Title: S16 E44: Abdel on ZK STARKs & Bitcoin Maximalism
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Abdel (Abdelhamid Bakhta, @AbdelStark; StarkWare / Starknet, former Head of Ecosystem; ex-ConsenSys/PegaSys Ethereum core developer on Hyperledger Besu, co-author of EIP-1559; Raito Bitcoin ZK client)
Published: 2025-09-17
Duration: 3:18:37
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2025-09-17_s16_e44_abdel_on_zk_starks_bitcoin_maximalism.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2025-09-17_s16_e44_abdel_on_zk_starks_bitcoin_maximalism.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, given a full manual read-through (about 240 corrections, including a pass against the YouTube auto-captions of the livestream), then reconciled against a full local small.en (int16, VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps; three-way comparison (draft vs small.en vs YouTube captions) over the whole episode (522 disagreement spots reviewed, about 60 further fixes). 104 doubtful or dropped stretches were checked against short audio clips re-transcribed locally with medium.en (int16, VAD) and against the small.en words, including the STARK "FRI" primitive, the Marathon mining-service remark, the Calle / Nostr / BitChat shout-out at 03:01:53 (dropped sentences restored), the Cashu proof-of-liability and zero-knowledge passages around 02:55-02:58, the Raito header-chain proof "Big Mac" cost at 02:50:21, the magazine-for-Bitcoin experiment at 02:11:33, and the Sciences Po exchange at 02:27:38. Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (two reference voices, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop); paragraphs were re-segmented on the small.en word timings and short turns re-attributed where the scan or the audio was unambiguous. Sponsor reads (SideShift.ai, Citrea, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com) are read live by Vlad. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the feed and the web: StarkWare, Starknet, StarkEx, SHARP, Cairo, Stwo, Eli Ben-Sasson, ZK-STARKs vs ZK-SNARKs, FRI, OP_CAT, OP_STARKVERIFY, OP_CTV / CTV, CSFS, OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY, OP_MUL, GSR (Rusty Russell), BitVM / BitVM2 / BitVM3, ColliderVM / ColliderScript, Citrea (Tugce Smith), Alpen Labs, Binius / Irreducible, Robin Linus, Liam Eagen, Ethan Heilman, Hunter Beast / BIP 360, ConsenSys, Hyperledger Besu, EIP-1559, Vitalik, Plasma, Raiden, Chris Blec, Cashu, Calle, LNbits, Lisa Neigut, Nostr data vending machines, BitChat, Knots / "Knotzis", Luke Dashjr, Peter Todd, OCEAN, Slipstream (Marathon), Laszlo Hanyecz, Paxful / Ray Youssef, NoOnes, MiCA, General Bytes, Lamassu, Shitcoins Club / Bitomat, K1 (El Salvador), Alex Gladstein / Human Rights Foundation, Pierre Rochard, Michael Saylor, Grinta. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; spoken phrasing (including Abdel's non-native grammar) kept. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:49] Vlad Costea: Welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 16, Episode 44. We are live with Abdel, and this episode is sponsored by SideShift, Citrea, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, and NoOnes.com. Abdel is a very special kind of person because right now he is working on Bitcoin and is a Bitcoin maximalist, and he has infinity divided by 21 million in his profile. But at the same time, like seven years ago, he was working at ConsenSys. And he was an Ethereum core developer. And it's quite an interesting journey, and we're here to talk about it.

[00:01:25] Vlad Costea: So it's good to have you, Abdel.

[00:01:27] Abdel: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Yeah. Indeed, I'm a weird animal in this space. I actually I cannot think about anyone else in the same, like that went from Ethereum core dev to kind of Bitcoin maximalism. I did see like examples the other way around, but not for. Yeah. So happy to talk about that.

[00:01:50] Vlad Costea: I know a guy named Mario who went from hardcore BTC maxi to working as an Ethereum core developer.

[00:01:57] Abdel: Yes, I know this guy. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:00] Vlad Costea: Very bright guy. Like I have a lot of respect for him.

[00:02:04] Abdel: Same for me. Yeah.

[00:02:05] Vlad Costea: So what's your story? Why did you start with Ethereum at first? And what is it that you find interesting about Bitcoin today?

[00:02:13] Abdel: Yeah, actually, it's funny because I mean, I did not start right away with Ethereum. I mean, I knew Bitcoin before I knew Ethereum, but it was more as a hobby. It was not me working in the space actively and so on. But yeah, I heard about Bitcoin very early, like 2011, 2012. But it was not sufficient to strike me and to leave everything else on my job and so on. But I was curious about it first on the technical level. So trying to check a bit the code, understand how it works and everything.

[00:02:52] Abdel: But at this time, retrospectively, I think I was not mature enough to understand the potential impact of this, especially on the political level and on the economic aspect. I was too much into the tech aspect. That's why it's really when I discovered Ethereum and this idea to kind of like the next level, in terms of something that is more ambitious, you know, the world computer and so on and so on, which was to me like very cool on the engineering front. And it was sufficient for me to kind of leave everything I was doing and try to consider working in that space and so on.

[00:03:38] Abdel: But then even when I decided to leave my previous job, I was working in the fintech industry, which is funny because this is why I like to say that before fighting banks, I was working for them. And it actually was a very good opportunity to understand how broken the fiat and bank system is and so on. But it took me time to really understand it. All my learnings from this period working in the fintech industry, helped me when I actually understood the impact on the economic and political aspect of Bitcoin.

[00:04:13] Abdel: But yeah, it's for me, even when I was working on Ethereum, I was always into Bitcoin and I consider myself as a Bitcoiner. So like many years ago, even before doing stock where I was describing myself as a Bitcoin and Ethereum maximalist. So I never was only Ethereum, just to be clear. I was always Bitcoin and Ethereum. I always considered only those two as special and only those two are kind of making sense to me. If the North Star is to build unstoppable systems that can resist to globally coordinated nation state attacks.

[00:04:54] Abdel: If this is not your goal, your North Star, Okay, maybe you can consider something else. But because for me it was what was important to me, I always considered only those two. But then it's true that over the past two years, mostly I kind of shifted a bit and became closer and closer to the Bitcoin side for different reasons. And I guess we will discuss more in details about those. But yeah, just wanted to say that I never was only Ethereum. Before I was like Bitcoin and Ethereum maximalist, and then I never considered anything else as serious or something that was meaningful to me on the philosophical aspects.

[00:05:34] Abdel: Some of them are cool on the pure technical aspects. And it's interesting because I think there is this technical distraction for engineers that like to work on cool stuff. But sometimes it's a distraction that can make you forget about why we are doing all of that.

[00:05:53] Vlad Costea: It's funny that you mentioned the North Star and in the way that you said it almost sounded like no stir, which is something else that you're working on and something that we can bring up later into the interview. What I do want to ask you right now to stay on topic. Would you argue that having a background in fintech makes you more likely to look into DeFi and stuff that is built on Ethereum? Because basically Ethereum is an extension of fintech and just an attempt to make some of that decentralized?

[00:06:28] Abdel: It's a good question. I never talked about it, but I'm not sure because I was working specifically on payment solutions. So even when I was working on fintech, it was only on cloud based payment solutions. So, you know, like all solutions to pay with your phone using NFC and contactless technologies. So it was at the very beginning of contactless payments. So it was still on the payments front. So I never was really into like TradFi advanced and so on in the normal world, I would say. So probably not.

[00:07:03] Abdel: But it's interesting, maybe like for some people working in fintech, they are more likely to be interested in DeFi. It's a good point. I never talked about it actually. But in my case specifically, I don't think so because I was working on payments specifically.

[00:07:17] Vlad Costea: What were your first contributions to Ethereum? Like, do you recall exactly what it was that you contributed to? And was it because of your background or because you discovered something that needed improvement?

[00:07:29] Abdel: Yeah, so I first started to play with it, like not on the protocol level, but trying to build applications with it, like trying to build some smart contracts and whatnot. So I played with various ideas, like just small stuff, some small games or some stuff to put, you know, degrees on the blockchain, like to attest the validity of diploma on the blockchain, this kind of stuff. But more to understand the architecture and how it looks like to build a decentralized application. It's really when I joined ConsenSys that I went into the protocol development as an Ethereum core developer.

[00:08:13] Abdel: And my first contribution to Ethereum protocol was working on Besu, which is an Ethereum client implementation developed by ConsenSys. Initially, it had some ambition to be also used for a kind of enterprise blockchain. This was also when it was in collaboration. JP Morgan was involved into that and then ConsenSys brought the name and then became Hyperledger Besu. But I was working on the mainnet side of the Ethereum client, so something that is compatible with any other Ethereum client. And I spent actually two years working on one single thing, actually, which was an interesting turning point in my journey.

[00:09:02] Abdel: It was EIP-1559, which was the introduction of the burn, the fee burn in Ethereum.

[00:09:10] Vlad Costea: Ultrasound money, that's where it comes from.

[00:09:12] Abdel: Exactly. So it was very a turning point for me in my journey, actually. I think it shifted a lot of my perception and so on. And I was maybe like too much into it at that time when I was working into it because I was the champion of it. Like, you know, when there is an EIP proposal, usually you have one or multiple champions that will try to coordinate all the work and discuss with all the teams and make sure we're progressing and so on. So I was doing this work for EIP-1559 on the technical side, and I spent like, yeah, two years working on that.

[00:09:44] Abdel: And it was extremely interesting on many levels because it was very important and impactful change on the technical front, but also on the economical side of things. And I learned also a lot about the governance of decentralized systems, also the dynamics with the miners at this time, because it was the discussion started before the merge, before the migration took place. So I learned so much on that. And then. Like, after it went to mainnet, I took more time to take a step back and think about the impact and consequences of that.

[00:10:22] Abdel: And the fact that it's an interesting dilemma, because objectively, it was a good change for Ethereum. I mean, if Ethereum started right away with it would be very good. But the fact that we changed it on the fly is an interesting precedent. Because if you can, you can argue that if you can do it for a good thing, maybe you can do it also for something bad. So it's very interesting trade-offs in terms of the governance of decentralized protocols. But yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking more about it and the consequences of changing the monetary policy on the fly and this kind of stuff.

[00:10:57] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it is an interesting conversation, because Ethereum has a lot of precedents that can lead to slippery slopes from the hard fork from 2016, which basically tried to undo the harm of the DAO hack. And all the way to changing the monetary policy and deciding that the transaction fees will be burned so that they're going to have a deflationary currency if they're going to have a lot of on-chain activity. It was really interesting. I think at the time I was sort of critical because it felt like central banking, you know, a council of high officials or something getting together and deciding what to do.

[00:11:44] Vlad Costea: Well, let's do this with the currency. And if it doesn't work out, we can undo it any time. And it's very unlike Bitcoin, where we all agreed that there's going to be this inflation schedule and this is the max supply and this is the way in which it's going to get distributed. And I think I've also come to terms with the fact that Ethereum is supposed to sort of be the anti-Bitcoin and do everything sort of the opposite of what Bitcoin is doing. Just to experiment and to let builders play with stuff, because that's what Ethereum is about.

[00:12:20] Vlad Costea: I spoke about this during my interview with Vitalik. Ethereum is the most successful implementation of the Bitcoin 2.0 protocol, which was started with colored coins and Counterparty and Mastercoin slash Omni Layer, which is also where Tether comes from. And there was a lot of competition at the time to see which protocol is going to emerge as the one that takes on this idea of using the blockchain to put tokens on it, to tokenize Wall Street assets, to put commodities, to create decentralized exchanges, to create decentralized organizations and all of these ideas that initially came from Bitcoin.

[00:13:01] Vlad Costea: And it just happened that Ethereum sort of beat the competition at the time it was BitShares. It was what was the other one? NXT. It was once again Mastercoin, which was also the first ICO. For some reason, Ethereum ended up becoming the successful one. And in their journey, they made a lot of decisions that are very anti-Bitcoin. And for a while, I was hoping that the Ethereum Classic fork was going to be a good one. It's going to be the one to succeed, because it's the one that's closest to the spirit of Bitcoin.

[00:13:35] Vlad Costea: There's a lot to be learned from this because, first of all, the market follows narratives. And the narrative for Ethereum was always the fact that they're building stuff, not that they have a fixed supply and that they they try to be like Bitcoin.

[00:13:52] Abdel: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't think it's on purpose to be anti-Bitcoin, but I see where you are coming from. And as for the fact that it makes you think about how it works with central banking, with some official gathering and saying that we can change the policy. I think it's not like that. I mean, it's much more decentralized, but totally I see it's precedent that it was possible to do that. But again, as I told you, first of all, it took more than two years to get this change and actually more because actually it was proposed by Vitalik in 2018.

[00:14:30] Abdel: Then everyone said that it was too complex to implement it and so on. And then one year later, someone in ConsenSys that is now leading protocol development in the Ethereum foundation asked me if I would take the challenge to try to push it. And I said yes, without knowing the implication of this rabbit hole. Just saying that, yes, it took a lot of involvement from many, many people and debates and exchanges with miners that were opposed to it. At some point it was big, like, you know, there was a big mining pools on Ethereum that started the StopEIP1559 initiative with the website and trying to encourage other miners to oppose to this change and so on.

[00:15:11] Abdel: So yeah, still, I think it was like everything was transparent, discussed in public polls and whatnot. But yeah, I totally agree with you. It's a very big difference in comparison to Bitcoin and the fact that there is this thing where we all agree that we will never touch it. I mean, some people now start to think that maybe to fix the security budget, we won't have the choice. I don't believe that that's what I believe we need to think about other ways to fix the security budget. But yeah, in general, I agree with you that there is this consensus that this is something that we should never touch.

[00:15:48] Abdel: And yeah, regarding what you said about adding some precedence on Ethereum, this is exactly what I was discussing with Vitalik in 2022. You know, the boiling frog syndrome, like this idea of like, yeah, for me, this is literally what I said to Vitalik at this time. We accumulate like some small changes. If you take them individually, you can argue that, Okay, they are good, they are fine, etc. But then at some point you wake up and you realize that you are too weak to get out of the water and you will just die.

[00:16:25] Abdel: And I had, yeah, when I wrote this to him, it was when there was the introduction of a trusted setup on Ethereum to support the blobs on Ethereum. You know, now there are two markets, one for rollups that are sending data to Ethereum that is separate from the general fee market. And for this technique and this mechanism, which is called danksharding, it requires the introduction of a trusted setup on Ethereum. And even if it was arguably the most properly executed and secure trusted setup ever, probably like with more than 100,000 participants.

[00:17:07] Abdel: And I participated to it, so I know it was secure because you need only one honest participant. But still, I think it was a very bad precedent. I'm very anti-trusted-setup in general, that's why also I prefer STARKs over SNARKs. But because the problem is that people in 10 years, they won't have the chance to have participated in the ceremony. So they would rely on the fact that there was someone that did it properly. So I think it's very bad. And I think ultimately that we did not invest sufficient time to analyze all the alternatives.

[00:17:43] Abdel: And at this time, we were trying to argue that maybe there would be a way to avoid the trusted setup using some primitive of STARKs, which is called FRI. Without going into details, this would be something that would not require a trusted setup. But at this time, some people on the Ethereum core development said, no, it won't be practical and it won't be efficient and so on. But it was a bit too rushed, in my opinion. That's why I was a bit mad about this precedent. And that's when I felt that the temperature was too high and I had to jump.

[00:18:15] Abdel: But yeah, there are a lot of stuff like that, like the move from proof of work to proof of stake. The premine itself is a precedent and everything. So yeah, I very much agree with what you said. And now it's risky. And I think that now there is also the fear of the market and the fear of maybe of Solana and this kind of stuff. And maybe Ethereum is too much into response mode and trying to react and so on and accelerating the upgrades and so on.

[00:18:42] Abdel: And I think it's a very vicious cycle. But we can discuss more about that because ultimately at the end of the day for me, it's really important to consider the strengths of the social layer. Because at the end of the day, this is what will protect the core principles of your blockchain. And it's an interesting topic because if you take also the analogy on the Bitcoin side with the current filter war and stuff like that, you can also see the downsides of having a social layer that is very diverse, but also you have a lot of non-technical users that want to participate in the governance and so on.

[00:19:22] Abdel: It's hard, but yeah, it's very interesting.

[00:19:27] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I was going to mention these non-technical users who never look at any piece of code and they just look at their high priests and they trust them absolutely. And they just follow the one who seems more, what's the nice word for it, like slightly autistic, but at the same time knowledgeable. And they just conflate this state of radicalism and autism with knowledge. And there's this ideology that was built around Bitcoin. And I think it's specifically because of this ideology that a lot of people will dismiss everything that you do because they will say, wait a second, this is the same guy who decided to change the monetary policy on Ethereum.

[00:20:15] Vlad Costea: And he's here building on Bitcoin. Like, how do we know he's not going to try to destroy the 21 million supply?

[00:20:23] Abdel: Absolutely. It becomes a matter of debating who is pushing an idea, as opposed to discussing the idea itself. So it's very interesting. We saw it very clearly with OP_CAT and all the drama, [unclear: we started with us], and a lot of conspiracy theories and so on, which is pretty insane. So yeah, definitely, it's more about who is pushing an idea and so on. But at the same time, I do like actually the fact that there is involvement from non-technical users, because to me, I see this is literally the opposite of Ethereum.

[00:20:58] Abdel: And I think even if there is the downside of having those non-technical people having to trust by proxy someone at some point, I think still it's better than having a fully closed and research-centric roadmap and so on, because especially if you accelerate the pace of upgrades and so on. It's very, very bad because you have newcomers, even if they want to be involved and understand the implications of the changes and so on. They are so overwhelmed because there are so many stuff going on in parallel, so many EIPs, so many stuff.

[00:21:34] Abdel: So even if they wanted to, and actually very few want to, they cannot, they are just left out. And then it concentrates the power and the discussions among people that are experts. It's true. So then they are more legitimate to discuss and the technical implications. And so on. But at the end of the day, I still believe it's very important to educate the social layer, including non-tech people, because if we want to be able to resist to nation state attacks and so on, we will need to have all those people also to help us on that.

[00:22:07] Abdel: We cannot rely on just a small group of technical people because they can easily be captured or put in jail and everything like that. So we also need to educate the people and for them to understand the trade-offs and why we are doing that and so on. For example, there is something that I really like in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and you can see it even in the tooling, in the wallets and so on. If you are using public RPC providers, you always have some warnings to say, okay, it has some implication on your privacy and stuff like that, which is something that I don't really see in the Ethereum ecosystem.

[00:22:41] Abdel: Everyone literally is fine using MetaMask connected to a public RPC and no one gives a shit about that, which is very bad. So I think it's very important to put this culture deeply into everything, even in user-facing stuff. Just putting a warning to someone that is using a public RPC is very good. I think it's very important. And then people will question and they will try to understand, okay, why do I have this warning? Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something? And so on.

[00:23:10] Abdel: I think it's very, very important. So even if it has some downsides and we see it like with the filter war and some people that are debating stuff that they don't understand in the first place, I think it's still a better model. Because for me, like if I compare Bitcoin and Ethereum, I would say that the risks are very different. I would say that my conclusion is the following. The risk on Bitcoin is mostly on the tech front, like becoming obsolete and not fixing the stuff that we know have to be fixed, which are security budget, privacy, quantum resistance, mostly.

[00:23:44] Abdel: And on the Ethereum side, I would consider the risk being more on the social layer, like diluting too much the values and not having a sufficient number of people that will understand them and protect them over time. So you have some dilution and then you just accumulate the compromises, as we said before. And then less and less people will call out the compromises and so on. And you will just end up recreating the system that we wanted to fight in the first place. Yeah.

[00:24:15] Vlad Costea: I actually talk about this a lot, that if we don't decentralize and we don't use the tools the way that we're supposed to in a non-custodial way and actually run the software ourselves to the extent that we can. Yes, we're not really replacing anything. We're just replicating or slowly building a PayPal. Yeah, yeah.

[00:24:35] Abdel: It's just that with extra steps and then we are just like, yeah, I agree with you. It's very important. We need to use it the proper way to educate people. But again, this is something that I really like in Bitcoin, because those past two years, I was more and more attempting to Bitcoin events and so on, even like small meetups. And that was something that was striking to me when I compared to Ethereum. I always attended Ethereum events and conferences, but they were always focused on the technical aspect.

[00:25:08] Abdel: And it was striking to me to see that in those Bitcoin meetups, especially the small ones, there are some technical talks, but way less than ideological talks and talking about economy and about why we are doing that in the first place. And then, because for me, it's obvious in the beginning why I believe in that, but I forgot that we are still a bubble and it's not something that mass adoption can easily understand. So when I was going to Ethereum conferences, not seeing the talks about that, it was fine for me because I was already believing in that cyberpunk vision and so on.

[00:25:44] Abdel: But then I realized that the new people that came to those events, they don't care and they don't understand those things. And so if you talk only about tech, they are missing the point, actually. And then they cannot make the difference between Ethereum or Solana or anything that is cool on paper on the technical front, but that is clearly not a credible attempt to build an unstoppable system. And then in those Bitcoin events, and especially the small ones, I saw people really focusing on why we are doing that.

[00:26:15] Abdel: And it was very cool to me, like talking to people very far from the tech side, like people working in different industries, like old people, young people, and a very strong focus on why we are doing that, why money is broken right now, the consequences of having a broken fiat system and this kind of stuff. And I think it is very important to build a very strong and resilient social layer. And this is the only way, in my opinion, that we can make it and fight against the governments and nation states.

[00:26:47] Vlad Costea: There was actually someone in the chat who rage quit within 10 minutes. He said in the beginning that this is intellectual retardation and that he's a toxic Bitcoin maximalism. And then he said, [unclear: what is the social layer to match your talk]? It's a pity that all this wasted intellectual energy, that we're wasting all of this intellectual energy. I'm out till next time. Really funny.

[00:27:14] Abdel: He doesn't get the point.

[00:27:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:27:17] Abdel: Do you have the handle of this person? Because the tone and messaging points remind me of someone, Ethereum maxi, that is oftentimes commenting on my tweets about Bitcoin and the fact that I'm criticizing Ethereum sometimes. Okay, anyway, it doesn't matter, but it's funny. Yeah, they're missing the point completely. All those people are missing the point. I do believe that many people that believe in Ethereum actually believe in the cypherpunk vision and so on. But I was blind to the fact that many of them want Bitcoin to fail and die.

[00:27:52] Abdel: And this is something I never understood. And I think I was blind to this. And some Bitcoiners told me that in the past, many years ago. And I did not want to believe it because for me, it was absolutely obvious that if you are working on Ethereum and if you came on Ethereum because you believe in decentralization, cypherpunk values and so on, there is no way you can be anti-Bitcoin. At the maximum, you can want both to succeed. But I never considered that it would be even possible to think about a world where only Ethereum would succeed and Bitcoin would fail.

[00:28:24] Abdel: It was impossible for me to comprehend this. And recently, when I shifted to become more Bitcoin maxi, I saw those people on the Ethereum side coming to me and I debated with them, discussed with them. And I realized that actually many of them want Bitcoin to fail. And it was very weird to me. I really cannot understand that. I can understand the other way around because objectively, Ethereum did some compromises. Even if it has [unclear: tight open quotes] and so on, it did some compromises. And then depending on where you place your acceptance level on some criteria, you can accept or not accept them.

[00:29:01] Abdel: So that I can understand that Bitcoin considers Ethereum as something that is not a credible attempt and so on or that is distracting too much and so on. But the other way around, I cannot comprehend it. Also, I saw again some FUD on the proof of work itself and so on. I thought it was like [unclear: 2015, third era] and that we were past this. But no, still some people are anti-proof of work in the Ethereum world and this is very weird. Like for me, I never considered proof of stake as good because of the environmental impact of proof of work.

[00:29:39] Abdel: Never. I never bought into this bullshit. The only reason why I tolerated the proof of stake of Ethereum and I'm saying tolerate because I'm not a huge fan of it. I tolerated for three reasons, I would say. First of all, it had six years of distribution through proof of work. It did not start straight with proof of stake, which would have been very bad. The second one is that it's designed to be extremely resilient and decentralized and so on, which is very good, unlike all the other proof of stake systems.

[00:30:12] Abdel: And the third one is that it's not coupled with governance. It would be catastrophic if, in addition to staking and having some economic power, you would also have some governance power on the platform. If it was the case, it would be like dramatic for Ethereum and I will never accept it. So for those three reasons, I tolerated it, but I always felt that the beauty of the proof of work is insane. And the fact that you have an external entropy that secures the network and that is connected to the real world with the physics connection in a way and energy connection is very good.

[00:30:52] Abdel: I think it was the real revolution, to be honest. So I never like bought into like this thought against proof of work. And then, yeah, there were technical reasons to potentially migrate to proof of stake, mostly if you want to build a rollup-centric Ethereum, because proof of stake has finality, for example. This is the kind of details that are good for rollups and this will be so challenging for rollups and Bitcoin. So it's clear that it has some advantages for sure. But yeah, for me, like proof of work was the real revolution.

[00:31:26] Abdel: And, yeah.

[00:31:32] Vlad Costea: Usually I think about the fact that proof of work is what makes Bitcoin not a Ponzi, because if you think about it, anyone can basically put their excess electricity to work and try their shots to get a reward. Yeah, the fact that we have this distribution of the monetary supply means that there is no central issuer. And this is basically the decentralization element in Bitcoin outside of how many people run nodes, because those don't really matter.

[00:32:05] Vlad Costea: Hmm.

[00:32:06] Abdel: I mean, I would not say they don't matter, but yeah, I definitely see where you are coming from. I agree with you on the distribution. It's very like pure and fair. And yeah, I agree on that.

[00:32:22] Vlad Costea: At the same time, fair is not supposed to mean equal or egalitarian.

[00:32:27] Vlad Costea: Yeah, no, it's for those who can afford it. And it always has been. You can argue, yeah, but in 2010, I could mine with my laptop. Well, why didn't you? Yeah, yeah. It was only for those who had the information at the time. And then smart people figured out how to use their GPUs. And you could also complain at the time, well, I can't afford to buy GPUs to mine. Exactly.

[00:32:53] Abdel: Yeah, that's true.

[00:32:55] Vlad Costea: And it is competitive. It is fair, but it's not equal.

[00:32:59] Abdel: Yeah, yeah. And it is not supposed to be. So yeah, it's fine. That is that it is not equal, I guess. Yeah.

[00:33:08] Vlad Costea: I mean, at one point Satoshi emailed Laszlo, I think this was in 2010, and said, I don't know, man, I'm not some kind of socialist, but can you please turn off your GPUs so that new users can mine with their CPU? Yeah, he was an idealist who really wanted new users to feel, I guess, the gratification of receiving coins after they turn on their wallet. Yeah, yeah. And of course, it was not gonna happen long term. Satoshi also witnessed the creation of slush pool, which was the first mining pool back in 2010 or 2011, around, I guess, one month before he left slush pool was launched.

[00:33:54] Vlad Costea: And a lot of stuff has happened where Satoshi was proven to either be wrong or too idealistic, even the privacy of Bitcoin, which is chapter in the white paper.

[00:34:05] Abdel: Yeah. So, and I know you are very much into privacy, right? I think that this is probably your biggest problem with Bitcoin right now, right? The fact that it lacks privacy and that there is no real work to fix that. Would you consider it to be like your number one problem with Bitcoin right now, or the number one thing that you want to see fixed on Bitcoin?

[00:34:30] Vlad Costea: Yes, but at the same time, privacy also needs scale. Yeah. And it needs to be somewhat affordable, because we do have coinjoins, we do have payjoins, and we have all of these techniques that if used in combination, then they can give you not privacy, but a degree of anonymity, meaning that nobody watching the blockchain will have certainty about who you are, but they will still see what amount is being sent, where it comes from, and where it comes from is a coinjoin. And where it goes is a new address.

[00:35:06] Vlad Costea: And just because there is no information at the time of the transaction doesn't mean that later, there cannot be more information about what happened. Someone's going to join some KYC exchange, and then you can backtrack to see what happened there.

[00:35:20] Abdel: Yeah, but I agree with you that it has to be scalable and accessible and affordable. I agree with you, like you cannot have like real privacy if it's not accessible to everyone, to the masses and be affordable. But yeah, it's a good level of practical privacy in a way, in the meantime. Yeah, so you would still consider that scaling is the number one priority, maybe.

[00:35:50] Vlad Costea: I agree, because it's also an existential threat to Bitcoin, the fact that you can have nation state actors KYC-ing the whole chain. You already see this with OCEAN, who are softly pushing for a world where regulators will say, this is what you can have in Bitcoin blocks, and this is what you cannot, because they're super compliant in the way that they're approaching this. And they're even worse than, I guess, legislators and nation states in this regard. But I think this needs to be a topic of its own, where we talk about filters and what's happening with OCEAN.

[00:36:25] Vlad Costea: I need to plug a couple of ads and then we can come back to the topic of privacy or your journey from Ethereum to Bitcoin, which I think is not finished. But let me mention the sponsor that tries to enable, actually, there are two of them that can enable privacy on Bitcoin. The first one is LayerTwo Labs. They have this zSide, which is a Zcash fork as a sidechain on Bitcoin. You can check out the software at layertwolabs.com/download. They also have fun memes on their Twitter page.

[00:36:59] Vlad Costea: Yesterday, they posted a reading of the Twitter exchange between Pierre Rochard and Luke Dashjr, read by two Brazilian models. And that's super funny. I recommend you to watch that. And basically, what drivechains are two-way pegged sidechains which are enforced by miners. And basically, they would enable the kind of sidechains that were promised about a decade ago. With the ability to not just scale, but also have the features from all the interesting altcoins, there's also an Ethereum sidechain. There's something that's shaped, I guess, from Namecoin.

[00:37:38] Vlad Costea: And there's also a prunable big block sidechain, which is called Thunder, which is sort of a joke about lightning. But anyway, check out LayerTwo Labs. And also, there's Citrea, which is responsible for building the first optimistically verified ZK rollup on Bitcoin. They also basically what they try to do is bring Ethereum features to a ZK rollup on Bitcoin, which inherits the security of the base layer. And they're going to launch later this year, as far as I know, and they're going to be using BitVM2.

[00:38:17] Vlad Costea: And what else is interesting? They're going to have all of these services which are available on Ethereum on stuff like Aave, which means you're going to be able to borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin and other stuff. Basically, I think Citrea got a lot of unfair criticism because the core developers said, well, if services like Citrea want to use inscriptions for their ZK proofs, which they will be putting on the Bitcoin blockchain. It's better for them to use OP_RETURN because it doesn't bloat the UTXO set. And they said, how about we just drop the OP_RETURN limit because, you know, people can just go to the miners nowadays.

[00:39:01] Vlad Costea: There is the Marathon mining service. I think it's called Upstream or something like this. I'm not sure I got to look it up, but that one can let people add stuff to a Bitcoin block without actually going into the mempool. Ah, yeah, Slipstream, no? Slipstream, yeah. You can bypass the whole Bitcoin network process just by going to a mining pool, which has a decent hash rate, has a good chance to mine the block within a day.

[00:39:30] Abdel: Yeah, Peter Todd used it to upload a bunch of malware and viruses to Bitcoin blockchain. Recently, he did that with 100 kilobytes of data.

[00:39:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, check out Citrea, C-I-T-R-E-A dot X-Y-Z, and watch out for the launch later this year, which is going to happen whether you like it or not, because they figured out how to do it without covenants.

[00:39:54] Vlad Costea: And I guess there is some stuff to unpack here, right? Because...

[00:40:01] Abdel: Yes, a lot. I'm a big fan of Citrea, by the way. This is their merch. This and this is from Citrea merch. I got it from Istanbul last week in BTC++ Scaling Edition. They are very good also for merch, not only to build good BitVM bridges and ZK rollups. Yeah. Big fan of Citrea. I like them. And it's true that I think they received very unfair treatment from a lot of… I don't know if it's a lot, but from some people in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And they were associated to this filter spam drama with some weird conspiracy theories also as well.

[00:40:39] Abdel: The fact that they paid some core developers to push this, which is completely not true. And they did not even say we want that. They said, okay, if we had this possibility, we will do it. But we don't ask for anything. As you said, it's a good way to say it. They will do a launch anyway. It's permissionless. They have a way to do that. They just mentioned that if they had this, they wouldn't use it. And also, it's not for the happy path. It's for edge case.

[00:41:06] Abdel: So, it's not for the happy path. So, in theory, this is not something that we will maybe ever see used ever. So, it was crazy to see how this was used in this filter drama. I mean, maybe it's good for their awareness and mindshare, because now a lot of people are talking about Citrea. Some people say that there is no bad publicity. But yeah, I think it was unfair treatment. And it's a bit sad to see when you have people that are trying to innovate and push what can be done on Bitcoin.

[00:41:43] Abdel: And I do believe they have the genuine vision. They have good intentions. You know, they want to help for the hyperbitcoinization of the world and so on. So, I really respect them for that. And the fact that they keep pushing, despite the lack of support and the people that are trashing on them. We also face the same kind of stuff. So, I also have a lot of empathy for them, because we're in the same position. And I'm discussing with them regularly. And I believe we have the same mission and the same vision.

[00:42:14] Abdel: And we all want the same thing. And it's a bit sad that some people don't see it like that. But anyway, both them and us, we will continue pushing. And others as well, like Alpen and other teams. So, yeah.

[00:42:27] Vlad Costea: I also said this to the Citrea people, that, of course, they got all of this negative publicity. But right now, they are sort of like the Xerox of ZK rollups. Because everyone else who's going to come along and launch, they're going to be labeled as, oh, just another Citrea service. Yeah, that's true. And I feel sorry for the Alpen guys. Like, no offense, guys. You worked so hard on this. And I think right now, they decided to delay their launch because...

[00:42:57] Vlad Costea: Garbled circuits, yeah.

[00:42:59] Vlad Costea: Yeah, yeah. Garbled circuits by Liam Eagen. Yes. They're really brilliant. But I think that Citrea is going to win this race, specifically because they're going to be the first ones to launch.

[00:43:11] Vlad Costea: And everyone will know their name.

[00:43:15] Abdel: Yeah, yeah. I discussed that exactly with them. Both of them, actually. And I tend to agree with you, to be honest. Like, I was a bit surprised in a way to see that Alpen Labs was pushing most of their efforts into, like, Glock or BitVM3. Which is also interesting that they don't name it explicitly BitVM3, whereas Robin Linus is calling this the BitVM3 family. It's interesting. But yeah, overall, I think, like, it's very pragmatic to launch with BitVM2 and then, like, see how to upgrade. Because even Citrea agrees that garbled circuits are the future of BitVM bridges.

[00:43:53] Abdel: They're not saying, no, no, no, it's not good. But first of all, they just did the audits. The audit just was complete for BitVM2. So it's a lot of money and time for the audit. So it would be a bit of a waste of time and money to just throw it. And I think they want to also check the demand and the trust and so on for BitVM bridges. Because literally, we still don't know. Like, this is a missing factor that we don't know.

[00:44:22] Abdel: Because on paper, BitVM is amazing. It's way better than the status quo in terms of trust assumptions and so on. But we don't know yet if people will have trust and put some money, bridge to BitVM bridges and so on. So it's also good to have like a team that will just ship and go to mainnet. And it will be an interesting signal to see if people actually want more trust minimized ways to have more programmability on Bitcoin. So it will be an interesting signal. And for us as well, we are waiting that because it's also a good input that we are missing right now in terms of how much we prioritize this internally.

[00:45:02] Abdel: Like going live with a BitVM bridge for Starknet and so on. So first of all, we have the same vision and we want them to succeed because it's good for hyperbitcoinization and so on. But also it would be a good input for us about the demand for this kind of solution. Because again, yeah, they are much better on paper and everything. But you know, they are not battle-tested. There are new constructions still going and so on. So we still don't know how much people will put trust in those systems.

[00:45:31] Abdel: So it would be interesting to see both the reaction about the fact that they will spam blocks with the data and also the market signal in terms of how many people would want to put some money into those bridges.

[00:45:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, for me, it's interesting because this whole situation with Citrea and Alpen reminds me of video games in the late 90s when you had all of these game engines that were launching. And there was one that was supposed to be very good and it got delayed multiple years because it tried to switch to the next video graphics engine. It started out with, I think it was the Quake 1 engine and then Quake 2 came along. And they said, well, we want to do it with the Quake 2.

[00:46:20] Vlad Costea: And then Unreal Engine came out and they said, yeah, we want to use Unreal. And I think they delivered the game in 2011 or something. It was called Duke Nukem Forever. And the joke was that, first of all, they said it's going to take as long as it takes to launch. But by the time it came out, they had the latest graphics, but the mechanics of the video game were dated. Because they built on that foundation and they just replaced the graphics and the physics. But the concepts like the design was not modern anymore and it sort of suffered because of this.

[00:46:56] Vlad Costea: I don't think it applies to ZK rollups, but there is something to be learned here. Because sometimes when you're first to market and you launch something, you can still improve it. It's not like it's the end of the world and what you launch is going to ossify you.

[00:47:11] Abdel: Yeah, I agree with you. But I do think we have an example in the Ethereum landscape with rollups in general, not just ZK rollups. The fact that optimistic rollups launched before and sadly without even fraud proofs, which is insane to me. It's completely insane. That not only they were inferior, but they did not even ship the core engine of their security, which is insane.

[00:47:33] Abdel: But if you take the reality now, it's insane because literally everyone knows that ZK rollups are way better on every level. But yet, none of the ZK rollups is even in the top three most successful layer 2s on Ethereum. Sadly, so it's insane when you think about it. I do want to hope that the Bitcoin ecosystem will do better on that front and will be more meritocratic. And reward more of the solutions that are really into building a long term vision with strong security and whatnot.

[00:48:08] Abdel: But let's see, the market, unfortunately, is not always rational and rewarding the players that are playing the fair game in a way. So, yeah, I do think that we have an example of this sad reality on Ethereum landscape. The fact that even today, despite the fact that everyone knows that ZK rollups are better. Yeah, the most successful ones are like Base and Arbitrum, and all of them are optimistic rollups. So let's see if it will be better and different on Bitcoin.

[00:48:41] Vlad Costea: And I'm super excited about all of this that's happening. But at the same time, I see what's happening on the other side with people running Bitcoin Knots and saying, we don't want the shitcoiners to build on Bitcoin. We don't want this. I can see a lot of social opposition, which on one hand is going to trigger the other side. And they will say, Okay, I'm going to try Citrea just to spite you, to make fun of you. Just like right now they're saying they're going to run Bitcoin Core v30 just because they want to make the Knots people feel angry.

[00:49:18] Vlad Costea: But it's sort of sad that there's no not I mean, I remember how it was with the Lightning Network. Right. There was consensus that this is exciting and that this is very ahead of its time. And it's the advanced technology that Bitcoin is going to get. Everyone agreed that it's the way to scale and it's the way forward. And there was an allocation of resources that really supported the Lightning Network to take off. And it had many issues and quirks and mishaps. And even today, even if it's more usable than it was eight years ago, it's still not what it promised to be.

[00:49:57] Vlad Costea: But with ZK rollups, we have examples on Ethereum, I mean, we can do some testing today, there's also the Citrea testnet that people can try. It's not like they come out of nowhere, it's just that there isn't enough support for them, not the same amount, not of the same kind. I see a lot of marketing budget being deployed. The fact that there's an advertisement on my podcast is proof of it. But the question is, will the users actually use Citrea? Or will the Ethereum users decide to move away from WBTC, which is custodied by BitGo and also wrapped as a token?

[00:50:39] Vlad Costea: And it's less secure than a ZK rollup on Bitcoin. But do they care? That's the other question, because we can complain all day about the lack of security of that. But people still use it. There's 100,000 Bitcoin on it. And will we see any migration towards ZK rollups?

[00:51:00] Abdel: It's a good question.

[00:51:01] Abdel: I do hope that the people on the Ethereum at least will care and they will want like a better flavor of wrapped Bitcoin that are trust-minimized. But for example, like on Sui or Solana, I believe they don't care at all. But I do hope that on the Ethereum side, maybe some people will care. And I agree with you also that we have examples of ZK rollups functioning in production, like for example, Starknet and the ZK tech itself. Like it's not only theory, like our production proving system is in production for more than four years.

[00:51:37] Abdel: It has secured like nearly two trillion dollars of cumulative volume processed more than half a billion transactions. So it's practical stuff like that proven in production. So I agree it's a big difference. It's not something just on paper. And by the way, coming back to the value of Ethereum with respect to Bitcoin, I do believe that that in its own justifies kind of the existence of Ethereum as a testnet for Bitcoin in a way. And all those learnings and because the reality, like let's be honest, like ZK space without Ethereum will not be the same.

[00:52:10] Abdel: ZK space will not be the same without Ethereum right now. It accelerated so much the whole ZK industry over the past five years. It's insane. All the funding that went into research and so on, because there was finally a practical application and incentives to actually push it forward. So just that is very good for Bitcoin. I believe that. So even if you only want to consider Ethereum as a testnet for Bitcoin. I think it still has some value where it's a sandbox and you can experiment and do stuff and then you can take the learnings and apply the good ones to Bitcoin and just leave the rest.

[00:52:46] Abdel: So I think that some Bitcoiners should embrace it more like that, even if they don't consider Ethereum itself as something credible. But at least what is happening can be good learning on the mistakes and stuff like that. And now we are really at the time where Bitcoin maybe has the possibility to leapfrog completely because Ethereum for the first years really tried to do everything on the layer one and then realized that it was not possible. And then decided to shift to a rollup-centric roadmap and say, Okay, we will maximize security and decentralization on the layer one, censorship resistant as well.

[00:53:28] Abdel: And for scaling and expressivity and whatnot, we will use layer twos. And they really optimized for that. But now we should think about it like Bitcoin can really leapfrog and go directly from like the rock-solid store of value to actually P2P cash by embracing layer twos. And also privacy at the same time. So I think we are really at a turning point for Bitcoin. And right now, the filter drama is a bit connected to this discussion because, you know, some people try to oppose and say, Okay, is your Bitcoin as money or as arbitrary data or face storage space?

[00:54:06] Abdel: But I think there is something in between, which is, Okay, something that will enable rollups or layer two constructions to settle on Bitcoin efficiently, which will improve Bitcoin as programmable P2P money in the self-custodial manner and so on. So I think this debate is also interesting on that front because it became a question on the existential nature of Bitcoin and so on. And for me, I believe you are in the same position. I do believe that if Bitcoin is only a store of value, it has failed.

[00:54:39] Abdel: It has to be P2P cash, otherwise it has failed, in my opinion. And I do believe that there is an opportunity to leapfrog completely and take all those innovations, research and production grade solutions that exist today on Ethereum, take them and try to see what can be applicable to Bitcoin.

[00:55:01] Vlad Costea: At the same time, you sort of simplified the journey that Ethereum underwent to get to rollups, because I do remember there was Plasma. There was the Raiden network, which, if I'm not mistaken, was shaped after the Lightning Network. And there were lots of other attempts to build L2s. And at one point there was like more than a dozen L2s that emerged at the same time. It was madness and it was very difficult to understand which one is really going to succeed. Some people, there was this [unclear: Sasal] or something.

[00:55:43] Vlad Costea: Oh, no, Chris Blec. Chris Blec. There was this guy who was all the time, I don't think he's on Twitter anymore, but he was criticizing these L2s on Ethereum as being just multisigs with master keys that can receive changes anytime. Yeah. So rollups, I think, were an evolution that took a long time. You are right about Ethereum funding ZK research, because I read some articles from back in 2014 or something when... So initially, the ZK stuff was proposed for Bitcoin. Satoshi mentioned it in 2010, that it could be used to write a more efficient version of Bitcoin.

[00:56:24] Vlad Costea: Then in 2013, there were two influential papers. The first one was called Zerocoin and the second was Zerocash. It was a bunch of academics who wanted to build this system on top of Bitcoin. The main issue was that it required a trusted setup and the core developers were against it. So we saw the emergence of two altcoins that basically developed zero knowledge proofs for this purpose. It was Zcoin that launched first and then a week later it was Zcash. And from this point on, I think Ethereum was much more supportive and saw the potential in integrating this technology into their own stack.

[00:57:10] Vlad Costea: And I think the purpose was not necessarily privacy, but to make data more scalable. To compress as much information into these ZK rollups and have more efficiency for the data on Ethereum. Because it just bloats. It's kind of a mess.

[00:57:28] Abdel: Yeah, I agree. The ZK aspect was used mostly for the scaling aspect and not for the privacy. Only Aztec is into the privacy aspect from the beginning. But yeah, at some point we'll all hopefully work on privacy. Like again, even for us right now, we are not putting a hardcore focus on privacy. Unfortunately, because lack of demand in a way, that's the issue. But you can maybe argue that it's chicken and egg problem. Maybe you need to build the infra first. But we are doing some work on the privacy aspect.

[00:58:04] Abdel: Right now, even if we don't have privacy on the Starknet protocol, we can have it on the app layer. Because on Starknet it's very cheap to verify zero-knowledge proofs in general. Even from other ecosystems. For example, I mentioned Aztec. And they have their own stack for building private applications using their language that is Noir. And what you can do is you can write an application with Noir, generate a proof with their system and verify it on Starknet. So that's one way to do that. And we have other people that are building right now confidential transfers directly using verification of zero-knowledge proofs in Starknet directly.

[00:58:42] Abdel: So we do care about privacy. But to put it more into the protocol level, which is a huge work, right now we don't prioritize it. But ultimately, I believe that there is no full sovereignty and freedom without privacy. So for me, it's inevitable. You need privacy if you want to have sovereignty and freedom. And without that, as you said earlier, you always have some risk. And it's a big risk of capture. And we need to be careful about that.

[00:59:14] Vlad Costea: I also got to plug two more sponsors. And then we can move on and talk about StarkWare. You hinted at it a few times. I think it's an interesting conversation. I think it's also a layer where even if you said that you don't prioritize privacy, you can build something like Tornado Cash. Just fork it and add it on top of this layer. And I think it's also useful to talk about OP_CAT and other stuff that could have been useful. And then ColliderScript, which was published, I think, last year in November.

[00:59:48] Vlad Costea: And it was sort of a game changer. So I'm just outlining some topics that we can pursue. But before that, let me present the sponsors. SideShift is the place where you can swap something that you have for something that you want. For example, if someone wants to pay you on stablecoins and we are in the middle of a bull market, and it might be a bad idea, not financial advice, but it's definitely not great to hold on to stablecoins during a bull market. You can basically send the person who wants to pay you on stablecoins a USDT address and then put your Bitcoin address to the receiver.

[01:00:25] Vlad Costea: And boom, you're just going to receive BTC to your wallet without ever having to deal with the stablecoins, without having to set up a Tron wallet or whatever. The fees are pretty low. The liquidity is good. Unfortunately, it's not available in the US the normal way. Wink, wink. And what else? It's SideShift.ai. They have a lot of pairs. They used to have Lightning also, but they dropped it. I think they were the first exchange to accept Lightning and also one of the first major ones to drop it, give up on it.

[01:01:02] Vlad Costea: But they still have Liquid if you're into that. And I think also Rootstock is there. It's pretty cool. Check it out. And there's also Bitcoin.com News, which I think has gotten so good over the last few years. It used to be known and a lot of people remember it as the website that says Bitcoin is slow, use Bitcoin Cash. Now they rebranded. If you go to their web page, you'll see that the Bitcoin logo is not green anymore. It's orange. And they also have pretty good news coverage.

[01:01:35] Vlad Costea: Like, for example, let's run this experiment right now. Let's see how many times they mentioned ZK rollups or even StarkWare in their articles. I think it's a lot more times than you see on Bitcoin Magazine, which focuses more on toxic maximalist narratives. So let's write StarkWare in the search box. They don't have exact... Wait, Starknet. Yeah, they do have some articles about Starknet and the Cairo verifier. And yeah, I think it's a much more diverse news source, which also covers news about gold, news about oil and other markets, which might be related or interesting.

[01:02:25] Vlad Costea: And they also cover other parts of the world about what you don't hear very often, like Russia or India, China and even Africa. So check it out. I think they do pretty good journalism. And I would not promote this if I didn't also check them regularly to find some news that I don't find in other parts. And last but not least, there is NoOnes.com, which is a peer-to-peer exchange, very much in the spirit of Paxful, if you remember that one, except that Paxful was VC funded.

[01:02:58] Vlad Costea: It sort of had a US headquarters and the co-founder of Paxful, Ray Youssef, decided he doesn't want to deal with any of that. Right now he's focusing on empowering the global south. He calls these people his lions and works with people from Africa and people from the Middle East and from South America. And the purpose is to get coins into their hands and enable them to have parallel economies. Basically, if you register to NoOnes and you start trading there, whether it's peer-to-peer or spot or even if you go this route and use their debit card for spending your Bitcoin or whatever, you are giving liquidity to the global south.

[01:03:43] Vlad Costea: And these people will hustle their way into selling the coins and establishing markets, onboarding more people. And it's all being done in a non-custodial way, which is a lot of fun and it's exciting. So check out NoOnes.com, which is N-O-O-N-E-S dot com, which ironically has 8-bit graphics, just like the NES.

[01:04:08] Vlad Costea: Okay, Abdel, so which topic should we talk about first? Let's talk about StarkWare, what it is and what ZK-STARKs are.

[01:04:17] Abdel: Yeah, sure. So StarkWare as a company, basically the co-founder and CEO of StarkWare now, Eli Ben-Sasson, is the inventor of ZK-STARKs. And as you mentioned earlier, the year 2013, actually Eli Ben-Sasson gave a very interesting talk at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, where he was talking about ways maybe to liberate ZK for Bitcoin at that time. And it was before the creation of STARKs. So the creation of STARKs, the paper was released in 2018. And yeah, so these STARKs are a new family of zero-knowledge proofs that improves and brought a lot of interesting properties over the previous state of the art, which was SNARKs.

[01:05:12] Abdel: You mentioned one of them. That was one of the reasons why the Bitcoin community rejected them, which was the need for a trusted setup for SNARKs. So STARKs, the T is for transparent, which means that there is no need for a trusted setup, which is very good. So we did not explain it, but the trusted setup is basically a ceremony that you do once. And there is this idea of you need to have usually one honest participant that will destroy the cryptographic toxic waste. It is how it's called.

[01:05:45] Abdel: And if one person does it honestly, then the system is then secured. And STARKs were very good on that front because they don't require a trusted setup. So that was one of the main advantages. Another one is that they are using very simple cryptographic assumptions like hash-based basically, which is very good for quantum resistance. So that was another very good advantage of STARKs. They are not using complex cryptography like elliptic curve pairing, cryptography and this kind of stuff. And then also they have very good properties in terms of scaling, because SNARKs are mostly used for the succinctness of the proofs, like how small they are.

[01:06:32] Abdel: But STARKs are very good in terms of their scaling properties. The magical property of STARKs is that it is exponentially faster to verify the proof as opposed to re-execute the original computation, which means that the more computation you aggregate into one proof, the more interesting it becomes, which is unusual in other systems. It means that the more activity you have, the more compression and performance gain you get from the proof in terms of the throughput, but also the cost and so on. So they are very good for that.

[01:07:10] Abdel: They are amazing. So StarkWare invented those STARK proofs. And it's interesting also to see how they were received in the Ethereum community in the first place. I would say that originally the research on ZK on Ethereum was very into SNARKs and they did not immediately embrace STARKs. And many people were very skeptical about them and saying, no, they will not work and so on. This is not the way. And StarkWare was really believing that it would be the way. And I think that seven years later, we can confidently say that they became literally the state of the art now.

[01:07:53] Abdel: Everyone is using STARKs now, even like all our competitors on Ethereum that were using SNARKs before. Now they are all using STARKs and most of them are, at the end of the day, wrapping a STARK in a SNARK just to send a smaller proof on-chain on Ethereum. But they are using STARKs as their main proving infrastructure. So it's one of the examples where, and this is something that I love with StarkWare, this a bit like a mix between visionary and trailblazing, like exploring uncharted territories and having a bold vision on something that they truly believe in.

[01:08:32] Abdel: And it was the case for STARKs. And then there were many other cases that in later with Validium and other stuff. But the main dominant example is STARKs themselves that were very criticized and many people were skeptical. And then years later, they literally became state of the art. And then StarkWare started to think about how to use them to build concrete meaningful stuff. The original idea was to build concrete applications like perpetual exchange or this kind of stuff. Like dYdX was one of the first customers of StarkWare, which was one of the biggest perpetual exchange back in the day.

[01:09:15] Abdel: So it was built on StarkEx, which is the ancestor of Starknet. It was not permissionless and it was not for arbitrary computation. So you could not deploy and write your own smart contracts and whatnot. And then came Starknet, which is a ZK rollup using STARK proofs. And right now, Starknet settles on Ethereum. And the goal is to expand and to have Starknet set up also on Bitcoin. Yeah, so this proving infrastructure, as I mentioned before, has been battle-tested in production. So it's interesting because we have the shared proving infrastructure that is used not only for Starknet, but also StarkEx.

[01:09:59] Abdel: So we still have some StarkEx customers that are using StarkEx architecture. And we also have Starknet app chains, which are like basically the same stack as the public Starknet, but they run their own app chain. And we have this common shared proving infrastructure called SHARP. And the idea is that you can use it to basically aggregate any kind of jobs when you want to generate the STARK proof. And again, because as I said earlier, it's more interesting to batch more and more computation. So you can also like batch computation from one ZK rollup, another one, some app chains, whatever.

[01:10:40] Abdel: And you can generate some aggregate the proofs and do a recursion. So it's battle-tested infrastructure. And then, yeah, the goal now is to expand it to Bitcoin. For that, we cannot do it like completely as we have now on Ethereum. We are missing some pieces to do exactly the same on Bitcoin, mostly because we cannot verify efficiently STARK proofs directly on-chain on Bitcoin with Bitcoin script. So on Bitcoin, there is a small VM that is Bitcoin script, but it's very limited in comparison to Ethereum.

[01:11:14] Abdel: So we cannot verify it. Efficiently STARK proofs. For that, we will need something. This something could be different things. You mentioned one of them, which is OP_CAT. And there will be other ways to do that. But yeah, if we wanted to do exactly the same architecture, which is the ultimate one, as the most trust-minimized or trustless, because it's better than BitVM. And this is the end game because you don't even have the one-of-n honest assumption. You need to trust no one.

[01:11:46] Abdel: Basically, you just trust the math and the mathematical proof, and then you verify it on-chain. But in order to do that, you need to be able to verify the proof on-chain directly. And this is how we can have the end game vision, which is trustless, fully fledged ZK rollup. But for that, we will need the soft forks. And then there are multiple ways to have it. And we can go into more details into the possible approaches. But yeah, this is the goal for us. And in the meantime, while waiting for the soft fork that would enable this end game vision, we will start with the best we can do today, which is BitVM bridge designs.

[01:12:27] Abdel: It was not announced officially, but he shared a bit about this. We are doing collaboration with Alpen Labs to work together on the BitVM bridge design for Starknet, and so on. Yeah, so as a pragmatic way to start extending to Bitcoin, we will start with BitVM bridge. And at the same time, we will continue exploring if there would be other ways to do that. Is there a way without soft fork? Like you mentioned, Collider. And ColliderVM is one such possibility, but we don't know yet if it would be practical or not.

[01:13:04] Abdel: And at the same time, we are continuing to explore potential soft forks. That will get us there, or at least get us closer. So is there directly something that will enable verification of proofs directly, like OP_CAT, or something that gets us closer, like covenants, like CTV or CSFS, for example. They will not give us the end game, but it will be a step closer. Yeah, that's the summary of what StarkWare is and Starknet and the current state.

[01:13:36] Vlad Costea: I remember when I interviewed Eli Ben-Sasson last year, I think it was in May or something. And at the time, the prevalent narrative in Bitcoin was that OP_CAT was next in terms of soft forks. It was rewritten using TapScript by Ethan Heilman and another guy, I don't remember his name right now. But basically, it was proposed as a BIP and it seemed to get a lot of attention. And it was also it had two powerful narratives. The first one is that it was only a dozen lines of code.

[01:14:18] Vlad Costea: The second one was that it was created by Satoshi and disabled by Satoshi because of concerns that no longer exist. Yes, but there was such a negative campaign that was launched to target OP_CAT. Like, I think part of the blame is to be taken by the Taproot Wizards, because they did a horrible job. And just for the record, what OP_CAT does is something you can do in Excel today. You put together two rows. One says ABC, the other one says 123. And then you run OP_CAT and you get ABC 123.

[01:14:56] Vlad Costea: That's exactly what it does. But builders can basically use this feature to put together a lot of interesting stuff. There's this famous saying that you can build anything with OP_CAT, but it's not necessarily the most efficient way to build it. Exactly.

[01:15:13] Abdel: So part of it is Taproot, and I guess the other part is us, right?

[01:15:18] Vlad Costea: Taproot Wizards.

[01:15:20] Abdel: Yeah, but you said part of it is Taproot Wizards. So I was thinking that maybe there was another one. No, no, no, no.

[01:15:28] Vlad Costea: I think you guys did pretty well, to be honest.

[01:15:30] Abdel: I mean, it will be fair. I mean, it's fine if you think that it's okay. Maybe we did not like... I think like one, for example, controversial thing that we did, maybe, but it's weird, is the fund that we did, like the $1 million fund for OP_CAT research. Like, and the goal was really like, to make it like neutral and even people that were against OP_CAT, it was an opportunity for them that OP_CAT would actually be harmful for Bitcoin and so on. But some people said, no, it's not good, like to involve some fund for this and so on.

[01:16:07] Abdel: I mean, yeah, I understand the criticism for Taproot Wizards as well. I mean, I really like Eric Wall and Rijndael on the technical front, they are doing very good stuff. And I really like Eric Wall's takes in general, but I agree, like maybe the extreme meme culture around it is a bit too provocative and a bit too like, maybe it was harmful. And this is something I discussed with Eric many times, actually, and I do believe like maybe it was maybe not the right way to do it.

[01:16:38] Abdel: But anyway, I agree with you that it had some momentum and then the momentum dropped for some reason. Yeah, and now there seems to be like a start of momentum about CTV and CSFS. But I think right now we have too much distraction with the filter war right now, unfortunately. And that's very sad because we should focus more on discussing what's next instead of discussing this distraction, I would say, at least.

[01:17:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think you did a pretty good summary of it. But I also want to add that a lot of non-technical Bitcoin users perceived OP_CAT as something that's, first of all, related to the Taproot Wizards because they had the cat avatars. And they also perceived it as just technology that enables them to have decentralized exchanges for their JPEGs so that they can swap their tokens, build markets for this. And this narrative was much more powerful than the good stuff like the StarkWare or even the other stuff that can be built with covenants.

[01:17:55] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and it's sad that we got to this point, but also recall Peter Todd, who is objectively someone who has the competence and the knowledge to look at code, saying that he doesn't want something built by Eli, who was also behind Zcash on Bitcoin. So he got lazy instead of actually looking at what this does. He appealed to his previous experiences and emotions or whatever, because Peter Todd was active and involved in the creation of Zcash during the ceremony. And then he had... Oh, I didn't know that.

[01:18:37] Vlad Costea: Oh, you didn't know that? Just a second. I want to show you something.

[01:18:41] Abdel: Ah, that's very interesting.

[01:18:43] Abdel: Okay, that explains a lot. Okay, interesting.

[01:18:49] Vlad Costea: It says here non-electronic remains of compute node. Okay.

[01:18:58] Vlad Costea: It has the signature of Peter Todd all over. This is basically the laptop that he used during the ceremony. These are the disks, the DVDs that he wrote during the ceremony with the data. I have parts of the laptop, obviously.

[01:19:14] Abdel: Why? How come do you have them?

[01:19:16] Vlad Costea: I bought it from him.

[01:19:18] Abdel: Oh, interesting. Okay, it's a piece of history.

[01:19:21] Vlad Costea: At one point he decided he wants to sell it because he's moving or whatever and he has too much stuff. I bought this for like a thousand bucks from him in Bitcoin.

[01:19:30] Vlad Costea: Okay, interesting. And now I have a bunch of people who want to put this in a museum and they're trying to make me offers to buy it. That's just funny.

[01:19:39] Abdel: Okay, interesting.

[01:19:40] Vlad Costea: I've been holding on to this for three years and I do agree that it belongs in a museum. Like I'm just a nerd in his bedroom. Maybe I... I don't offer the best way for this to be presented to the world. Maybe some people will be interested in cypherpunk history or whatever. If Zcash becomes more successful than this, it's also going to be more valuable.

[01:20:02] Vlad Costea: So I'm just holding on to it. It's a very nice memory. But my point is that even someone who is technically competent and can verify the code is using the same kind of FUD tactics. Like, oh, I don't like this guy. And if I don't like this guy, it means that everything that he builds is bad or whatever.

[01:20:24] Abdel: Yeah, as we said earlier, we'll discuss the people who push the change instead of discussing the change itself. So I agree it's sad. And yeah, it's true that it was tainted too much with degen use cases. But for me, like when I was discussing with Bitcoiners about the benefits, I was always using the angle of improving Bitcoin as money. Like, even if you believe in the fix the money first, OP_CAT is good for that. Again, as we said, like scaling for privacy and this kind of stuff.

[01:20:56] Abdel: But I agree, like most of the time, to be honest, when I opened the discussion with Bitcoiners, it was easier. Oh, yeah, but you know, those people, I don't like those people or yeah, but it will bring degen use cases that we don't want. Even if I was not at all discussing about those use cases, there was an extreme focus for many people about that instead of realizing the potential to improve Bitcoiners. Or government of money. So it's a bit sad indeed, that the momentum was lost on that.

[01:21:29] Abdel: Yeah, right now I'm trying to go maybe a bit more extreme and think about maybe do a proposal for an OP_STARKVERIFY opcode directly, like which would be the most extreme thing to do. I want to do it maybe mostly as a thought experiment, because it's challenging. So I don't know. I'm still considering whether or not I should go into this rabbit hole because it will likely be controversial. But I think it can be interesting to think about. Because, yeah, I had also some interesting discussions that were more constructive about OP_CAT.

[01:22:08] Abdel: Yeah, Salvatore is pushing a lot of stuff like he's behind the Swiss Army Knife proposal, which is a set of four opcodes for Bitcoin. And he made very good arguments about why pushing OP_CAT alone was a bad idea, and that we should not do that. He said that it also pushed away some open minded technical Bitcoiners that realized the potential of OP_CAT. But as you said before, something interesting, you can do it, but not in the most efficient manner or in the most elegant way. So it means that, yes, some people understand that it can bring everything, almost everything, but in a way that is ugly, and that they don't want that.

[01:22:58] Abdel: So he was trying to explain to me that pushing OP_CAT alone is a bad idea. I think Alex, working on Arcade right now, also has some similar arguments about the mistake that maybe we did about thinking that the smallest change would be the most viable path. And he was trying to argue that maybe not, actually, because, Okay, maybe it's the nine lines of code, but if it enables stuff in a very ugly manner, maybe this is something that we don't want. I think there is also maybe some PTSD about Taproot and the hack that was found to do inscriptions and ordinals and this kind of stuff.

[01:23:45] Abdel: Yeah, so yeah, TL;DR, some people say that maybe it's not time to think about just the smallest change, but the change that makes the most sense. So if there will be something that will be not only OP_CAT, but OP_CAT plus some other stuff. So one example is the Swiss Army knife, which is OP_CAT, OP_CTV, OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY and OP_AMOUNT, which would be an opcode to be able to introspect the amount of the UTXO. Then maybe it's better because then you can build stuff, but in a more elegant manner and more efficient.

[01:24:21] Abdel: So it's interesting dilemma. And then the most hardcore path would be to enshrine native ZK verification in Bitcoin directly, which would be the most efficient, most specific. So you eliminate all arguments about enabling stuff that you don't want because it will have a single purpose, a very tiny proof. But it comes with a lot of challenges because you need to enshrine one specific flavor of STARK protocol and whatnot. So there is concerns about credible neutrality and whatnot. But I think it's very interesting to maybe start discussing about that.

[01:24:55] Abdel: To evaluate better all the potential alternatives that we have, the most generic flexible ones that are the less efficient, the most ugly ones. And at the extreme, also part of the spectrum, something extremely specific. And in between, there might be some other things to do that get us to the end game vision of being able to build the trustless ZK rollups on Bitcoin that will bring massive scale and throughput and privacy and everything. Like, good UX also. One aspect that is overlooked, I think, is how much it can improve UX in a self-custodial manner.

[01:25:33] Abdel: And we prove it on Starknet today. It's not just theoretical stuff. On Starknet, you have something called account abstraction. And this is very powerful because you can be very flexible in the way you authenticate with the blockchain and the way you spend your money. It can be anything. It could be something like you authenticate with your face ID. So completely seedless, no passphrase, nothing like that. You can have social recovery wallets. For example, if you have someone in your family that is not tech savvy and cannot manage properly seed phrase and so on, you could have a way to unblock this person maybe with some guardians or this kind of stuff.

[01:26:18] Abdel: So you can also improve the UX, but still with self-custodial. So not only it improves and you can do more, but you can also improve like UX and scaling and costs and everything.

[01:26:36] Vlad Costea: Someone in the chat, his name is Odin Free says, say Starknet brother, Abdel.

[01:26:42] Abdel: It's one of my colleagues from Starknet. He's funny. Okay. Hi, Odin. Starknet brother. I said it now. Yeah. It's a meme in the Starknet community. So yeah, Odin is my colleague. He's great. He's interesting because we are working in the same team and I am the Bitcoin maxi. He's the Ethereum maxi kind of like, and we play about that. We fight each other internally and externally. Yeah.

[01:27:12] Vlad Costea: On the topic that you mentioned, which regards the simplest change or the one with, I guess, the least impact versus the one that enables the most stuff to get built. I do remember after OP_CAT was proposed last year and it seemed to be a serious conversation. We did have during the BTC++ event, this great script restoration idea, which basically packaged together all of these opcodes that builders need to add stuff to Bitcoin. And they said, how about we just optimistically... Maybe if I say optimistically proposed, it will be confused with optimistically verified.

[01:27:54] Vlad Costea: But we just have this optimistic approach to pushing soft forks and we enable everything that people need in order to build on Bitcoin. And that never went anywhere. It was just one dose of hopium that people inhaled during that event. And then when it went to Twitter, it just was forgotten, I guess.

[01:28:18] Abdel: It's a good point I forgot to mention, but GSR is definitely something that we would love seeing in Bitcoin because it will enable everything we need. Even more, like much more efficient than OP_CAT alone, because it also has OP_MUL, multiplication, which is also very important for us. And also, I think Rusty Russell did an amazing job into thinking about the pricing of those opcodes and so on with the varops budget, the concept of dynamically pricing opcodes. And he did a lot of work and benchmarked the opcodes in different scenario, trying to price the worst case scenario and stuff like that to categorize the opcodes, depending on their complexity and stuff like that.

[01:29:03] Abdel: But yeah, I agree that it did not get traction sufficiently. But yeah, GSR would be one path as well. Yeah, for sure. And many people will love to see it because it will have pretty much everything we need to build fully fledged ZK rollups on Bitcoin and more than that. Not only that, but also improve Bitcoin as a base layer as well. Yeah.

[01:29:27] Vlad Costea: I don't know what we're going to have in the end or if we're going to have something, but even from Luke Dashjr's side, I saw a tweet last week in which he said that Bitcoin is not a final project and we do need a Z. ZK Verifier.

[01:29:42] Abdel: I was extremely surprised by that. And literally what I mentioned before, I discussed that with him actually, because I was extremely positively surprised that he said that. So the stuff I mentioned, like the OP_STARKVERIFY is something related to that. That's also, we discussed it back in the day a long time ago, but we always thought that it would be too specific and it would never be possible to push something like that. But after I saw that, I discussed more and realized that maybe it's interesting to at least open the idea, because at least at the very least, the positive aspect it can have is people will be forced in a way to have a position about that, which will make them try to at least maybe educate themselves about ZK, what it can bring and what it can enable.

[01:30:32] Abdel: So even if there is like extremely likely no chance to push something like that anytime soon. But the impact of that, like having people to think about it, to talk about it, to educate more about ZK for Bitcoin, maybe it's a good opportunity to spread more knowledge about ZK, demystify ZK on Bitcoin. This is also why I'm doing a lot of projects that are using STARK proof on Bitcoin, but without soft fork, without anything like that. We are pushing a lot on that front, like using STARKs today on Bitcoin, but not necessarily to verify proofs of our chain.

[01:31:06] Abdel: But there are so much you can do with Bitcoin, with STARK proofs on Bitcoin, and also for its symbiotic ecosystems, like Nostr, Cashu, we are doing a lot of experiments on those. We'll be happy to mention a few of them if you want. But I realized that it's way easier to talk and educate about ZK if you don't talk about soft forks at all. So that's why also I realized that it's also very good to build stuff that don't require any soft fork and you just show that STARKs is a new paradigm shift, you know, it's like, it doesn't have to be coupled to blockchain at all.

[01:31:43] Abdel: It's just a new way to verify integrity of computation without executing, like, you know, Bitcoin was zero to one in the way you can verify integrity of everything. But for that, you need to execute everything. STARK proof is just a new way to do that without even executing it. I want people to understand that it's a new way to verify the integrity of a computation without executing it, which is extremely good, because it removes the tension between accessibility of verifying and the scaling you want. Because usually, if you want to increase the throughput and so on, you will need to have bigger machines, hardware requirements and so on.

[01:32:25] Abdel: Because if you verify integrity by executing, it means that you need to be able to execute as fast as the blocks and transactions that are coming on the blockchain, which is why it's capped on Bitcoin, because you don't want to hurt the decentralization of the network by forcing the nodes to use big machines and so on. This will be catastrophic for the decentralization of the network. And I want Bitcoiners to understand that with this magical construction, you can verify the integrity of computation, but you can do that on a very small device, with a phone, with a Raspberry Pi, with a toaster maybe even.

[01:33:03] Abdel: So, yeah, this is something I want Bitcoiners to understand that it doesn't have to be even correlated to blockchain at all. It's just a new way of verifying integrity of computation.

[01:33:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I very much agree with you, but I remember I was at BTC Prague this year and I spoke with a guy who was working on the Specter hardware wallet, which honestly is really good. And at one point I was, he was mocking me a bit. He was saying, oh, I hear you're into shitcoins nowadays. And I said, yeah, there's some really exciting stuff happening. Like, have you taken a look at Zcash recently? And he said, no. I asked him, do you know what zero knowledge proofs are?

[01:33:42] Vlad Costea: And he answered, no. And I offered, do you want me to explain to you how ZK proofs work? And he said, no, I have better stuff to do. And he left. Really? Yeah. And for me, it was very exciting because I found someone who knew nothing about it. And it was like my opportunity to practice my pitch, basically, because it's very hard to explain zero knowledge proofs. Yeah, it is. And I was just going to try.

[01:34:07] Abdel: But he did not even give you the opportunity to even try.

[01:34:10] Vlad Costea: I will not forget this.

[01:34:13] Abdel: Yeah, that's very sad.

[01:34:14] Vlad Costea: This interaction, because on one hand, I was very much available to explaining. On the other hand, I was dealing not with some random pleb who brags about not being technical. It was someone who was working for a company in the industry.

[01:34:28] Abdel: Yeah, that's much worse than if it was a normal pleb. Yeah, you could understand. It's very complex. But yeah, this guy. Yeah, it's sad, to be honest. I agree with you. Yeah, I met actually one non tech savvy pleb in BTC++ Scaling Edition. And it's funny because he's a Knotzi. So he's in the Knots camp. But he attended my talk about STARKs and Bitcoin. And then he was curious. And he said, oh, now I want to understand more the nuances and how this works and so on.

[01:35:01] Abdel: So there is hope, I agree that it is frustrating, but we need to try. So please continue to try to do that when you go to those conferences. They will surely face people like that that don't want to even understand what it is about. And they are missing the point. But we need to keep trying and we need more and more people to try that. It's important.

[01:35:24] Vlad Costea: I remember after that event, so at the same time, there were two events happening in Prague. There was BTC Prague and there was also MoneroKon. And at BTC Prague, someone took a picture of Michael Saylor's slides. And it was about how much gains you're going to have if you hold for a certain amount of years, like his predictions. And at the Monero event, there was, I forget his name. Oh, that's a shame. This older guy who is usually contributing to Monero Project, ArticMine, that's his name also on Bitcoin Talk, you can find him in some threads.

[01:36:07] Vlad Costea: And he was presenting some algebra, basically. And someone put those together and said, this is the BTC Prague math and this is the MoneroKon math. Like it's sort of degenerated to the point where in one side you talk about gains and you talk like Wall Street people. And on the other side, there is actual cryptography talk and there is math talk, which is useful. And on the topic of ZK proofs, the way in which I describe it usually is that it's like so going from Bitcoin to using some sort of ZK to do basic stuff, like verifying the blockchain in one second to to basically assume that everything is valid and you download that ZK proof and you don't have to sync the whole node.

[01:37:00] Vlad Costea: Exactly.

[01:37:01] Vlad Costea: It's like going from arithmetic, which is what Bitcoin is like today when you're running a node to algebra, which has formulas. And of course, you have to be more knowledgeable to prove that the formulas work and that they're true. You have to run through some demonstrations. But once you have algebra, you can skip basically multiple additions and everything that is so basic in arithmetic, which of course works. Anyone can understand what's happening, but it's very intensive from a computation point of view. And with ZK proofs, you have more of algebra.

[01:37:40] Abdel: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's exactly that. It's a good way to frame it. I think some people like normal pleb would need a level even lower than this. But yeah, I think like for intermediate people, yeah, they can understand this analogy. I think it's a good one. And yeah, I agree with you. Like, it's true that like I was saying that I really like the Bitcoin events because we talk about why we are doing that. But this is very not what I was discussing about indeed, like the Michael Saylor gains and so on.

[01:38:11] Abdel: This is something I really don't like in this new wave of Bitcoiners that are just simping MicroStrategy, Saylor and ETFs. This is insane to me. They are like, yeah, this is completely insane. And then like those people that are like, for example, crapping on Ethereum, they are like just hypocrites, like Ethereum conferences and so on. Like they are much closer to what you described for MoneroKon at least, despite the fact that it's only this and not also the why we do that. But for sure, like it's way better than just just simping like those Michael Saylor and just buy my stocks and stuff like that.

[01:38:48] Abdel: So it's very bad. And there is like seems to be like the big new wave of so-called Bitcoiners that are just like far from the cypherpunk ideals and so on. And this is very bad. Yeah.

[01:39:02] Vlad Costea: But let me tell you something which I hope is not true, but if it's true, it gets very depressing. Maybe that we entered the phase where fundamentals and technology are no longer important and it's only about narratives and no matter how good of a proposal you're going to have and how much you spend developing and building something that's useful for people. You're not going to get it, especially if it requires a soft fork, not because it's not great, but because people are afraid of shifting the narrative about what Bitcoin is and they think that the market will react to that and they're not sure if the price is going to go up or down.

[01:39:46] Vlad Costea: But there's a risk that it can go down and they're so afraid that they're going to lose money on this that they would rather do nothing because so far the market has rewarded them for doing nothing.

[01:39:57] Abdel: Yeah, it's a good point. I think you are into something. I want to hope that we are still not in this phase and that there is still hope. But to those people, I would reply that honestly they are dismissing completely the fact that actually doing nothing is the biggest risk of capture that you can have because now you have all those people like Michael Saylor, ETFs and so on that are capturing more and more of the supply and then at some point they might want to influence the development of the protocol.

[01:40:29] Abdel: And for them, the best thing that can happen is no change at all. So if we are not careful, we give them actually the tools to capture Bitcoin in the way they want and then they can do like censorship and whatever. They can control it completely. So doing nothing is actually helping those people to actually capture Bitcoin and then completely destroy its value proposition. And I do want to hope that even the market will punish this. Like if it ends up being captured, then there is no point.

[01:41:03] Abdel: It has so much value. But it's not clear. I agree with you. Like, again, the market is not always rational. But I want to hope that we are not in this phase yet. But I agree we are close to this already today. We can see it like people, as you said, are worried about changing the narrative of Bitcoin. I can see it very clearly. And now this is why also they are much more into the store of value aspect rather than the P2P cash component. And it's very sad.

[01:41:34] Abdel: I wish we had more talks about how to improve Bitcoin as P2P cash and not about how to have the number go up forever, you know.

[01:41:42] Vlad Costea: But yeah, I think for non-technical people, there's a huge disconnect between the fact that Bitcoin gets advertised as something immutable, something that cannot change, something that was released in a perfect state and we never had perfect money before. But Bitcoin is exactly what we have been looking for. And then there's the fact that you have Bitcoin Core developers and the fact that they're making refinements and improvements and they come up with proposals and they try to make Bitcoin more useful. And then they're going to ask themselves, wait a second, does this mean that Bitcoin is not perfect?

[01:42:19] Vlad Costea: Does this mean that Bitcoin can actually have bugs or that there is some stuff in there that maybe we don't know about and we just assume it's perfect, but in reality it's not? And I think most people never ask the question because they're afraid. They're afraid that if they do ask the question and they do discover something, it's going to get a lot of people to sell because they're afraid of what might possibly be out there. So if you spend a lot of time looking at the Bitcoin code, you actually can come up with some ideas about how you can destroy the system.

[01:42:54] Vlad Costea: Just some small changes that you can make to break consensus or even cause some minor delays in block propagation or something which is going to cause chaos and can lead to orphaned blocks and reorgs and whatnot. So the more you know about how this works, I guess the less bullish you're going to be about it economically because you do understand. But on the other hand, you had all of these business marketing people who went there to the guys on Wall Street and they said, this is the perfect money.

[01:43:30] Vlad Costea: You're going to make a lot of cash on this one.

[01:43:33] Abdel: Yeah. Totally. I agree with you.

[01:43:38] Vlad Costea: I don't know what's the bridge between the two worlds. We need to find a way to explain, to convey the message that, hey, this is still not perfect. Even if it has these qualities, even if we do agree that Bitcoin is this, someone can fuck something up. Like it wasn't so long ago that Matt Corallo just wanted to have a small optimization and inserted an inflation bug, which was not exploited, was discovered by a Bitcoin Cash developer and disclosed very ethically. Like at the time, it was like the peak of the fight between BTC and BCH.

[01:44:14] Vlad Costea: And some BCH developer found that and instead of destroying BTC, he went to Greg Maxwell, he went to Pieter Wuille and all the others and said, hey, look, there is this one here. Let's fix it. And he collaborated in fixing it, which is amazing. And it's also what gives me faith in this this whole space.

[01:44:36] Abdel: Yeah, no, I agree. It's amazing when you think about it. So I don't know what the answer is about how to build those bridges. Maybe it's something that lies into what we discussed earlier about understanding what it is about, because at the end of the day, I see Bitcoin as a wake up call for humanity. And if people wake up and understand that we believe that there was no alternative to the broken system and so on, but we know now we know that there is an alternative that is possible.

[01:45:08] Abdel: And if we have people that wake up on that, then it's a call for freedom. And this is something that you cannot kill, which means my point is the following. It means that even in the catastrophic event of the technical bug and so on, at some point, if the wake up call works, you probably can find solutions like that. That is a bit my conclusion about the existential risk between Bitcoin and Ethereum. I would consider that the risk on Bitcoin is more about the tech front and the risk on Ethereum on the social layer.

[01:45:44] Abdel: And then I was thinking, what is harder to fix? And I do believe that you can always fix a broken tech, but the broken social layer is forever. So I don't know if that makes sense, if I'm clear, but I think that the wake up call is even more important than what is actually Bitcoin right now. And there will be ways to potentially fix some technical issues always, as long as we have a strong and resilient social layer. But for that, we need more education. We need people to understand why we do that.

[01:46:17] Abdel: We need them to care and fight if needed, because at some point, we will need to fight. At some point, like the government and banks and so on, they shifted, sometimes they were trying to completely forbid those things and then they were trying to capture them or take profits from them and so on. But at the end of the day, we need to be ready for the day when they want to shut down it completely and we'll have to fight. It's also why privacy is super important, preserving privacy of developers, people that are involved, because you don't want them to be at risk and so on.

[01:46:55] Abdel: But yeah, I'm diverging a bit, but I think the bridge is about understanding why we are doing that and trying to [unclear: peel] the wake-up call for everyone.

[01:47:07] Vlad Costea: And on the topic of privacy, I can argue that even at the base layer level, Bitcoin does need privacy because miners should not be able to discriminate based on the origin of the transaction.

[01:47:20] Abdel: Yeah, it's good for censorship resistance, exactly, completely. I agree with you, privacy gives a lot of censorship resistance properties as well, protection against MEV and this kind of stuff as well. So it's true. For example, take the example of Cashu, even if it's custodial, at least it has some very good properties in terms of censorship resistance because the mint cannot discriminate between users. So that's interesting. So I agree with you, having privacy on the base layer is very important to improve censorship resistance and that makes Bitcoin stronger in general.

[01:48:00] Vlad Costea: And I think at this point, it's very dangerous that because of the Knotzis, K-N-O-T-Z-I, just for the record, I'm not getting into World War Two.

[01:48:14] Abdel: Yeah, it's good that you clarify it, even more for me because of my shitty French accent. So maybe when I said it before, it was closer to the other word, so good that you clarified it.

[01:48:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm just saying it because YouTube is going to transcribe this and they're going to think, wait a second, this guy is into radical politics or whatever. We don't want to get mislabeled by the algorithm.

[01:48:34] Abdel: Nice catch.

[01:48:35] Vlad Costea: But these guys are basically going down a very slippery slope where they say, well, we don't want this on the blockchain. And I think once you open the floodgates for this kind of self-regulation, which may be malevolent, maybe paranoid, I don't know what their intentions are. But then there's going to be governments saying, well, you should also include some filters for copyrighted material, like you should not be able to inscribe copyrighted material. And then governments will say, well, here's a list of blacklisted addresses that come from Chainalysis.

[01:49:12] Abdel: Or for compliance stuff and stuff like that.

[01:49:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's only going to get worse because once you bend the knee and you say, yes, this is a worthy cause. I mean, I'm not even sure why OCEAN mining exists, like from the beginning their legitimation was weak, like, oh, allowing miners to build their own templates. Okay, it's not that big of a deal. But now it seems like they have all the tools basically to have their own fork, to be honest, like they run their own node client and they have their own mining pool. Interesting. And they can also, I think, on the long run, if they keep on getting more users to mine with them, they can stall developments.

[01:49:59] Vlad Costea: They can blackmail everyone and say, unless you make us happy, we're not going to agree with you.

[01:50:05] Abdel: Yeah, it would be interesting if it was the case because they are literally accusing those that came to attack Bitcoin. But maybe it's a good sign up to avoid seeing that they are trying to attack it. So it's weird. I mean, like I talk to Luke from time to time and like even if I don't agree with many of most of his takes, actually, especially outside of Bitcoin.

[01:50:31] Abdel: I do want to believe like that he has good intentions in a way, but it's true that it's weird. Like, especially if you see like the propaganda of mechanic and like there is something weird. I agree with you, like, if you take all those elements, you combine them. It could be something trying to control the vertical stack and development, as you said, like a client, a miner implementation and so on. It would be interesting. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, for me, my take on that on the filter drama and the Knots discussion is that it could have been a good excuse to have a proper conversation about having client diversity on Bitcoin in the proper manner.

[01:51:17] Abdel: But now the way it's done is completely crazy bullshit and it's very counterproductive. So it's only distraction and division. And the problem is that the other side, I mean, the Knotzis are mostly playing on the emotional level, trying to [unclear: catch stupid normies] with child porn and stuff like that. While the other camp is more rational and like pragmatically presenting like more, yeah, more rational takes, I think. But, you know, the emotional side is more likely to win for the plebs and some people that don't understand the trade-offs and they need to believe in something.

[01:51:55] Abdel: And so I do see why it works, this technique, but it's very sad. And I hope that, yeah, I don't like the fact that Luke is playing this tactic, to be honest. I'm happy that he considered Bitcoin as not final and that it's not time to ossify completely right now. And like, for example, stuff like in training is a key verification, but implying that some people are trying to attack Bitcoin and stuff like that, the way it's done is very bad and counterproductive. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, it's a complete distraction.

[01:52:30] Abdel: And it's true that if you think about who can win the most of this situation, it's probably like the big ones that don't want to see any change. Like, as we discussed, like MicroStrategy, ETFs or governments even, they do have incentives for Bitcoin to not change. And maybe like having some distraction to not talk about governance and not talk about how to improve Bitcoin is good for them.

[01:52:59] Abdel: I mean, I don't know, man, it's weird.

[01:53:04] Vlad Costea: But I do have to ask at this point, because there is so much manpower, there is so much energy, there is so much knowledge that got poured into these proposals to improve Bitcoin. If they're not happening, do you think that they will die off or will they move to other networks? Like, do you see a future where all of these ideas get built on Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin? Or do you see a future where some people decide, let's have a developer-friendly fork of Bitcoin and everyone gets some airdrop, and then they decide which one is the real Bitcoin, the one that's more useful or the one that's supported by BlackRock?

[01:53:42] Abdel: Okay, it's a good question and I would be very explicit and honest about my personal opinion on that. I think this can never work and happen. I believe that if this happens, this capture and like all those proposals dying and so on, I think it will just end up with Bitcoin dying or just being only maybe temporarily a store of value, digital gold or whatever, but not anywhere close to its original vision of being P2P cash. And I don't think it's possible to have something that will be a developer-friendly fork of Bitcoin, just because the problem is that you cannot reproduce the conditions that Bitcoin has.

[01:54:34] Abdel: If you think about it, the reasons why Bitcoin is there today, how it is, is insane. The likelihood of having all those combinations of all of those factors, the fact that it was launched without almost anyone caring about it was actually very good, because there was no capture, there was no companies that tried to capture it from the beginning, no VCs, no premine, no whatever. This right now, you can never reproduce it, because if you make something that is like having some traction, because to do it properly, you need a lot of power, like funding, marketing, coordination and so on.

[01:55:15] Abdel: But it means also that some people will see the potential profits from it and will try to capture it from the beginning and so on. I'm just trying to say that I don't think it's possible ever to reproduce the conditions that were met for Bitcoin to be where it is today. And if Bitcoin does not work and Ethereum as well does not work, because to me, even if I said that I went more into the Bitcoin maxi side, I would say today that I only consider Bitcoin and Ethereum as the two systems that have a chance to ever be something that can resist nation state attacks.

[01:55:53] Abdel: It's just that now I consider the likelihood of that to happen much more in favor of Bitcoin. And I do think that Bitcoin can succeed without Ethereum, but I don't think it's true the other way around. So that's why also I want to put all my focus on Bitcoin. So I would say I became a maximalist because I think it has the most chances to succeed and the chances are not that high. So it's a distraction to try to think to make something else work, because even Bitcoin, the fight is far from being over.

[01:56:28] Abdel: As you said, it's very risky right now. And to me, this is the one that by far has the biggest chances of success. So no, I don't think it's possible. So if Bitcoin dies, I don't think there will be another opportunity, maybe ever, to be honest, to build something like this. That's why it was also a wake-up call for me personally to realize that. And it was something that helped me to get out of my technical bubble and distraction working on cool engineering stuff. And this is also why I do like the fact that it's hard to change Bitcoin because it's also what makes it very special, resilient and so on.

[01:57:11] Abdel: But of course, I do see the downside as some people are trying to push innovation on something that can improve it. So it's a double-edged sword. It's very hard. It's frustrating. But I do want to accept this frustration. We need people to act as watchdogs and to try to protect it, even if I am on the other side this time. And I'm trying to advocate for some stuff that I genuinely believe can improve Bitcoin. But I have to accept the price of it. I have to accept the fact that we need to convince that it's good for Bitcoin.

[01:57:43] Abdel: We need to convince that it's not harmful. And I'm willing to play the game. Of course, it's me personally, but some companies, they have some reality. They have some funding. They have some stuff like that. So at some point, maybe some people will say, Okay, we cannot afford it. Bitcoin does not want us. We will do it somewhere else. Maybe this will happen. But I'm just saying for me personally, I don't believe in such a world where Bitcoin will fail and there is another attempt to build something that could be unstoppable against nation state attacks.

[01:58:12] Abdel: So that's the last hope we have. This is why also I want to put all my focus on that.

[01:58:18] Vlad Costea: I can also argue that there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the Bitcoin network itself and whether or not it's going to be sustainable. We can agree that the network is going to fail at one point and we can move the BTC tokens to another network which has good security and also does not need, does not have the same high costs to produce the coins. Even if the price goes down, at least we preserve the system.

[01:58:49] Abdel: Yeah, interesting.

[01:58:54] Vlad Costea: Like maybe that the Bitcoin network is just the place of birth and will not be the final phase. And a lot of Ethereum people say this. You come from that camp. They say, well, we can tokenize Bitcoin. It doesn't have to exist on its own blockchain and whatever. Yeah, but I mean, the value of it also comes from the proof of work creation.

[01:59:13] Abdel: Yeah, exactly. And for me, like it would mean like just Bitcoin as a store of value, but not for its censorship resistance properties and whatnot. So it does not make sense for me. I don't want to see this scenario happening. And also something that is, I think, a bit different if I compare the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities in a way is that. Like many people on the Ethereum side, I think are worried about what it will take for Bitcoin to succeed completely at the planet scale, in terms of how you transition from the fiat world to the Bitcoin standard world.

[01:59:50] Abdel: And people are worried about the consequences of that, as in, like historically, disruptive changes like that usually come with a lot of blood or fights or stuff like that. So they're worried about the doom scenario where it's a bit like something like the ultimate consecration of Bitcoin will be a collapse of the fiat system and so on. But the transition to the Bitcoin standard will be painful, maybe. And I think some people on the Ethereum side, they want more happy scenario where we get to decentralized system, but without having to fight very hard and without, like, yeah, it's more like the honey badger spirit versus unicorn or like, or maybe chameleon, like Ethereum wants to, like, try to feel less harmful to be like a bit the Trojan horse for the existing system and gradually replace it less disruptive in a less disruptive way than Bitcoin.

[02:00:53] Abdel: And Bitcoin is more like, honey badger does not care, we'll change it. And we need like more cypherpunk people that will want to fight against the system. And so on. So, but I'm worried about the capture of the Ethereum philosophy, like doing that very gradually, the Trojan horse for TradFi, because it actually works. But the problem is that then it brings more powerful forces that can capture it. Like, for example, just stablecoins is a huge risk, like, because, like, ultimately, if you have all the DeFi that depends on stablecoin, and it depends on central issuers, then they have a huge power.

[02:01:33] Abdel: Of influence over which fork will be the canonical chain, and so on. So it's very risky. So it works well, the strategy of being a Trojan horse for TradFi and this kind of stuff. But I think this is also what can kill it. So I very much like more and more like the philosophy of openly saying what we want, instead of trying to hide it. And I do want to see Bitcoin as a way to fight the broken system. And also to accept the consequences of the transition to a Bitcoin standard in a way.

[02:02:07] Abdel: But I do understand that some people are worried about that, and they want to think about a happy path and so on. But I believe it's so much powerful and disruptive change that it's very hard to make it extremely gradually. And it's good to have people that openly state the goals and try to work upon making it reality. But it means that also, at the same time, the risk of this ossification is real. I think we need to tend towards ossification at some point, but not now.

[02:02:38] Abdel: I mean, like, Bitcoin is not final today. We have to fix the security budget, quantum resistance, privacy at the very least. And then gradually tend to ossification by just like bug fixing and cleaning and stuff like that. Yeah.

[02:02:52] Vlad Costea: At the same time, something that I envy about Ethereum, and I'm someone who spent many years dismissing it, making fun of all the mishaps and saying, well, it's so horrible, and it's everything that Bitcoin shouldn't be. But at the same time, the dev culture is incredible. And if the value proposition of Bitcoin is what it is, the value proposition of Ethereum is what it can do. And there's always something that needs to get built to make the price go up. And maybe that it's sort of a race against the clock, because every cycle Ethereum has to come up with some new gimmick or something that it can do in order to capture the attention of the mainstream.

[02:03:36] Vlad Costea: In the case of Bitcoin, we can't think of anything significant. Maybe you can say, well, the Lightning Network was major, but in many ways, it was a major disappointment also. In the case of Ethereum, you had the ICO, you had the DeFi, you had the NFTs. Nowadays, I see a resurgence in the DAOs. And I'm not sure what is the latest narrative, maybe prediction markets or something else. But that's still something that entered the mainstream. I think Polymarket was huge last year, and is still huge right now.

[02:04:00] Vlad Costea: And the home of Polymarket is Ethereum. That's where it comes from.

[02:04:04] Abdel: Yeah, that's true. But again, as you said, it's a trap, because you need to craft and come up with new narratives and so on. So and I think it also increases the risk of dilution and distraction. This is something that I like trying to react to the market and being fear-driven and so on. It's also like, maybe the reason why the value proposition of Ethereum is not clear, because it shifted too much. And, you know, this cycle, I think we it was trapped between institutional interests on Bitcoin and like the degen stuff on Solana, literally.

[02:04:54] Abdel: So then the value proposition of Ethereum is not clear. And especially at some point, if Bitcoin can become a settlement layer, then it becomes hard to think about the clear value proposition. So this is also why the fix-the-money-first aspect of Bitcoin is very, very good, because it's easier to for people to understand it, to educate about it, and so on. And then you consolidate the social layer over time. While if you don't have a clear value proposition, a clear mission, and at the same time, it shifted many times over the past years, it becomes hard like to understand clearly the mission, vision and stuff like that.

[02:05:37] Abdel: And if you don't believe like in something very strong, it's harder maybe to get people to get into it in a way that they will want to protect it, maybe they will come and they will have fun and they will shift from one narrative to another one. And they will be okay with that. But in no way they will be involved and they will feel that they need to protect it. And they will not see the bigger picture of like being able to fight the system and stuff like that.

[02:06:01] Abdel: So I think having a very simple mission, and honestly, I believe like what is written here, like fix the money, fix the world, I do believe that the impact of fixing money on the world is so huge that everything else at this time is a distraction. That's also why, like, I really like this idea of fix the money first, like, let's not try to distract and try to decentralize everything else. Because it's not even clear, to be honest, at this time that they require the other use cases require such a hardcore level of decentralization, censorship resistance, and so on.

[02:06:37] Abdel: Where for money is very clear. So let's just fix that. And the impact of that is huge. And like, I see it like how Bitcoin is used by human rights activists to fight against tyrannism. So I'm like, I'm very fond of what Alex Gladstein is doing with the Human Rights Foundation. And I saw that with my eyes, like testimonials of people fighting tyrannism, using Bitcoin and Nostr to provide for their freedom, for their lives, for their family. So when you think about it, the impact of fixing the money is so huge for the world, they can improve the world in so many different ways.

[02:07:14] Abdel: There is another meme or motto in Bitcoin, which is make war unaffordable. And I think it's honestly like, I think it's good also for people to understand that Bitcoin is also maybe a peaceful exit to the fiat system and how not having a hard money has a lot of consequences in the world even for wars and conflicts and so on because the governments have to finance war by printing money or devaluing people's money and stuff like that. So if they understand that Bitcoin is really a peaceful exit to the fiat system and you can take your sovereignty and so on. The impact of that is so big that I consider more and more everything else as a distraction to be honest.

[02:08:02] Vlad Costea: At the same time, on the topic of fix the money, fix the world, I do see some interesting improvements in fintech. For example, Apple Pay, which is really amazing, because you connect your bank account to your phone. And when you make payments with Apple Pay, you get much better privacy for your payments than when you use your card, as the merchant will not know your name, which I think is a major breakthrough. It gives you sort of what we call in Bitcoin sender privacy, which is achieved in Bitcoin with maybe something like zero knowledge proofs or ring signatures or whatever.

[02:08:41] Vlad Costea: It's sort of a big deal. And when Bitcoin came out, it was very innovative, because it provided a lot of features for money that did not exist, like sending money to anyone in the world instantly and also having a degree of anonymity. It was amazing. But nowadays you have services which are much better than PayPal used to be, which enable you to have similar features. And most people are finding basically the use case for Bitcoin in that one. Of course, it's not going to be censorship resistant, and it's not going to provide you any kind of freedom.

[02:09:19] Vlad Costea: The service can shut you down anytime, can take away your money. But still, for the part of the world where financial censorship doesn't happen. Even though we saw what happened in Canada in 2022, in January, and somehow we forgot about that very fast, like we moved on, like, okay, banks are fine. We don't care.

[02:09:43] Abdel: Yeah, no, it's not fine. Like even Europe is cooked, like with the CBDC and so on, like the digital euro, we are cooked, man. So I agree right now, we don't see it as a reality. And we say, okay, it's third world problems, and so on. But it will be soon our problems too, even for people in the Western world, to say it, and so on. So to be honest, yeah. But it's true that people don't see it as a threat right now. And they are fine not having censorship resistance and stuff like that.

[02:10:14] Abdel: But for me, I'm more and more pessimistic. And especially now that I have kids and so on, I'm thinking about their future and so on. And to be honest, I'm very pessimistic about the trajectory of things in Europe and everywhere. So yes, true. Decentralization and censorship resistance don't matter until they do. But usually when they do, it's too late if you don't wake up on time. So we need to be prepared. But I agree with you, what you say is true. And this is literally the reason why people are dismissing Bitcoin in most modern societies or most advanced financial systems and so on, because they have the wrong feeling that they are safe.

[02:10:54] Abdel: But it's an illusion right now.

[02:10:56] Vlad Costea: So, yeah, I ran an experiment like three or four years ago or longer, where something else that I do in my spare time is that I produce the only video game magazine here in Romania. And I had a special run in which people had to send Bitcoin if they wanted to get the magazine. And I told them, I know it's a major inconvenience for you and you have to learn something new. But at the same time, I think it's something that's useful for you to understand. I just want to say that what really happened is that people got super lazy.

[02:11:33] Vlad Costea: There were a couple of guys who did the grind, basically, and decided, Okay, I'm going to go to this ATM, I'm going to put cash in it and send to this address. And then people reached out to these guys and said, can you please also do this for me? And I'm going to give you like two euro extra or something. And it led to this centralization where basically it was just a handful of guys getting the magazines for everyone else, where everyone else was lazy and they just wanted to send transactions from their cards or something. And my experiment was sort of a failure from this point of view, because I realized that even if people have the right motivation and incentive to pursue to learn about Bitcoin, they choose not to.

[02:12:18] Abdel: Okay, but when you did that, the only way to buy it was with Bitcoin or you still accepted cash, but you did a discount if you paid in Bitcoin.

[02:12:26] Vlad Costea: No, no, no fiat.

[02:12:27] Abdel: Maybe we should consider discounts, because maybe seeing concretely that they will pay less if they pay in Bitcoin would be an incentive for them.

[02:12:38] Abdel: I don't know if it would be sufficient to overcome their laziness. But yeah, Okay, interesting experiment.

[02:12:45] Vlad Costea: I gave them no other choice and some of them complained and they said, oh, you're making it hard to get. And I said, it's not really that hard. I made you like a full-page guide on what you have to do. Okay, you just scan this QR code at some sort of ATM in your city or you can onboard via an exchange, but I don't recommend it.

[02:13:06] Abdel: There are many ATMs, Bitcoin ATMs in Romania?

[02:13:10] Vlad Costea: Surprisingly, yes, because some people, so there is a lot of remittances in my country. We have, I think, from the European nations, we have the largest number of people who work in other countries. We have one million people in Italy, one million in Spain. We also have like half a million in France and also Germany. And all those people...

[02:13:36] Abdel: They send money back to Romania.

[02:13:38] Vlad Costea: Exactly. They make money and they send it back home. And some of them figured out that they can use the Bitcoin ATMs and they have lower fees than with Western Union or MoneyGram or something else. So that's why we have a lot of Bitcoin ATMs, because their family members, they just go and they withdraw cash. Oh, that's cool. I don't think they even know what's happening there.

[02:13:58] Abdel: Oh, that's cool. Okay. And do you know, like, if there is one, there is a monopoly in terms of vendor for this? Again, I'm asking because I met the founder of K1 in El Salvador and I love him and the K1 ATMs are amazing. Yeah. So I was wondering, like, did you know about the vendor of those ATMs?

[02:14:20] Vlad Costea: No, as far as I know. So there used to be sort of a monopoly with General Bytes. I think for a long time they were the largest manufacturer. They had like 80 percent of the market and everyone was buying from them and rebranding the ATMs. I think right now we do have General Bytes, but I think I've also seen one that's made by Lamassu, which is based in Portugal, if I'm not mistaken. And there's also a Polish company that used to be called Shitcoins Club and now they're called Bitomat, like Bankomat, Bitomat.

[02:14:59] Vlad Costea: Anyway, they make their own ATMs and they don't sell them to third parties. They just make them for their own purpose. And it also has an interesting Bitcoin shape, like it's very hard to mistake it for something else.

[02:15:12] Abdel: Okay. And is the regulation friendly on that front? Because, for example, I know that in France you cannot have ATMs that sell directly Bitcoin. The best you can do is that you can sell a voucher or something like that. That can make you redeem some BTC that you are not allowed to directly send BTC from the ATM. So I'm wondering, like, if it's friendly in Romania for anyone to buy a Bitcoin ATM and install it in their restaurant or whatever and start to accept Bitcoin or sell Bitcoin through the ATM.

[02:15:44] Vlad Costea: There is a regulation that you cannot handle more than 2,000 euro without KYC. Okay. So you either set that limit or else you have to create a company and have lawyers and whatever to make sure you comply. And it's only going to get worse later this year or next year because we had these regulations across the whole European Union. What was it called?

[02:16:16] Vlad Costea: MiCA?

[02:16:17] Vlad Costea: MiCA, exactly. And all the companies need to get licenses from the European Union. It's very bad. There will be no way for you to buy any Bitcoin legally without KYC.

[02:16:28] Abdel: Yeah, it's insane. It's very bad.

[02:16:33] Vlad Costea: And there's like a writing on the wall right now, like, hey, you can still use it for now. But once we get the MiCA license, you'll have to present your ID. And I think that's when these businesses will sort of lose a lot of customers. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. It's a huge inconvenience. And it's also a security hole just to put your ID there, hoping that it doesn't get hacked or something. [unclear: That's fucked up.] But the regulators, they don't understand. They say, no, we got to stop criminals.

[02:17:06] Vlad Costea: But I don't think this has much to do with Bitcoin. It has a lot to do with the war on cash that's happening all around Europe.

[02:17:14] Abdel: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's more that it's not targeted against Bitcoin for sure. But a consequence of that is that it affects Bitcoin. But yeah, I don't think it's the primary target. I agree with you.

[02:17:28] Vlad Costea: You can already see how the 500 euro bills are disappearing and the value of the 100 euro bill goes down every year.

[02:17:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah.

[02:17:37] Abdel: It's insane. Even now, to just withdraw, yeah, it's illegal to hold more than, I don't remember how much in France. And also the withdrawal limits are insanely low now, much more than they were a few years ago. So the trend is really not good in terms of owning your own money and do everything you want with it.

[02:18:00] Vlad Costea: It's illegal to hold a certain amount of cash?

[02:18:04] Abdel: Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. I mean, you can, but you need to disclose exactly how you got it and so on.

[02:18:14] Vlad Costea: So basically invite people to steal it from you.

[02:18:17] Abdel: Yeah, kind of. Exactly. It's very bad. Anyway.

[02:18:21] Vlad Costea: Like you disclose it to some government institution and you have to trust that they will not get hacked or divulge it to some employee who's going to tell someone else that, hey, this guy's holding his money under the mattress. Yeah.

[02:18:33] Vlad Costea: That's just horrible.

[02:18:36] Abdel: Yeah, that is horrible. And now even like, I think right now I cannot even withdraw more than 1000 euros without asking approval from my bank and telling them why I want to withdraw this and so on. And the amounts keep decreasing over time, you know? So it's, yeah, they are doing a war against cash, as you said. It's very clear. Yeah.

[02:19:00] Vlad Costea: But I had this funny situation earlier this year with my bank because I bought my car in December of last year and they wanted to know exactly what happened there, why I have this large amount of money. And I explained to them exactly what happened. And then they said, well, we want you to provide documents about where you got your Bitcoin from, when you bought it, what price it was. And I was like, that was almost 10 years ago, man. Who holds documents for something like this?

[02:19:27] Vlad Costea: It's really crazy. And I told them, if I told you that I got it from gambling Or that I do prostitution. You just say, ah, okay, that's fine. You would look the other way. Now that you hear that it's Bitcoin, like, it's really crazy. The amount of paperwork that you need to have and the stuff that you need to justify.

[02:19:52] Abdel: And you managed to convince them to do without those documents?

[02:19:57] Vlad Costea: I couldn't find anything.

[02:19:59] Vlad Costea: I told them, you can do whatever, you can shut down my account. But just remember that I have been your customer since I was a teenager. And I was receiving allowance in the same account from the government. And you can see my whole history. You can see I'm not a bad actor. Like they said, yeah, we have to do this to comply with norms and regulations for prevention of terrorism. And I was like, are you seriously giving me this crap? Like, you can see my whole history.

[02:20:29] Vlad Costea: You know exactly what I bought and how much money I had. And now you're telling me, oh, I'm potentially a terrorist. And I'm pretty sure that the employees also find it ridiculous. They have to comply. They realize they're losing customers because of this and people don't like them. There's a movement here in Romania for people to use more cash, but they limited the amount that you can spend in one transaction to 2,000 euro per transaction. So if anything is more expensive than this, it needs to go through a bank.

[02:21:10] Vlad Costea: You can't buy a car, you can't buy a home, you can't buy anything.

[02:21:16] Abdel: Yeah, but isn't it an opportunity to push for Bitcoin, more Bitcoin adoption? Or is it hard to accept and receive payments in Bitcoin in Romania?

[02:21:26] Vlad Costea: I think it became worse, to be honest. There used to be some shops that were accepting it. And sometimes, for example, this laptop that I'm using, I got it from a shop that was accepting Bitcoin. Now they don't anymore because of MiCA. And I think they were using the same payments processor out of convenience, like they did not have BTCPay or something set up. And when MiCA emerged, they were like, yeah, we have to provide these documents. And then they looked at the sales statistics and they said, oh, we make like three, four thousand euro a month from this.

[02:22:03] Vlad Costea: It's not worth it to spend money on lawyers and whatever, just to keep this going. Okay, that's sad. It is. But it also goes back to the fact that we failed to make any significant grassroots adoption happen. We always created companies and relied on third parties and worried too much about regulations. And now I think is a pretty bad time to start.

[02:22:35] Abdel: I think we do see some grassroots adoption, but on a smaller scale, like in circular economy places like in Costa Rica, El Salvador, in Africa, it's small scale. But I do see like this happening, like people on the ground, like helping people to start accepting Bitcoin payments and so on. I think it's, yeah, places where it makes more sense naturally, like obviously where you are in countries with a very weak currency or very strong inflation, like in Turkey or Argentina. They understand more naturally the first part about the consequences of having weak money like fiat.

[02:23:21] Abdel: And then they are more in favor in learning and understanding what Bitcoin can bring on the table or countries with less financial inclusivity or people that are unbanked or people. Yeah, but I think, yeah, it's slow, but it's happening, I would say. And I saw that in some of those countries, like in circular economies, they think it's great. But yeah, to go from this to the next level and having mass adoption is not easy, but yeah.

[02:23:58] Vlad Costea: I was referring specifically to Europe because we have a situation here, which is very disappointing. Like I see so much propaganda about European Union winning and being great and having all the right policies, but then you see them banning AI. And you see them having all of these regulations, which are very much against forward thinking, against technology. And you see the startups going to the US if they want to raise capital. And you see that there isn't much that's interesting that's happening here. They're super conservative in some ways.

[02:24:35] Vlad Costea: They think that they're smart because they're collecting taxes from these tech companies. And they have a few tax havens in Ireland and Malta where a lot of these financial and technology companies are operating, but we're not really producing much innovation anymore.

[02:24:55] Vlad Costea: Yeah, completely.

[02:24:56] Abdel: No, I'm very pessimistic for me, like Europe is cooked right now because the problem is that it's a very bad cocktail because it's bad both economically speaking, innovation, tech and also kind of identity crisis across the whole Europe and almost like civilizational war in a way. So if you have all those components together, it's a very bad cocktail. So, yeah, Europe is maybe not cooked, but not going in the right direction right now.

[02:25:31] Vlad Costea: We could be going in the right direction if there was more focus on thinking about the future because you have some of the same ethnic and national clashes in the US, but they don't have any problem getting the smartest minds in AI.

[02:25:49] Vlad Costea: That's exactly my point.

[02:25:51] Abdel: If you have only one of those issues, it's fine. As you said, the US also has the same ethnic and civilizational issues, but economically they are way better and favorable for innovation and so on, which mitigates the other problem. But in Europe, we have both at the same time, which makes it very hard.

[02:26:12] Vlad Costea: We just fall behind and even our universities, I'm not sure if they're that great anymore for research.

[02:26:19] Abdel: Yeah, I'm wondering. Yeah, maybe also even education is decreasing. Yeah, that's true.

[02:26:27] Vlad Costea: But at least in Romania, we have this very powerful European Union propaganda that still works and people think, yeah, we are ahead, we are doing great. These people from Brussels, they're smart, they know what they're doing.

[02:26:43] Abdel: Okay, interesting.

[02:26:47] Abdel: People still believe it. Okay.

[02:26:49] Vlad Costea: I mean, in my part of the world, it almost seems binary, like you either embrace this or you let Russia embrace you. Yeah, okay. So I guess it's good to have a dose of hopium and say, yeah, we made the right choice because these people are great. I see. Coming from France, I think is a bit different.

[02:27:11] Abdel: It's a bit different, yeah. It's also fucked up, but for different reasons, yes.

[02:27:19] Vlad Costea: I mean, I understand why you think that Europe is cooked because France is in a very bad situation nowadays.

[02:27:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it is.

[02:27:27] Abdel: Completely fucked up. The government is fucked up. They have a big divide in the society.

[02:27:38] Vlad Costea: I actually studied for six months at Sciences Po in Paris.

[02:27:41] Abdel: Oh, really? When was that?

[02:27:42] Vlad Costea: I was on an exchange, yeah, 10 years ago.

[02:27:44] Abdel: Oh, 10 years ago.

[02:27:45] Vlad Costea: And I could already see because my scholarship was 500 euro per month, and this meant I could only live in a very bad area. It was Villiers-le-Bel up north. So there's Saint-Denis, and then there's Gonesse-Arnouville, and then there's Villiers-le-Bel. Yeah. It was not even on the metro map, and I could see the divide in there.

[02:28:08] Vlad Costea: There was on the left side of the metro exit the Arab neighborhood, and they had their own shops. They had their own businesses. It felt different. And on the right side, you had the Africans. That was the African side. And I could see that there was a lot of tension. Like, they would not talk to each other. Sometimes there were fights. More often than not, there were in-fights, like just random people fighting in the street. And I could also see them not paying for, it's not metro, it's RER, R-E-R, which is like a regional train.

[02:28:46] Vlad Costea: They were jumping across the fence to not pay for tickets, and they had their own methods to escape paying. And I could see that they're not even trying to be, like there was a huge discrepancy between what you would see in Paris, the city, compared to what was happening there. It's almost like they were not trying to be French. They were acting like they're somewhere else, and they have their own country in there.

[02:29:11] Abdel: Yeah, it's sad. And yeah, for me, I feel particularly impacted because I'm also coming from immigration, but I did not behave like that. I think right now, both camps are going too extreme, and there is no nuance anymore. But I think it is possible to integrate properly in society without losing your roots and identity. So I think it's very sad to end up in this situation where both sides cannot understand each other. And it becomes, yeah, there is some extreme polarization, and it's very bad. Yeah. And as you said, it was 10 years ago.

[02:29:56] Abdel: So imagine now it's worse now.

[02:29:58] Vlad Costea: So, yeah, I haven't been to that area recently. I'm not sure if I want to, but it was weird. I was just grabbing a book every morning and sitting down, reading the book, pretending I don't see anything around me. In some ways, it was productive. Like I spent so many hours reading just during my commute. But on the other hand, I knew I couldn't. First of all, I'm not so good in French. On the other hand, I could not really understand them because they do speak French, but with a different accent.

[02:30:32] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I see. The way that they pronounce words is different.

[02:30:36] Abdel: Yeah, I see. Yeah, it makes sense. And how I'm curious about the impact of like, do other countries like Romania, maybe as example, look at this example and like going more extreme in their immigration policy. Yeah, and stuff like that.

[02:30:55] Abdel: You're funny.

[02:30:56] Vlad Costea: You're so funny.

[02:30:57] Vlad Costea: Why?

[02:30:58] Vlad Costea: You have no idea. We got like hundreds of thousands of people from India and Nepal.

[02:31:03] Vlad Costea: Oh, really?

[02:31:05] Abdel: Yeah. I have no idea. Okay.

[02:31:07] Vlad Costea: We got a lot of these migrants who came here for work. Nepal is politically in a very bad situation. Their government collapsed and they had to vote on Discord.

[02:31:17] Abdel: Yeah, that's funny. That's interesting.

[02:31:19] Vlad Costea: And these people are willing to work for like 500 euro per month. And they also have enough money to send something home. So I don't know exactly where they sleep and what they eat because life here has become very expensive because of this. So the post-pandemic inflation and the Ukraine war and the fact that we're supporting all of this and we also send, quote unquote, free electricity to both Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova and the incompetence of our politicians and all of these factors have added up.

[02:31:54] Vlad Costea: And life right now is very expensive. Like if you look at grocery costs, it's no different from France or Germany. Oh, wow. And the salaries are lower than this. Yeah. And then I see these people from Nepal, they come here, they do mostly, I think, construction and also they deliver food for all of these corporations like Bolt or whatever. Yeah. I see them on bicycles or scooters.

[02:32:23] Abdel: What do people think about them generally? Like are they afraid of like producing what happened in other countries like France or like do they feel less safe because of this? Like this phenomenon is something recent?

[02:32:37] Vlad Costea: It's very recent. Yeah.

[02:32:39] Abdel: Okay.

[02:32:40] Vlad Costea: Like the last couple of years.

[02:32:41] Abdel: Okay. And do we see like people like turning against like is there a political movement that is against that or like trying to...

[02:32:49] Vlad Costea: There is, but it's labeled, so it's almost like they're copying scripts from other countries. It's labeled in the same way as Front National in France. They say they're extremists, they're horrible people, they're stupid. I think that's the most prevalent narrative about them that they're stupid. And that's the way that they get dismissed, even though they do end up in presidential races or something. In the last election, they ended up in the last round.

[02:33:17] Abdel: Ah, okay. So very similar to France, actually.

[02:33:20] Abdel: It is.

[02:33:21] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it is very similar. And I don't know where this is going. The narrative that I heard is that these people are not willing to stay. And we do like to laugh at this idea as Romanians. We say these people, okay, they work here, but they don't want to stay here. They want to go to Germany. They want to go to France. They want to go to Sweden or some welfare state. That's going to give them free stuff, because we're not giving them too much free stuff.

[02:33:50] Vlad Costea: But we don't know if they're going to make kids here and what impact that's going to have. It's still a new phenomenon. I'm not sure what they're thinking, if they like our country, if they think it sucks and they want to go somewhere else. Once they get their Schengen visa, they can go to any other country. But I don't know. It's still a new phenomenon for us. I'm not sure if we're going to end up with the same crisis or we're just going to unload the crisis on France and Germany.

[02:34:21] Abdel: Yeah. So you would even increase our crisis and not yours. That's interesting. Okay. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. What you said reminds me a lot of France, actually, like the Front National and so on. And the fact that for many years what saved us in a way was the fact that they were also dismissed as stupid and also alien and so on, because of their affiliation with Jean-Marie Le Pen and what he did in the past and so on. So it was easy for people to classify them as evil.

[02:34:58] Abdel: But now they are much smarter than before, like with younger people, like good looking people talking in a good way, like not being associated with this. So, yeah, over time, people are more and more willing. And at the same time, you have like this feeling of being unsafe that is rising and so on. So people are like, so I think the next election will be interesting, like in two years. It might be the turning point. But yeah, it's it's a bit I'm worried because all that is happening in Europe reminds me a bit of the Europe in the 30s, you know, when like how the extreme right on all the countries emerged and we all know how it ended up.

[02:35:47] Abdel: But yeah, I don't know.

[02:35:50] Vlad Costea: At the same time, I think our generation is softer, to be honest, like maybe, yeah, maybe that we're not going to go to the same lengths. And by we, I mean our generation, if people get radicalized.

[02:36:04] Abdel: It's true, but at the same time, our generation did not face this. So over time, you forget the impact of this, like for the World War Two and what happened. You see what I mean? So it's true. But at the same time, maybe people will say, Okay, it's Okay. And, you know, we'll go into it and we will forget how it can end up. Yeah, you see what I mean? So I agree with you that I don't like the collective human memory is strong enough to.

[02:36:34] Abdel: Yeah, and at the same time, to be honest, like I do understand some people that feel that as their last hope and choice. And I'm worried for my kids because, you know, I'm from the immigration. My wife is not. So our kids are métis. How do you say, you understand métis? How do you say it in English? We are both like, I'm from immigration, but my wife is not. So our kids are, how do you say métis in English? I forgot the word.

[02:37:03] Vlad Costea: I don't know, mixed origins.

[02:37:06] Abdel: Yeah, Okay, there is no word for that, mixed race, mixed blood. Okay, Okay. Yeah, so I'm worried for them and the world, they will grow up and so on, because I want a good balance in them not losing their roots and so on, but being properly integrated in society and everything like I did, like contributing actively to society and so on. So I do understand both sides and I do understand that some people are worried and they can like make some shortcuts and target a certain group of people as a general problem.

[02:37:42] Abdel: And because, you know, as I said, the combination of both the economically bad situation plus that makes it like it's a multiplier of the problem. Like if the economic situation of the country was way better, it would be way less of an issue, in my opinion. But yeah, anyway.

[02:38:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but coming back to Bitcoin, I think short term, it's horrible. Long term, it makes the printers create more money and it might just be the catalyst that gets more people to understand why Bitcoin matters. Exactly. Because immigration is one of these issues where it's very difficult to deal with the situation and you need a lot of disposable money to be able to handle all the challenges. So it just leads to more inflation. Yeah. When you have like a stable ethnic community in your country and I can think, for example, of Baltic states, even though it's not a great example, because they used to be part of the USSR, they have a lot of Russians.

[02:38:47] Vlad Costea: But they're just Christian white and they don't have much immigration going on. And for them, it's very easy to handle. For example, I remember Estonia being presented as this very advanced electronic digital country that can even have remote voting on your computer and stuff like this, which seemed very utopian in the 2010s. But it was happening in Estonia, but their population is like two million, which is a small European city. So it works on a small scale. Exactly. Consensus among people and similar history and origins and language, like not too many differences.

[02:39:32] Abdel: Yeah, it's hard to scale it. I agree with you.

[02:39:37] Vlad Costea: And the more scaling you have, the more expenses. So.

[02:39:40] Abdel: Yeah, maybe one problem, like I don't know if it's specific to France, maybe not. The problem is that the country itself is centralized, pretty much concentrated in very small number of cities, which is where this is where the most economic activity happens, which means if it was more distributed, maybe the problem would be manageable. Because as we said, on a smaller scale, it would be way easier to properly integrate people. Also, there will be less concentration. Yeah. So the fact that those countries are pretty centralized, like most of the activities happening in Paris, in France, for example.

[02:40:20] Abdel: Yeah, I think at least it doesn't help.

[02:40:25] Vlad Costea: I think it's the normal Pareto distribution because you find that all over the place. In some countries, it's much worse. For example, I can think of Argentina, which has Buenos Aires, which is the main hub for economic activity. And when I was in Argentina, it was the peak of their hyperinflation. And people told me, you know, people have it pretty good here. Like you look around, you see these people from this neighborhood. I think it was called Palermo. And they were telling me this is not the real experience of the average Argentinian.

[02:41:02] Vlad Costea: If I really want to see what's happening, I should move into the villages outside because all the wealth of the country is moving through Buenos Aires. Okay. And it's not like this in most European countries. We have hubs, of course. We have regions that are wealthier than others.

[02:41:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[02:41:21] Abdel: I agree with you. It's less concentrated than in Argentina, for example. Yeah, yeah.

[02:41:26] Vlad Costea: And also African countries where just the capital is developed and the rest of it is just some villages.

[02:41:33] Abdel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.

[02:41:37] Vlad Costea: Hmm.

[02:41:38] Vlad Costea: I think decentralization and we can generalize this is like a sign of high development.

[02:41:45] Abdel: Yeah, that's true. I think we can generalize it like that.

[02:41:48] Vlad Costea: The lesser developed something is, the more centralized it needs to be to develop.

[02:41:53] Abdel: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

[02:41:56] Vlad Costea: Interesting. Yeah. Like all of these new coins that launch, they need to be centralized in the beginning. Bitcoin was centralized in the first couple of years when Satoshi was around.

[02:42:14] Abdel: Yeah, I see what you mean. But in this case, like the problems that you don't want to trust them that they will decentralize over time, you know, because it's easy to say it, but the incentives are usually not there. And you can argue that it's the same for example, layer 2s on Ethereum or whatnot. And it is true that people have, the companies that build those layer 2s, they have very small incentives to actually decentralize. First of all, because unfortunately, people don't care. And there is no demand for that.

[02:42:51] Abdel: So people are fine using those centralized solutions for a very long time, maybe forever. And then also, maybe they will think about [unclear: sharing their revenues, letting] people be part of the network and so on. So again, of course, I will speak about Starknet example, but we are the only example that does not just talk about decentralization, we are actually decentralizing. Right now, Starknet even today is already decentralized with multiple sequencers. We also decentralized the stack, which means like we have diversity for sequencer, full nodes and so on.

[02:43:28] Abdel: In fact, we are literally the only layer 2 that has this diversity. In fact, we are even more decentralized than L1s, which is surprising, like more decentralized than Solana or any L1s in terms of client diversity. I checked the number of people outside of the company that contributes to the improvement proposal of the protocol. We are even more decentralized than Solana, surprisingly, it's interesting. Anyway, just what I wanted to say about the lack of incentives for, in general, in the space to decentralize. And you have to trust the good intentions of the people.

[02:44:07] Abdel: And this is something that you want to avoid in the first place. We want to build trustless permissionless systems. But at least I wish that the people would reward more, the people that are actually doing it for real and so on.

[02:44:25] Vlad Costea: I feel stupid for asking you this so late into the interview, but was StarkWare basically your personal bridge that helped you start working on Bitcoin? Was it because of StarkWare's ambition to become this system that works on both Ethereum and Bitcoin that you started building on Bitcoin in the first place?

[02:44:46] Abdel: No, in terms of, I did want to do that way before joining StarkWare. I never had the opportunity to actually do it. So yes, my job in StarkWare enabled me to do that also because I wanted to and gave me the time and resources to actually do it. But in terms of me personally, I already wanted to do that. It's just that before I was too deep into Ethereum core development, so I never had the opportunity to actually do it. So I was just a Bitcoiner, but without actively contributing to Bitcoin ecosystem.

[02:45:22] Abdel: But StarkWare and our expansion plans and so on gave me the tools to do that. And also I contributed to also make StarkWare consider going on Bitcoin in the first place. So it's both ways.

[02:45:37] Vlad Costea: To the average non-technical person who's going to be hopefully listening up to this point, what is like the elevator pitch? Why should they be open minded about what StarkWare is building?

[02:45:51] Abdel: Good question. For Bitcoin specifically. Okay, so I think they should be open minded for a simple reason. What we are building, first of all, I would say the pitch without even mentioning Starknet. This is very important for people to understand. STARK proofs, as I said earlier, is a completely new paradigm shift in the way you do verifiable computation and everything. So it does not have to be correlated to any blockchain. And in particular, it does not have to be associated with Starknet. That's the first thing. Second thing is that all we do on the zero-knowledge proof proving infrastructure is open source.

[02:46:32] Abdel: Both the research and the code and everything is open source and can be used by anyone. It's fully permissively licensed and anyone can use it.

[02:46:42] Abdel: And STARK proofs can be beneficial for Bitcoin even today. We did not touch precisely about some use cases, but you mentioned briefly one of them, which is to be able to verify the validity of the whole blockchain by just picking a proof in seconds. In fact, it's milliseconds. We did that recently and we are generating full proofs of the whole Bitcoin header chain of main net. We broke the world record about the time needed to generate the proof. We were able to do that in six hours, 6.5 hours generating the proof for the whole chain.

[02:47:18] Abdel: And this is very important to understand that you do that once and then with the proof, anyone can verify it in a few milliseconds. Even on a toaster, as I said, I'm not joking. You can verify the proof in the very small devices. So this kind of stuff can be beneficial for Bitcoin today. So not just talking about changing Bitcoin. So you need to understand that. And this tech is open source and has been proven in terms of it works not only on the theoretical level, but also in production.

[02:47:48] Abdel: It has been battle-tested for years in production on very large scale and so on. So, yeah, it doesn't have to be correlated to a particular blockchain. It's open source. It's battle-tested. It works and it can be beneficial for Bitcoin today without the soft fork. And then if you are open to learn more and think about the benefits for Bitcoin long term, I think the end game vision would be interesting if we could verify STARK proofs on Bitcoin, as I mentioned before, which would be a way to improve Bitcoin as programmable money in a way that scales to the masses without losing self-custody.

[02:48:28] Abdel: And as bonus points, it can be also helpful for privacy and quantum resistance. For example, we are exploring today how we could use STARK proofs to do quantum resistance signature aggregation on Bitcoin. We are doing some experiments. For example, we are talking with Hunter Beast, who is the author of BIP 360 on Bitcoin. We will do an experiment using our proving technology on the system that he designed. Yeah, so that would be the pitch for why STARKs can be interesting in the context of Bitcoin. And this is not even talking about Starknet.

[02:49:11] Abdel: And then if you are already convinced about the benefits of zero-knowledge proofs and you want to see in practice, in action, what it could be. An actual Bitcoin, layer 2 on Bitcoin, assuming we could do what I mentioned before, [unclear: verifying STARK proofs], then you can check Starknet and the kind of application that you can do today and the kind of UX you can have with wallets, with stuff like face ID authentication or session keys for games if you're into gaming, this kind of stuff.

[02:49:40] Vlad Costea: That was one long elevator ride.

[02:49:43] Abdel: Yeah, sorry. Way too long. But TL;DR, STARK is good, open source, battle-tested and can be good for Bitcoin today without soft fork.

[02:49:53] Vlad Costea: There's this meme that was posted also on the Bitcoin Takeover Twitter page, which you should follow, by the way. That one STARK proof is smaller than a photo on your phone, is cheaper than a Big Mac combo to generate, and takes less than the blink of an eye to verify. Such a cool way to present this. But what does it mean that it's cheaper than a Big Mac combo to generate?

[02:50:21] Abdel: Yeah, Okay, so I should have started by that because I did this meme, I came up with this idea of doing this analogy. So the Big Mac is for the proving, this is the cost of generating the whole proof. And we are talking about the proof for the whole Bitcoin header chain from Genesis to now. So all the 16 years of Bitcoin blockchain history. So this was the cost, the concrete cost that we paid [unclear: with Stwo] to generate this proof. This proof will make it accessible to anyone to verify and anyone can verify it in less than the blink of an eye.

[02:50:57] Abdel: So in 50 milliseconds and on a very small device like a toaster, for example, or Raspberry Pi or whatever.

[02:51:04] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's really cool. I think if anything, this meme is more powerful than all that explanation.

[02:51:16] Abdel: Yeah, it's good to know. So I would do that more because it's a pity, because I did that. I came with the meme and I also thought that it was a good idea for people to understand. Also, when we did the record and when we communicated about it, we realized that there is a lot of misconceptions and confusion in the Bitcoin community about the distinction between proving and verification, because we communicated the record about the proving time and people thought that it was the time you need to verify.

[02:51:47] Abdel: And they were saying, but look with my, I don't remember what was the name of the fast sync mode. I can verify the chain in four hours. And then I realized that, okay, there is huge confusion and they don't understand that it means that you can verify in 50 milliseconds. And then this is when I started to find, to think about analogies. And then I came up with this idea of the memes with the Big Mac, the eye blink and stuff like that. Yeah, but it's good to know that it's a good way to, I will use it more.

[02:52:00] Vlad Costea: I think you already hinted at the difference between them, but concisely, how would you describe the difference between ZK-SNARKs and ZK-STARKs?

[02:52:27] Abdel: Okay, yeah, very concisely. ZK-STARKs, no trusted setup. So better, you don't need to trust anyone. Quantum secure, so that's good if you want something that is future proof that you won't change in a decade or whenever quantum becomes a real threat. They have better scaling properties as well, and they are using no additional trust cryptographic assumption. So they are hash-based, so simple crypto. Simple crypto, no trusted setup, better scaling properties, and future-proof.

[02:53:00] Vlad Costea: Okay, is there any way that ZK-SNARKs can become quantum resistant? Because I've been looking into it and thinking hard about it. My idea was basically that if you forked Zcash with the Bitcoin UTXO set, you could have a much better Bitcoin that's like a Swiss bank for holders. I was thinking of the challenges long term. I think the scaling still needs work, and there's also the quantum resistance, but otherwise I think one third of the problem at least is solved already.

[02:53:35] Abdel: Yeah, so the distinction between STARKs and SNARKs that I made is a bit too binary in the sense that it was true at the beginning, but now the frontier between the two is a bit more blurry. There are some quantum resistant SNARKs, and there are even some SNARKs without trusted setup as well. So it's not as binary as it was. So yeah, it's possible to design a SNARK system that's quantum resistant. So for example, Binius is one of them, built by the Irreducible team. So yeah, it's possible.

[02:54:17] Vlad Costea: Okay, what else should I ask you? Is there anything you wanted me to ask you but I didn't?

[02:54:23] Vlad Costea: Ah, good question.

[02:54:31] Abdel: We discussed already about the filter war.

[02:54:33] Vlad Costea: We talked about your journey. Oh, Nostr and Cashu. I saw on your GitHub page.

[02:54:43] Abdel: Yeah, we are doing some particular experimentation using STARKs both for Cashu and Nostr. So for Cashu, what we do, you are familiar with Cashu, right?

[02:54:56] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's Chaumian ecash, like a federation on top of Lightning.

[02:54:59] Abdel: Yeah, okay.

[02:55:01] Abdel: So you can have perfect privacy, but it's custodial. So you need to trust the mint, but the mint cannot [unclear: profile] you particularly. So it cannot discriminate between users. And then in Cashu, so the UX is amazing because it's literally instant and you can send the tokens without connection and it's extremely low fees. It's amazing. In terms of UX, it's unbeatable. You cannot beat the UX of Cashu for payments, that's for sure. But of course, it comes with the downside of being custodial. So it's good for many things, but it's not a silver bullet because of this.

[02:55:40] Abdel: And then in Cashu, the creator of Cashu wants to introduce spending conditions which will give programmability. Like for example, you want to send the token, but only if after a certain time, which is the most basic condition, time lock or something like that. And then maybe more advanced constructions. The problem is that originally he talked about mimicking the way it's done on Bitcoin with pay-to-public-key-hash or this kind of stuff. But the problem is that you cannot really do that on Cashu because it will break the privacy because it reduces the anonymity set.

[02:56:17] Abdel: Because then you can discriminate between people that are using plain Cashu tokens versus people that are using pay-to-public-key-hash tokens and this kind of stuff. So that's why we talked about using zero-knowledge proofs for that. And the idea is that, and we did it and we will communicate about it soon. We did a fork of Cashu where we implemented the possibility for anyone to write spending conditions in Cairo. So I did not mention that Cairo is the language that we created. And anything that you develop in Cairo becomes verifiable.

[02:56:50] Abdel: You can generate the STARK proof with it. So you define your spending condition in Cairo, which is a smart contract programming language. So you define whatever you want. It can be a hash time lock contract or whatever. And then the recipients of the token needs to generate the proof of the valid spending conditions and then sends the proof to the mint. And the mint will just verify the proof, but he will not learn anything about the spending conditions. He will just know that both the sender and the recipient agrees that I should move the tokens and that's all I need to know.

[02:57:26] Abdel: So you keep the privacy because the mint does not know and cannot discriminate between users. And you have expressivity and programmability. So this is something that we did in the Cashu mint, in the protocol and also in wallets and we will communicate about it. So that's one experiment we are doing with Cashu. In the future, you could also imagine, if you were able to verify proofs on Bitcoin, you could imagine to have proof of liability scheme on Cashu, where the mint would put some of the reserves on Bitcoin L1.

[02:57:57] Abdel: And then you could prove that the mint has some reserves and so on. So to avoid the risk of fractional reserves or [unclear: rug pull], you could do that. But for that, you will need the proof. But what we did, we can do it now without any change on Bitcoin. So you define the spending conditions in Cairo, and then the mint does not know anything about them. So you still have privacy and then you gain expressivity. So this is something we did with Cashu. For Nostr, I will mention just one project, we are doing multiple.

[02:58:26] Abdel: But one thing I'm very bullish about on Nostr is DVMs, which are data vending machines. So the idea is that because some people that know Nostr believe it's only about social media, but in fact, Nostr is much more than that. I honestly believe it can reshape the way we think about the internet. And there is something in particular that I am particularly excited about, data vending machine. So this is the idea that you can use Nostr as the coordination layer between customers and service providers. So you can see it as a digital permissionless marketplace of services.

[02:59:01] Abdel: And then it works as the following. The customer, the user will send a job request. We say, for example, I want a translation service for this. And then you will have service providers that will send some quotes on the Nostr network. And then the customer will choose, and then the service provider will perform the job and send the job result back to Nostr. And what we did, I was thinking that, okay, in the future, it could be amazing if you can have like decentralized permissionless Amazon, for example.

[02:59:34] Abdel: Anyone can build permissionless services and sell them on the internet in a censorship manner. But in this world, I was thinking that maybe you will want a way to verify the integrity of the computation that was performed by the service provider. So what I did is an experiment where the service provider is not only generating the job results, but also proof that it was done correctly. And then the customer will get the job result and will be able to verify in the browser that the job was executed correctly.

[03:00:06] Abdel: And I think it's especially important in the era of AI. It will be so important that we can verify, because right now we are going in a world where we are trusting those big AI companies like OpenAI. We don't know how they train their model and everything. So I think it's very important to think about the way where we can have like what we call the integrated web, where you can verify anything. So I did an experiment on that with Nostr data vending machine. I did not push into it a lot, but some people were excited about it.

[03:00:37] Abdel: So I might do another push. But for that, maybe there will need to be more adoption of Nostr in the first place to pitch about verifiable computation on Nostr, maybe. That's a few examples. Sorry, that was a bit long.

[03:00:51] Vlad Costea: No, that's pretty good. Actually, my Forrest Gump story about Cashu and Chaumian ecash on top of Lightning is that I was sitting in a bar, I think it was 2022, right next to Calle, the creator of Cashu, and he was babbling about Chaumian ecash and how you can build that on top of Lightning. And we were just drinking beer and I was half drunk. Okay. And the next week, after he flew back home, he actually released the first version of Cashu. And I remember being like, oh, this guy was serious about it.

[03:01:27] Vlad Costea: And then I saw how Jack Dorsey endorsed it. And then it became a big thing. And he got a lot of money from that deal. And now he's very popular. And he's like one of the top Bitcoiners when it comes to posting stuff and getting reactions. And like, you know, it's that guy from the bar. And I remember when I was there, he mentioned it.

[03:01:52] Vlad Costea: That's an interesting story.

[03:01:53] Abdel: Yeah, I really love him. I really, I think he's, and by the way, it's funny because he's very into the core of the filter drama right now. The Knotzis are very much against him, like they're all attacking him and so on, which is crazy because he's one of the most [unclear: safe, helpful] persons I know. He has very good intentions for Bitcoin and he's doing amazing stuff. And still people are implying crazy stuff about him and so on. So it's insane. So I'll very much support Calle. Calle is amazing. He's literally dedicating his life to build freedom tech and improve people's lives. But for real, like not just talking about it literally, he's building stuff that, like, for example, BitChat now that was used a lot in Nepal in the crazy situation and so on. We're not talking about just theoretical stuff. He's literally dedicating his life to building freedom tech and privacy. And it is risky. As we said before, working on privacy stuff is not easy. So yeah, I just wanted to shout out Calle. He's amazing. Keep up building, man. It's insane. And honestly, like the people, the Knotzis that are after him, you are so dumb. People like just realize what he's trying to do. And you will realize that you are mistaking your enemy anyway.

[03:03:05] Vlad Costea: I also want to mention the fact that Bitcoin was created specifically to decentralize e-cash and then someone came and said, you know what? We can build on top of Bitcoin e-cash.

[03:03:15] Abdel: We go back full circle. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

[03:03:20] Vlad Costea: It's kind of funny. I got rugged one time. I think it was called eNuts or something on my phone. Let me check. Oh, wow. Yeah. It was very early. And I think basically they were running on some sort of LNbits server and the maintainers of the servers were not happy that someone deployed this stuff on their server and they asked them to move. Oh, okay. And then they moved to their own server. So I'm not sure who got my five dollars or something. Maybe it was the Cashu developers.

[03:03:58] Vlad Costea: Maybe it was LNbits. I don't know. It's just that it was one of these situations where very early I realized, okay, this can't really work in the way that I want.

[03:04:09] Vlad Costea: Yeah, for sure.

[03:04:10] Vlad Costea: Or maybe it was too early.

[03:04:12] Abdel: Yeah, I think like right now it's way better than it was and it's developing very fast. And Calle already has some good idea to mitigate the risk, like with the proof of liability scheme and so on with a design where you will be able to audit the reserves of the mint and detect that the mint is cheating or not and so on. But yeah, for sure you need to be aware of the trade-offs and the fact that it's custodial and the mint can [unclear: rug] everyone at any time.

[03:04:38] Abdel: Yeah, for sure. I think it's just like an interesting incremental improvements, a bridge towards going to self-custodial way later, but and also like it's better than the status quo for sure. Like if you could have like private banks that are using Cashu, this kind of stuff. So this is why I support Cashu and this, even if it's not the end game for what I want to see in terms of self-custodial sovereignty and so on, of course. But I see it as an incremental improvement and potential bridge for people to get into this.

[03:05:13] Abdel: Yeah.

[03:05:15] Vlad Costea: I remember interviewing Calle two years ago in Prague. It was him and Lisa Neigut together. If that's how you know her. And basically what I respect about him is that at the time Cashu was starting to get traction and people were presenting it as a scaling solution. And Calle was making a big effort to say that this is not scaling Bitcoin. If you want to scale Bitcoin, you should look into other ways to do it. But this does not serve the purpose of scaling. It's for people who were already using custodial wallets. And it's in order for them to get some privacy against the custodian.

[03:05:57] Abdel: Exactly. Yeah. And he was always honest about that. So this is why I respect him a lot on this because he's not trying to sell it as something that it's not. So, yeah, it's very important.

[03:06:09] Vlad Costea: I think essentially that's the difference between something legit and a scam. Yes. It's the way in which you present it.

[03:06:16] Abdel: Yeah. As long as you are honest on the trade-offs and the trust assumptions and everything. Yeah, exactly. I think this is a good distinction, actually. Yeah.

[03:06:24] Vlad Costea: But then again, you're going to get people saying, well, you can also have sophisticated scams where simultaneously what you say is true and what's happening just flies under the radar for most people like they can't catch.

[03:06:38] Vlad Costea: Yeah.

[03:06:39] Abdel: Yeah. I do see people saying these kind of things. That's true. But then what to do, man? Then you just wait until you can do the perfect thing and then you do nothing.

[03:06:51] Vlad Costea: I don't think it's better, you know. So, yeah, I see a lot of nihilism in Bitcoin with a lot of ossifiers dismissing everything. So it's funny to look at their mental gymnastics because it's hard for them to argue that Bitcoin is already perfect with a straight face. So they have to come up with creative excuses to not let stuff get built. And once again, this goes back to what I saw this year when I went to a couple of Ethereum conferences. These people are just building, good or bad. They're making it happen. And then they let the market decide if it's good or bad.

[03:07:30] Vlad Costea: In the case of Bitcoin, you almost have to ask for permission from node runners to keep your stuff.

[03:07:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah.

[03:07:36] Vlad Costea: And be like, I hope you don't mind. I'm going to deploy some ZK proofs and I'm going to use Bitcoin as a data availability layer. Or I hope you don't mind. I'm going to be opening Lightning or Ark or some other kinds of channels on the base layer. It is a bit depressing when you think about it. I do wish we scaled better to the point where on one hand, it did not require industrial grade servers to run a node. But also people could build without making a big deal out of it.

[03:08:13] Abdel: Yeah, I agree. It is frustrating for sure. As I said earlier, I know that we have to pay the price, but it is for sure frustrating. And I wish it would be easier to just debate the idea and not the people and consider in a rational way what it could bring to Bitcoin and so on. But yeah, it's hard.

[03:08:37] Vlad Costea: I also think that part of the fragmentation is this distinction between developer events like BTC++, like TABConf, like a bunch of them that are out there and they focus on builders OP_NEXT and whatnot. And then you have the general Bitcoin events. You have Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas or you have BTC Prague or you have all of these events that celebrate non-technical people like financially successful guys, Wall Street types. And they go on stage and they sell some sort of narrative about what Bitcoin is, which goes against what you hear at the developer conference.

[03:09:20] Vlad Costea: And the average person most likely is going to go to the bigger events where they meet more people and they interact with the community and they feel like they're part of a movement and they lose a lot. And what's really unfortunate is that most of these technical events have free live streams or if they don't have, they put their videos on YouTube. And then you look at their page, I think TABConf, I looked recently and they have like 50 views for their videos.

[03:09:46] Vlad Costea: And it just makes you wonder why, how did we get to this point? Like you made an investment, right? You bought a lot of Bitcoin. Maybe you sold something precious to you. You delayed your gratification a few years because you think this is going to be successful. But don't you want to know why? Like you just want to believe that it's going to be successful and you want to make memes, but don't you want to understand what this does, what you actually bought?

[03:10:16] Abdel: Yeah, it's surprising that people that are investing, as you said, like maybe some significant part of their life savings and so on, and they don't take time to try to understand why and so on. It is sad for sure. And I saw this phenomenon particularly accelerated recently, like this cycle with the new wave of people that are simping Michael Saylor and stuff like that. Yeah, unfortunately.

[03:10:45] Abdel: Anyway, yeah.

[03:10:47] Vlad Costea: I see the same struggle with my podcast because it's not technical enough to be like the Optech newsletter. Hmm. And it's not newbie friendly enough to be in the same league as other shows. And there's some value in this in-between space, but it's also not the popular space.

[03:11:08] Abdel: Okay.

[03:11:09] Abdel: Yeah. So yeah, I guess it's pretty niche, like the kind of audience, unfortunately. But I wish, honestly, I believe that this exactly in-between is probably the most important thing because this is the thing that can bridge them to the other part at some point, ultimately, because there is no way they can jump from the extreme to the other extreme. So it's very important that people do that, actually, what you're doing is very important for education. I wonder how we can help in general, like pushing more this kind of stuff, and getting the curiosity for people to understand that it's hard, it's complex, but it is accessible if you want, there are resources to get into it and so on.

[03:11:53] Abdel: And you will find your way. Yeah.

[03:11:57] Vlad Costea: I mean, StarkWare did sponsor a few of my episodes last year. And then the marketing guy complained that I don't have enough views, even though I told him from the beginning that this is not the most popular show. And it's like this loop, right? Because on one hand, developers and people who are into this are happy that this exists. Because it gives a platform, it pushes ideas. But on the other hand, marketers are not happy because they have to justify the expenditure with numbers. And they say, wait a second, we paid for this episode, which only had 200 views on YouTube.

[03:12:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah.

[03:12:35] Abdel: I see what you mean. Like they think about KPIs and stuff like that. And it's sad. I agree with you. And you told me that privately. And I can say also publicly that I'm sad about that.

[03:12:45] Abdel: No, it's fine.

[03:12:47] Vlad Costea: Just water under the bridge. But what I mean is that I've learned over time that it doesn't matter how many people listen. It's all about who listens. And when Robin Linus sends me a DM and says, hey, man, I listened to your episode with this guy, and it was really good.

[03:13:04] Vlad Costea: That's where the value is.

[03:13:06] Abdel: Yeah, when you tweeted that the importance is who is listening. And I totally agree with you. This is why you should continue no matter what. It's very important. Even if it's not a lot of people, some people actually really like what you do. And I am one of them to be clear. I already told you, but I say it also publicly. So yeah, you need to continue. I hope it can give you more motivation to continue. I'll keep going.

[03:13:29] Vlad Costea: Don't worry. And also, we got a comment right now from Tugce, I think is the way you say her name, from Citrea, said, great episode. It feels like a circle kind of. Yeah, exactly. Someone said smoke mass pot go in the chat. I don't get it. Same. Got distracted. So what I was saying is that maybe that we're in a situation where all of these development teams are supporting each other and they're listening to the content that they create about each other. But while this is nice, we do need to get to the clubs somehow.

[03:14:14] Abdel: Yeah, we need to break the bubble for sure. Yeah, I agree.

[03:14:18] Vlad Costea: I'm going to try to make some short clips from some of your explanations. Put them on YouTube. See if I start a conversation because it's useful to have this conversation. It's been how many years since 2009? 16 years. 16. 16 years because I'm on season 16 of the podcast. Yeah. Makes sense. No, I didn't start from year one. I just started and at one point they synced and I said, I'm going to keep a season for as long as this year and Bitcoin's existence takes place. But my point is that in 16 years, there are so many breakthroughs in mathematics and cryptography.

[03:15:02] Vlad Costea: And it's hard to argue with a straight face that Bitcoin is where it's at and that it should not be improved in any way. For a long time, I was going to conferences and the prevalent narrative was that we need to move from ECDSA to Schnorr. Yeah. And Taproot was that upgrade, but it did not fulfill the whole mission.

[03:15:24] Abdel: Yeah.

[03:15:25] Abdel: No, I agree with you on that. Like we cannot consider Bitcoin as final right now. And I agree we need to learn from all the breakthroughs that happened and all the innovation that happened in those 16 years and see what can be beneficial for Bitcoin. And of course, it has to be done in a proper way, in a conscious manner and everything. But yeah. But the first step is to get out of the distraction right now of the bullshit useless debate and drama. And then we can think about the next step.

[03:15:55] Vlad Costea: There's CRAV23 in the chat who said, stupid, why do people talk like it's the early days? Early days no more.

[03:16:04] Abdel: It is the early days. We are building stuff for decades to come. So it's still the early days, you know. It won't be the early days when there will be 1 billion users using Bitcoin on a daily basis on their daily life. So it's still the early days.

[03:16:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah. The end game is medium of exchange and we have to get there somehow. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. We have been going for three hours, 16 minutes. Wow. I just want to ask you, what is the special word that people should write in the comments if they get to this point? And that's how we know that they listened.

[03:16:43] Abdel: Ah, easy. Grinta.

[03:16:46] Vlad Costea: What's a Grinta?

[03:16:47] Abdel: Grinta. Okay. You don't know Grinta. Interesting. So Grinta, or grinta in Italian. So it's an Italian word that means great determination, but in a very strong way. It became popular in the football field. It means like players that will literally die during the match, they will go beyond injury to transcend their limits and so on. So Grinta is a mindset that I really love personally. And it became a meme in the Starknet community because I wanted to talk about this mindset to the builders and so on.

[03:17:26] Abdel: And I realized that there are a few people know about it and you confirmed it. When I say Grinta, no one knows what it is. So it's interesting. And I had some fun during BTC++ in Istanbul because there was an Italian guy that I really liked and he knew about Grinta and he found it very fun. So Grinta is a special word.

[03:17:43] Vlad Costea: So how do you spell it? G-R-I-N-T-A? Yeah. I think grind comes from this. Exactly.

[03:17:52] Abdel: Probably it's the same word.

[03:17:58] Vlad Costea: Grinta. Type that in the comments if you listened up to this point. Thank you very much, Abdel, for your time and explanations and expertise. Thanks to everyone who listened. I think we are at 1100 views on Twitter and I don't know on YouTube it's going to add up.

[03:18:19] Abdel: That's cool.

[03:18:21] Vlad Costea: So thanks to everyone who tuned up or tuned in for this. And I'll see you on the next one where I will interview someone named Shai who's working on improving proof of work. Goodbye. Bye. Thanks.