] Vlad Costea: Yeah, agreed. But there is a lot of nuance here that most people fail to grasp. They don't understand that Ethereum has built something that might be interesting for Bitcoin. I had Vitalik on like three or four episodes ago, and he agreed to a degree that Ethereum is sort of like a sidechain for Bitcoin. Because right now, the most liquid layer two for Bitcoin is actually Ethereum with wrapped Bitcoin. There's like one hundred thousand BTC in there. And I think both Citrea and Alpen are trying to tap into that to minimize the amount of BTC that is exposed to this counterparty risk and bring that to a layer which has the same security assumptions as Bitcoin.

[00:53:26] Vlad Costea: Am I correct in this?

[00:53:27] David Seroy: Yeah, exactly. And one, I really enjoyed the Vitalik episode, and that was like an awesome pull for you. I think you've had like some really good guests over the past 12 months. But for now, Ethereum is kind of like a sidechain for Bitcoin. However, most people don't like they think that, oh, wow, like we're going to have these BitVM style bridges and we'll be able to bridge Bitcoin to Ethereum in this near trustless manner. And that's like that is not the case. Like if you're bridging from the Bitcoin consensus layer into a different consensus system like Ethereum, there is no amount of ZK cryptography, BitVM, that can ever fully eliminate the trust assumptions.

[00:54:09] David Seroy: There's like a hard line when you're going between different consensus systems. So for now, Vitalik is probably right that like Ethereum is a side system to Bitcoin and we have WBTC and cbBTC over there. But kind of what ourselves and Citrea are building is a rollup is a separate blockchain, but it inherits the consensus of Bitcoin. So as I kind of like that line that you have here where you try to bridge over Ethereum, like that's going to be a trust assumption no matter what. With a rollup, you can essentially eliminate that more fully.

[00:54:39] David Seroy: And I think once this stuff comes to market, then we're really going to siphon back a lot of the Bitcoin that has been bridged over to Ethereum. And it's going to come, yes, closer to these kind of like Bitcoin security and Bitcoin trust assumptions. And that is, I think, closer to the Holy Grail that we want for scaling.

[00:55:00] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but once again, you've got to grasp the nuance. And you said something nice about my podcast. I also have to say something nice about your podcast, which is the Stratacast. It's pretty good. You have most of the investors and contributors to Alpen Labs. So to anyone who's trying to learn more about Alpen Labs, then this podcast episode is going to teach you. Go to David Seroy's podcast, which is called Stratacast. It's really good. I've been listening to bits of it. I didn't have time for entire episodes, but it's very informative.

[00:55:33] Vlad Costea: And you're doing a great job. I hope you keep going.

[00:55:37] David Seroy: Yeah, thank you. There are, like I joked with you earlier, dozens of us that listen. So hopefully we can pump those numbers up and I can get some more episodes out.

[00:55:46] Vlad Costea: No, but it's really good because I remember at one point, Stephan Livera was arguing that there are too many Bitcoin podcasts. And I disagree in the sense that I think we should have more Bitcoin podcasts, but focused on very niche topics. Because everyone's trying to be Joe Rogan. Everyone's trying to be like Peter McCormack or something. Just interview people from all across the ecosystem and know nothing about the topics and just get famous because of it. But we have a lot of competent speakers who are specialized in some topics.

[00:56:20] Vlad Costea: Maybe they don't know a lot about the others, but they just need to send that extra piece of information in a way that's easy to digest to the listeners. And I've been chasing this concept. I've been trying to get as many Bitcoin layer 2 people as I can. I've been trying to unite tribes. I even got a BSV guy to try to see what's up, where they're currently at. But my point is that there should be more of these podcasts focusing on specifics as opposed to just, hey, this is sound money.

[00:56:55] Vlad Costea: We're winning. We're so rich. I'm going to buy a Citadel with one BTC in 10 years. Or why should I spend my Bitcoin today when I can buy a private jet in 20 years? I don't know. It's weird to me. We have too much of that and not enough actually useful conversations.

[00:57:14] David Seroy: Yeah, I'm 100% in alignment with you there. And I was very cringe and resistant to starting a podcast [unclear: for those reasons]. I was like, we don't need any more Bitcoin podcasts. But I agree with you. We don't need any more of the number go up, moon juice, stock to flow podcast. Let's get back to these cypherpunk ideals to scaling Bitcoin to these open conversations. And yeah, we were talking about price earlier. And you said, hey, we have an all-time high. I honestly didn't even know until my dad texted me.

[00:57:46] David Seroy: I'm just not focused on that anymore. I got into Bitcoin, yeah, sure, for number go up, a financial economic incentive. But there's so many way cooler things that are happening in Bitcoin. And I think most people in their Bitcoin journey, they actually become a little bit numb to number go up. And they're like, wait, why am I in this again? I've become wealthy. I've gone through these cycles. My bank account has gone up. And I think they actually feel a little bit of burnout and existential dread and being like, damn.

[00:58:13] David Seroy: I told myself I was into this Bitcoin because it's separation of money and state. But they actually only cared about number go up. And then once number had gone up, they have a little bit of identity crisis. And I think that's why you see people actually leave and disappear from Bitcoin. I think that there's a moment of introspection where they're kind of like, fuck, why am I in this? And I think what I love with what you're doing and what we're doing at Alpen is it kind of reignites this why.

[00:58:38] David Seroy: It's like, oh, hell yeah, we can separate money from state. We can actually create these non-custodial solutions. We can add world-class privacy. We can build better financial solutions than what the centralized providers are applying. That's what gets me up in the morning. I don't go and check CoinMarketCap every day and look at Eric Wall's rainbow chart and all of these MicroStrategy [unclear: shills]. I understand that's a part of Bitcoin. It's like, cool, totally. But it acknowledges there's some other really badass stuff happening here.

[00:59:08] Vlad Costea: So did you just acknowledge that you don't have any MSTR stocks in your portfolio? And you missed out on the gains that you could have had? Yes. That's horrible, man. Are you even a Bitcoiner if you don't have a stock portfolio related to MicroStrategy?

[00:59:26] David Seroy: Yes, I know it's sacrilegious, but it is a sacrifice I was willing to make.

[00:59:33] Vlad Costea: Like, do you make payments with Bitcoin or are you like Jimmy Song and Tone Vays and Samson Mow and all of these reputed and serious Bitcoiners who are paying with their credit cards to get points? And they're saving their Bitcoin because that's why Bitcoin was invented.

[00:59:51] David Seroy: Yeah, I mean, I have mixed views on this. I mean, yeah, like I have Lightning wallets, I love going to conferences and things that support Bitcoin for payments, and I will use it there. But I'm also sympathetic to the idea of like, you know, use Bitcoin as a store of value, you know, borrow against it. And I mean, that is part of the reason why I mentioned things like Morpho and these DeFi solutions. Like, I see stablecoins as actually kind of like a bridge to hyperbitcoinization. Like, I think it is, I see both sides.

[01:00:21] David Seroy: Like, I would love to use Bitcoin as like medium of exchange and payments, but I also don't fault people if they say, I like using this as a store of value. I want to borrow dollars against it until we get to, you know, maybe a hyperbitcoinized world and use those. And so that's also why I'm big into Bitcoin-backed stablecoins and, you know, flying around censorship resistant stablecoins on like, you know, perfect privacy networks. So I think there's a balance there.

[01:00:47] Vlad Costea: Yes, but at the same time, you're not increasing the demand for freedom money. You're just enabling the US dollar to be transacted with the technology that we built for Bitcoin. And I remember the counterargument for this. It was from Rocelo Lopes, who is one of the main people at Tether. I had him on my show last year. And he was saying, well, every time you look at USDT and you see the T in it, just remember it stands for Trojan horse. And once we get everyone on board with this, they're going to discover Bitcoin.

[01:01:16] Vlad Costea: But I'm not sold on the concept. I think that in order for a currency to actually work as money to be a real currency, you need to have proper demand for it. And if the demand is only speculative, as opposed to rooted in utility, we're sort of losing the battle. And what we've seen and we spend a lot of time talking about Bitcoin and thinking of ways to improve it. But Monero has gotten bigger over the last couple of years, and it's used for payments in many more places.

[01:01:50] Vlad Costea: Litecoin is the number one most used currency on BitPay. BitPay, which was built for enabling you to pay with Bitcoin. And then you see all of these oddities where Lightning is not even one percent or something of transactions on Bitrefill, even though they invested a lot of money in it. And OK, not one percent, maybe it's 10 percent, but it's still underwhelming compared to the expectations. And you get all of these virtue signaling, happy-go-lucky guys go to conferences and they say, I'm going to pay with my wallet of Satoshi or my Phoenix wallet or whatever.

[01:02:24] Vlad Costea: And this is how we build a parallel economy. But it's super delusional because they are in a small bubble and the outside world doesn't care about this. And there are certain altcoins that have gained a lot of traction over the years. And I think the biggest threat right now to Bitcoin adoption is actually USDT, because people are willing to pay three to five dollar fees on Tron today. Right now, you can look it up what the Tron fees are for sending USDT. But Bitcoin, I think the mempool was pretty empty when I looked at it earlier today.

[01:02:58] Vlad Costea: And this is sort of an existential threat to the network.

[01:03:03] David Seroy: Well, I think you only have legitimacy to your claim if the stablecoins that people are transacting are backed by treasuries. But if people want to use stablecoins and these are Bitcoin backed stablecoins, then all of the demand to hold the Bitcoin backed stablecoins is directly channeled into Bitcoin. So, yeah, I think that's an important nuance here. Like if we just have Bitcoin as its like store of value, but everybody's still using Tether, which is kind of the state of the market right now, then yes, every single dollar that gets minted into Tether that directly allows the government to perpetuate this fiat game, and to kind of like assert their control over the monetary system.

[01:03:48] David Seroy: While I do think Tether is a great company and they're very Bitcoin aligned, like with 100% certainty, every dollar that goes into Tether 100% supports the fiat game. But if we had some credible way to create Bitcoin backed stablecoins, then I kind of like disagree with you entirely because anybody that desires that Bitcoin backed stablecoins directly corresponds to increasing the demand for Bitcoin. And that's a happy medium for us to kind of like acknowledge that people desire stablecoins, they're familiar with stablecoins, but we can kind of continue pushing demand into Bitcoin.

[01:04:24] David Seroy: That is like the bridge.

[01:04:27] Vlad Costea: Yes, but I guess in order to build something like a Bitcoin backed stablecoin, you're going to need to put up a lot of collateral just in case of volatility. If the price goes down, you must make sure that the price of one USDC or whatever Bitcoin stablecoin is still going to be at one USD or something or whatever you establish.

[01:04:50] David Seroy: I think that issue is like way overblown. Like I don't think collateral efficiency is a blocker to creating like Bitcoin backed stablecoins. And a lot of these kind of like newer evolution of Bitcoin backed stablecoins are actually like very collateral efficient. And yeah, like what's preventing them from like scaling to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. It isn't the fact that like, oh, you have to over collateralize these coins. Like that's literally never been a blocker. Like that's a total red herring. Like it's a non-issue whatsoever.

[01:05:26] David Seroy: The blocker really has just been like the design of the protocols were very like weak and actually centralized. They aren't anymore because there's like some new models that have come out and you just need to like basically find the demand for why somebody would use a Bitcoin backed stablecoin. Like that's the bigger issue. Like it's the fact that you have to like over collateralize with Bitcoin in order to like, you know, create these stablecoins. And that's a non-issue. The issue is like, okay Vlad, I have a Bitcoin backed stablecoin.

[01:05:55] David Seroy: This thing, let's just assume it's fully decentralized. Like there's no centralization risk whatsoever. Like why would you actually use that? That's the main issue. And really it comes down to it's like, man, would I rather hold this like random Bitcoin backed stablecoin that like nobody's ever heard of or Tether or one of these stablecoins that like earns interest. And so finding just the demand for this issue. And I think where we could potentially see it is with privacy. Like right now this intersection of like stablecoins and privacy, it's non-existent.

[01:06:31] David Seroy: It's like, I would argue impossible to get because if you have a stablecoin like Tether and you say, I want dollars, but I want to use them privately. Well, as soon as it goes into like a shielded pool, like a Monero style setup or like a Zcash style or shielded CSV or whatever, boom, it gets censored. Like Paolo and Tether or Jeremy Allaire, they just say, we're just going to like block it. So if you want to access private stability, you need a censorship resistant stablecoin. And in order to have a censorship resistant stablecoin, like you need to be able to, you know, program BTC into like a ZK rollup.

[01:07:03] David Seroy: Then you need to be able to have like an actually truly decentralized protocol that can mint these stablecoins and that there isn't an actual like censorship vector. If you can do that, then you have this world where you can put in BTC as collateral. You can borrow against it at a very low interest rate, which is what everybody wants. Those stablecoins can proliferate. And then people that want it, they can put it into like a shielded pool. Like this is a true product market fit that that doesn't yet exist today, but that we kind of now have the technology to build.

[01:07:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's interesting and it's definitely much better than trusting the Tether treasury and using this on layers that can be absolutely censored because they're not sufficiently decentralized.

[01:07:47] Vlad Costea: But I keep thinking that all of this started from the idea of increasing Bitcoin adoption and we got to a point where we're just reinventing the U.S. Dollar. And maybe it's super cypherpunk, right? Because if you go back like 35 or 40 years ago and read the mailing list, you're going to see that all of them, they wanted to create a way to send U.S. Dollars, mostly because there was someone running some remailer or some server that was useful to the community. And they're asking each other, so how do I pay you for this?

[01:08:20] Vlad Costea: Because it's useful. I want you to keep running it, but I don't want you to run out of money running it. And they're like, well, I don't want to tell you who I am. I don't want to tell you where I live. I don't want to tell you my bank account details. So how are we going to do this? It was problematic. And for them, I guess it was sort of the holy grail to create a private U.S. Dollar, even e-cash. The first form of digital cash was using fiat currencies.

[01:08:50] Vlad Costea: It was just a way for you to get private transactions using these fiat currencies. So maybe it makes sense if you look at it from a cypherpunk perspective, but from a Bitcoin point of view, it's really strange.

[01:09:09] David Seroy: I'm not sure I entirely agree. I think that there's actually a very nice synergy here, so bear with me. We have this model that I've explained to you where you can put in Bitcoin as collateral, you can borrow against it, you create these censorship-resistant Bitcoin-backed stablecoins. And then we agree that you could put these censorship-resistant stablecoins into these cypherpunk privacy-level things, and that is kind of aligned with what you're saying, where, okay, there is demand for this kind of dark dollar, so to speak.

[01:09:39] David Seroy: But you would argue right now that, hey, that doesn't actually help the mission of Bitcoin directly. But the way that these protocols work is, the more usage or distribution you find for this quote-unquote dark dollar or this censorship-resistant dollar, then the interest rate to borrow against your Bitcoin, the lower it will become. So you could get in a world where, in this protocol, you could be able to borrow against your Bitcoin at near 0% interest rate, and that is a direct result of the demand for these dark dollars.

[01:10:11] David Seroy: So you appeal to that market for the censorship-resistant dollars. That in turn will drive the interest rate down. The lower the interest rate becomes to borrow against your Bitcoin, the more that people will buy it up and see it as money and collateral, which will increase the number go up, which will increase the adoption. So all of this is the way for me to say that this kind of empty but very desirable product market fit for private dollars will drive more adoption and higher number go up of Bitcoin.

[01:10:42] David Seroy: As more people adopt Bitcoin as collateral, we get closer to this world of hyperbitcoinization. Eventually, hopefully, the speculation goes down. You get a little bit more stability of Bitcoin, and then we get into this world where instead of people using dollars, they're using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. I know that may not be on the time frame that you would have hoped that, hey, everybody is using Bitcoin for payments today, but this is a very real, credible path to kind of bridge us to this eventual endgame of using Bitcoin in a cyberpunk way.

[01:11:14] Vlad Costea: I agree with you in this sense, but it's just not what I expected. It's very different from, I guess, the spirit of 10 years ago when everyone was trying to get Bitcoin to get accepted as a medium of exchange. Then we had the Lightning Network, which promised to get us there. It seems like after so many years, there wasn't much adoption, and it's still difficult to use for people willing to accept payments in it, at least in a non-custodial way. It's a bit desolating when you realize that we used to have Microsoft and Dell and Steam and Expedia and all of these companies being open to Bitcoin, to accepting Bitcoin payments.

[01:12:00] Vlad Costea: Now we're just happy when there's some fast food chain accepting BTC for their hamburgers or whatever. It seems like the adoption has gone down, and we're trying to reinvent ways to find Bitcoin useful.

[01:12:16] David Seroy: I don't disagree with you there. The kind of narrative and the use case for Bitcoin has changed. I personally still am very ideologically aligned with where it can head to, even if that's kind of not this idyllic vision we had for 10-plus years ago. I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't maybe have it as pessimistic of a view on it as you might be alluding to.

[01:12:46] Vlad Costea: Anyway, I want to ask you about the way that Alpen Labs uses ZK and also shielded client-side validation and a couple of other topics, but let me present two more sponsors. The first one is NoOnes.com, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace. You go to their website, and you're going to be able to sell gift cards. You're going to be able to use their spot market, their peer-to-peer market. Most of the users are from Nigeria and the Middle East and some other African countries.

[01:13:20] Vlad Costea: The CEO, Ray Youssef, is trying to build this peer-to-peer economy for the global south and believes that that's where the adoption has to start, and that's where the revolution is going to be coming from, and there's this system in place which gives everyone a percentage, everyone who's involved in the deal. By providing some liquidity to this platform, you're basically allowing for more Bitcoin adoption in that part of the world. If you're sympathetic with the mission, check out NoOnes.com today, and if you don't mind doing the KYC, they also have a debit card that you can use for spending.

[01:13:57] Vlad Costea: I'm not too much into that, but maybe you are. Not judging here. You do you, whatever is useful for what you're doing. There's also Hodling.ch, which is a business from Switzerland, which specializes in self-custody. If you have a lot of Bitcoin, and you're keeping it all in your house or something, and you're concerned that you're going to be subjected to a $5 wrench attack, you can ask them how you can set up your multisig in a way that you distribute the keys efficiently, and in a way that you're not going to lose them.

[01:14:29] Vlad Costea: Or if you're part of a company that's deciding to buy Bitcoin because we're at the all-time high. That's the wise thing to do, to buy when it's super high. Anyway, if you're part of a company that wants to do this, then you should probably reach out to them and ask about a quorum, a multisig, or some sort of setup that is going to remove the CTO of the company or the IT guy from accessing everyone's coins because you don't want that guy to be able to spend the company's Bitcoin.

[01:15:01] Vlad Costea: So check out Hodling.ch if you think it's useful. And I think they also have a recovery system nowadays. So if you lost some words from your seed phrase or you scrambled the words, they can help you figure it out. So David, let's talk about shielded client-side validation because you have mentioned it a few times. It was developed and the first person who came up with it, if I'm not mistaken, is Liam Eagen. There's also Robin Linus who has his own version that's called ZKCoins, if I'm not mistaken.

[01:15:35] Vlad Costea: And it seems to be one of the most exciting projects when it comes to Bitcoin privacy.

[01:15:42] David Seroy: Yeah, I mean, we could even trace the origins back even further. Like originally this concept of client-side validation came from like Peter Todd, who may or may not be Satoshi. Also joking, definitely not, but you know, people joke that he might be. But yeah, Peter kind of said, hey, there's like so many things that don't actually need to go onto the Bitcoin blockchain that you can do client-side, which kind of just means yeah, like not on the Bitcoin blockchain. And so there is way less data and computation and everything that you need to put on the blockchain.

[01:16:17] David Seroy: Why don't we just do all of that peer-to-peer and then just post like the minimal amount of data possible to Bitcoin? Like if I send you Vlad a transaction, why does every single node in the network need to know and be aware and like validate all of that computation? And so Peter kind of proposed this idea and then actually like your potential future fight opponent, Giacomo Zucco, you know, really, really like picked this up and said, hey, like I want to pursue this concept. So he's been a big fan of it.

[01:16:47] David Seroy: And then there was a researcher by the name of Maxim Orlovsky who did RGB. So that's kind of like the train there. So in this client-side validation, it's like a, you know, it's just like a separate, you know, protocol where like in order to send a transaction, like to make sure a transaction is valid, like you need to check a few boxes of criteria. Like if I send you Vlad a transaction, I need to make sure that like someone needs to know that I actually did in fact have like the amount of money somebody needs to make sure that I actually did like sign that you know, cryptographic keys.

[01:17:25] David Seroy: And then someone needs to make sure that like these funds have not been double spent. And what client-side validation said, it's like pretty much everything except for the double spend criteria can be taken off chain. So I can communicate that I had a certain amount of money as well as my signature to you Vlad, like we don't need a blockchain whatsoever for that. The only thing we need is just like to post some amount of data on the Bitcoin blockchain, the ledger to say that those funds have not actually been double spent.

[01:17:51] David Seroy: And that is primarily like how RGB and client-side validation works. The issue here is that if I send you some amount of money via client-side validation, there's essentially like a transaction history that kind of like grows. It's like, well, these coins were sent from David to Vlad and then Vlad you send the coins and it's kind of like the provenance or the history of the assets like grow off chain. And that becomes a major issue in RGB or Taproot Assets, which also is a client-side validated protocol is that the like state history essentially grows.

[01:18:24] David Seroy: And so what how shielded CSV or ZK coins that you mentioned like Robin Linus is doing ZK coins and Liam and a few other people kind of like pursued, a shielded CSV, is like when I send you that data off chain, instead of sending you like the whole entire history of all of those coins so that you can kind of prove that it's valid, I just send you a zero knowledge proof which compresses it. Like I am mathematically proving that the transaction history of those is essentially valid that like that here's a valid signature. And yeah, you're essentially able to compress all of that history.

[01:18:59] David Seroy: And so you really get like the zero knowledge factor, the privacy for free. Like when I send you that zero knowledge proof off chain on the client side, not only am I compressing the state history, which allows it to scale better, but it's also hiding all of the past history and data about that. You would just receive a transaction that says you Vlad received, you know, one Bitcoin, here's a mathematical proof that's true. You don't need to be worrying about anything else.

[01:19:24] David Seroy: And so that's really this kind of transition from like the Giacomo Zucco, like Maxim Orlovsky, RGB, Taproot Assets, Lightning, to now a kind of more shielded CSV, ZK Coins world, which gives us the scalability of client-side validation plus the perfect privacy. The only remaining caveat here is that okay, we can now set up this like separate you know, basically blockchain where we can do these like, you know, client side, validated, you know, perfect privacy payments, but you still need some sort of bridge to bring your Bitcoin into that.

[01:19:59] David Seroy: You can almost think of it like a side chain. And it's like, if we want to do perfect privacy Bitcoin payments, like how do we bridge from the layer one into this like shielded CSV or ZK coins paradigm. And for that you need something like BitVM or you need a ZK verifier. So all of this stuff about like, you know, Robin Linus created BitVM and that allows us to do ZK rollups for a lot of these guys, like they don't care about BitVM and they don't care about ZK rollups.

[01:20:26] David Seroy: They say we want perfect privacy payments with Bitcoin, but just in order to have that, they had to like invent the ideas of, you know, BitVM in the first place. So I think for like Robin and Liam, I don't want to speak for them, but that's their end goal for us. Like ZK rollups are just kind of like a byproduct that that's kind of been invented by these guys' desire to create shielded CSV.

[01:20:51] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but it's interesting that the ZK rollups were able to get much more attention and interest as opposed to the privacy application of using BitVM. I'm not sure if I should say it, but someone who was involved in the creation of BitVM was very upset at one point because you see all the news about Alpen and Citrea raising a lot of money and, you know, growing as companies and maybe pushing the development further. And then you realize, well, the use case that you intended and for which this is built is not receiving that much money.

[01:21:32] Vlad Costea: And maybe that privacy is sort of a lost cause in the case of Bitcoin, because people pretend that they like it, but then they don't really fund it.

[01:21:43] David Seroy: Well, I think there's multiple things going on there. I mean, yeah, like privacy is a less talked about and less, you know, openly desired a use case. And yeah, frankly, like it's, it's a very precarious thing to say that you support, like, you know, look at the, Tornado Cash guys, like they're in fricking, you know, they're struggling. Potentially on the precipice of getting, like, life in prison. So it's a very fine line between saying, hey, like, yes, I believe that privacy is a human right.

[01:22:11] David Seroy: Like, like I, you know, support this kind of cypherpunk, you know, vision and Hey, you know, how do we go out and raise money for this, by the way, like VC, like you may, you may get thrown in jail. Like that's kind of the unsaid thing that everybody's like a little bit scared about. So kind of seeing how these, legal cases, play out is like really important. And I think that's a super up in the air battle right now.

[01:22:38] Vlad Costea: I agree with you partially. I think, okay. The case of Samourai Wallet, they have been in jail for about one year now, but the way that it seems, it's more about political speech that they might have broadcasted via Twitter. They said something about, well, Russian oligarchs, if you want to launder your money or whatever, you can use Samourai without any sort of censorship. And I think Wasabi was more, Wasabi being their competition was more moderate in terms of making these statements. They were more, I guess, professional when it comes to PR saying stuff like, well, privacy is for everyone.

[01:23:24] Vlad Costea: We also have this Chainalysis partnership where we have like a blacklist of UTXOs that we don't let into our coinjoins and stuff like this. I think they're ahead of their time because right now on Ethereum you have Railgun and you also have, I think you still have Tornado Cash, but they were able to censor it a little bit in this capacity. For example, I don't think North Korean hackers can still use Tornado Cash like they did before. But my point is that I'm not sure if privacy per se is the one that's under threat.

[01:24:02] Vlad Costea: It's just political speech in favor of privacy and some, I guess, narratives that you might push in terms of what you can use privacy for.

[01:24:15] David Seroy: Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, that could be good nuance. I think that would be great. Well, I mean, I think in this like ideal utopia world that I have, it's like everyone should have access to privacy. And like, you know, like you may not want to be a political activist, but other people might want to be. And I think like being able to protect, you know, their rights is important. But I think the barometer for all of this is kind of what you alluded to, where if you build some sort of protocol and North Korea wants to use it.

[01:24:50] David Seroy: Like, what are you what's going to happen? And yeah, that's kind of my thoughts on it.

[01:25:01] Vlad Costea: But we have to remember that some of the same conversation was being had in 1992 or something with PGP, right? Yeah, [unclear: Zimmermann] went to court because he published an open source piece of cryptography, which at the time was considered to be a weapon of the Allies who won World War Two. And for them, cryptography was still classified. It was a military instrument. It was not supposed to be just uploaded on the Internet so that Russians or I'm not even sure who the other enemies were at the time.

[01:25:37] Vlad Costea: So the enemies of the allies who at the time were part of the Warsaw Pact on the other side of the Iron Curtain could also get access to this. And it was just a couple of years after the USSR collapsed. It was still in a context where the mindset was still focused on this Cold War idea. And the way that they had to fight for it was to prove that you can publish this in a book and you can send this by mail somewhere else, or you can put the code on a T-shirt and you can travel.

[01:26:06] Vlad Costea: To different places and you can see the code for that. It's free speech. And it was an important victory for open source cryptography, without which we couldn't have had Bitcoin today. And I think we're at a similar point today, except that I don't see privacy advocates fighting as much as they're coping. I think there is a lot more coping involved and a lot more cooperation in terms of saying, well, we also don't want the bad guys to have privacy. So how about we make these adjustments to minimize the impact of the privacy, make it more compliant or whatever.

[01:26:45] Vlad Costea: But in the end, maybe that we're going to get protocols which are uncompromising. And, you know, once you once again, I knocked something on my desk. Once you allow the state to have control and filtering over privacy protocols, it's sort of a slippery slope. Like maybe in a few years, you're going to make it redundant. You're going to get to the point where what what's the reason of using privacy anyway, because you've given so many so much backdoor access. But I still hope that we're going to have neutral protocols that are going to get built and people will have access to that for reasons which are very legitimate, like your neighbor not knowing how much money you have.

[01:27:29] Vlad Costea: Or we've seen so many cases over the last couple of weeks, especially in France, with crypto people being kidnapped and held for ransom and having their family members kidnapped. And it's just a very unfriendly world out there. And nobody really wants to get into that situation. And that could be much nicer if there was some serious privacy for this stuff.

[01:27:56] David Seroy: Yeah, there's really like two different ways that it could go, right? It's like, maybe we, the government says, oh, OK, like, we can support privacy as long as, you know, you have this whitelist and there are these kind of like, you know, backdoors, or, as you alluded to, we actually can build like credibly robust and censorship resistant protocols and people will find ways to use this like with or without permission. And in some ways, it's almost kind of like the Uber model where, you know, once you've just kind of like broken through enough that you know some of these just like regular hurdles like they almost just like have to capitulate because they're like well like we just can't stop this.

[01:28:40] David Seroy: And I think that's maybe somewhat what some people are hoping for. But this is a broader implications for like Bitcoin and the BitVM stuff. Like right now we have this 1-of-N, you know, trust assumption, BitVM style bridge. And that's like pretty dang good. But it's not perfectly 100 percent trustless. And so I think if you really want to bring, you know, privacy, like radical privacy to Bitcoin, you are eventually going to need to go past like the BitVM style model with this 1-of-N trust assumption and really build something that is robust, which brings us back to the soft forks, like bringing in a CAT verifier, like a STARK verifier or like multiply.

[01:29:23] David Seroy: Or just like just a straight up native, like ZKP verifier. Like if you truly want this defensible defense in depth, you know, accessibility to privacy, BitVM could be good enough, but it's not perfect. The other thing. Oh, I think I lost my train of thought. So, yeah.

[01:29:45] Vlad Costea: I also wanted to ask you, does Alpen Labs use ZK only for data compression and having this efficient system, or does it also use ZK for privacy?

[01:29:57] David Seroy: Yeah. So just so the audience is aware, like ZK historically is associated with like zero knowledge as in privacy. But today, most people, when we talk about ZK, we're using it as a scaling and like a compression technique. So there's no privacy associated with it. The technical term we should be using is like a validity proof rather than a zero knowledge proof. Validity proof, you get the succinctness and the scalability. ZK, you get privacy. Unfortunately, everyone just uses the term ZK, even though it doesn't actually have privacy.

[01:30:31] David Seroy: When it comes to the rollup in building this like BitVM style bridge, it's more a validity proof for the compression and succinct nature rather than for privacy. When we talk about shielded CSV, you're definitely using it both for the succinct compression effect and the perfect privacy. So again, just recap that. It's kind of the validity proof to create this kind of bridge from bridging Bitcoin from the layer one into an EVM or shielded CSV or whatever. But then once you're in something like shielded CSV as like a separate side system, that's when you get the privacy benefits.

[01:31:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah. When I had that conversation with Talip, which I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, he did mention that there's only room for three or four ZK rollups. And he does hope that there's going to be a third or fourth one outside of Citrea and Alpen Labs, which is going to focus on privacy. And I wanted to ask you if there is such a rollup today that's being deployed on Bitcoin.

[01:31:38] David Seroy: Well, okay. So this kind of gets into like the, I don't know of anybody that has like a working implementation of like a privacy rollup that's being built specifically on Bitcoin. But where this kind of like BitVM architecture is going is you could have like Bitcoin layer one. Again, you have this ZK verifying BitVM bridge, and then you could have like different what we call execution domains where one of them could be an EVM like what Alpen and Citrea is building. And then you could have somebody could permissionlessly like deploy a radical privacy one, someone could permissionlessly propose anything that you want.

[01:32:15] David Seroy: And like all of these can share like one single bridge and have interoperability. So I think before we even ask the question of is somebody building like a privacy rollup, it's like you need the lower level architecture so that they can easily launch this themselves. Like we don't want, I kind of disagree with what Talip is saying here, where like we don't necessarily want like a separate rollup for Alpen and a separate rollup for Citrea and a separate rollup for privacy. And like that leads to a lot of like fragmentation and essentially this siloed system.

[01:32:49] David Seroy: And this is the problem that's going on in Ethereum right now is like you have all these teams that tried to create rollups and they all look like separate blockchains. Like they don't easily interoperate with each other. And so you have huge fragmentation. So a superior long term solution is building something that like is more of a public open good, like a bridge where you say, look, this doesn't belong to any team. It doesn't belong to Citrea. It doesn't belong to Alpen. It's more like an extension of Bitcoin Core itself.

[01:33:15] David Seroy: And anyone can use this neutral infrastructure that has no rent seeking or no token associated with it. And if you want to build or support like a privacy rollup on top of that shared open bridge, you can. If the government wants to build a CBDC on top of that bridge, they could. You build this radically unopinionated stack. And I think that for me is like the ideological end game of Bitcoin, where I personally am all about the monetary revolution. I'm about like the 21 million. I'm about like the privacy, like more of these cypherpunk ideals.

[01:33:47] David Seroy: However, you want to provide an unopinionated stack where you just say, look, we're not going to compel or coerce you into our views. Here's why we like our views. But if you want to do something else, your own rollup, it's fine. But you can use the shared infrastructure that that is kind of architecturally where this stuff is going, where you can appeal to everyone's preferences.

[01:34:10] Vlad Costea: What about Lightning Network, though? I think I mentioned that a few times before, but we didn't really get into it. What do you think went wrong there? Because it was supposed to be the one scaling solution to end them all. It was the scaling solution that was going to make the block increase not necessary, block size increase not necessary anymore. And it seems like for all the promises and all the hopes and all the money that was invested in it's still not there. And I think it was like two years ago that what's his name, Antoine.

[01:34:47] Vlad Costea: I don't remember. Can you say again?

[01:34:51] David Seroy: Yeah, I think it's like French, like Poinsot?

[01:34:54] Vlad Costea: No, it's not that one. It's another one.

[01:34:58] David Seroy: Oh, yes, I know who you're talking about.

[01:35:00] Vlad Costea: Yeah, he came up with this very critical bug of the Lightning Network and said that this is very dangerous. Money can be lost from channels because of this attack vector. And I remember it. Was it Antoine? Let me look it up. Yeah, it was.

[01:35:20] David Seroy: I know who you're talking about.

[01:35:22] Vlad Costea: And he said he's not going to want to talk about this until he can actually fix it. And it's been like two years and there's no official fix. Right now, Lightning is still very small. If you look at it, I think there's like 5000 Bitcoin that's locked on the Lightning Network. It's a small fraction of the Bitcoin economy. Exchanges process more BTC on a daily basis. You have businesses that maybe process more BTC on a daily basis. It's really disappointing. And my question for you is what do you think went wrong when I guess we relied too much on Lightning and then it did not deliver?

[01:36:05] David Seroy: Yeah, well, a couple of things. One, it was Antoine Riard.

[01:36:10] David Seroy: And yeah, I mean, I think we just oversold what Lightning can actually do. I still think Lightning has a product market fit and it is very good at this one specific subset of you can create a channel with someone and you can send very high frequency, very small denomination amounts of payments. And that is useful. But people who, again in the Bitcoin community, a lot of people in the Bitcoin community, they're just not very technically competent. And so they weren't really able to understand that, oh, wow, like you have to open channels and close channels and that costs money and you need to create like inbound liquidity.

[01:36:57] David Seroy: And you can't actually, you know, program, you know, the wallet and the UX experience. And oh, whoops, like we need to create this like very custodial thing if we want to like manage the channels. And I think there's just kind of this expectation of like, OK, like we're past the block size wars and we now support this Lightning thing. And Lightning is like, you know, like Jesus Christ like reincarnated and he's going to come here to like save all of our Bitcoin concerns. And I think that narrative just like spiraled out of control and people didn't realize like how limited Lightning is.

[01:37:28] David Seroy: And so, yeah, I think I think it was a little bit of a victim where, like, the Lightning Labs team, like, I don't know. They're not going to like dispel it and be like, yeah, no, actually, Lightning can only do these like small niche of things. So I think they just kind of like leaned into it and allowed this narrative to spiral out of control that Lightning is maybe more powerful than it actually is.

[01:37:48] Vlad Costea: I remember a meme that I think was posted by LayerTwo Labs, if I'm not mistaken. It comes from the Rick and Morty episode with the robot that passes butter. I'm not sure if you know that clip, but basically there is this robot built by Rick Sanchez, who is the main character of Rick and Morty. And he built this robot and the robot has an existential moment and says, what is my purpose? And Rick answers to him saying, well, you pass butter. And the robot is very disappointed in himself, realizing, well, he's not very important in the world.

[01:38:27] Vlad Costea: And this meme was adapted by some people making fun of the Lightning network and they put basically a Lightning logo on top of the robot. And the robot asked, what is my purpose? And I guess I'm not sure who's supposed to be, Rick. But the answer is, well, you get Bitcoiners accustomed to using custodians. And the robot is very disappointed, like, oh, shit, I've done what basically Bitcoin was invented to avoid or to eliminate. And I also find this funny. And this is like a side conversation related to Lightning, because we see the reemergence of eCash.

[01:39:09] Vlad Costea: And eCash was a system that had very good privacy, but was centralized. And in the context of Lightning, it can work if you're using custodial Lightning. But once again, Bitcoin was invented as a way to be better than eCash, to be decentralized. And instead of focusing on building something which is decentralized, we're just saying, well, let's bring back this 35-year-old invention and slap it on top of this Bitcoin layer. I don't know. It's very weird. It's a weird time to be a Bitcoiner. A lot of the stuff that you thought was true about the system turns out to have been just a bullish narrative.

[01:39:50] Vlad Costea: And I look forward to the Saylor generation to also have their wave of disillusionment and realize, wait, it doesn't always go up? Wait, Bitcoin can do this too? You're supposed to also use it as money? You're supposed to do this? It's going to be funny.

[01:40:09] David Seroy: Yeah, I tend to agree with you that there's an irony of these scaling solutions that we purported that there's actually pretty significant trade-offs that are maybe antithetical to what we hope for, where it's like Lightning is more custodial, so is Fedimint. And yeah, I do agree with you that maybe in some ways Bitcoin has lost a little bit of that ethos and that vision, but I don't know. I'm just not as fazed by it. Maybe because I like being the underdog. I felt very uncomfortable when it's like, Bitcoin is winning.

[01:40:42] David Seroy: It's becoming mainstream. Now I'm sitting here saying, oh man, they don't know that we're building ZK rollups. We're building non-custodial solutions. And we're going to bring privacy and we're going to have Bitcoin-backed stablecoins. And I like that that's not mainstream. I like that this kind of new thing of Bitcoiners don't know that. For me, it's more fun to be on the bleeding edge and I don't need the notoriety of number go up in mass markets. In fact, by the time we maybe build these ZK rollups, we have all this cool stuff and it becomes, everybody's like, whoa, this is the best thing going.

[01:41:19] David Seroy: It's better than the custodial TradFi solutions. Maybe I'll just be like, oh, I'm so tired of that. We talked about that 10 years ago. Maybe that's just part of my personality. But yeah, I've never been more excited about Bitcoin, honestly.

[01:41:34] Vlad Costea: Well, that's good. Are you going to Las Vegas next week?

[01:41:40] David Seroy: Yeah, so I'm going to be on a panel with Paul, Willem from Botanix, maybe one other person, but they always put me on panels with Paul. I don't know if that's like punishment or reward.

[01:41:55] Vlad Costea: Paul from Botanix? No, no, no. Paul Sztorc. Oh, that's going to be fun.

[01:42:02] David Seroy: Yeah, I really like Paul. And he's heard every single argument imaginable on drivechains and replied to all of them ad nauseam. But yeah, I do think I'm very supportive of drivechains. I think it's like a great idea, but I just think the puck is moving in a different direction.

[01:42:21] Vlad Costea: Well, let's see, because if we get a covenant soft fork, I think you can also deploy drivechains without the protections granted by BIP-301. But I think you can do BIP-300 with covenants. And if there's market demand for it, maybe that we're going to activate that also as BIP-300. It's just that there's this assumption, according to game theory, that the miners are going to be honest. I like to present this metaphor. It's like farmers deciding that they want to burn their crops to get the money for insurance.

[01:42:58] Vlad Costea: Of course, they can do that, but nobody's going to want to work with them again.

[01:43:05] David Seroy: Yeah, I'm not worried about the game theory of "miners will steal." I think I'm in agreement that it seems very, very unlikely that they would steal the funds. But I think drivechains have other limitations and maybe just headwinds against them.

[01:43:23] Vlad Costea: At the same time, what I like about drivechains is how they don't just promise, it's part of the design, to pay the miners. Every transaction fee is something that the miners collect. I was going to ask you, how do these ZK rollups contribute to the security budget?

[01:43:39] David Seroy: Yeah, quite significantly. So, I mean, the way that miners make money in drivechains is like you have the Bitcoin layer one that the miners are obviously mining, and then they're merge mining these other chains. So they're running the nodes of these other layers. They're doing transactions on these other kind of drivechains, separate layers, and those miners are ordering or sequencing the transactions. So they both collect the transaction fees, and because they're ordering the transactions, they can also extract MEV, which can be extremely profitable, but also hyper-centralizing to the Bitcoin layer one.

[01:44:14] David Seroy: So the MEV is like a little bit of a criticism. I'd actually say a pretty significant criticism of drivechains. Now, rollups, on the other hand, again, you have Bitcoin layer one, and then you have some sort of rollup. Let's assume everybody's doing DeFi or payments or privacy, whatever they want. Now, you can take all of that transaction data and you can compress it, not totally, but you can get up to like a 30 to 50x compression effect on it. And you can post all of that data into the Bitcoin layer one.

[01:44:45] David Seroy: So because you have to post that data into the Bitcoin layer one, you have to pay for that block space. So a rollup in its purest form allows us to have any sort of expressivity like DeFi or privacy or payments, and then it allows us to get up to 30 to maybe 50x scalability improvements. And all of that, because you're posting the data into the Bitcoin layer one blocks, you're driving pretty significant revenue to the Bitcoin miners. And this goes back to kind of what you've mentioned a couple of times with the Citrea guys and Talip talking about how you can only have like three to four rollups before the block spaces will fill.

[01:45:25] David Seroy: But in reality, people on the rollup, they have the option. They could say, do I want to pay for the Bitcoin block space for the highest level of security? So they get like that 30 to 50x scalability improvement, but they have to pay for that block space. Or they can get a thousand, a million x scalability improvement, but they can post their data elsewhere. And so visually, like I'll put a metaphor here of what this looks like. If you imagine like the Bitcoin layer one is a bucket and you're pouring in transaction fees into that bucket, you will essentially fill up the L1 block fees up to near the top where miners are becoming like fabulously rich.

[01:46:00] David Seroy: The security of the network, we're going to feel good about it. It's probably not going to be sitting at one sat per vbyte, like miners are going to be making a lot of money. But if that bucket fills up too high, you'll start spilling over into these kind of like lower security data solutions for kind of like less valuable transactions. And so like the highest value of transaction, people say, hey, like I need Bitcoin level security for this transaction. You know, it's over $10,000 or whatever, like that will just kind of sit in the bucket and increase the security budget of the miners.

[01:46:29] David Seroy: And like we'll feel very secure that transaction fees are securing the network. But you can have this spillover effect where people that want cheaper transactions and want more scalability can use these alternatives. So that kind of gives us the best of both worlds?

[01:46:45] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Also, regarding my previous question about going to Las Vegas, it was mostly on the topic of going mainstream because you're going to realize that you're surrounded by politicians and comedians and all of these celebrities who got invited and they're going to see something very bullish about Bitcoin. It's going to be like a three day podcast, which is being voiced by these famous people who talk about Bitcoin. And they're going to say, well, it's so great and we want to allow this to flourish in the USA and blah, blah, blah.

[01:47:23] Vlad Costea: I'm not going to that event because, first of all, it's super expensive. And secondly, I already know what to expect. But, yeah, it's strange to come from this very niche project, which is trying to stay close to the roots of Bitcoin and then walk into this pool of new Bitcoiners who are enthusiastic about it, but they don't even understand how it works. And maybe that they're only there because they want to make more U.S. Dollars. And hopefully they will understand more about the technology along the way.

[01:47:58] Vlad Costea: But I doubt it.

[01:48:00] David Seroy: Yeah, I'm sympathetic to what you're saying here. But I think, like, Lyn Alden talks about this and many people do. If we expect Bitcoin to kind of be this global asset, this is just the natural evolution. You're going to have these large factions and pools of people who are not necessarily ideologically aligned with our perception of what Bitcoin is. That is just the natural reality of it. And hopefully, over time, we can build out these more cypherpunk-aligned solutions. And eventually that camp that thought they came into it for number go up starts to appreciate what we say Bitcoin is for.

[01:48:43] David Seroy: And we build out just solutions that are better than TradFi and fiat. And hopefully we can continue to show how we perceive Bitcoin is better. But I'm at peace with the fact that a lot of people are in this for number go up. And a lot of people have no idea about the underlying principles. As long as we don't abandon those principles entirely and we don't like Bitcoin has fully gone centralized. As long as that light of the core ideology underpinning Bitcoin still exists and can be an option for people that value it, that's what I think I'm happy with.

[01:49:28] Vlad Costea: I should have asked you this much sooner or earlier into the interview, but does Alpen Labs have any token? Because that's, I think, the main idea that people have about these extra layers and anything that's imported from Ethereum.

[01:49:45] David Seroy: No, we don't have a token. A rollup doesn't need a separate, independent token. You can use Bitcoin or kind of like the Alpen version of Bitcoin in order to pay gas and transaction fees. Now, can people deploy tokens? Yeah, it's an expressive EVM environment. So we can't prevent or forbid people from that. And just in general, even on the business side, we talk with a lot of these teams in the Ethereum ecosystem and they're like, oh, you need some sort of token to incentivize usage. And I'm like, no, we don't.

[01:50:23] David Seroy: And I think that we're pulling in the largest tier one blue chip companies and distribution channels without it. I think people are seeing, there's a bit of an existential crisis going on in Ethereum. People are like, holy shit, they thought they were fine with all the tokens and the gambling. And they're like, all right, this is just maybe a small little means to get us to this end goal of scaling Ethereum. But now they're like, this thing's gotten out of control. And even the people that were kind of like pro Ethereum and kind of like supportive of tokens, they're kind of wanting to come back to Bitcoin.

[01:50:53] David Seroy: They're saying like, I want something real. I want real product market fit. I want products that can stand up on their own merit without these token incentives. So long answer short, no, we don't have a token. I think that we're not like radical ideologically against them, but we're kind of bending over backwards to avoid one because we just think they lead to horrendous incentives and they're not directly necessary.

[01:51:21] Vlad Costea: But if you're to do some sort of fundraiser, do you think it's fine to issue a new token for this purpose and say, well, it's worth this much once you buy it from us, but after that, we're not going to hold any of it. We're not going to engage in it. It's your problem. What you do with it. It's like a collectible. You think that's a legit use case or is it sort of scammy?

[01:51:42] David Seroy: I mean, it is. I hate the word scam because it's just like overused, but yeah, like there've been some pretty despicable practices with tokens and like justifications for them. You know, in my opinion, my bigger issue is that they just lead to horrendous incentives. Like people start off and saying, Hey, we're going to build something like, you know, really cool. And it's gonna scale Bitcoin. And like, we just need this token just to like, you know, incentivize usage and everything. But if you're a founder, if you're a human and all of a sudden you thought you were in this for the right reasons, and then you're sitting there looking at, like, I just pulled in like a couple hundred million, like maybe a billion dollars, all of a sudden you're looking at your wife and you're looking at your girlfriend and being like, Hey, this seems like a lot of work.

[01:52:22] David Seroy: And like, it'd be pretty dope if we just like went out and lived down on an Island together, you know, and that's my biggest issue with the tokens is they've just like, they've radically set back our industry from like a development and engineering perspective. Like, like the way capitalism works is like, you do need these lower time preferences. Like you need people that have big ambitious visions to feel like they can't just get an instant, you know, reward, like right off the bat, like that, if you're making a venture capital bet, like you're 10 years down, like you're motivated, you're [unclear: cooking] down there working on it.

[01:52:53] David Seroy: And if you can get a liquidation or a liquidity event, you know, within the first, you know, six to 12 months, it's just human incentives. Like it's just going to decimate our ability to like further these ideas that we have. So the kind of like brutalization of the incentives is really the biggest issue that I have with tokens.

[01:53:13] Vlad Costea: I agree with you. Also, Orkun says hello. Orkun Kılıç, the founder of Citrea. I'm not sure if he's the only founder, but he's definitely the CEO. And I was going to ask you, do you think that the Lightning Network technically, since it's agnostic, it's not, you know, it's blockchain agnostic. You can use it on any protocol or chain. Do you think you can use that for settlements to make swaps between ZK rollups, like a bridge of sorts?

[01:53:48] David Seroy: Yeah. And sorry, my AirPods like ran out of battery, so hopefully this sound is okay. Yeah. In theory, you could take lightning channels and like bridge them between different rollups. But in this kind of vision I had laid out to you where like you can have Bitcoin layer one, and then you have like a shared bridge and then you can have all of these different like execution domains. You could have like the EVM, you could have privacy, you could have data like if you share the same bridge, then you can actually like trustlessly using zero knowledge proofs, like bridge and share liquidity between these different domains.

[01:54:21] David Seroy: So what you're kind of telling me is like, Hey, could you use Lightning to swap, like create a Lightning channel network between these different rollups? And it becomes like the mesh in between this. Yes. In theory you could, but if you have a shared bridge, in like one single kind of, like ZK rollup style bridge, then you don't even need lightning network as like an interoperability layer as much. So the jury is still kind of out about how this architecture is going to play out.

[01:54:50] David Seroy: Maybe people will use lightning, maybe they won't have to because there's a better solution that we could do with zero knowledge proofs. Like the jury is still out on it.

[01:55:00] Vlad Costea: So when do you think that Alpen Labs is going to launch on the main chain? And what are the expectations in terms of users, liquidity, enthusiasm surrounding it?

[01:55:15] David Seroy: Well, I think we're, we're targeting, you know, later this year, you know, I don't know, maybe Q4, but like TBD on the exact timeframe, you know, normal engineering delays and disclaimers, in terms of like the usage, I don't know. We'll see. I think we'll see. I do think that there could be a substantial, demand. But you know, like some of this, these bridges are kind of novel. It's probably a little bit more difficult to go up to a big investor and say, Hey, like bring on, you know, $10 billion of BTC.

[01:55:55] David Seroy: Like we're, we're pretty sure this tech works. You know, so, these things are just going to have to have time and market and Lindy and like being battle-tested before people will probably bridge like insane amounts of BTC over.

[01:56:10] Vlad Costea: I think the biggest risk when it comes to this kind of innovation on Bitcoin is that the culture is against it. So you can build something super cool, super useful with a perfect market fit, but at the same time, you're going to get a lot of hostility or otherwise what's the word for it when people don't care, apathy, a lot of apathy from the Bitcoiners. I think early on lightning had a similar situation before it had a big marketing push, but it's not very intuitive to most people that they should be using this.

[01:56:50] Vlad Costea: I know that Peter McCormack bought his Aston Martin using money that he made from referrals from BlockFi. And BlockFi was providing a service as a company which Citrea and Alpen Labs are going to be offering as a protocol under ZK rollup. So I do believe there is definitely a huge market for BTC backed loans but I also see at least within my Twitter bubble a lot of opposition and negativity towards anything which is trying to bring something which is not Bitcoin native. It seems like these guys were almost programmed to believe that they should only use Bitcoin on the base layer, on Lightning Network, and that's maybe the only situation where they can say they're not making normal transactions.

[01:57:43] Vlad Costea: And Blockstream, of course, made sure that their federation is inserted into the conversation and is socially fine to use a solution which is not decentralized. But we do need to work a lot on perception and the fact that nowadays, even for the most stupid reason, which is OP_RETURN size, you have this social battle between factions. And I do believe most of it, as you said, is guerrilla marketing from OCEAN because they mine like a block every day, which, you know, if you blink, you miss it.

[01:58:18] Vlad Costea: It's not a major mining pool, but when they do this sort of virtue signaling, they're in the news and everyone talks about them and, you know, they have some credibility.

[01:58:34] David Seroy: Yeah, I have a little bit of a different view on this. We just don't need the approval of the Bitcoin community to do what we're doing, like whether they say, wow, this like passes the Bitcoin, you know, vibe check. I really don't care. Like, you know. We can now build this with by like allowing Bitcoin to reason about zero knowledge proofs. And if people like Jimmy Song and Giacomo and whoever else like don't approve it, I'm like, sorry, like, we're just doing it. We don't need to fork Bitcoin.

[01:59:01] David Seroy: Like we're building within the consensus rules. And if they don't like it, if they don't approve of it, then don't use it. But then the question kind of moves to, well, okay, we can now build this and we can now do this thing. Like we need to actually have a product on there that people value. We can't like preach at them morality stuff and say, oh, you know, don't you want to use this? It's so much more aligned with the Bitcoin ethos and it's non-custodial.

[01:59:23] David Seroy: And like, we almost like shame them into like trying to convince them to use a ZK rollup. But they don't want to use it. Don't use it. I really don't care. But I think this example you gave of like Bitcoin backed borrowing, like this is something that just economically and rationally like people want. They want to be able to post their Bitcoin as collateral and borrow dollars against it and not sell it. And that is kind of the point of like inception where I think people are going to be looking at some of the applications on these Bitcoin ZK rollups.

[01:59:52] David Seroy: And they're going to say, wow, with like no token incentives whatsoever and like no separate token, like this is the single best way to borrow against your Bitcoin where you can do it at higher loan-to-values. You can do it at much lower rates. You can do it without KYC. You can do it like more frictionlessly and more snappy with fast transactions. Like there's not going to be this separate thing where it's like you have to convince people to do it with like these token incentives or you have to say like, oh, hey, don't you want to do this on chain, bro?

[02:00:20] David Seroy: Like DeFi is so cool. It's just literally like my dad is going to look at this thing and say, wait, like this is awesome. Like you're telling me I can borrow it like 4% against like my Bitcoin collateral and it's instant. I can just do it from my mobile phone. And once you build out that product, and it can just straight up beat the TradFi solutions. It can beat the strikes. It can beat, you know, the Ledns and the Unchaineds and like all of these kind of things that all the Bitcoiners approve of.

[02:00:44] David Seroy: Then it doesn't matter about getting anyone's approval or like what's morally the right or wrong thing. It's just, hey, we're going to win because we built a product. By the way, you're kind of supporting trustless non-custodial solutions. And we've kind of said that for many years in Bitcoin where it's like, oh, you just need to build these things that have like clean UX and they feel like a normal TradFi web 2 solution. But it was cope. Like it was a lie. Like we couldn't actually do it.

[02:01:08] David Seroy: Now, like you don't have to believe me. And that's kind of like why we don't market ourselves very much because it's like, you know, like we're just going to build it like we don't have a token that we're showing. And when the time is right, you know, judgment will be. Do people actually want to use this thing because it's just straight up better product?

[02:01:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I do like your attitude. And you mentioned something about your dad being able to use the service from Alpen Labs on his mobile phone. This was going to be my follow up question. What's the user experience going to be like? What kind of wallets are going to be supporting this ZK rollup? Are you going to have existing wallets doing integrations or do you have your own tools that people need to download?

[02:01:52] David Seroy: Well, in theory, you can you can attack it from all angles. Like, you know, we could build our own wallet. You know, you could integrate it into existing wallets, you know, in an ideal world. And it's going to take quite a bit of engineering to get there. But there is a path to get there where, you know, you could just embed this straight into other existing distribution channels. Like, like, you know, Cash App or something and Cash App just has like, you know, they don't try to like install MetaMask or some sort of like EVM wallet.

[02:02:21] David Seroy: They can just, you know, kind of seamlessly integrate this back end of like a ZK rollup into their front end. And and like users don't even realize it or what's what's happening. Like Cash App just says, hey, you know, you have a Bitcoin balance. You want to borrow against it? Great. Here's stablecoins in your wallet. You know, like [unclear: the Strike guys] are also pursuing this path. Where, you know, you have things like passkeys, like here I have my my cell phone. Like most people don't know this, but there's actually like a secure enclave like inside this, which is basically a hardware wallet.

[02:02:52] David Seroy: Like there's essentially a Ledger or like a Trezor device in this phone. But because you can't like program Bitcoin in a certain way, you like you can't put your your private keys like into the Apple cell phone. But once you're in a rollup and you have more ability to kind of like program and then you can actually store kind of like your private key in your mobile phone. So you don't have to like either have a hot wallet that can be hacked or you don't have to like carry around your Ledger.

[02:03:20] David Seroy: Like you can hold your private keys and you can access your funds like through, you know, your your face ID on on your phone. Like this this is the type of stuff that is possible with a ZK rollup. That's not possible with something like Lightning Network. It's like that that beautiful UX. You need expressivity. You need programmability.

[02:03:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but at the same time, can you name any wallets that are available today and have been modified or forked to work with Alpen Labs?

[02:03:53] David Seroy: With Alpen? No. I mean, we're like, you know, not even on a public testnet yet. We're on a private devnet. So again, that's why sometimes I'm a little bit hesitant to like overmarket and overhype this stuff, because we're kind of just like focused on building it first. But hopefully, you know, a year or so from now, I'll be able to come back to you and be like, Vlad, you can actually try this. Right. You don't have to just listen to me talking. So if you want to be skeptical for now, it's fine.

[02:04:18] David Seroy: I think John Light actually posted this, like in response to like Balaji's, like the big tech investor several months ago. And John just said something to the effect of like, rather than explain it to you, like, I'm just going to build it and show you. And I think that's kind of the mentality that we're having at Alpen is like minimal hype, just we're going to do it and the proof will be in the pudding.

[02:04:42] Vlad Costea: I remember last year I was at Pizza Day in Prague and Citrea was there doing a demo and they asked everyone to run MetaMask. And I think it was a very big cultural tipping point, at least to myself, watching Bitcoiners just take out their laptops, install MetaMask and configure it to work with the Citrea testnet. And I was thinking, you know, this is a tool that was built for Ethereum and now it's working for this ZK rollup. And there seems to be no opposition among the people there.

[02:05:13] Vlad Costea: They just did this. They followed every step of the hackathon. And I was wondering if the wallets that are most likely to work with these ZK rollups are something like BlueWallet or whatever on Bitcoin, which is already popular and has a lot of users, or do you think it's going to be tools that are imported from Ethereum?

[02:05:40] David Seroy: I don't want to sound too vague here, but I think all the options are on the table. In reality, in the short term, some of these things like MetaMask are just configured to more easily integrate with EVM compatible dapps. But, yeah, I mean, I think even some of these Bitcoin lightning wallets are going to look at this and say, again, like the [unclear: Bitcoin backbone] is like a perfect example. They're going to say, oh, that's pretty compelling. Like, we would love to offer our customers an option to borrow at, you know, 4% fixed interest rate against their Bitcoin.

[02:06:16] David Seroy: And they kind of have like no choice but to say, all right, we're going to start integrating this.

[02:06:22] Vlad Costea: You've mentioned the 4% a few times, and there is this meme that stems from the 2021 events. Where does the yield come from?

[02:06:32] David Seroy: Yeah, so I think a good example of a protocol on Ethereum is like Morpho. Like the OG protocol is something called Aave. Aave is like the biggest, you know, money market kind of DeFi protocol on Ethereum, where you can put in collateral, say Ethereum, and then you can borrow stablecoins against it. So when I'm referring to this 4%, like you could go to app.morpho.com or whatever right now or Aave, and you could put in like a wrapped version of BTC, and then you can borrow stablecoins at that 4% rate.

[02:07:05] David Seroy: Now, some important caveats are it is wrapped, so it's trusted, it's centralized, you're using WBTC. It also is like a variable interest rate. But aside from that, like the code, I think Morpho is only like 600 lines of code, and there's no rehypothecation, like there's no reusing of that collateral, and there's no like fractional reserve lending. It's just like this is a very clean and simple product that, again, like it doesn't even have these like insane token incentives that are like driving down the interest rate. This is just a product of, because of the more seamless rails of like DeFi, it's more easily able to amass like dollar and stablecoin liquidity.

[02:07:46] David Seroy: When there's more stablecoins available to lend, it can drive the interest rates down. So we've kind of like had this cope in like the crypto industry where it's like, oh, once we have these permissionless DeFi rails, everything's going to be more seamless. And a lot of that stuff was like kind of lies, but in this case, it wasn't like this advent of like stablecoins and these DeFi protocols really has allowed for more seamless capital formation, which has driven interest rates down. Now, the only credible criticism against something like Aave and Morpho, in my opinion, versus the kind of like custodial Bitcoin solutions, is that these are variable interest rates.

[02:08:18] David Seroy: And so some people would say, hey, like there could be a scenario where you think you're getting 4% and then tomorrow it just like blasts up to like 20%. And that is, I think, a valid criticism, even though historically, you know, for the past couple of years, you can see that the average interest rate I think sits around like, you know, 5% or 6%. Like it's still very, very, very competitive. I think over the coming months, people will start to see some of these protocols that are moving from variable to fixed interest rate products.

[02:08:46] David Seroy: And once you have that. You're going to say, there's no more excuses. Like, why would you pay Strike or Unchained or these companies that I respect and like, but why would you pay them 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15% interest with KYC, with like added friction, with renewal fees, with like lower loan to values, worse terms, when you can just go on chain and you get all of that plus better terms at a cheaper rate, and then you'll be able to get fixed interest rate. Once that final little bridge is crossed of a fixed interest rate DeFi protocol, which I do think is coming, it's just 100% better.

[02:09:28] Vlad Costea: It seems to me like these ZK rollups, such as Alpen Labs and also Citrea, are the best part of Ethereum coming back to the best and most secure network, which is Bitcoin. And the question that I have for you, do you believe that there are other parts of Ethereum which are legit and interesting and should be making their way to Bitcoin?

[02:09:50] David Seroy: Yeah, I think I've touched on a lot of them. Yeah, like the DeFi, like borrowing, I think is a major one. I think like a Liquity V2 style stablecoin, which is like a scalable and actually real deal like censorship resistant Bitcoin-backed stablecoin is a solution that's real. I think some of the, when I was mentioning kind of like the wallet UX and like the hardware wallet being in your phone, that's kind of part of this thing called like account abstraction, which allows you to get this like world class payment UX, where if you wanted to pay with stablecoins, you could.

[02:10:21] David Seroy: If you want to pay the gas fees with Bitcoin, you could. If like we want to onboard a million people in Africa, like we could just, we could essentially pay like their transaction fees on their behalf. Like you can really get granular and customizable on like the payment UX. Yeah, again, like ZK was pioneered in Ethereum. I think that covers like the major things that it's like the best of Ethereum we're going to bring back to Bitcoin. And I need to be real, like there will also probably be some bullshit that comes in from the EVM, but it'll be isolated to the ZK rollups like it won't infiltrate down into the Bitcoin layer one.

[02:10:59] David Seroy: Yeah.

[02:11:00] Vlad Costea: When it comes to scaling Bitcoin, do you believe that at this point, increasing the block size would be beneficial for the project?

[02:11:09] David Seroy: Oh, man, you're going to try to get me jumped in Vegas.

[02:11:14] Vlad Costea: Not necessarily. You can choose to not answer this.

[02:11:17] David Seroy: No, no, no, no. I mean, I think it's been interesting to for people to kind of like re-contemplate a block size increase. Like I think Adam Back, you know, even has kind of said, hey, like he's not totally opposed to a block size increase. I'm actually like halfway through Hijacking Bitcoin from Roger. I think he makes like some compelling points. I think James O'Beirne has kind of like mentioned this is something he's open to.

[02:11:43] David Seroy: Even Robin Linus mentioned open to a block size increase. So there's actually like quite a bit of like people that are like, you know, more Bitcoin aligned who are saying like, look, a block size increase isn't totally off the table. With that said, for me, it's like not really a priority at this point, one, because it's just like it's such a crazy, like contentious issue. And even if we didn't have a block size increase, like I'm just so optimistic about like how far we can push these these ZK rollups that that I'm like, you know, I got, you know, I'm happy enough without a block size increase.

[02:12:14] David Seroy: Like if we get to, you know, a billion users on chain and then you're like, OK, it'd be beneficial to have a block size increase. Like, I don't think it should be totally off the table.

[02:12:24] Vlad Costea: Yeah, to me, I think it was like three years ago that I interviewed Thomas Voegtlin, the creator of Electrum Wallet, which I think is one of the oldest Bitcoin wallets out there. And what he said at the time is that he was against the block size increase under the provisions of the New York Agreement, but he was never against the idea of increasing the block size. So if another campaign starts and it's legit and it concerns onboarding more people to Bitcoin in a trustless and non-custodial way, then he would be for it.

[02:12:59] Vlad Costea: And at the time, it was much more controversial. I think now saying that you like bigger blocks in Bitcoin is much safer than it was three or four years ago when it was peak toxicity and it was peak copium that four megabytes with SegWit is going to be enough forever. But at the same time, I think also John Carvalho, who basically for a while was the poster boy for small blocks because he had that interview with Roger Ver and he became the "Bcash" guy and everyone celebrated him as a hero for a while.

[02:13:35] Vlad Costea: And even he is saying nowadays that it's maybe much better to increase the block size than to try to find other workarounds and tricks that are not as effective. And where I'm getting with this is that you had this wave of Bitcoin developers and early adopters who got phased out in 2017. They went to BCH, they went to Ethereum, they went to other projects and they were very much in favor of increasing the block size. Right. And now you see Jameson Lopp, you see John Carvalho and you see all of these guys who are part of the new guard who came in and said, well, we're toxic, we're super maximalist about this, we're not compromising Bitcoin for the sake of doing this.

[02:14:19] Vlad Costea: Now they're coming to the conclusions of Gavin Andresen, of Mike Belshe from BitGo. I mean, it's sort of funny, right? After seven years of growth and learning and trying to deploy projects and protocols and trying to work with these limitations and believing that lightning is going to be the solution. They come to the conclusion that they hated like seven years ago.

[02:14:49] David Seroy: Yeah. Sorry. Can you hear me?

[02:14:52] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I guess you switched from the other microphone to your AirPods.

[02:14:56] David Seroy: I got a little bit extra battery, I think. Yeah, I think people just, some contingent of people, like you said, maybe the Jamesons and John Carvalho and some of these other people, like, I think they're just coming to the realization that, OK, like maybe the pendulum swung like a little too far into the extreme of this like purist camp. And I think they're just trying to, it's like, how do you find that line between, yeah, OK, like we agree, you know, less change to Bitcoin is better and Bitcoin is about money and we want to scale on layer twos.

[02:15:31] David Seroy: But like there also are like literal technical limitations. And I think that kind of like, quote unquote pragmatism is coming back to Bitcoin. And people are just saying, look, like the pendulum has just like swung too far to the extreme. And like we can't, you know, we can't let Bitcoin development be dictated by people who are not developers and who literally have like no idea about how these protocols work. And their only concept of Bitcoin is like metaphors. For me, that's like an immediate flag. When somebody is trying to explain Bitcoin development with a metaphor, it's like, well, to explain how your node works, it's like, let me come up with this like metaphor about how it's like Bitcoin is energy and stuff.

[02:16:15] David Seroy: I'm like, done. We are not having consensus conversations with metaphors. You know, if you're going on a podcast and you want to explain it with a metaphor, that's fine. But like that's the kind of Bitcoin camp that I am kind of like rejecting a bit. And I think those other people are as well. Carvalho in particular, I think he's interesting, like get all these like unique ideas around Bitcoin. And now he's like, you know, the we should call Bitcoin bits now guy. I don't even know what he's working on anymore.

[02:16:51] Vlad Costea: He actually has a pretty cool project with Synonym. They deploy the social network that's going to get launched this summer. I was part of the beta testing team and that's interoperable with Nostr. And they also have their own Bitcoin development kit. I mean, they've been building stuff. It's just that the culture that he nurtured, which is that of being toxic and negative about stuff, didn't help him also have successful products. And it's a bit tragic when you think about it, because he was super popular when he was toxic.

[02:17:23] Vlad Costea: But now that he's optimistic and he's building stuff, the same people who are following him don't seem to care as much. And they moved on to Saylor or whoever is speaking the same language, but with different words. And it's really unfortunate what you said, because it seems like right now the people who are in control of the Bitcoin narrative and they seem to have the loudest voices when it comes to consensus are the Austrian economist wannabes. I'm not going to call them Austrian economists because I don't consider Saifedean to be a true Austrian economist.

[02:18:00] Vlad Costea: But this guy sold like a million books, right? And people look up to him and they think, well, he's the Bitcoin guy. He's the one who understands how this works. And really, he doesn't. And he still maintains that attitude that he kept from 2017 of being on guard because the barbarians are at the gates or whatever, and they're going to attack Bitcoin any moment now. And every attempt to change might just be a Trojan horse to attack Bitcoin. It's a very dangerous mentality, especially if you're non-technical and you don't know anything and you keep on maintaining this position that Bitcoin should never change.

[02:18:41] Vlad Costea: It's perfect money. It's already been improved. Why do you need anything else other than the tools that already exist? Especially when you admittedly don't pay with Bitcoin and use credit card or whatever, because you think that you should apply Gresham's law and only use Bitcoin for saving. It's a deep rabbit hole once you get inside of it from the other side of it. So you came out of it because you outgrew your mentors, I guess. A lot of people learn from Saifedean, and then you learn more about Bitcoin than he ever will know.

[02:19:18] Vlad Costea: And then you go back to try to explain to the other people, and it's just madness going back there. But I hope, honestly, I think this narrative and this approach will only work for as long as the number keeps going up. And maybe that the [unclear: number go up] factor of it is what keeps us from actually building something meaningful. Because Bitcoin never had the existential crisis that we keep talking about. That after multiple halvings, we're going to see an issue with the security budget. Or that it doesn't scale.

[02:19:53] Vlad Costea: Because right now, if you look at the mempool, it seems to be scaling very well. Because the industry has routed around transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain. So I guess in a bear market that lasts for a few years, we're going to get the best chances at building something. Because all of these people will maybe leave Twitter and GitHub and not talk about Bitcoin anymore. Maybe find some other venture in politics or nutrition or fitness or whatever they're going to be selling. Just because Bitcoin is not hot anymore.

[02:20:29] Vlad Costea: And the cypherpunks are going to be able to build the tools that are going to get us into a new golden age. I don't know. I'm so hopeful. I think every Bitcoin bull market has been preceded by some sort of breakthrough. And if you look at it, there was some sort of narrative or something that got built. Which gave everyone hope that Bitcoin is really going to work. This time around, the narrative that started the bull market is the ETF. And it seems like that's the scaling layer.

[02:20:56] Vlad Costea: That's how Bitcoin is being transacted and used. And nowadays I'm pretty sure we have a lot of paper Bitcoin. Which I'm not even sure how it's going to get redeemed. And what's going to happen afterwards. But I'm convinced. I mean, you're more optimistic than I am. But I'm convinced that this will not end well. And once it does end, that's when we're going to have a serious conversation about the technical fundamentals of Bitcoin. Until then, if you come up with any proposals, you're going to be the guy who's trying to kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

[02:21:32] Vlad Costea: They're going to be like, well, it's working. It's getting me rich. I can do this. It's useful. Whatever. Don't spend it. Never sell your Bitcoin, as even Donald Trump told us. So yeah, I do wish you the best of luck. I do wish that you're going to deploy this and get all the users. But what I see in this Austrian economist, pseudo-Austrian economist rabbit hole, is desolating and depressing, honestly.

[02:22:03] David Seroy: Yeah. Well, so two things. One, I pushed back my last call an hour because I wanted to keep going with this. But I do have to drop in like 10, 15 minutes. So we won't make it to the eight hour record. But I actually...

[02:22:16] Vlad Costea: Who is it? So I need to apologize to them. Who is it that you canceled the call?

[02:22:23] David Seroy: Oh, just some BD conversation on the Alpen side. I don't know if I want to throw out their name.

[02:22:27] Vlad Costea: OK, no doxing, but Alpen guy, I just want you to know that David is doing a great job and he's really developing the business here. OK, so don't punish him in any way.

[02:22:40] David Seroy: Love it. Thank you for that. I'll have to clip and send that out to the person. But I think that phrasing that you said, it's like outgrowing your mentors. I actually think I very much resonate with that. You know, I came into Bitcoin through like when I was an armchair libertarian for like many years, but I didn't really put the connection on the kind of like philosophical arguments of like free markets and capitalism that I really like cut my teeth on into Bitcoin into like much later.

[02:23:04] David Seroy: But, you know, Saifedean and The Bitcoin Standard was like very much a part of that. And now, yes, like I kind of see I'm like, OK, you know, maybe from like a monetary side, I'm like very much in agreement with this guy, but from like a technical and development. He's just like so far out of his league, in my humble opinion. But with that said, it's like these conversations aren't like black and white because I can look at someone like Saifedean and the Austrians and monetary maxis and be like, I am hyper aligned with them on many things.

[02:23:32] David Seroy: I came into this less so from the cypherpunk side and more so from like the monetary argument side. I've become more cypherpunk-pilled over the years. But like, you know, I very much resonate with the monetary camp. So I don't like completely disavowing these kind of like the monetary maximalist Bitcoin Austrian side, because that is like very near and dear to me. But yeah, when it comes to like the non monetary stuff, like how platforms can scale and the technology and the kind of like the benefits of zero knowledge and the comparisons of like Lightning Network or Fedimint, I'm just like I just think definitively these people have no idea what they're they're they're talking about.

[02:24:07] David Seroy: But I do think that the Overton window is starting to change, as people are starting to kind of like wake up a little bit more to this. And part of it is because like five years ago, it was a scenario where if someone like Paul Sztorc came on or sidechain people or like, you know, people that are kind of like platform maximalist said, hey, like, let me pitch you on this on this compelling idea for for Bitcoin, you would get zero traction because the more purist camp would just say, would you say, well, fork it. Like, if you think it's such a great idea, why don't you fork it and see if like your your product is going to succeed in the market?

[02:24:41] David Seroy: And so the point I'm saying here is like the camp that has the leverage in these debates is ultimately the camp where they don't require any sort of change to Bitcoin whatsoever. But after like, you know, Casey showed that inscriptions were possible and you can embed this arbitrary data and then BitVM came about. Now, like the leverage in the debate has kind of switched where now you have this this camp of people, maybe it's like our camp of ZK rollups versus like the Saifedeans and the monetary maximalists.

[02:25:07] David Seroy: They used to have the leverage because they would say, well, hey, if your idea is so great, just fork it. You know, now we're the ones that say, hey, if you don't like our idea, if you don't like our idea of scaling, you guys fork it. So now it's like the people that have this desire to build these more like cypherpunk solutions, these non-custodial trustless ZK rollups, like all the stuff we spent the past couple of hours building about like we are the ones that, in my opinion, have the leverage.

[02:25:31] David Seroy: And this goes back to the same thing with like the OP_RETURN debate and OCEAN and all those guys, like they can sit here and complain until they're blue in the face about how spam is bad. And this is what's best for Bitcoin. And we will continue just to get the dopamine hit of arguing with them. But at the end of the day, like we are in the position of power because the consensus rules support us. It's like, which side does the current existing consensus support?

[02:25:53] David Seroy: And right now the consensus, it's a little bit clunky, but it's allowing us to put in data into Bitcoin. It's allowing us to explore things like zero knowledge proofs and rollups and privacy. And so that's why I'm just like, I'm less fazed by it. Would I love to see them like the monetary maximalists wake up to like all the insanely cool stuff that we're doing on the technical side? Sure. But like, do I need them to wake up to it? No, I don't need their permission. I don't care.

[02:26:18] David Seroy: I'm doing it. This is what I want.

[02:26:21] Vlad Costea: That's beautiful. I think I'm going to clip this too and post it for the haters. I think nowadays it's going to be...

[02:26:29] David Seroy: [unclear: Everybody's going to hate me.]

[02:26:31] Vlad Costea: I'm going to post this after you go to Las Vegas, maybe. I'm not sure how many people are going to make it all the way to the end of the episode. We've had more than 1,000 viewers so far, which is beautiful. And if you made it this far into the episode, maybe you should have a magic word that you can post in the comments just to prove that you're an OG, you're legit. You've been listening to this. So what's the word, David?

[02:27:01] David Seroy: Alpen, of course.

[02:27:03] Vlad Costea: Alpen? Yeah. Okay. Write Alpen and post also a mountain emoji. I love it. Or maybe Nepal. I think that's more of an interesting Easter egg. Just type Nepal.

[02:27:19] David Seroy: Yes, yes, yes. N-E-P-A-L.

[02:27:24] Vlad Costea: Yeah, do that. Thank you very much, David. I feel ashamed right now that I don't have any more questions for you and I got to let you go. I'm known for eight hour interviews. This has only been going for two and a half.

[02:27:38] David Seroy: Yeah, well, this one was super fun, Vlad. I think you've been crushing it. Like I said, I don't know if I just wasn't as familiar with the content before, but I feel like you've been on this like rampage over the past like 12 months. And I can feel like you've been, I don't know, simultaneously like you want to recapture like a spirit of Bitcoin. You brought on some like amazing guests. So, you know, I'm an avid listener and, you know, keep up all the great work.

[02:28:02] Vlad Costea: Where can people follow you, David?

[02:28:06] David Seroy: David underscore Seroy, S as in Sam, E as in Edward, R-O-Y on Twitter. And yeah, don't hold anything I say on X against me.

[02:28:17] Vlad Costea: Also, don't fight him in Las Vegas. He's a good guy, OK? If you're listening to this, Saifedean, don't get triggered, even though he blocked me on Twitter. So don't choke on your steak. Maybe lower your steak dinner ticket prices a bit. I don't know. Anyway, I'm rambling. Thank you very much, David. And thanks to the sponsors. Once again, SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Citrea, NoOnes.com, Hodling.ch and Bitcoin.com News. I'll see you in the next one. And I think it's going to be about proof of work mining.

[02:28:51] Vlad Costea: So stay tuned for that. Bye.