S16 E62: Abdel's Updates on Starkware & ZK STARKs Adoption
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0:48Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is season 16 episode 62. This episode is sponsored by Unstoppable Wallet, SideShift.ai, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, and NoOnes.com. We are live with Abdel, who came back once again for the second time this season. It's not unprecedented, but he was very adamant that he should talk about his latest breakthroughs with ZK-STARKs and StarkWare. And before I let Abdel speak about what he's been up to, you know, all of that cool scaling and quantum resistance and privacy stuff, I just want to rant a bit because next month it will be seven years since I started this podcast.
1:33And I spend a whole lot of time just looking at other shows to understand, you know, what's trendy, what kind of guests they're inviting. And of course, I sort of discovered the obvious this morning when I looked. There's this application, I think it's called Pod Something. I receive their newsletter every morning with all the latest Bitcoin podcasts that got published. And what I want to rant about is that, yeah, it's called FeedSpot. What I want to rant about is that too many shows are trying to just provide reassurance and they're like, oh, don't worry, it's still bullish.
2:12Yeah, the price went to 80 something thousand dollars and it was a hundred thousand dollars last week. But it's fine. It's bullish. Here's the reason why. Oh, listen, this is the floor. This is it. Buy now. Oh, look, the SEC said this and therefore the price is going to go up. And it just pisses me off on one hand because I realized that some of these people have been going for pretty much the same amount of time as I have, except that they don't actually give any useful information.
2:46It's just speculation. And they're trying to project a narrative and say, believe in this. And if we all believe in this, then it's going to happen. So sort of like self-fulfilling prophecies. But even these narratives, they're backed by the underlying technology, because if there was no technology, there would be no narratives to build around them. And this show has always been about trying to find the latest and coolest technology that's going to write narratives, that's going to make the number go up. Maybe not in the next week, maybe not in the next month, but in time.
3:20If you're patient enough and you actually think about the impact that this is going to have on Bitcoin and Bitcoin adjacent projects, then you will actually succeed at your investment and whatever. So I just want to thank everyone who's been supporting the show and has been watching for such a long time. Seven years is a long time. I didn't know I was gonna do it for such a long time and I'm gonna start season 17 in January, which is exciting. And thank you for sitting for my rant also.
3:54And now let's talk about some real tech stuff with Abdel, who has some updates, because last time he was on the show, he explained all about ZK-STARKs and how they work. The previous episode was with this guy, Alan Szepieniec, and he's this Polish ZK-STARKs guy who built something that's called Neptune Cash, which takes this StarkWare technology and puts it on a layer one, which I still think is interesting. But in the meantime, you've been running some experiments, you've made some breakthroughs, and there is some bullish news about the adoption of ZK-STARKs.
4:30So I'll hand it to you, Abdel.
4:33AbdelYeah, thank you for having me a second time. And I can only agree with your rant before. It's very sad that this is the state of the industry that is driven mostly by speculative stuff and so on. So I'm happy that there are some people like you that keep pushing on the right aspect. So keep doing that, please. I'm with you on that. Yeah, so I was there with you in September, I think. And yeah, since then, I think a lot of stuff happened. Also on things that are related to a project that you like a lot, which is Zcash.
5:11And I have to admit that you were one of the people that gave me more motivation to actually look and forget a bit about my biases and check again about the current state of Zcash ecosystem, the community and so on. So thank you for that. You are one of the people that gave me like motivation to check again, give it another chance, because I dismissed it a long time ago, and I never actually went back to check what happened since and so on. And I think it's a mistake overall because it's always good to follow what's happening and to try to be intellectually honest and so on.
5:50So I did my homework, I checked a bit and discussed more about what was happening on Zcash with Zcash ecosystem people like Zooko and so on. And then I had this idea of proposing something to Zcash community that would enable leveraging our STARK tech to empower Zcash on several aspects as scaling and also programmability. I can explain more in detail later, but the fun fact is that, and I did it on purpose, I submitted the same day an equivalent proposal on the Bitcoin technical forum, which is Delving Bitcoin, and on the Zcash technical forum, the same kind of proposal, something to enable...
6:40Vlad CosteaWasn't it the mailing list, Bitcoin dev?
6:42AbdelNo, I did not do it on the Bitcoin list. I did it on Delving Bitcoin, which is the equivalent of the Zcash forum. It's like the official dev channel of Bitcoin is the mailing list, you are right, but there is Delving Bitcoin, which is kind of like the technical forum in between where people are discussing ideas usually before submitting them on the mailing list and so on. So I did that the same day and I wanted to compare the reaction because you were saying that there is an ossification culture in Bitcoin and that people in Bitcoin are against innovation and changes and so on.
7:22So I wanted to do a case study with something concrete and compare the reaction. And I have to say that you are right, the Zcash community showed much more appetite on the proposal and the proposal got much more traction than the one on Bitcoin and so on. Even if some Bitcoiners actually interacted with the proposal, asked some questions, very interesting discussion and so on. But overall, yes, the appetite and traction on the Zcash side was much stronger and bigger. So it was interesting and then I discussed this idea with more people and we decided to build a proof of concept.
8:01But yeah, I will stop there first. But yeah, this is something that I tried after talking with you and after my first intervention with you. It was an interesting case and I will continue on that in the coming months.
8:19Vlad CosteaYeah, so let me state the obvious. This is what altcoins are for. And this was obvious like 10 years ago, but nowadays it's so taboo. It's so, I don't know, stigmatizing for developers to go to the other side and say, okay, so Bitcoin does not think that this technology works. Let me show how it works on Litecoin or Zcash or something else that's been around for years that is fairly decentralized and also runs on a similar codebase.
8:49AbdelYeah, exactly. It's a very interesting field of experimentation. You can see it almost as a Bitcoin testnet in a way, but not in a negative way. Like I'm saying that in a positive way. It's a field of experimentation. You can innovate faster, try things and so on. And maybe at some point, some of those innovations, they will take their path on to Bitcoin also. At some point, they are sufficiently better tested and people understand the benefits and you can see useful applications that are leveraging those primitives and so on.
9:25So this is something that I wanted also to try doing on Zcash because we have, as you know, the ambition to settle Starknet on Bitcoin and long-term we want to have native ZK verification on Bitcoin. This is why we will push similar ideas in Bitcoin. So doing that on Zcash in advance is also very interesting for us to also anticipate the challenges. We will have the questions from the community and it's working because after I made the proposal, the community was happy and so on.
9:56But some Zcash core devs, from Electric Coin, for example, they were asking very good questions about the impact on the block space, how much it could be problematic to have multiple STARK proofs that would consume some block space and so on, could it be new DoS vectors for Zcash, this kind of stuff. Those are very good questions and this is the same kind of challenges we will have in the future for Bitcoin. So it's a good anticipation to do that. So I think it makes a lot of sense that we use those altcoins projects as experimentation for Bitcoin.
10:35Vlad CosteaBut at the same time we should also get prepared for a future where it's no longer a testnet and Bitcoin does not change anything at all and we have to run with the parallel technology that we have built. Like we can either have a future where Bitcoin does everything and we're gonna have the entire global economy on the 21 million supply or we're gonna have Bitcoin as maybe the savings account or something. The store of value, that's the narrative about it. And there's 21 million of it, but there's gonna be like many complementary coins that serve different purposes that basically satisfy demand for something that Bitcoin does not have.
11:21And I think right now Ethereum is the biggest sidechain because it has like a hundred something thousand BTC locked into WBTC, which is wrapped Bitcoin. And I think to a great degree, the fact that you have transactions on other blockchains is just something that complements the limitations of Bitcoin. And it's unfortunate because maybe in a few years we're gonna run into an issue where the miners are no longer profitable and they need to make revenue from transaction fees and the transaction fees come from somewhere else.
11:58And maybe that we should get merged mining. This is why I promote, for example, LayerTwo Labs, they're building the drivechain for Bitcoin. And I think of all the proposals that are trying to come up with a solution to this security budget issue, this drivechain makes the most sense because it's also for scaling and it's also for adding other features to Bitcoin. But all of it goes to the miners and the miners are going to be able to sustain their economy. And it's also not increasing the block size unreasonably.
12:35Like with drivechains, you're not getting a block size increase at all. There is no need for it. So, yeah, I think it fits the best with the current culture in Bitcoin. But I'm also a fan of rollups and I want to ask you more specifically, like, what was your proposal on the mailing list?
12:52AbdelYeah, I will comment first on what you said, because I was saying that it's a good experimentation field, but you are saying that it's also a good insurance against Bitcoin in case Bitcoin does not adopt those things on time. I mean, possibly, yes. My preferred scenario is that Bitcoin adopts those things and that we fix Bitcoin in a way that we work to make it private, quantum resistant, scalable, fix the security budget and so on. I'm not a fan of having Bitcoin only as a store of value.
13:27It has failed, in my opinion, if it's only a store of value. I want it to be P2P cash, but for that, there are things to be fixed or improved and so on. So I'm not saying that this world cannot happen, but at least this is something that I don't want to see. I would prefer that we fix Bitcoin somehow. We need to make it work and so on. That does not mean that it will completely invalidate all other projects potentially. And this could be something in between where you have the new financial economy that is using Bitcoin for most of it.
14:03But you still have maybe complementary niches that are using some other altcoin projects for some specific cases, maybe. But yeah, I want Bitcoin to be unstoppable P2P cash for the planet, for sure. That's my preferred option. Drivechains, I think, are interesting. I mean, they have the big advantage that they don't necessitate a change on Bitcoin base layer. So you don't need to ask permission. That's very good. Unlike rollups, for example, I do believe that it's not the same kind of guarantees in terms of security and how you inherit the properties of the base layer.
14:42But I agree that in the meantime, this is at least a good temporary solution that is also helpful for the security budget, as you said. And I think there is no silver bullet. I'm all for a world where there are many scaling solutions. You have Lightning, you have Cashu, you have drivechains, you have rollups, you have BitVM-based rollups at the same time. And users can choose. They have optionality to choose based on their needs, their risk profiles, their appetite, and technical knowledge as well, maybe.
15:14And maybe we will see a world where wallets can abstract the complexity and use different kind of scaling solutions depending on the... You start to see that more and more on Bitcoin. Like Bull Bitcoin that is using different kind of technology depending on the amount. It can use Liquid, it can use Lightning, or it can use Bitcoin on-chain depending on the amount and so on. And they are pretty good in abstracting the complexity for the user. So I think in the future, we'll see more and more of that.
15:45So coming back to the proposal. So Zcash is based on Bitcoin tech, as you said. It has the same Bitcoin script capabilities plus the zero knowledge system to enable privacy with the privacy pools and so on. But the Bitcoin script is similarly limited. You cannot do much. It's not Turing complete and so on. So naturally, you cannot implement ZK rollups, layer two solution on top of Zcash for the same reasons that you cannot do on Bitcoin today. So my proposal was about adding something in Zcash base layer to enable native STARK verification on the base layer.
16:33So it's interesting because initially, I wanted to do this the same way as we are proposing it for Bitcoin, which is to add new opcode. It can be with a generic opcode like OP_CAT that will enable that. Or it can be with a tailor-made specific opcode, OP_STARK_VERIFY, for example, which is the proposal I made on Bitcoin forum. Like a very specific opcode that does only that, but does it very well and so on. So it has tradeoffs, of course. You have tradeoffs if you are using the generic approach with OP_CAT or the specific approach with STARK verify.
17:12I can explain more, but it does not matter for the moment. So I wanted to do similar proposition on Zcash. But then I realized that they have something on Zcash that is not live yet on Zcash, which is called TZE, which stands for Transparent Zcash Extension. It's a way to add new features to the base layer in a way that is more flexible and more simple than adding opcode. Like adding opcodes in Bitcoin script is very hard. It's error prone, it's risky in terms of security and whatnot.
17:46So they created something that makes adding more changes to the base layer more easy and more flexible. And I thought it would be a good idea to explore how to do this STARK verification using this model. So this is what I researched and so on. And it happens that it's a very good solution to do that. I really like it and I think it's much better than adding opcodes and so on. So I propose to add a new TZE for the STARK verification. And concretely speaking, this will mean that you will have the ability to verify your STARK proof natively on the Zcash base layer.
18:26And this is the primitive that you need if you want to build the layer 2 on top of Bitcoin, like Starknet, for example, and that will settle on Zcash layer 1 and inherit the security properties of Zcash. And hence, you can extend trustlessly the capabilities of the base layer. You can do more with the ZEC asset on the layer 2. You can have perps, DeFi, stablecoins, whatever. And also you have scaling, high throughput and cheap transaction fees and whatnot. So this is the proposal.
19:04Vlad CosteaYeah, that's really ambitious. And I do believe that having a ZK rollup on both Bitcoin and Zcash is useful. Helps with scaling and can also have privacy. The ZK rollup, which is most popular right now on Bitcoin, is called Citrea. And it basically tries to bring Ethereum to Bitcoin on a ZK rollup. The interesting part for privacy about it is that it can have something like a fork of Tornado Cash or Railgun, which is pretty good, but it's not good enough. Like, I'm not going to dox where you're from.
19:44And by the way, there is a comment in the chat from Moonsettler, and he said that it feels like you rugged everyone by not having long blonde hair like Goku. And you have short, dark hair.
19:57AbdelIt's a good comment. Yes, I'm trying to get them longer, but it's hard.
20:02Vlad CosteaIt is hard. I can attest to that. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, ZK rollups. And I think it would be very cool to have something that also adds native privacy. And you're from Europe, generally speaking, like I can tell by your accent that you're from one of the European countries that speaks French and there's a bunch of them. Basically, I think next year we're going to be pressed into revealing how much Bitcoin we own. This is like a European Union-wide directive that's being pushed so that all the holders must reveal how much they hold in self-custody.
20:45This is insane. And you come from the country which... I mean, no, you come from one of the countries that have a lot of these five-euro wrench attacks and kidnappings and people losing fingers and having family members being held by a bunch of terrorists. And it's really awful. And the fact that some government institution is going to have like an Excel table where they have everyone's name, everyone's address and everyone's Bitcoin address and how much they have in it is just going to lead to more problems.
21:19And the fact that we don't have any kind of base layer privacy only makes it worse. And once again, my rant back to fellow podcasters, like they promote KYC exchanges like it's nothing. They're like, yeah, just DCA on whatever. I'm not going to endorse it. And it's all good. You can withdraw any time you want and blah, blah, blah. But all of that is surveilled by blockchain analysis firms and is tied to the user's identity. And I'm pretty sure that they report to the tax authorities so the governments know already how much the citizens have bought.
21:58AbdelNow this is insane. I'm very scared about the direction in the whole Europe. They are killing freedom and they are putting citizens at risk, as you said. It's really insane. It does not make any sense. We have to fight it. And I think that the best weapon we have is tech. We need to fight with tech. It's the best weapon we can have. And freedom tech is, I think, the best hope we have to fight. And we need privacy. I agree with you that we need it on the base layer.
22:33But in the meantime, if we can have layer two and application layer privacy and this kind of stuff, it's already better than not having anything. But ultimately, we need to have those things on the base layer for sure. It's also a big risk of capture by governments, nation states. It's an obvious attack vector if they want to put pressure on people and so on through this kind of measures and so on and more potentially. So yes, this is crucial.
23:08Vlad CosteaI think it's really horrible. And it's sort of disappointing that people ignore this and they shrug it off and they're like, oh, it's bullish, whatever. Because governments are acknowledging that this has value and this is like free advertisement for Bitcoin. Yeah, of course, the number is going to go up. But are you going to be there to basically take advantage of the fact that it's going up or?
23:34AbdelYeah, FGU is better than NGU. So freedom go up is better than number go up. We should not forget that. The fact that the price is going up is almost a byproduct of this nice technology and these properties. But the end game is to take back our freedom and sovereignty. We should not forget about it. Because no matter the amount of money you have, if you don't have freedom, sovereignty and safety, it's almost as if you had nothing. So, yes.
24:08Vlad CosteaIt's still sort of baffling to me that this is not a more serious conversation on the dev mailing lists on Bitcoin. Like there are a lot of mature proposals out there for adding privacy to Bitcoin. And it seems like I'm not going to say all of them because I'm sure that's not true. But most of the developers are just afraid even to talk about it. And even among the investors circle, it's kind of taboo to talk about adding privacy to Bitcoin because potentially it can lead to BTC getting delisted from some exchanges.
24:44Which is going to fuel some FUD and it's going to get maybe dumped by some traders and there's going to be less liquidity and whatever. But I do like... so, something that happened yesterday and we decided we were going to have this interview more than a week ago or something. That's when we set the date. But yesterday we had Zooko, one of the creators of Zcash, going to the SEC and explaining to them how Zcash works and having this very positive sort of presentation about it. And I think that one of the effects of this event is going to be that institutions are going to get encouraged to invest into Zcash.
25:27And once they buy into Zcash and it becomes fine for people to hold something that can be private, then maybe it's going to be culturally and politically safe for Bitcoin to add privacy. And this is something that makes me hopeful when I see it, that it's no longer going to carry a stigma. People are not going to look at privacy the same way. They're going to say, well, yes, it used to be sort of private back in the day. And now with AI being so efficient at tracing addresses and transactions, maybe it's good to give people more privacy.
26:04And I think this is the perfect way to frame it. A very good narrative and something that gives me hope for the future. Because if I look at what Adam Back or the Blockstream team is talking about, it's not very optimistic.
26:19AbdelNo, I totally agree with you. And what happened yesterday with Zooko and the SEC roundtable and so on was a very good push in that direction to make people understand that privacy is normal, as you said. But Zooko is very good. He's a very good storyteller, and his notes about his mom was very cool and funny about us being guinea pigs with surveillance and this kind of stuff. It's very good and people need to understand that privacy is normal. So it's important. By the way, we had Katherine, our general counsel, that was also part of this event in the SEC roundtable, talking about ZK and quantum resistance and privacy.
27:01So I would not expect a few years ago that the SEC would have these kind of conversations. Look, I'm not going to lie, I'm more into cypherpunk kind of stuff. But I do believe that it's important also to have this push with those regulators, politicians, even if I don't want to ask their permission. And at the end of the day, we need to build solutions that don't require their buy-in and so on. But at the same time, it's probably good if there is this kind of push to make them understand that privacy is normal.
27:35Also maybe like to have citizens to be less scared away by that. If this is those people that are talking freely about it, maybe they will be less scared and so on. And then maybe at some point they will understand that it matters and they will be willing to fight for that and so on. Ultimately, we need to build in a paranoid way and we don't need to ask permission and we should continue doing that. But at the same time, it's good to have this kind of push in addition.
28:08It's not one or the other, but I'm saying that it's not a substitute to continue going in the fully cypherpunk direction, but it can be a bonus at least. I don't think it can be a net negative because, let's say, because some people might fear that it's a Trojan horse and so on. Because, for example, I saw some Bitcoiners that are even against the fact of adding privacy on the base layer. They are saying, no, it's better to have full accountability of the supply on the base layer.
28:41Privacy is bad on the base layer. It can be also a way to add a backdoor. You know, there is PTSD or stuff that happened in the past on Zcash, probably, and stuff like that. And people are worried about relying only on moon math and this kind of stuff. And if they don't see the supply in a fully transparent manner, maybe they are worried about that. And they are thinking that maybe this moon math technology that no one understands is a good way for some malicious people to inject backdoors or whatever.
29:14So I think there is this concern from some people and probably we need more education, more people that understand those things and can bring trust on those systems. And now they are more mature and more and more better tested in production at large scale, securing a large amount of money and so on. So it's time to at least consider it seriously. Yeah.
29:43Vlad CosteaYeah, but at the same time, we also have to agree that Bitcoin is also something that we agree on at the social layer. So it's like an ideology. It's an idea. And it's backed by software that we can change. Yeah, I don't think there is anything wrong with that. I think there is a very unreasonable amount of concern about the software stack and the fact that hard forking can be horrible and can split the community or whatever. If we all agree on something, of course, there's going to be some actor that's going to be contrarian and say, well, I believe that this is the real Bitcoin.
30:23And we have seen some of that play out with the Bitcoin Cash fork. But at the same time, we shouldn't be so afraid of code.
30:34AbdelYeah, I agree. At the end of the day, the social layer is like extremely important. And that's also why I think like the fact that Bitcoin is moving slowly and so on is also good in a way for that because it gives more time for people to participate in those decisions in the governance of the protocol and so on. While on a system that moves fast and has a lot of upgrades and so on, for example, Ethereum, it's harder. Even if you want to, as a user, get involved in those things, it's very hard to follow everything that is happening and so on.
31:12So I think it's a risk of fragmentation of the social layer, and also a risk of concentration in the hands of fewer people that can understand all the trade offs of all changes and so on. So I think on that, it's actually a good property that Bitcoin is moving slowly and so on. And then we can put more trust on the social layer, because there is less risk of fragmentation or concentration in fewer hands and so on, because you have more time to bring more people to try to understand the changes, to discuss them, to voice their opinion and so on.
31:50Of course, the more people you have, the harder it gets to get consensus on the changes. But I think overall, it's healthy, and it's a good mitigation and prevents some risks of capture, because you have more watchdogs that will fight and protect the protocol to respect the core principles and so on. But yeah, we should not be scared of changes for sure. And there are stuff that will need to be fixed anyway, like privacy is one in my opinion, quantum, scaling in general and the security budget.
32:25The job is not finished yet. So yeah.
32:29Vlad CosteaYeah, but I think the real enemy is this mindset or ideology where we say Bitcoin is already perfect. It doesn't need anything. And if it comes from some sort of altcoin, then it's shitcoin tech, and we should not touch it. And the argument is look at the price chart. Okay, look what happened to Zcash. It was more than $1,000 after the launch, and then it just went down 99%. And that's the ultimate reason to reject it. And I think that's very stupid. Or you look at the performance against BTC on a certain timeframe, and you say, well, maybe this is not worth it.
33:09If that's the kind of mindset that we're going to adopt, I think we should look into Tron, because since they added USDT, Tron, I think has been outperforming BTC. And you can look at that narrow timeframe from 2021 until 2025. You're going to realize, okay, Tron is actually outperforming BTC. But does that mean that we're going to adopt the technology of Tron? Of course not.
33:38AbdelIt doesn't make it any better. Yeah, no, it's a very good point. This is stupid argument. It does not matter. And look, I can see the same thing for Starknet all the time. And I'm telling to people, it does not matter what you think about Starknet or the price or whatever, because the tech is open source, and you can use it regardless of any blockchain, any token, whatever, you can use it for like pure Bitcoin project that will not use, include any other coin or whatever. This tech is open source, you can use it like for anything you want to improve Bitcoin, and just take it like, those are stupid arguments.
34:14They should not be a benchmark to assess the quality of a project or its tech or its potential benefits for Bitcoin.
34:25Vlad CosteaYeah, it's the laziest way to approach it. And I do believe that promoting this ideology that Bitcoin is always going to be this Bitcoin Core with just some minor refinements is also an attack. Because the reason why we started this, and maybe I'm going to sound like Roger Ver or something, but it says right there, peer to peer electronic cash system. The point of the block size war was not that this is going to be a store of value and the fork is going to try to be digital cash.
34:59The point was that we're going to try to do it with second layers. It was never about giving up on peer to peer electronic cash and embracing digital gold. It was just that we're going to do it in a different way. That was the major disagreement at the time. And it seems like as Lightning did not get enough traction and Liquid was a total failure, and all of this kind of adoption didn't really go anywhere. And we ended up having stablecoins that are eating Bitcoin's market share.
35:31People became complacent and they said, well, this is what Bitcoin is for, for savings. You put your money in it and then you forget about it. I think that's detrimental to the mission of the project, because the fact that you can pay with it and the fact that it has a network effect is also something that contributes to the price.
35:54AbdelYeah, totally. I think it's a big mistake and the wrong mindset. And I'm pretty much with you, as I said before, it has to be peer to peer cash or otherwise it has failed. So I am pretty in line with Jack Dorsey because he's always saying that if Bitcoin is only a store of value, it has failed. So it has to be peer to peer cash for sure. And I think it was a good decision to consider scaling with second layers and stuff like that. And we should continue in that direction.
36:23And now we have more also experience and maturity on the things that can work at a large scale in terms of second layers. Like we can look just at what happened on Ethereum and just take the good innovation that enabled that and it can be useful for Bitcoin. It's not only like theoretical on paper stuff now. It's not anymore the case. You can see those technologies in production use that scale and they work. And it's undeniable that they work at scale and they can provide good UX transactions and security and whatnot.
37:01So it's time to consider adding those things into Bitcoin.
37:07Vlad CosteaYeah, I got to plug a couple of sponsors and I'm going to start with LayerTwo Labs because I've already mentioned them. And I want to add the fact that you can go to layertwolabs.com/download and you find the latest version of the software and you can test it on the Bitcoin Signet. So as you said about these rollups and other technologies that come from Ethereum, there is already something that you can test. It's not purely theoretical. It's not just a BIP that you can read on your screen.
37:39It's software that you can run. So check out also the drivechains on layertwolabs.com/download. Also, something that we should talk about is called BTCFi, which is something that was launched by StarkWare. And the website where I first read about it is Bitcoin.com News. They have this article from, let me check the date, September 30th. And they announced that StarkWare decided to run this DeFi service that lets you basically earn yield on your BTC. And I'm curious how this works and where the yield comes from, which is always the question that you should ask.
38:18And also I recommend people to check out Bitcoin.com News because they have very balanced coverage and a very good approach to journalism. Like they're not pro-Trump, like Bitcoin Magazine, and they're not pro-institutions like CoinDesk. They're somewhere in the middle. And you also find news from parts of the world which maybe you usually don't hear about. So check them out and let me plug another one before we get to BTCFi: Unstoppable Wallet, which I don't think supports Starknet at this point, but is still interesting for using with Zcash, for using with Bitcoin, for using with Monero.
38:57They also have swaps inside of the app so that you don't have to get on exchanges. If you just buy Bitcoin and you want to get something with privacy, you swap it from inside of Unstoppable Wallet. And it's free. It's open source and endorsed by Bitcoin.org. If you go to Bitcoin.org and there's that section that's called Choose Your Wallet, you will see that Unstoppable Wallet is possibly the best recommendation for mobile. So give it a try. It's free. It doesn't cost you anything to install it.
39:31Check it out. Now, Abdel, let's talk a bit about this new StarkWare service, which is called BTCFi, where I'm not sure if you can stake or if that's the correct term for it, but you can definitely deposit your Bitcoin and earn some yield on it. And it doesn't work like BlockFi, as far as I can understand. It's not an institution. It's not run by suits. It's operated by code.
39:56AbdelYeah, exactly. So BTCFi is a program which is a set of products, applications, and changes in the protocol that in general aim to enable Bitcoin finance on Starknet. So we have this ambition to make Starknet like the financial layer of Bitcoin, like to make Starknet expand the Bitcoin economy, basically. And this will be done in multiple steps. The endgame is to have this completely trustless, extending Bitcoin in a completely trustless way, which is something we cannot do today because of the lack of native ZK verification on Bitcoin, as you know, and we will have some steps in between.
40:39The next step will be a BitVM bridge, similarly to Citrea or Alpen Labs and so on, which is better bridging solution in terms of trust assumptions, because it reduces the trust from classical multisig, where you need the honest majority assumption. Like, for example, on Liquid, which is a federation, you need the honest majority to be honest for the system to be secure. With BitVM, it's very cool because you need only one out of n operators to be honest. So it's very, very cool. And anyone can challenge. It's permissionless to challenge, to trigger the fault-proof mechanism similar to what we have on optimistic rollups on Ethereum.
41:21So it's very cool. Right now, we started to launch BTCFi even before the BitVM bridge. Right now, we do it with Bitcoin wrappers like WBTC, SolvBTC, LBTC, this kind of wrappers. So of course, just to be crystal clear, you do have the same risks of counterparty risk that those wrappers have in general. But aside from that, we have cool things on Starknet that are unique to the Starknet protocol. First of all, we have Bitcoin staking. So on Starknet, there is staking of STRK, so the native token of Starknet.
41:56But we added the possibility to stake Bitcoin on the consensus layer of Starknet. So it's not something on the application layer. So it's very good in terms of security, because it's not smart contract additional risk and so on. It's directly enshrined in the protocol. So you can deposit a stake on Bitcoin in the form of wrapped Bitcoin, either WBTC, SolvBTC, LBTC, and then you can get some yield. So where does the yield come from? So in this case, it comes from the classical inflation of the proof of stake mechanism of Starknet.
42:33So from the point of view of the Bitcoin asset, it's risk free, economically speaking, because the yield comes from the inflation of the STRK proof of stake mechanism. So it's the most sustainable and the less risky source of yield you can get on the wrapped Bitcoin asset, to put it simply. That's the first primitive of BTCFi. And then depending on your risk profile, you have other solutions. You can use money markets like lending, borrowing platform on Starknet, to borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin as collateral.
43:16So the idea is to enable people to live on the Bitcoin standard and they have like fiat expenses, for example, but they don't want to sell their Bitcoin. So what they can do instead is to borrow some stablecoins against their Bitcoin as collateral on those money markets on Starknet. And the goal is really to make... There are two axes for BTCFi. One is to get the most sustainable source of yield for Bitcoin. And the second one is to make it the best place to borrow efficiently some capital with your Bitcoin.
43:51So those are the two axes. And then we have a range of products to fit those properties. So Bitcoin staking on the consensus, and then you have like some products, money markets, lending, borrowing. And then you have also Bitcoin-backed stablecoin, Uncap. It is called Uncap, so it's a project on Starknet. And they are doing Bitcoin-backed stablecoins. You have like all the money, yeah, lending, borrowing platform. You have perps. You can do like advanced options, advanced strategies to generate some yield using delta neutral strategy, margin calls, this kind of stuff.
44:29But this is more for advanced DeFi users. So it depends on the risk profile. We want to fit both for advanced DeFi power users, but also institutions and people that want like just minimal risk opportunities to generate yield. And that is Bitcoin staking. If you want like the less risk possible way to generate sustainable yield, this is Bitcoin staking directly. And then if you are open to other stuff, you can use like other products as you want. And we have also like some more institutional offering where you have like some BTC only regulated funds where you can deposit Bitcoin.
45:10And then they have some strategies. Under the hood, they can use Starknet on chain to generate yield and also other off-chain strategies as well. So those are regulated products for institutions that want to use like only regulated products. And those products, they are using Starknet under the hood to generate some yield.
45:29Vlad CosteaYeah, so I think you explained it pretty well. But what I want to ask you is if someone holds BTC in self-custody on the Bitcoin network, how can they earn yield? And I think it's pretty funny that basically you say that yield comes from Starknet token inflation, because basically this means that the Starknet token is getting sold to buy more Bitcoin to give it to the people who deposit.
45:58AbdelYes, but the hope is to create a kind of flywheel because the more Bitcoin TVL you get, the more capital efficient strategies you can get, the cheaper it is to borrow against your Bitcoin. So the hope is that you can create a flywheel that will bring value accrual to STRK. But this flywheel, we need to demonstrate it in practice for now. This is the idea behind it. But yeah, this is to be demonstrated that bringing all this liquidity and those good products to generate yield and to borrow efficiently some capital against Bitcoin will create some value accrual.
46:39But yeah, because also the more Bitcoin you get on the Bitcoin staking, the more security you have on the proof of stake mechanism of Starknet and so on. So the idea is to create this flywheel. But in terms of user experience, yes, the first step will always be to bridge. You will have to bridge your Bitcoin to a wrapped Bitcoin on Starknet. So for that, you can use different bridging solutions. You can use LayerZero or Hyperlane or many, many different solutions that enable to bridge your BTC from Bitcoin L1 to Starknet.
47:15The most trustless way actually is to use an atomic swap. So you have Atomiq Labs, they are providing very good solution to perform atomic swaps between Bitcoin on-chain and Starknet and also between Lightning and Starknet directly in one atomic swap. And then you go from your Bitcoin on L1 or Lightning and you do an atomic swap and you get WBTC on Starknet in one transaction. And it's trustless because it's HTLC atomic swap. So Atomiq Labs is probably, for Bitcoiners, the best way to bridge to Starknet because it does not require a third party, it's based on atomic swap.
47:52So it's very interesting. And then you can use all BTCFi products directly on Starknet. There are some portals where you can have access to all those strategies and products, the money markets, the Bitcoin staking, and you will see the number of Bitcoin staked in the protocol for the different wrappers and this kind of stuff. The yield you can get and this kind of stuff.
48:18Vlad CosteaIs there mandatory KYC or something? No. Or do you just swap?
48:26AbdelNo, no KYC, completely permissionless DeFi basically. It's fully on-chain. You don't have to do any KYC. So you can do an atomic swap from a non-KYC Bitcoin to Starknet and then you can use freely those products directly on-chain without asking permission and without KYC.
48:46Vlad CosteaSo full disclosure, I'm not getting paid to say this. And historically speaking, I haven't had a good experience with the marketing department of StarkWare. But basically what you're describing here sounds a lot like what Hal Finney was saying with Bitcoin backed banks that are issuing their own currency against BTC. So it does sound a lot like that, except that it's not institutional. It's actually pretty cypherpunk.
49:14AbdelYeah, and it can be both because as I said, we also have like more institutional offerings that are using those components, but they add a legal layer where you have to KYC to use their fund and so on. But it can be both. If you want to do that by yourself, completely cypherpunk, you can. But you can also have regulated compliant products that are using the same primitives. They just add off-chain legal stuff on top. But yeah, yeah.
49:46Vlad CosteaIt's interesting. I might take a look. And once again, no endorsement here. It's just my personal curiosity.
49:53AbdelYeah, I think it's interesting. And this is what we want to see in the future, where you have hyperbitcoinization of the world and we need these kind of new tools for a Bitcoin economy to flourish and so on. So we are building those primitives for this Bitcoin economy to flourish and to use Bitcoin for the new financial world, basically.
50:16Vlad CosteaI remember I met a guy in Argentina two years ago, and he told me that he basically lives off the interest that he makes on DeFi for the coins that he deposited. And I was sort of intrigued by the idea. But at the same time, I was like, so how do you trust these DeFi platforms? Like, they can always go out of business. They can rug you, they can do something and run away with your coins. And he was like, oh, it's fine. It's the kind of risk that he can take.
50:48AbdelYeah, that's why we want to minimize the risk as much as possible. That's why we included the Bitcoin staking directly into the protocol. Because as long as Starknet is running, you can use the staking directly. And then if you are willing to take slightly more risk, you can use applications. And then you have the usual smart contract vulnerability risks and so on. Yeah, even if, of course, those protocols are audited and so on. But there is always some kind of risk. Yeah.
51:24Vlad CosteaAnyway, before we change the topic, and I know you want to talk about quantum resistance and other interesting stuff. I just want to ask a final question on the topic of ZK verifiers and more specifically, ZK-STARK verifiers as an opcode. I know that and it's very taboo, but this is what I do. I ask questions that other podcasters are afraid to. I took a look at Bitcoin Cash and I realized that they're trying to build something similar with a ZK verifier that allows them to do a rollup.
51:55And it's very funny because they spent so much time saying that they don't need layer twos and they're going to scale on chain. And now they're like, OK, so these rollups are interesting. Let's do it. And I was wondering if and I've asked the same question to Citrea in private. Like, wouldn't you guys have like a more efficient system if you built it on Bitcoin Cash? And they actually said that, yes, it would work much better, but they don't have the same amount of users as on BTC.
52:26And also their investors really want them to build this on BTC so that this is sort of their mission. But I'm curious, technically, like Bitcoin Cash has like 32 megabyte blocks or something and added a bunch of opcodes like OP_CAT, OP_MUL, which does multiplication. And they're useful. They sort of abstract a lot of the complexity that you write into code.
52:53AbdelYeah, for sure. So if the question is, would it be technically more efficient with the ZK rollup on top of Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin? Yes, for sure. No doubt. It would be much more efficient. Why don't we consider it? Again, Bitcoin is not only about code. You can always fork code, but you cannot fork more than a decade of people teaching freedom and sovereignty to people, the social layer, you cannot fork it and so on. This is what ultimately gives value also to the protocol, to Bitcoin and so on.
53:25And also like Bitcoin Cash objectively made some compromises and some sacrifices on some of the important properties. So I do not believe that it's a viable solution. It's not a real competitor to Bitcoin. It's something else. I could explore it as like just for fun. And in fact, I discussed with some Bitcoin Cash core devs and they were asking the same, Oh, guys, don't you want to explore what you are doing on Bitcoin Cash? We have all the primitives, blah, blah, blah. And it's true that technically speaking, it would be like much more efficient.
54:05And we might do it, but that's off, to be honest. I would not put a bet, similarly to Zcash in a way, but even less, because the problem that I have with Bitcoin Cash is that they are too much antagonizing with Bitcoin. They're saying that, no, it's the real Bitcoin and so on. And I don't want to stimulate that. You could argue that in a way, some people on Zcash are also doing the same. Also with the meme of Zcash being encrypted Bitcoin and so on, which is the meme that I personally don't like, to be honest.
54:42And I told it to Zooko and to other people. I do understand why when they do that and it works amazingly well. It's a very powerful meme for sure, because then it's easy to get the value proposition of Zcash. Also when they do the comparison between like HTTP and HTTPS, Bitcoin is HTTP and Zcash is HTTPS. So it's easy for people to understand that, of course, like the secured version, encrypted version is better. But I don't like this idea. I think that the Zcash community should not like try to push Zcash as a rival competitor to Bitcoin directly.
55:21Something that could empower it at some point, like more friendly fork or I don't know how to call it or how to qualify it. I could even tolerate like this kind of what you said before, which is Zcash as experimentation field and also insurance in case like Bitcoin does not adopt some important stuff in time. That I can accept it, but I don't like the fact that some people in Zcash and even more on Bitcoin Cash, they see Bitcoin as the enemy. I don't like anyone seeing Bitcoin as the enemy.
56:00I have like big fights today with Ethereum Maxis that are rooting for Bitcoin to die and fail. And I'm going fully against them more and more. This is something I... like, look, my opinion is the following. I think that anyone that is rooting for Bitcoin to fail is an enemy of freedom tech, period. I really mean it. It does not mean that, like for you, for example, you are saying or you're criticizing a lot Bitcoin, but in a constructive way, you're just saying it's not perfect. We should not become complacent.
56:32The job is not finished. That I completely agree. But someone like rooting for Bitcoin to die, it for me is necessarily an enemy of freedom tech, in my opinion. Maybe I'm a bit too extreme, but this is how I view it. I cannot comprehend why someone that came on Ethereum or Zcash or another thing for its cypherpunk roots and ideals that would want Bitcoin not to succeed. And it does not mean that it would invalidate the value of those other systems or that it would mean that they should not exist and so on.
57:07But Bitcoin is the best shot we have in the attempts of building unstoppable systems that can resist to globally coordinated nation state attacks and this kind of stuff. So we should not miss it. And we should not mistake the enemy. And I don't like anyone that sees Bitcoin as the enemy. And again, it does not mean that Bitcoin is perfect or that we should not fight to improve it and fix problems. I'm the first one to advocate for those things. But Bitcoin is the best hope we have for humanity, in my opinion.
57:41Vlad CosteaOh, I don't disagree with you here. But also Bitcoin Cash is like a blackmail attack on Bitcoin because it basically tries to fragment the mining. And if there is anything that's going to happen in the future with BTC, the miners can switch to BCH. And they already have the ASICs, they already have the infrastructure and the access to electricity, they can just switch to something which is maybe more profitable to them. So in this way, I think Bitcoin Cash is like a pushback. And I don't like the fact that it's ignored in the sense that it's just dismissed because it does some things that are right with the same code base and the same design.
58:24And maybe that BTC should catch up, because apparently it's safe enough. They proved that OP_CAT is not flawed. And the version of OP_CAT that they restored is the one that Satoshi wrote. It's not the one that was neutered and rewritten in Tapscript by Heilman. What was his first name?
58:44AbdelEthan.
58:45Vlad CosteaEthan, yeah. So the BIP for OP_CAT on Bitcoin is actually much more tame than the OP_CAT that Bitcoin Cash has. And that one was proven to be safe, like there was no actual attack on it. It's sort of disappointing that we're not having a real conversation in which we're also pointing out to the things that Bitcoin Cash did right and we can learn from what they did.
59:12AbdelYeah, I agree. We should not dismiss some of the good things that are done by a project, even if the project is not a credible attempt or a credible alternative to Bitcoin. I agree with you on that. Yeah.
59:28Vlad CosteaYeah. Anyway, for the four remaining listeners who haven't unsubscribed yet, let's move on to quantum resistance, which is another interesting topic, because it seems like so I've seen news over the last week or so with investors saying, well, Bitcoin did not address the quantum threat and I believe it's coming and therefore I'm selling my Bitcoin. This is also why I say that the technology is the one that creates narratives. And it's important to talk about technology and be real about it, as opposed to just larping on memes.
1:00:03And I don't know, I got blocked by so many Bitcoiners who see me as useless for propaganda. I'm just not helping with that and they don't like it. And the question is when does quantum actually become a threat? Because in the minds of some investors it's already there. It's already here threatening to steal coins. And I do see some of this attempt to amplify the threat of quantum computing, as maybe, and this is my personal conspiracy theory, maybe a way to freeze Satoshi's coins and say well if he hasn't sold up to this point he probably never will.
1:00:45And we should make sure that the first quantum computer that gets created does not have access to this.
1:00:53AbdelWell it's an interesting conspiracy theory. First of all I would say that I am against any measure that will include confiscating Satoshi's coins. I'm completely against that. Some people are saying that they are the bounty for the quantum computer. So yes, they are there. If someone builds a quantum computer that is capable of breaking elliptic cryptography then they can take it. It's the bounty for it. It's a service for human progress in a way. So I'm against any measure that will confiscate Satoshi's coins. For example, if someone will get access to his coins and will be malicious and whatnot, it will be the same and I would not be in favor of freezing or confiscating those coins.
1:01:47It would be censorship and it would be against anything that Bitcoin represents to me. So it does not make any sense. So now the question about when the quantum will be a serious threat and so on, is it today? No, in my opinion it's not today for sure. But we should be ready on time and I think we should not dismiss the reality of it. Like I would not use the word urgency. I think it would be a bit too much at this time. But the problem is that because we know that it will take a lot of time for Bitcoin to adapt and not only about the code itself but more about the social layer, the tooling, everything, because it would have a massive impact on everything like all wallets, RPC endpoints, all services, everything would be impacted.
1:02:38So because of that and because of the usual slow pace of development of Bitcoin that again I think is healthy and beneficial, but because of that it means that we need to anticipate even more this threat. So I think that I am in favor of anticipating the threat now and for sure I would state something like that. For everything new it should be designed in mind with quantum resistance as a first principle. Like for everything new. So for example, so everything that is not yet finalized as BIPs and so on, I don't know, let me find a concrete example.
1:03:19Yes, Utreexo, for example. There are some BIPs right now about Utreexo. So maybe it's time to think about analyzing every cryptographic primitive and assess whether or not they are quantum resistant. If yes, good. If not, either consider moving to something quantum resistant now or at least have a clear migration path to something that could be quantum resistant tomorrow if needed, including thinking about the migration process, how to move from non-quantum to quantum safe stuff and so on. So there is an initiative, the dominant initiative on Bitcoin for post-quantum stuff is BIP-360.
1:04:02We are actively discussing with the BIP-360 people and I think it's very important therefore that we should have more awareness and people working on that. Blockstream recently did a lot of research and improvements on quantum resistant hash mechanisms and signatures and so on. So it's a very important work. So I will not use the word urgency but I think we need to work on it right now, think about the migration path, design carefully any future changes in the protocol, any need to have this in mind. It should be one important pillar going from now.
1:04:47Everything needs to be thinking about the quantum threat going forward and we are thinking about solutions and ways to reuse STARK proofs for that because STARKs have this also good property that they are quantum safe. It's funny because back in the day when Eli and team created STARKs, people were saying that those things don't matter, the quantum computer will never happen. The STARK proofs were created in 2018 and at this time no one was taking the threat seriously and so on. People were saying guys you are optimizing for something that will never happen and so on.
1:05:33I'm happy now that we built with first principles and future proof long-term thinking. So STARK proofs are quantum safe and they are relying only on hash functions, they are not using elliptic curve cryptography and stuff like that because that is vulnerable to quantum. You have some efficient quantum algorithms that can break elliptic cryptography? Because they are efficient for discrete log problems and all the stuff that makes those systems secure today, they are not secure in the context of a quantum computer with sufficient power. But STARK proofs, they are quantum safe because they are relying only on the hash functions and not on elliptic curve cryptography.
1:06:22So now we are thinking about ways to leverage that for post-quantum Bitcoin. We are exploring stuff like a signature aggregation that will use STARK proofs to bring quantum resistance and other kind of stuff and we are discussing with BIP-360 people.
1:06:43Vlad CosteaFor the listeners who did not catch the interview with Hunter Beast, the author of BIP-360, you should really check that out because it's interesting. Something that I do want to mention about your comment is that basically there is no way to know if a quantum computer steals Satoshi's coins or if Satoshi moved the coins. I think this is the pro-interventionist argument that okay maybe that if Satoshi hasn't moved the coins until now maybe we should give him like a short amount of time and that after that I think the best use of these coins if you're gonna intervene is to just give them as mining rewards.
1:07:29But once again there's also no certainty that all of these addresses belong to Satoshi. It's just an analysis that was made by Sergio Demian Lerner who was also on the show last year and he published what's called the Patoshi research back in 2014 on his blog that's called Bitslog and people just take that at face value. There wasn't much questioning of it and I don't think it's a very advanced kind of analysis but it is something that we need to think about actively. And the other dimension is the migration.
1:08:11Like is it going to be a soft fork? Is it going to be a hard fork? A hard fork would make it more efficient but basically some people would be left behind but soft fork also makes the people who don't migrate very vulnerable and Bitcoin doesn't scale very well to move your coins to new types of addresses. So I don't know what's your take on this?
1:08:37AbdelYeah it depends like hopefully if we anticipate sufficient time before we can have like the less intrusive less brutal change and maybe we can handle it with successive soft forks but if we don't anticipate sufficiently maybe we won't have the choice but to do a hard fork.
1:09:05So I would say like for people that want to avoid hard forks and that are like soft fork maxi I think the best is actually to anticipate now to make it like a more smooth process to give more time for tooling and users to adapt. Again because as you said also one of the big problem is like the scaling issues of Bitcoin the fact that you cannot move easily your coins especially if everyone does it at the same time. So yeah I think there is a path where we will have to do a hard fork but like with sufficient anticipation maybe not yeah.
1:09:48Vlad CosteaSo by anticipation you mean that we should basically merge BIP-360 as quickly as possible and then give people time but I also see conversations about these quantum resistant signatures. The fact that they're very large in size and that would make Bitcoin even less scalable.
1:10:07AbdelYeah, yeah, that's the issue. The problem, to be clear, we did not mention it, and it's a very good point this comes with some overhead and non-negligible overhead so and then if you are saying to users you will pay more Bitcoin will be even less scalable if they don't consider the quantum threat as serious in the first place it's a very hard sell so it's a good point.
1:10:36At least I would want the tooling to be ready to like to have like some testnets and some wallets that can support those new signature schemes and whatnot but activating the option for real even in an opt-in way could be premature today yes I'm with you yeah it would be probably premature to do that today yeah.
1:11:02Vlad CosteaYeah and I think honestly the best way to go forward is to hard fork and have like another network to which we migrate that maybe also has some fixes that we need maybe it has OP_CAT, maybe it has a version of Zerocash, like the Zcash protocol like the latest refined one just stuff that makes Bitcoin useful and move to that one and then we can finally be Bitcoin maximalists and say well we have it all.
1:11:33AbdelYeah I mean like if we have to do a hard fork yes I would be in the opinion potentially to bundle with other stuff that we cannot easily do without a hard fork now yes it's a good point but then it would be horrible to settle on what we include in this hard fork because there are so many potential stuff you would do so agreeing on the minimal things that would be sufficient to consider Bitcoin final in a way it's interesting thought experiments. Privacy I would say is mandatory for sure quantum resistance as well enabling ZK verification to me would be necessary because also it will help on the two other dimensions privacy and quantum resistance.
1:12:21And covenants yeah with that for me I could consider Bitcoin as final as in like of course not no changes at all you need still like improvements but fixing and whatnot but at least no more features no more big things if we have that yes it could be it could fulfill the role of becoming unstoppable P2P cash with sufficient properties to make it scalable and private and whatnot.
1:12:51Vlad CosteaWhat I think is going to happen is that basically this interventionist argument is going to divide people and then we're going to have different hard forks that take a snapshot of the Bitcoin UTXO set at a certain point in time and then the users will choose the one that pleases them ideologically the most. There's going to be one that keeps Satoshi's coins there's going to be one that says let's give the coins to the miners and maybe that there is also going to be one that adds a bunch of soft forks and.
1:13:26I don't know it's hard like I'm not sure if Satoshi is dead or whatever. No it doesn't matter but at the same time you can also argue that you're just kicking the can further down the line because quantum resistance is not like something final right you're always going to have more powerful quantum computers that can crack the signatures. In the future so therefore you're going to have to fork once again to mitigate this risk so it's something that you're going to have to do like every 30 40 years maybe so I don't know which one I would choose because it's very delicate.
1:14:15I'm still not sold on either approach but I would not say that something that takes Satoshi's coins and gives them to the miners is inherently bad but it opens up Pandora's box for a lot of other types of confiscation like it's an ugly precedent. But a network I've been thinking about this like a network that has a rule where if you don't move your coins in 20 years then they're going to become mining rewards is not that bad it just means that you have to do a transaction every 20 years.
1:14:52AbdelYeah but then those like they are very arbitrary rules and where do you put the limit and so on so it hard but I see what you mean but look you know we already have with the filter war escalation crazy measures about confiscating stuff.
1:15:10Vlad CosteaYeah, yeah, yeah. There's someone who proposed something that's not OP_CAT, it's the Cat.
1:15:14AbdelThe Cat, yes, exactly.
1:15:15Vlad CosteaSome people are convinced that this is actually AI slop.
1:15:18AbdelYes.
1:15:19Vlad CosteaLike, written by some sort of AI. The proposal says that basically all UTXOs smaller than 1,000 satoshis should basically get frozen or confiscated so they cannot be spent. And this diminishes the value proposition of Ordinals and also encourages node runners to have like a smaller UTXO set that they're storing and validating. And I think it's stupid and it's just an ugly precedent for confiscating people's coins. That's the endgame.
1:15:54I think that basically this is like the small and seemingly innocent way of getting to Satoshi's coins because a lot of institutions this is my second conspiracy theory okay. So I believe that these institutions that invest in Bitcoin are afraid that Satoshi's coins can crash the market if they ever enter exchanges so they want to do their best to make sure that they never hit the market. And if they never hit the market then they're fine their investment thesis remains unchanged. But how do you do that first you need to basically stick it very gently and get people used to the idea that, you know, Bitcoin is not unconfiscatable.
1:16:39First we were saying that Bitcoin is censorship resistant and now we say well let's add filters and censor the transactions that we don't like. And after we sort of had this fight inside of the community and we were divided by our approach to it. Let's also try to break another axiom or it's not even an axiom it's like a social agreement on Bitcoin that it's unconfiscatable and you cannot take away somebody's money. And they say well they're just dust UTXOs they can barely pay a transaction fee and blah blah blah if the blocks get filled with more transactions you're not going to be able to move them anyway and let's stop the spammers because it's part of someone's holy crusade.
1:17:29It's just silly I don't even know why the community is stuck debating this it should be just laughed at and we should move on to more serious things but we're not. We're just I don't know for some reason for the past year Bitcoin has been stuck. We were so close like I remember last year there was almost consensus for OP_CAT, and there was almost consensus for CTV.
1:17:50AbdelExactly.
1:17:54Vlad CosteaEveryone agreed that, oh, we're gonna go forward, Great Script Restoration, super nice idea, let's have it. And then we ended up with this situation with Knotzis versus Coretards.
1:18:08AbdelYeah actually that's why I honestly like I'm not laughing at your conspiracy theory because it's exactly my point. I also think the same like the ones that benefit from this is the store of value maxis, literally the guys that don't care about P2P cash, all the Michael Saylor, all those guys they benefit a lot from status quo no change at all. And like potentially as you said planting the seed of those crazy ideas that could change even like some stuff that were like impossible to even challenge like two years ago like confiscating stuff and so on.
1:18:47And now it seems more and more normal to discuss that but no it should not. So I think it's a I can buy this conspiracy theory to be honest like they benefit the most from it. Yeah and it's so frustrating as you said there was a lot of momentum about covenants and very interesting stuff moving forward in the right direction and this bullshit stuff completely killed all the momentum so it's extremely frustrating.
1:19:17Vlad CosteaBut at the same time this goes back to my point about the role that Zcash is playing right now. It's like where the builders are going and I'm not exaggerating there are a bunch of people who got fed up and they said I'm not going to work on Bitcoin anymore because it's so exhausting. I'm just going to build it here and I'm going to prove that it's good and maybe that Bitcoin will revisit the idea when they say that when they observe that it has users and it gains traction.
1:19:45And it's unfortunate but it's part of the game theory right like when when you're really trying to get a girl and she ignores you you talk to her friend.
1:19:54AbdelYeah I agree with you I see exactly what you mean I would not say I agree but I see where you're coming from. It's a valid strategy it is a strategy for sure. I'm just worried a bit, because I actually spoke with some people they told me exactly the same. I'm just worried that if we all do that without being honest about the fact that we do that because we want in the end to improve Bitcoin people might not get the message and they will think Bitcoin is not the best hope we have which I believe is the case still.
1:20:30Do you see what I mean? Like I'm just worried about the message being lost in frustration because I do feel that with some people and myself even I'm doing the same strategy to be completely transparent and honest. I'm also doing that. I was discussing with Zooko I told him look it's also a way to say guys you don't embrace ZK on Bitcoin and so on look what can happen on Zcash if you are not paying attention those builders can go on Zcash and so on. So I'm just worried about the message being lost in translation but I do understand the strategy and unconsciously or consciously myself I'm also doing it in a way.
1:21:11That's also for a reason that I made the same proposal the same day on both trying to compare the reactions and stuff like that. I just want to be more honest about what we really want and I think you want the same as well is to improve Bitcoin and we are just frustrated and pissed off. And we want like we are thinking about more drastic measures to make people wake up on Bitcoin and not become complacent or not being satisfied with the store of value only narrative and stuff like that.
1:21:53Vlad CosteaBut you have to agree that it sucks to spend so much time asking for permission and trying to get people to understand what you're doing and they just dismiss it as a default mindset. They're not even considering what you're presenting. If you come up with a better presentation or a better proposal or better code it doesn't change their minds and that's the frustrating part. You do need to prove it somewhere. Of course we're not going to live forever. That's what Vitalik thinks about himself but most of us we're not going to live forever we're just going to have limited lifetime and it's good to release stuff as opposed to just keeping it as a proposal.
1:22:35But what I want to mention I've also name-dropped Vitalik. Basically I think it was the same with Ethereum which was also proposed for Bitcoin. Initially it was supposed to be a protocol just like Omni or Counterparty and they realized okay this is not going anywhere let's just launch a new network.
1:22:58AbdelWhy would you build an L2 where the people on the L1 dismiss you they don't care about you?
1:23:04Vlad CosteaIn the beginning it was super friendly. If you look at the website of Ethereum.org you're going to find that in 2016 or something they had this cartoon of Bitcoin and Ethereum shaking hands. Being like you know it's like a sidechain with its own token. It adds smart contracting and other features that Bitcoin does not have. Of course the culture has evolved to the point where there was an incentive for holders of the ETH token to try to maximize their holding and say well this is better than Bitcoin and Bitcoin is useless look we can tokenize Bitcoin on Ethereum game over Bitcoin blah blah blah.
1:23:43But at the same time I can also argue that the fact that Ethereum exists has done a lot of good for Bitcoin. On the development side on the regulation side because they had money to pay lobbyists to look the other way for a while. And they also right now are trying to be part of this privacy is normal campaign and they're trying to add privacy to Ethereum which I think is very bold. It's something that we're still afraid to talk about in Bitcoin and they're just going headfirst saying yeah let's let's do it let's defend the Tornado Cash developers.
1:24:21That's something that I admire about the project even if it did not have the fair launch that we like in Bitcoin. It sort of helped Bitcoin in lots of ways and I think Zcash is the same like when I interviewed Zooko I could understand that this guy is a Bitcoiner waiting for validation. He still wants Greg Maxwell to say yeah man you're great he still wants Adam Back to acknowledge that he did a very good job. It's just that he doesn't get it and for a long time he was I guess characterized as a scammer as someone who just tried to make more Bitcoin and blah blah blah.
1:24:59He delivered a lot more than the initial proposal for Zerocash was presenting. He was able to move the protocol way beyond that. To be honest I think that Josh Swihart is a much better leader and CEO than Zooko. Zooko is like this guy who knows how to talk to developers but you need someone who also talks to normal people and gets them to understand why this matters. But I think Zooko is also stuck between two different sets of incentives because on one hand he wants Bitcoin to adopt the technology.
1:25:36Because this is why he started this in the first place. He was one of the biggest Bitcoin bulls, the first guy to write a blog post about Bitcoin. He onboarded the first big Bitcoin miner. Who created the first mining pool was working for him at Tahoe-LAFS, and that's Slush. And then we got Slush Pool. So he basically sent an internal email in 2010 and told people hey check out Bitcoin it's really cool. And a lot of OGs came from that email that he sent. So he did a lot of good stuff for Bitcoin.
1:26:10He wants Bitcoin to succeed and he loves it I'm pretty sure. He will tell you that he holds no Bitcoin which I don't believe. But he also wants the holders of the Zcash token to be prosperous. Because they went through a lot and it's been a very stormy ride with lots of downs and not too many ups. And now it finally seems like it's paying off and it's gonna work out and they're getting institutional recognition and they went to the SEC yesterday. And there is universal acceptance of the idea that privacy is good and normal and citizens should be able to use it at least in the US.
1:26:55And it seems like they're winning you know finally after nine years of being on a mainnet and trying to ride through this storm. They're finally winning. But I do believe that this should also have consequences on Bitcoin. And we should not forget why this started, what Zcash actually is, because it's Zerocash. Basically a hard fork of Bitcoin with the Zerocash protocol added on top. They did not do SegWit and Taproot, they just focused on the privacy aspect. And it's something that we should take a look at and consider seriously.
1:27:36And I get so mad when I see people like Saifedean just dismissing it. Saying yeah, it has a trusted setup and inflation bug and it's a shitcoin, why would I look at it? And I'm like man that's so many years ago.
1:27:52AbdelYeah, I agree with you. The only caveat I would say is that now is actually the time to prove the thesis that Zcash can be what Bitcoin should have been. As in, yes, builders are coming and so on, but I'm really willing to see if this appetite for innovation and everything like that will remain with price going up. This will be the real test because it's easy to innovate when the project is not working. As you said, until recently the project was almost dead and no one was using it, no one was talking about it.
1:28:33So it's easy to change things in those conditions. Now that there is the spotlight, that people are paying attention and so on, you start to see some new dynamic of power and ecosystem players, different entities with different incentives and so on. You have some Zcash DATs with Gemini and Cypherpunk, blah, blah, blah. You have different ecosystem players, you have newcomers, new big champions like Mert and those guys and whatnot. So I'm curious to see if this appetite for innovation and this would remain or if we will go slowly towards like more ossification.
1:29:13No, don't touch it, don't touch it because prices going up. Why would you change anything now and so on? So it's time to prove the thesis that Zcash could be what Bitcoin should have been on that front. And it's a good test for me. And I'm waiting to see, I'm observing a lot of direction of people and I was actually discussing that with Zooko. And I think that even him starts to be worried about that, about will we continue to see appetite for innovation, sufficient pace of upgrades and whatnot, as opposed to people like now focusing on price going up and being worried about changing anything on Zcash.
1:30:00So it's a good time to test and validate those things that Zcash community was bragging about and so on. Because to me, yes, it's when you are more successful that you can actually test those convictions for real. Because when the project is dead, it's easy to change anything as frequently as you want.
1:30:22Vlad CosteaI actually have an interesting question in the chat from Moonsettler. But before that, I forgot to plug two ads and I apologize to the sponsors. I'm late with them, it's been 90 minutes into the episode. It is what it is. Okay, NoOnes.com, peer-to-peer exchange that aims to empower the Global South. It's sort of shaped around the personality of CEO Ray Youssef, who is best known for Paxful. He was the CEO there before he left and decided that a business that's based in the US does not serve necessarily the interests of the users.
1:30:57He started something which is focused entirely on onboarding people from Africa, from South America and the Middle East. That's sort of his focus group. And he has a spot exchange. You also find a peer-to-peer marketplace for gift cards and also coins. And they also have a debit card for spending if you're into that. The URL is noones.com. And it's a very interesting platform for peer-to-peer Bitcoiners. Sort of like LocalBitcoins on steroids. This is the way that I like to describe it, but also with a mission.
1:31:37Like it's not just about people trading, it's also about giving coins to those who actually need them to escape the realities of their regime. Where maybe a 10% volatility is nothing compared to their fiat currency. And there's also, last but not least, SideShift, which is not ShapeShift as a lot of people seem to make a confusion in their minds. SideShift is the website where you go and you swap something that you have for something that you want a lot more. The case that I usually present is that in a bull market you don't want to hold on to stablecoins.
1:32:14First of all because they're not censorship resistant. Secondly because the other asset might go up. So if someone wants to pay you on stablecoins, you just send them the address from SideShift where you also put your BTC address. And there's gonna be a swap in the middle. You just receive Bitcoin to your wallet and you don't have to worry about all of this gas situation where you have to get Tron or Ethereum or whatever just to pay gas. You just get what you want directly into your wallet.
1:32:46But in a situation where maybe that you think that the price of Bitcoin is gonna go down and you want to diversify or something, or hedge in stablecoins, you can also do it the other way around. The URL is sideshift.ai, which is S-I-D-E-S-H-I-F-T dot A-I.
1:33:05Thank you very much to all the sponsors. Now the comment in the chat from Moonsettler. He says, "Hard fork would be more efficient. Where the f did you get that, Vlad?" And this was in the context of migrating for quantum resistance.
1:33:25AbdelYeah so he agrees with you and I actually also agree more and more now. After talking more about it and spending more time to think about it. Also because as you said potentially it's an opportunity to bundle with other stuff that would be impossible or much harder to do with soft forks only. So I need to think more about it but it's a very good argument. The fact that we can take it as an opportunity to maybe also bundle with other painful stuff that would be much easier to do with a hard fork.
1:34:06I think it's an interesting argument. Also again what can influence my perspective is the timeline we have of the threat to be real and serious but that we don't know. So it's hard to plan in advance because of this uncertainty of the timeline. And also as we said before the fact that even if we implement solutions today they come with an overhead and it comes with a price or something that we don't know when it will become a real threat. I don't know it's I need to think more about it but at least I really like what you said the argument of like potentially bundling with other stuff.
1:34:52Vlad CosteaTo me because I'm a nerd I think it would be also interesting to observe if you leave behind a network that's 100% vulnerable to quantum attacks and you migrate to another one which is quantum resistant. You can see how the quantum computers are actually attacking and observe the patterns and get some information there. Like is it happening in the way that we expect? Which are the first addresses that are targeted? What's really happening there? And this can give us a lot of useful information because quantum resistance is not something final that's one and done.
1:35:31It's something that you have to pursue every I don't know how many years it's gonna take but there's gonna be another fork for quantum resistance in the future. Maybe that we're gonna be dead by then and it's gonna be our children fighting about it. But I still think it's useful to have this kind of information and observe on something that maybe is still listed on exchanges but valued as I don't know one dollar per token or something. And let the quantum computers break it so we can see what's really happening while we already migrated to Noah's Ark, you know?
1:36:12AbdelYeah, it's interesting.
1:36:20No, I cannot say it. I will write you about it later. About something you said that is very funny.
1:36:30Vlad CosteaOh really?
1:36:31AbdelYeah, yeah, yeah.
1:36:32Vlad CosteaI should change my job, become a comedian.
1:36:37AbdelNo, no, it's not funny, it's funny that it's... yeah, you will understand. You said one thing that is one of my current focus right now, but I cannot share it now.
1:36:53Vlad CosteaYeah. Anyway, I do think that hard forking is cleaner in this situation. Yeah. It's a more easy to understand approach. You're migrating to another network that has these features. And if you're getting left behind, you're gonna lose your coins. And it's better to do this early. If you're gonna soft fork, it's more messy because it's also confusing. Like you're gonna be on the same network and you're gonna see news about the soft fork that upgrades to quantum-resistant signatures. And then you're gonna have to move your coins to addresses that support them.
1:37:34But some users will think, ah, we sort of prevented the risk. I don't have to do anything. And then they're gonna lose their coins. I think that's a risk that's not really worth taking. But there's also the risk where the users don't migrate to the hard fork. But they can always claim their UTXO. They always have that option. Even if they forget about it.
1:38:00AbdelYeah, that's a good point. It's a better way to have a wake up call for people to act on time.
1:38:17Vlad CosteaI mean, of course, I understand that the culture of Bitcoin is very much pro soft fork. And everything that you can do with a hard fork, you can do with a soft fork. And it's less contentious. But I think everyone can agree that quantum computing is bad for Bitcoin. And the threat is not something that we should just take lightly.
1:38:39AbdelI agree.
1:38:40Vlad CosteaPlus, you know, Satoshi left us this network. It doesn't mean that it has to be the final form of Bitcoin. What Bitcoin is, is something that we all agree on. It's not this one network that's very buggy and frustrates developers. We can have like a rewrite that's more elegant.
1:39:03AbdelYeah, I tend to agree with that.
1:39:09Vlad CosteaYeah. But basically what I described right now in the minds of a lot of people is an altcoin. They're gonna say, yeah, you just created an altcoin. And maybe that I agree, it is an altcoin. Because people want like the original chain. They want that provenance. They want to say, well, this goes back to 2009 and it remained unchanged. But I can go back to the...
1:39:33AbdelAh, you did not have this part. Okay, then I don't agree. Yes. I mean, if you are saying that, yes, we could do like more drastic changes and so on and some hard forks. But I think it's not incompatible with keeping the provenance and whatnot and keeping the same chain. And we can still do like very useful stuff, including like having real client diversity, more implementations and whatnot. But without losing this property. Yeah.
1:40:17Vlad CosteaYeah, it's very delicate. I don't think there's like an elegant solution that makes everyone happy. But there should be something that makes everyone secure. That lets anyone claim their coins. I think that that should be the priority of this. Yeah, because if you're just allowing a small subset of users to become resistant to quantum and some coins will be stolen because of user negligence or something, we're not really accomplishing much.
1:40:57But once again, there's no we. There's this vague concept of consensus, which I don't know what that means anymore. We sort of had consensus for CTV, we sort of had consensus for OP_CAT. At some point there was consensus that Bitcoin is going to increase the block size in 2016 or something. So I don't know.
1:41:20AbdelYeah, the "we" is not clear. The notion of consensus itself is vague, for sure. And it will be harder and harder as we get more people. Again, as we said earlier, the more people you have, the harder it gets to come across to some changes and get consensus on those stuff. So that's also a sufficient reason to be able to improve and fix things where we can still manage to get some consensus and do the changes. And that's why also I think more and more that the store of value maxis are a big risk right now today, and that we should fight those.
1:42:09Vlad CosteaWell, it's hard to fight them when they're making everyone rich. But the funny part is that, I don't remember when I said this, but I've said it before, it becomes a problem when you get good news and they don't affect the price positively. Like Michael Saylor announcing that he just bought a large amount of Bitcoin. This used to move the market, now the market is immune to that. So if the bad news are still bringing the price down, but the good news are not affecting the price, we have a problem.
1:42:46And it means that we need a different kind of good news that we're not really having. And are we not really having any sort of interesting development? I think I might be wrong here, but I think that the 2017 and the 2021 bull markets were also fueled by some technological breakthroughs. It wasn't just institutional hype. There was something there. There was the hope. So for example, in 2017, it was all about the scaling wars and also Ethereum becoming a major player. That's when they started getting taken seriously.
1:43:24I think that's what's happening to Zcash right now also. Ethereum took a lot of developers from Bitcoin and had some use cases and people were experimenting with it. And that was exciting at the time. The ICOs and the DAOs and whatever was happening at the time, that was unprecedented. So it led to a bull market. But on the Bitcoin side, there was also SegWit and the promise of the Lightning Network that was making a lot of people hopeful. In 2021, it was actually the fact that, of course, people will say, yeah, people in the pandemic, they got bored and they started buying stuff.
1:44:07But that's not entirely true. There was a lot of building on the Lightning side, and I think that was the most optimistic year for Lightning. It seemed like everything's coming together and we're going to have a great future for Lightning. Lots of applications, lots of wallets, lots of nodes. I was also running a node at the time, and I know the energy that was in the space around the time. And then slowly it started to fade with people saying, well, you shouldn't validate Lightning transactions on a Raspberry Pi.
1:44:41You're slowing down the network. You're a slow router. Just turn off and use an LSP. And I think that that whole movement to become more centralized and efficient is what killed the adoption and the enthusiasm for the technology. And people moved on.
1:45:00AbdelYeah, for sure. Lightning became more like some kind of B2B tech, where it's used mostly as an interop layer between different systems. This is kind of the new narrative of Lightning, which is like the global language of the Bitcoin economy. People are using it as an interop layer. Like, for example, between Cashu and Liquid and all the sidechains and whatnot, or Ark and whatever, they are all using Lightning as an interop layer. But it's not anymore seen as something like for the retail to use for day-to-day payments and stuff like that.
1:45:37Also related to the fact that there are challenges for normies to get self-custodial Lightning. As you said, channel management, running your node and whatnot, those are not easy for normies. And those are adoption barriers that also contributed to make Lightning more like a B2B settlement or interop layer between various scaling solutions, rather than a direct means of payment for retail, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah.
1:46:15Vlad CosteaSpeaking of the devil and institutional adoption, I just got a message from David Bailey and he wants to do a podcast tonight. I don't know what tonight means in his U.S. terms, maybe that's going to be in 12 hours or something, but I'm excited.
1:46:33AbdelNice. That's going to be a fun one. Tell him to put his Bitcoin on Starknet for BTCFi if he wants to generate yield for his Bitcoin treasury company.
1:46:44Vlad CosteaYeah, I still don't get this. Like, you start a business whose only business is to own Bitcoin and to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. And you're like, so what's the business? Are you creating a product or service or something?
1:46:58AbdelYeah, there is a lot of controversy right now with Jack Mallers because he's saying, no, we are not just a traditional Bitcoin treasury company. And some people are asking, but then what is the business? And there is no clear answer right now on that. So I'm also curious to see like, how would it differ from like MicroStrategy or whatever Bitcoin treasury company? I have mixed feelings about those. Like on one hand, I think like the Bitcoin standard means that every company at some point will be a Bitcoin treasury company.
1:47:32That's for sure. And I think Adam Back is saying that and I think I tend to agree with that. That if we live on the Bitcoin standard, it means that all companies become Bitcoin treasury companies. But right now it's more like speculative instrument. And also some people unfortunately see that as a way to get exposure to Bitcoin rather than buying Bitcoin directly. And that's bad. So this is not my definition of a Bitcoin standard company. I think Bitcoin standard company is more a company that will use Bitcoin for its financial operations, paying salaries of their employees, receiving Bitcoin as payments from their customers, paying with Bitcoin, their services and whatnot.
1:48:17It's more what I want to see in the future of Bitcoin standard companies and not just investment vehicles like that that we have right now. But yeah, I'm curious to see the shift and if we can hope for something better.
1:48:36Vlad CosteaTo me, all of this treasury company shilling reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld where they pitch a show to NBC and they say it's a show about nothing. And they're like, well, what do you mean nothing? What does nothing mean? Well, you just have people in their daily life and they do stuff like, how is that a show? How is that interesting? Why would anyone watch that? It's the same, like it's a business that does nothing. And you're like, well, what do you mean it does nothing?
1:49:06AbdelI don't know this episode, but it's a funny analogy. Yeah. Yeah.
1:49:12Vlad CosteaOh, are you a Friends kind of guy? You like Friends more than Seinfeld?
1:49:19AbdelI watched a bit of Friends, but not that much. I'm just an anime guy. Aside from manga and anime, I don't watch a lot of stuff.
1:49:31Vlad CosteaOh, I love your Goku profile picture, but I got to tell you, I've watched Seinfeld over like six months every episode while having lunch. And it's so good. Like, I don't regret anything.
1:49:44AbdelOkay. Interesting. Maybe I should...
1:49:47Vlad CosteaIt's really good.
1:49:48AbdelYeah? Okay.
1:49:51Vlad CosteaIt gives you... it's so ahead of its time and it gives you insights on some social situations which are actually true and are happening. And that's like what gets you when what attracts you towards watching the show.
1:50:06AbdelInteresting. Maybe you should consider like for each of your podcast episodes, like to associate it with one episode of the show and do some analogy on something that reminded you, like, for example, we had an example right now with Bitcoin Treasury Company that reminded you about something you saw in one episode.
1:50:26Vlad CosteaYeah, I don't know. We're not that interesting, to be honest. No offense, but what's happening in that show is always wacky. And it's like, you know, very active in terms of social life. And we're just nerds. We just argue about lines of code.
1:50:45It's not like someone parks their car outside and someone drops like a bag on it and we get angry because of it.
1:50:54AbdelNo, I agree. But the implications of those nerdy discussions, they are huge, like if we manage to get it done, like the impact on the world will be crazy. And it has like, deep societal impact on everything, like the notion of freedom, sovereignty. Those are things that people will start to understand more and more. As we said, like in Europe, the killing of freedom and safety and the lack of trust in our governments and currencies and whatnot. So we are building the foundations of a big societal shift.
1:51:31And I think it will affect, like, everyone's lives in the future, no matter what. So yeah.
1:51:37Vlad CosteaSo let me ask you this. If you had a magic wand right now and you could perform magic to change Bitcoin and everyone's node and everyone running the software would agree with it. What would be that one change?
1:51:54AbdelOnly one?
1:51:55Vlad CosteaOnly one. Has to be one.
1:51:58AbdelHas to be one.
1:52:04Okay. So yeah, look, of course, I'm a bit biased. But if I'm thinking about the common denominator, that can enable most of the things I would want to see for Bitcoin, I would say it's ZK verification. Because as we said before, it's useful for quantum, for privacy, for scaling. It seems too good to be true, but enabling ZK, efficient ZK on Bitcoin can actually unlock so many cool stuff. We improve Bitcoin as P2P cash. Again, I'm not talking about adding new use cases and whatnot. Even if you care only about monetary use cases and P2P cash, this is very useful for that.
1:52:50So if I can choose only one, I would say native ZK verification because yeah, I believe it can bring a lot. But let's say I was not working on ZK stuff and I'm not allowed to do something with ZK specifically. I would choose privacy, but it would require some kind of ZK. So I'm fucked. I would say ZK, efficient ZK verification on Bitcoin.
1:53:22Vlad CosteaAlso, I should start asking this question more because I see it as a way to undo some of the damage that toxic maximalism has done in making some projects look less legitimate. Because we see that 99.9% of altcoins are scams, which might be true. But the question is, what's the other 0.1%?
1:53:45AbdelYes, you mean the calculation, it means that there are 20 legitimate projects or something like that, if I remember correctly, I saw you mentioned.
1:53:53Vlad CosteaYeah, but can you name like three or five or whatever? A small amount that you think, you know, you look at them and they're definitely legit. There's nothing scammy about them.
1:54:04AbdelOkay, so, okay, let me clarify my definition of what I will mean by legit to avoid any confusion. In all the projects I will name, none of them are projects that I could consider a competitor on Bitcoin, or a substitute to Bitcoin, etc. I want to be crystal clear on that. It's very important to me. So I will consider some projects that are legitimate if I think the people that are working on them, they are like legit, and they are not scammers, and they are mission driven, and they are building serious tech that is innovative or serious or could be useful to Bitcoin. Okay, that's my definition of legit.
1:54:48Yeah. Then I can include Zcash. I'm fine including Zcash in that. Finally, Ethereum, of course, I'm fine including Ethereum. Even if I don't consider it as an alternative to Bitcoin at all. I cannot name Starknet. So I will make the effort of not naming Starknet. Even if of course, I believe we are building legit tech that can be beneficial to Bitcoin. So Zcash, Ethereum, Aztec, I will name Aztec because they're like very mission driven focused and they were working heavily on privacy before it was cool. And willing to take the risk to work only on privacy before it was cool again. So it's very cool and they're building useful tech and whatnot. And the team is serious. Okay. Aside from that, oh, of course, like some serious BitVM projects, like Citrea and Alpen Labs. So yeah, it's fine already.
1:56:01Vlad CosteaYeah, but they don't have coins of their own. They don't have a token.
1:56:06AbdelAh, you want specifically projects with... ah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, yeah, okay.
1:56:16Vlad CosteaLike you can't look at Citrea and call it a shitcoin with a straight face.
1:56:20AbdelYeah, but it's true. But the only thing is that some people are saying that even if they don't have a token, which is insane, you do see like some people that are saying that they are shitcoiners, scammers and whatnot, and they don't even have a token. So it's insane. Okay. Yeah, I think that's about it in the projects that come to mind directly without too much effort. Yeah. But like, I can say yes, no, if you have some ideas of names, maybe. If you want to bring a few names and I can give you mine.
1:56:59Vlad CosteaI have a few listeners who like Monero, for example. I have a few listeners who like Kaspa, which is different from Bitcoin. It uses a different architecture.
1:57:08AbdelYeah, so let me address them one by one. Monero, yes, legit, for sure. Legit because it's like very cypherpunk by nature, but not as an alternative to Bitcoin, again, to be clear. And ah, the problem lately is that I don't really like their reaction to Zcash success lately. But I cannot blame like a whole project for like the behavior of some individuals that, so yes, I can include Monero in the legit projects. Yes. Put it simply, Kaspa, the problem is that Kaspa is too much into saying that it's a better Bitcoin, as opposed to Monero that I think like, is more like as bringing something that Bitcoin doesn't have, but without saying that it's a better Bitcoin or whatever.
1:58:03You see what I mean? The distinction between the two. To me, like, Kaspa is more like sold as like better Bitcoin, which is something that I don't like.
1:58:17Vlad CosteaWell, technically it's like Bitcoin without the blockchain. It uses the so-called DAG, which is entirely different. I think to be honest, it's ahead of its time. Like there's not much demand for that amount of blocks and transaction validation. And it's still at this point, a solution that's searching for a real problem to solve. So far, even something like Litecoin is good enough for users and was never really challenged to have like full blocks and a lot of transactions. By the way, what do you think about Litecoin? This one is divisive usually.
1:58:57AbdelLitecoin? No, I will not put it in the legit category. I don't think it is bringing any meaningful value to the world. Yeah.
1:59:07Vlad CosteaThat's interesting because it has the fair launch, right?
1:59:10AbdelYes, yes, yes. But now today, like in terms of things that I think would be useful for Bitcoin in the future, like I don't see anything meaningful.
1:59:19Vlad CosteaThey also took a bold turn and decided to diverge from Bitcoin with the MimbleWimble extension block, which is something that Andrew Poelstra proposed in 2016, if I'm not mistaken. So they built that thinking that it's going to be just like SegWit and Bitcoin is going to adopt it, except that MimbleWimble, even though it scales better, it's not as good as ZK-SNARKs.
1:59:47AbdelRight. So that's the interesting part about it. Yeah, but I don't think it's meaningful. So no, I will not include Litecoin. Yeah.
2:00:00Vlad CosteaYou should see my mentions every time I say something nice about Zcash. I have three Monero guys insulting me. Yeah, I know. I have a Litecoin guy saying, yeah, but we have the fair launch. And then there are like five Kaspa guys saying, wait a second, you spoke with our leader, who is Yonatan Sompolinsky. He's like, you spoke with our leader for seven hours and you still talk about something else? That's not Kaspa? Like, man, I get it. But you have to be real about the usefulness of technology.
2:00:33Like I understand it's really cool. There's a lot of interesting stuff out there, but not all of it is going to become adopted by the mainstream. And we the point of having altcoins was always to have the free market choose the best approach. Right. And also test stuff that's too early for Bitcoin. And I think what Zcash has been doing for nine years in testing ZK-SNARKs and refining them to remove the trusted setup and making them more scalable and making mobile wallets work. That's something that is going to be part of Bitcoin history, but not at this point where we are culturally allergic to telling stories about success that happened outside of the Bitcoin network.
2:01:25But I think in the future, we're going to include Zcash, we're going to include Ethereum as something that's successful. Ethereum started out as Bitcoin 2.0. That was the concept back in 2014 with finance people saying, well, we can do more than just BTC on the blockchain.
2:01:46And we've come a long way. Like, we have to be honest about it. Nobody expected Ethereum to be this successful. Maybe some people expected Zcash to be more successful, but privacy hasn't had a justification or use case until very recently when people became more aware of it. And the technology is also much more mature right now. So we have to take that into consideration. And where do ZK-STARKs stand in this whole picture? Do you see ZK-STARKs as being complementary to Bitcoin and Zcash and Ethereum and everything else?
2:02:24Or do you think that ZK-STARKs are going to become the standard that's going to get embedded into layer ones?
2:02:34AbdelI would say I see them as a way to empower all those existing solutions and for different reasons. They don't provide the same value add on different layers. For example, in the case of Ethereum, it's mostly about scaling because you can have already programmability on the layer one. You can already build apps and whatnot. While in the context of Bitcoin and Zcash, for example, it can also bring programmability. The possibility to extend trustlessly what you can do with the asset. So building smart contracts and whatnot. So ZK-STARKs, they can empower existing layers for hard money based systems like Bitcoin or Zcash, if you want.
2:03:30They can enable scaling and programmability for systems like Ethereum. They provide mostly scaling. They can be useful to bring privacy to existing systems as well. And as we discussed before, quantum. So I see them as a great tool to empower existing stuff. And also, even more in the future, their implications and impact will go far beyond just the blockchain industry in a way. They will completely transform many, many industries beyond blockchain. All of them, I believe. Obvious one is AI, healthcare, supply chain, everything, in my opinion, will be using ZK-STARKs in the future.
2:04:23It's another zero to one. It's a new paradigm shift. It's as big as the revolution as Bitcoin was in terms of bringing a new way to bring trustless systems. But in a way that does not even require to re-execute. So it's a big transformation, revolution in the realm of verifiable computation that is so large domain that it can encapsulate every single industry. So we think that, and it's funny because it's also something that we know that it's too ahead of its time as an idea to even talk about it.
2:05:01But Eli and we are discussing a lot about the Integrity Web, something that we consider will be the future of the Internet. And we think that this future will be using mathematical proofs for everything to bring like integrity of everything. You have basically an Internet where you truly own everything, your digital identity, your digital assets and actions. And everything will be proven with mathematical proofs in the future. And because ZK-STARKs are post-quantum, scalable, they can bring privacy. I believe that they are the future and the backbone of the Integrity Web.
2:05:42And in the meantime, they can empower existing systems like transform Bitcoin as truly unstoppable P2P cash and bring privacy to it. Potentially same for Zcash and add programmability to it and this kind of stuff. So, yeah, that's my view on ZK-STARKs.
2:06:04Vlad CosteaYeah, that's bullish. I respect it.
2:06:10I'm still waiting for that use case, which has been promised by Eli. And I know that you built something like this, like a fun project. So he was at a conference in San Jose, I think it was 2013 or 2014. And he was talking about being able to sync the Bitcoin blockchain in one second just by verifying one ZK proof. And this is going to scale mobile wallets beyond the SPV that we have today, which is sort of flawed. Because you're getting information from an Electrum server that knows a lot about your transactions.
2:06:46Oh, you showed your screen. And I'm still waiting for the moment when we get to synchronize a full Bitcoin node in one second just by verifying a ZK proof.
2:06:57AbdelOK, this is your moment now. This is not just a fun project. You mentioned it's a fun project. No, it's working for real. And not in one second, in 25 milliseconds on a Raspberry Pi. This is a real STARK proof verification of the whole mainnet header chain of Bitcoin. So not the block body, to be clear. We are not yet at this stage. So we don't prove all transactions, only the block header chain. But it's the equivalent of doing the same process that you do when you first sync from the network, when you do the IBD.
2:07:34So this is for real. It works already today. And this is exactly the use case that Eli was pitching in this conference in San Jose in 2013. So it took 20 years or so to do that. But it's even more efficient than the one he thought initially, because you can do that in 25 milliseconds on a Raspberry Pi. So we wanted to do it on the Raspberry Pi to show that you have this huge breaking of asymmetry of power, because this proof, you need quite some big computation to generate it, but not even that much actually now.
2:08:12It's reasonable. It's just a GCP instance with 128 gigabytes of RAM. So it's nothing crazy, right? But you can completely break the asymmetry of power because you can have the verification on a very low device, such as the Raspberry Pi, and you still have the full guarantee of the integrity of the operations. So it's not just a fun project. And actually, we are discussing with some people to do some actual integration. So to give a few examples, I could imagine integrating these capabilities in a block explorer.
2:08:49For example, you go to mempool.space. And right now, if you go on the block explorer, it's a "trust me bro." You know, you have the data, but you have no way [to verify]. With that, imagine that on the block explorer attached to a block, you have something to verify the proof locally in your browser. And then you could verify the proof.
2:09:11So that's one example. Another example is if you integrate those features into some wallets, then you can have efficient light clients and a better SPV payment verification system. Like, you know, SPV is a way to do simple payment verification. It was described in the original Bitcoin white paper from Satoshi. But with that, the beauty of it is that the proof is self-sufficient. The proof itself has all you need to verify the inclusion of a transaction in the canonical chain. So it can be very useful to do, like, ZK light clients and to have better SPV systems.
2:09:52So this is not like... So, this works for real on mainnet. We are discussing about potential integrations in real stuff, but this could become something useful for Bitcoin already today, without any change. It does not require any change to Bitcoin for that.
2:10:10Vlad CosteaYeah, that's really cool. I look forward to wallets actually using this, as opposed to just being a small-scale experiment that someone did. Because if a Raspberry Pi can do it, your iPhone or your new generation Android phone will be able to do it much faster. And with negligible impact on your battery, because that was also something that people were concerned about when... For example, there were proposals to run your full Bitcoin node on your phone, but that was very... very... how should I put it... consuming.
2:10:47It was horrible for actually using your phone on the go, because it was draining your battery very fast. With ZK proofs, you can do it much faster. And I'm very happy that you showed that. For the people who will be listening to this on Spotify, or those who have very tiny mobile screens and were not able to distinguish what's happening there, it was your tweet from September in which you proved how you were able to synchronize 16 years of Bitcoin history in a matter of milliseconds using a Raspberry Pi and some very smart math.
2:11:25Which, by the way, we should be using. We always say in Bitcoin that we trust in math and not institutions, and not politicians, and not bankers. I don't know what you're showing there. Oh, it's your "trust me bro."
2:11:41AbdelYeah, it's an example of an explorer that will integrate this. For example, you take a block, you go there, and you imagine you can have this on mempool.space, and then you can have this button. So maybe you don't realize it, but this is the equivalent of what the Raspberry Pi did. So this is the proof verification of the whole header chain up to this block. And you can do it locally. Do you see the console or not? No, you don't see it. Anyway, because I was showing the log of the console of the STARK proof verification.
2:12:16But yeah, trust me, this process actually did the STARK proof verification in the browser. So this is just to give you a concrete example of how it could look like for real integration on the block explorer, but even better if you integrate that in wallets, as we discussed.
2:12:34Vlad CosteaYeah, this is exactly the kind of stuff that we should be using as opposed to just talking about. I don't know why it's not the standard yet.
2:12:44If you're running a wallet or something and you're listening to this, I mean, I think a good way to go forward would be to talk to OGs who have been looking into this tech for a long time, like Thomas Voegtlin from Electrum.
2:13:03AbdelElectrum is really big. Can you put me in touch with him by any chance?
2:13:11Vlad CosteaSure. Yeah, he was on my podcast. I think I still have his contact.
2:13:14AbdelOK, amazing. That would be very cool. Let's try to push forward and actually use those things. Yeah, makes sense.
2:13:22Vlad CosteaYeah, it's so cool. I think what he's going to ask you is to just write a plugin that can get added for users to choose in Electrum. So I think that's a good start. I'm not even sure what's the trendiest, like the coolest Bitcoin wallet nowadays, because I use stuff from 2017, 2018, and I don't use mobile wallets too much, to be honest. I use full nodes.
2:13:51AbdelSo, yeah, there is one that I really like, but also I know the team: Bull Bitcoin. I think they are doing a great job into abstracting complexity. And as I was explaining before, they are using, in a smart way, all those different scaling solutions, depending on the amount. And it's pretty good in terms of UX. You are not lost. Even as a normie, you have the notion of like a savings account for big amounts that is using on-chain, and then you have stuff like that. And they have also very good recovery process using encrypted cloud and stuff like that to have a very smooth recovery process for people in case they are losing their seed phrase and whatnot.
2:14:33So, yeah, if you did not try it in terms of mobile wallets, I think it's really good. They are really like hardcore, self-custodial, sovereignty maximalist, but in a good way. In a way that is friendly to the user, because usually you have tension. You either have tools that are like very sovereign, very self-custodial, but that are not friendly or the opposite. And then I think they are onto something in terms of like the best trade-offs, in terms of like full non-compromise on sovereignty and self-custodial, but still with a friendly UX.
2:15:08So, yeah, I would definitely recommend checking out Bull Bitcoin as a mobile Bitcoin wallet.
2:15:15Vlad CosteaYou should cut... I hit my microphone, sorry. You should cut this clip and send it to Bull Bitcoin with an invoice. They should pay you for it.
2:15:23AbdelYeah, Francis, if you listen, I will send it to you. So, Francis is the CEO of Bull Bitcoin.
2:15:31Vlad CosteaYeah, Francis Pouliot. He was also on the show and he hates me personally.
2:15:34AbdelAh, you're right. I'm not surprised. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We disagree, I know, on a lot of stuff.
2:15:40Vlad CosteaAnd even before that, I consider him to be a good friend as opposed to... So, he's a good friend to Rodolfo Novak, NVK from Coldcard. And when I pointed out that their firmware is not open source because they use a license which is not open source, it's source available, which is a different concept. He basically started memeing my replies and being like, you're just an idiot, you're just... I'm not gonna forget this. He just said what I'm saying is esoteric nerd talk, like stuff that nobody understands and nobody cares about.
2:16:20I was like, OK, so you value your friendship with this guy much more than the truth. And that's when I blocked him. And I wasn't, quote unquote, a shitcoiner at the time. I was more dogmatic than I am right now. But it's just that I realized that... When was that? Oh, five years ago or something.
2:16:40AbdelOh, wow. OK, a long time ago.
2:16:42Vlad CosteaYeah, so that's when I realized, OK, this guy is not honest in the way that I would like him to be. Ironically, the guy who was honest in that situation was Luke Dashjr. He's the one who basically said, wait a second, are you saying that something is open source and it's not? This is a big deal because everyone else... I don't know. It's like this person launches a company and releases a product, which is by today's standards very admirable, because nowadays people just launch companies without a product.
2:17:14But they decided that he's like the cool one and the one that should get promoted because he doesn't support any shitcoins. That was the selling pitch for Coldcard. And of course, they added some more features. And on purpose, it was never the user friendly one, not the one that you would like to actually use if you're a Bitcoiner. It has all of these quirks and inconveniences in the UX that make it very nerdy. And people take pride in actually using a Coldcard and they post pictures of it.
2:17:54But I think it's like a fashion product, much more than it's a serious security item. I'm going to get slayed for this, but security should be simple. And there's a lot of theatrics involved, like all the air gapping and stuff. It's not proven to actually help. It just makes it harder for you to spend your coins, which I guess is convenient for some people. It's much more difficult to send coins as opposed to using a Trezor or something. But I would always choose the open source code base that's most tested as opposed to something which I don't know, I'm not going to get into that conversation.
2:18:38I moved past that long ago. It's just that that's when I lost my respect for Francis. I like Bull Bitcoin and what they're doing. I don't like Francis.
2:18:46AbdelI understand. OK.
2:18:48Vlad CosteaIt's fine. I'm never going to get sponsored by Bull Bitcoin. And this name drop was possibly the only time people will hear anyone saying something positive about them on the show. Anyway, I want to thank the 1000 plus people who are here on the livestream. You guys are awesome.
2:19:08AbdelWow. OK.
2:19:10Vlad CosteaYeah, it's something. When you were sharing your screen, that was actually on the sidebar.
2:19:19I'm not sure if you noticed.
2:19:22AbdelNo, let me see.
2:19:23Vlad CosteaIt was on the sidebar with the rest of the Twitter spaces.
2:19:27AbdelOh, yeah. Oh, plus one. Yeah. OK.
2:19:31Vlad CosteaNice. We're basically competing for attention with the Wolf of All Streets. And there was something else there, like some sort of radio. Anyway, I'm really happy because this is not a great hour for people to join in. It's like morning, early morning in the US. And most of the listeners are from the US for better and worse. But yeah, I'm not sure if I have any more questions for you at this time. If you want to add something that we did not discuss, this is the time for it.
2:20:05AbdelI think we covered most of the things I wanted to discuss about, yeah.
2:20:11Vlad CosteaWhat's funny is that when you messaged me like three weeks ago or something and you said you want to join the show once again. I was thinking, what does this guy want to talk about? We already discussed most of the stuff. But things are moving fast.
2:20:26AbdelYeah, things are moving fast. And actually, I have many more things I could talk about. But the problem is that I could only do like an announcement of announcements now. So maybe, and I don't want to have you to invite me again and again. But there will be concrete stuff coming on Starknet privacy in the coming weeks and months. So at some point later, it does not have to be this format. We can also chat just on Twitter like that or personal DM. But yeah, we will have very concrete stuff coming.
2:20:59Very excited about it on the privacy front, on Starknet, on the protocol level. On the technical front, it's very, very ambitious and I'm very bullish on that. But also in terms of the product we have in mind that will leverage this. I think it will be interesting. Yeah, and I also have other stuff that are coming mostly related to some of them about the quantum stuff. But also some of them about the freedom tech in general, which is a topic I wanted to discuss a bit. But we probably don't have time anymore.
2:21:36Like talk about Nostr, BitChat and this kind of stuff and how ZK can also be helpful for that.
2:21:43Vlad CosteaLet's give it 10 minutes. It's interesting.
2:21:44AbdelOK. Yeah, sure. Yes. So I was saying earlier that ZK can be useful for many things. So, of course, Bitcoin and blockchains and whatnot. But I think like for freedom tech in general, I think it's very useful. So what is freedom tech first? For me, freedom tech is everything that can empower individuals in the quest of taking back their sovereignty and freedom. OK, that's my global definition of what freedom tech is. So it's any piece of code or tech that can empower you in this mission of taking back your sovereignty and freedom.
2:22:25And Bitcoin, I think, showed that it was possible to have an alternative system where you have code that will replace trust in institutions and stuff like that. But I think we can do much more. And we should not stop at just fixing money. Even if the impact of fixing money for the world is insane, like if you fix money, we actually solve many, many problems in the world. So I do believe in the fix the money, fix the world mantra. But I think FGU is better than NGU.
2:23:00So freedom go up. And I think that Bitcoin showed that it's possible. And we need to extend that to other important aspects of freedom. So there is money. So if you don't own your money, you are not free for sure. So Bitcoin gives us the tools to take back our sovereignty on money. That's very good. But then we need to take back sovereignty on communication. So Nostr is a great tool for that. So Nostr is what Bitcoin is to money, for communication. And also BitChat that is using Nostr and also Bluetooth mesh technology.
2:23:38And it's interesting to see where it's actually used. So I invite people to follow Calle, who is the creator of Cashu, and also BitChat. And he shared some insights about the download spikes of BitChat during certain circumstances. And usually it's in countries that are facing bad stuff. Political pressure on citizens, natural catastrophic disasters, stuff like that. So those freedom tech, they are useful for people. In Gaza also, for example, when they did not have access to internet. Those tools can empower people to communicate, which is a basic human right.
2:24:23The possibility to communicate and coordinate with other people. So freedom tech is very important for that. So I want to put more focus on trying to improve freedom tech. And I believe that zero knowledge proofs can be very useful for that. So I want to do more experimentation, combining Bitcoin, Nostr, Zcash, Cashu, BitChat, and all this freedom tech. To try to see how we can build a new world where freedom tech is the backbone of everything we build. So money, but more than money. Our communication, owning our actions, the right of privacy, of course.
2:25:05It's a continuation of the cypherpunk ideologies and stuff like that. But on a more generalized end. And I want to push more on leveraging ZK for that. That's the TLDR.
2:25:22Vlad CosteaBullish on freedom tech, and especially moon math. Yes. It seems like ZK is taking over the world. It was purely theoretical, like 10 years ago. And now we're finally getting real applications that are changing a lot of the way in which we interact with networks and protocols and communication. And it's really cool. It's amazing. If anything, I think so if anyone is listening to this and is searching for like a purpose in life or something or a new job. I think we're going to need a lot of people who are able to verify code.
2:26:00Specialists, basically. Or able to verify ZK proofs, the math behind them and the code. That would be super useful because it's like the metaphor that I use is like it's the leap from arithmetic to algebra. In arithmetic, you have numbers that you add and you subtract and it's very easy. In algebra, you have formulas that make that arithmetic more compact, smaller. You don't have to write one plus two plus three plus four plus all the numbers until 10,000. You actually have a formula that summarizes everything.
2:26:38And that's algebra. And with zero knowledge proofs, it's much more complex than just algebra. You basically reveal only the part of the formula that you want to the party with whom you're sharing information. So it gives optionality. And there is a lot of back and forth communication that happens. Basically, queries like is this the correct answer? Is this the correct answer? There's a lot of verification that happens. So I don't know where I'm going with this. I just got sucked into this ZK explanation. Oh, yeah. We need a lot of people who are able to verify it.
2:27:23Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And I think it's going to be a very well-paying job, not easy to replace by AI.
2:27:31AbdelAbsolutely. Yeah, for sure. It will be a good career path and a lot of opportunities. As ZK is hitting the world, as you said, and it's completely true, we need more and more people that can check the soundness, which is the correct term, the soundness of those systems, which is making sure that the prover will never be able to create a malicious proof and to convince the verifier of an invalid statement. So it's very important and we need more of that. I agree with you. It can be an interesting career path. Yeah.
2:28:11Vlad CosteaWhat do you think is a nice surprise word or something for people who listen up to this point and can be like a way for them to show off and say, "Hi, I've listened to the whole episode"?
2:28:23AbdelYeah, nice. I remember the last time we did Grinta and I watched in the comments, like, a few people actually watched until the end. I wanted to say FGU, but I said it many times earlier, so... Yes, I will say FGU.
2:28:46Vlad CosteaFGU, as in freedom go up. Yes. If you're listening to this, type FGU in the comments. Yes. Okay, Abdel. I was thinking we're going to talk for like 30 minutes, but we ended up extending it to two hours and a half because there's so much that's happening and this space is exciting. Don't get too obsessed with the whole Coretard versus Knotzi debate, because there is so much that's happening.
2:29:18AbdelYes, absolutely.
2:29:19Vlad CosteaAnd embrace innovation. Don't get stuck in this mindset that Bitcoin is already perfect because it's really not.
2:29:33Bitcoin is an aspiration. It's like an idea and we have to get to it. It's not like Satoshi figured everything out. Don't let a bunch of, so I think Paul Sztorc presented the best analogy for this, that people don't listen. They don't have to read research papers, but they listen to comedians on late night shows. And the comedians are not the experts. They're like the trusted people. And you trust that this person is gonna tell you what's up and what's important, and in a funny way that you can actually process what's really happening.
2:30:11And I think in Bitcoin we have a disconnect between the researchers, the people who build stuff and actually create something useful, and these figures which are telling you the memes and the jokes and whatever. Because they're not entirely honest about what's happening. And they're just selling you a narrative that everything is fine when in fact you should pay more attention to the research, but of course people don't have time for it and maybe that they listen to this podcast or another that tries to cover part of what's happening.
2:30:45But once again it's time consuming. And just one Saylor or Saifedean tweet can do a lot of damage that takes many hours of podcasting that I'm not sure how many people are gonna be listening to. So I don't know what's the solution for this, but if you're listening to this you're on the right path, you're learning. Thank you very much for it. And thank you very much Abdel, and thanks to the sponsors once again. I'm gonna name drop them in the order that you see in the bar that's scrolling at the bottom.
2:31:19LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com, Unstoppable Wallet, SideShift.ai and Bitcoin.com News. I'll see you on the next one, which I'm not sure if it's gonna be David Bailey because he has not replied, if he's doing it tonight or next week. But there's gonna be Alex Chepurnoy, I'm not sure how you pronounce this, I'm gonna ask him. But he was able, so he's building something that's called Ergo, and was able to rewrite the entire Bitcoin codebase much more efficiently. And some people say that he's really smart. I'm curious what he's got.
2:31:55AbdelInteresting.
2:31:56Vlad CosteaThank you, Abdel. Thank you very much, Abdel, and best of luck with ZK stuff, the moon math.
2:32:02AbdelThank you.
