S16 E64: Alex Chepurnoy on Ergo & Bitcoin Smart Contracts

0:47Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 16, Episode 65. No, it's 64, just like Mario. We are live with Alex Chepurnoy, who is a genius cryptographer and coder, who's like a legend in his field, followed by all of your favorite people in the space, because he was able to do some very amazing stuff, remarkable, and he has a bunch of research papers that he published. And also have to mention that this episode is sponsored by Unstoppable Wallet, SideShift.ai, Noones.com, LayerTwo Labs, and Bitcoin.com News.

1:23Welcome, Alex. It's really good to have you.

1:26Alex ChepurnoyOh, my pleasure to be here. So I'm just standing for a long time here. So I discovered Bitcoin back in February 2011, and doing development from 2013. So first around Bitcoin. Then, I believe some people share this disappointment, right? Many people around Bitcoin from 2011-12, like Amir Taaki, Vitalik. They started to explore altcoins because of some limitations in coin contractual capabilities.

2:12And so, yeah, I also got into these. And, well, I've started to explore Namecoin back in 2013. Then it used to be core developer of NXT, the first proof-of-stake cryptocurrency.

2:34But, yeah, after some years, I'm a work maximalist after working with stake for a few years. And then I also co-founded smartcontract.com along with Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, which then pivoted into Chainlink, but I left before the pivot. Then, yeah, I joined IOHK, one of the founding entities behind Cardano. And, yeah, I did a lot of papers to discover in-depth what's going on there, right? So what do we have in consensus, as well as other aspects of contractual capabilities, like clients.

3:22I covered a little bit of privacy stuff.

3:29So I helped Zcash guys, for example, was on a jury for the second grant program. Yeah, Zcash Foundation.

3:46Vlad CosteaYeah, I was looking at your Twitter. I don't know exactly why, but your microphone is cracking a bit, like there are cracking noises that come out of it. If you can switch to another one here in the meat interface, it would be nice. What I want to mention at this point is that I spoke with Yonatan Sompolinsky, the creator of Kaspa. And during our seven-hour interview, which turned out to be the second most watched of this season, he had like 60,000 views or something. Overall, he told me that you are his favorite Satoshi candidate.

4:24And the reason why he said you might be Satoshi is that you are able to do something amazing by rewriting a Bitcoin client in Haskell. And you only have like 3,200 lines of code, which according to him is something really amazing that you're able to compress all of that Satoshi code into something so small and elegant.

4:46What did you do?

4:50Alex ChepurnoyAll right, but yeah, I'm not Satoshi and I helped one journalist to find Satoshi. And hopefully Mike is better now, right? So it's cable, I believe, which is causing some issues. Yeah, there is some noise just outside, so I'm in New Delhi and there is a road from Greater Kailash to Okhla, very noisy, and my hotel is just on the road. So hopefully this noise is suppressed well, but yeah, let's see. So yeah, about Satoshi, so actually we did some work with the journalist.

5:32I've checked a lot of codes of guys like Adam Back, who is definitely not Satoshi, just by looking into the code and so on. And yeah, well, I'm pretty sure, well, actually a collective back figure, right? So probably there were some roles there. So one guy did the code and another white paper and forum posts. So, and yeah, I'm pretty sure one of them was Hal Finney, but I'm not sure Hal Finney did most of the code actually.

6:21So yeah, that's my theory and well, I think it's perfect to have multiple theories, right, about anonymity of Bitcoin.

6:34And about rewriting and so on. So that's just, you know, about discipline. So you're constantly iterating our, basically the same concepts here to get deeper and deeper, often rewriting, formulating in a form of code, then rewriting and so on, finding maybe more elegant solutions and so on. Actually, how I discovered Bitcoin, so peer-to-peer networks enthusiasts even before and also distributed systems engineer. And so I've searched through different peer-to-peer networks back then.

7:23There were a lot of them of different kinds and yeah, this Bitcoin it's designed, so it was quite absurd, you know, from the first look because it's not distributed system, it's fully replicated, right?

7:38So you're replicating the same data structure, how all the peers in the network and yeah, from a distributed engineer point of view, that's quite disastrous from the first look. And I spent a few years to come up with a better design to understand that, well, actually for a Bitcoin purpose, this is the best design, right? And that's why I believe we have a lot of proof of stake, right, and other consensus protocols around. So, well, engineers are coming into the space without realizing what's the desiderata here, why Bitcoin design is made in such a way.

8:29So they're doing some work, right, without discovering first, well, what's the goal. And that's why we have a lot of consensus protocols, right, which are quite different and not achieving Bitcoin goals. So now we have such, well, very different from peer-to-peer networks designs as Solana and so on. So yeah, I'm not quite fond of all those solutions, right? Let's get to non-existent problems in the first place. But yeah, often these days, people are doing these consensus protocols also to dump tokens, right, after all, which is another topic.

9:21So yeah, it wasn't the case back then. So around mid-2010, so people were quite honest, they tried to do different consensus protocols, proof of work, proof of stake, and so on, right? And I believe they were not so greedy after all, right? And these days, well, it seems it's just about doing tokens and dumping them on retail, unfortunately.

9:54Vlad CosteaYeah, so you're advancing very fast with the conversation, and I really want to talk about Ergo, what it is and what it accomplishes. But I just want to understand, back in 2011, when you discovered Bitcoin, what was it that attracted you to it? Was it the idea of peer-to-peer electronic money that you can send to anyone? Was it the promise that you can actually do much more with it and build contracts and use some of the upcodes in doing stuff that maybe was not considered by Satoshi?

10:26Alex ChepurnoyAll right, so how I discovered Bitcoin, it was our Twitter, so I found Bitcoin Foundation Twitter, accidentally. I believe because I was in that bubble already, right, in peer-to-peer related stuff by Twitter. So I discovered it's a Bitcoin Foundation.

10:49Vlad CosteaIs that because you're Russian and you guys, just like us Romanians, love torrenting stuff? So you're looking for peer-to-peer technologies to be able to bypass restrictions from your government?

11:03Alex ChepurnoyNot quite. So actually, yeah, BitTorrent was popular, right? Because, yeah, nobody loves to pay for content in Russia. Well, back then especially, but then, yeah, also I was maybe quite lazy guy, right? So when you are distributed system engineer, so you need to take care of server. So my idea was, you know, to, well, just write some code.

11:44Vlad CosteaAlex, what you're saying right now is muted for some reason. It's almost like there's a louder sound that covers your voice.

11:53Alex ChepurnoyOh, I don't know. Maybe I'll start again. Not sure. So, yeah, as an engineer, I was lazy, right? So the idea of mine was to have more peer-to-peer designs to take care less about servers, right? So when you have somewhat true flat peer-to-peer networks, it's serverless, right? So then you don't bother about servers. So that also was motivation to get deeper. But that's Bitcoin Foundation Twitter. It was crazy back then. Unfortunately, it's not the case now with banksters taking control over Bitcoin. But back then, like every tweet was about, you know, central banks will disappear in 10 years.

12:45So everything on Bitcoin. So that was crazy enough to attract my attention. So I started to read and, you know, the very original idea. So it was before smart contracts. Smart contracts, I believe, was the first wave of enlightenment. Let's say around Bitcoin, mass enlightenment. But the first wave was about money without central bank, right? So now maybe not so many people pay attention. But it's already, you know, absolutely crazy and groundbreaking idea, right? When you can have money without trusted party.

13:33When emission is controlled just by algorithm, right?

13:38And well, it's not defined by any party in the system, how many money would be issued, right? So that was quite revolutionary, I believe. Even that idea was enough back then to attract many people into Bitcoin.

14:02Vlad CosteaYeah, when I spoke with Amir, he told me that basically when he joined Bitcoin, a lot of the people who were developing on Bitcoin were interested in smart contracts and being able to build them and trying to figure out ways in which they can use this technology to build smart contracts. He told me that, for example, Pieter Wuille was like the most proficient and most active over the years developer in Bitcoin. He was very interested in this idea of contracts. And I guess the fact that we got Taproot is still like a leftover from that mindset where they were trying to figure out different ways to build contracts.

14:45So to me, it's interesting. You got attracted by the idea of replacing central banks because it seemed sort of crazy and you also had a background in peer-to-peer networking and distributed systems. But what was it that made you stay? Because that's the other trick, right? Because you discover it, you're like, oh, this is cool. And then maybe you just move on. Because when I first discovered Bitcoin, I just thought it's sort of a stupid idea. And I did not pay too much attention to it.

15:19Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so I started to read and why I got stick to Bitcoin and then cryptocurrency in general and still around. I believe because there are a lot of problems to solve, right? When we are talking about money without central bank, right? So what is Bitcoin as an asset about when we are talking about money? So as early as 2010, people realized that as electronic cash, it may be not so suitable option, right?

16:08And now it's evolved into digital gold, which is not surprising at all. But then about contracts, I believe the very basic needs here is to have a possibility to do monetary expansion in trust-minimized way, right?

16:31But I've come to all those definitions after many years of reading in things like, well, different research in cryptocurrencies, cryptography, as well as monetary systems, monetary theories, and so on. So I see if you have for digital gold, well, it's not working well as cash, right? I mean, for example, if you have in your pocket, one BTC and well, what's the equivalent now like 90,000 USD, right? And you have to buy a house, for example, then if you are not stupid, so you would pay, you would spend fiat, right?

17:24Because why to spend Bitcoin, a deflationary asset, right? When you can spend fiat garbage instead, because, well, it's depreciating our fiat. I mean, and Bitcoin is appreciating. So that's what's making Bitcoin not so good as digital cash, right? When you have other option, it's better to spend another option. So then what's Bitcoin is good for currency in general, I believe that is, well, unstoppable kind of digital gold, right?

18:14Well, but if it's private for sure, like Monero, Zcash, right? Then you can transfer it. Well, without attention.

18:26But if we are talking about doing cash, right, so I believe it should be done on the next level. So basically, you need for those smart contracts to do trust-minimized monetary expansion, right? So to produce money, maybe of slightly worse quality than digital gold. But well, with better elasticity. So with supply meeting demand from the real world needs, right? So I believe it was motivation, but it's hard to formulate it. And it was nearly impossible back in 2010.

19:14So I believe people spent many years to realize that.

19:18Just very few people actually, because those ideas are quite complex after all. And well, monetary systems in the real world, they're also overly complex, right? So people usually don't understand, for example, how money are created in a fractional reserve-based systems by commercial banks, right? So how often people think that's a government. But yeah, most of the money is created by commercial banks, we have fractional reserves. And yeah, there are a lot of other things here, how well some banks are regulating this process by different means and so on.

20:05And yeah, there are a lot of levels here in money creation, money aggregates and so on. So yeah, well, those things are insanely complex in the real world. So it's quite naive to think that there is some simple solution, right? So like some cryptocurrency, which you can code in like a couple of months, which can solve all the problems. So you need for some simple and open extensible solution, right? And that's why you need for somewhat contracts, but you need for contracts on top of good assets.

20:51So that's where Ethereum is not so good, right? So it's allowing for, well, unlimited contractual capabilities, basically, but the base asset itself is complete disaster. So it was proof-of-work based, then they switched to proof-of-stake. They changed the mission schedule a few times. So after all, it's hard to say, well, about quality of ETH asset itself, right? And so Bitcoin is another extreme, so it's a very good base asset, but well, very limited contractual capabilities, right? So well, then the idea of Ergo was basically to do something in between, right?

21:41So, well, good base asset, proof-of-work based, well, as well as in Bitcoin. We have strict approach to protocol upgrades so basically in forks since 2022. But then, yeah, we have additional contractual capabilities, also a possibility to do cryptographic protocols as applications, right, by providing some language for cryptographic protocols, developers, based on sigma protocols and, yeah, well, with enhanced contractual capabilities, we have ability to build trust-minimized monetary expansion tooling after all, right?

22:37So then hopefully, yeah, it will bring good enough money, well, digital cash, good base asset.

22:50Yeah, I'm sorry, yeah, so if it's overloading, right, so a lot of concepts here, and I'm passing quickly through them. So if you have some questions, let's dig deeply now, right?

23:13Vlad CosteaYeah, we'll break it down into smaller pieces, because you took a huge leap from what you were working on, on Bitcoin and all the way into how you ended up in Ergo. And it's like 10 years apart, I think, and there's a lot to figure out what happened in between. One small request that I have for you right now is to retweet the stream. Because I realized that we don't have, we only have like 200 views right now because you did not retweet it. Maybe we can get more. And it's also a bad time for the US, I think they're just waking up now. But in the meantime, let me plug a couple of ads, Bitcoin.com news is one of the places where you can read about everything that's happening in the space.

24:03And what I like about them is that they're not very US-centric, They're not very pro-Trump, like Bitcoin magazine, but they're not also very pro-institutions like CoinDesk, so it's a very interesting middle ground that you're gonna find there. There are also some pieces of news about Ergo Network, or Ergo Platform. If you search for that, you're gonna find some. And usually I go there because I find stuff from outside of my bubble, and it's useful because nowadays Twitter to me is much less useful than it was before. I don't discover as much stuff because the algorithm put me in some sort of echo chamber where I don't see stuff that I might be interested in but is slightly outside of my field of interest.

24:50So check out news.bitcoin.com, I really recommend it.

24:54And there's also Unstoppable Wallet, which is one of the wallets that's recommended on... Bitcoin.org, which is like the official, quote-unquote website of the Bitcoin protocol where you can download Bitcoin Core. And if you go to choose your wallet and you go to the mobile section, you're gonna see that Unstoppable is actually one of the most recommended ones. I'm actually going right now to Bitcoin.org, Choose your wallet, you go to mobile, and for Android and for iOS, you're gonna have Unstoppable which is the best overall for control, validation, transparency, environment, privacy, and fees.

25:37It's actually, so if you look at the comparison, it's actually better at validation than Green Wallet and it's better than Edge Wallet and BitPay and Bitter. It's sort of amazing that of all the ones that are recommended here, Unstoppable ranks the highest and it's free for you to download so it doesn't cost you anything check it out get it from the app store it's on android and iOS unstoppable wallet and I'll plug also SideShift, which is this place where you can swap between assets if someone wants to pay you in stablecoins or meme coins or something that you don't really want you can just use SideShift so they send the coins to SideShift and you get your bitcoin or ethereum or whatever it is that you want directly to your wallet without having to worry about gas tokens or anything else in between.

26:30Check it out. It's called SideShift, it's really cool.

26:39I want to ask you Alex about Namecoin, because you said you worked on it in 2015. I'm actually talking with Jeremy Rand right now, who's still working on Namecoin, to me, it's surprising. It's the oldest altcoin out there. It's the one that was endorsed by Satoshi. It was supposed to be called BitNames at one point in 2010, if I'm not mistaken. And it was Satoshi's idea to make it merge-mined, he said, okay, maybe that you can use the blockchain to issue domain names. How about you have like a merge-mined separate blockchain, because it's not a good idea to mix with Bitcoin. And it's also not a good idea to make it compete for hashrate or just launch with a new algorithm so just make it merge-mined, and namecoin has been around since 2011 if I'm not mistaken it was the first altcoin that was ever launched and I think it was also the purest in intentions like it solves an actual problem what it failed to do was to give people equal chances to register domains because people spammed it early on and registered pretty much everything under the sun.

27:52But I think it was also like ENS, right? You had to renew your domain. It wasn't one and done. Or correct me if I'm wrong.

28:02Alex ChepurnoyYeah, everything is correct. But also it was quite a first database, right? So, well, names were just one application, but it was possible to write a different k -value pairs, right? And well, for these domains, they had some standard key prefix, but it was possible. Maybe there were some applications to write different data on Namecoin, so it was the first, I believe, for blockchain.

28:47Yeah, well, it was first altcoin, but also was the first blockchain with some data, right? Names, mostly. So other early altcoins such as Peercoin and so on, so they did experimentation with consensus, mostly right, without touching the data layer contract layer. And yeah, well, Namecoin did that. So it was quite interesting. So I did some tooling for Namecoin. I'm not sure if it was first back then. But yeah, I did some tool for extracting all the data from the Namecoin blockchain.

29:38Back then it was about 200,000 records, I believe, something like that. It was late 2013. Then, yeah, well, I thought about some applications and so on, but then discovered ST, which was. Like BitShares, if you're aware of so, all those early approaches to have smarts, regional smart contracts for decentralized trading and so on. But there were no smart contracts, just core, features, right? So people just built core features back then. And then as generalization of all those ideas, Vitalik and other guys with him came with this Swiss army knife idea so to have some generalized smart contract approach.

30:45But yeah, well, Namecoin is awesome. So it's actually interesting if people are still contributing to it, and I'm also fond of a merged mining idea, and consider it to do some merge-mined sidechains also. The only issue here these days, it's about a lot of politics, right, so you need to get support from big Bitcoin mining pools, and then, yeah, well, it comes with a lot of games with those pools, you need to incentivize them enough, and yeah, a lot of games here, unfortunately, so it would be good to have maybe more open space here, so I'm also watching for BIP 300/301.

31:50Vlad CosteaOh, do you like BIP 300?

31:55Alex ChepurnoySo it's interesting, yeah, and yeah, I'm following Paul Sztorc ideas for years about sidechains and auctions for data, and some interesting ideas, I'm not sure if all of them are practical, but at least the guy Paul Sztorc is producing a lot of interesting ideas, let's say.

32:23Vlad CosteaYeah, he's also sponsoring the show with LayerTwo Labs, which is his company. And he actually, so BIP 300 for many years was just an idea that he proposed. And now he actually has a software. So for anyone listening, you can go to layer2labs.com slash download, and he has the software that runs on the Bitcoin Signet. So he has sidechains for Ethereum, Zcash, and a few others that you can test today.

32:51Alex ChepurnoyOh, so I need to say then that I wasn't asked to promote well, LayerTwo labs or Paul Sztorc personally, but yeah, I'm fond of his ideas. Yeah, for many years I'm following. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to have any discussions with him. So you mentioned Amir or Pieter Wuille, yeah, so I had many discussions with Peter back in mid-2000s, yeah, well, in particular about yeah, possible possibility for certain changes in Bitcoin protocol. And then, yeah, with Amir, i'm trying to help with DarkFi.

33:38So I made some GitHub issues and yeah, discussed a couple of things I found in the code, of DarkFi. But yeah, well, I would be happy to discuss merge-mined sidechains and some of those.

34:00Vlad CosteaI can connect you to him if you want.

34:03Alex ChepurnoyThe guy is full of interesting ideas, I think.

34:06Vlad CosteaI wanted to ask you, because the furthest I could go in terms of finding your early contributions to Bitcoin was working on BTC and something that was called Scala Client. Was that your first contribution, or was that just the best known?

34:28Alex ChepurnoyNo, it's open source, so the earliest was some website, I don't know if you're aware of BitcoinWisdom? No, that was before my time. Yeah, so it was the first aggregator of data from different Bitcoin exchanges, right? So back then, if we are not talking about South Korea and China, there were like three or four major, no, not major, just exchanges, right? So it was BTC-e, Mt. Gox, Bitstamp, and basically it, right? So then there were some South Korean and Chinese exchanges, but no luck to deposit money there.

35:22And so there was a BitcoinWisdom website, which did aggregation of pricing data from different exchanges, three or four of them.

35:39Because, you know, back then, because there was USDT, so because of different deposit options, and yeah, because of withdrawal problems sometimes, especially with Mt. Gox in late 2013, there were a lot of arbitrage possibilities, right? So such websites were popular. So, well, price difference was about like 10% easily between BTC-e and Mt. Gox, for example. And so even before BitcoinWisdom, I made my own website with aggregation of pricing data, as well as news from Reddit and some other sources about Bitcoin, but I forgot the name of the website to be honest.

36:32Maybe I can open source it, but I need to find the codes even. And so this BTC client was made like a few months after, and also in 2013, around spring 2013, I did work for some wallet with auto hedging. BTC wallets with a possibility to do hedging automatically. So to have 30% of portfolio in Bitcoin, for example, and 17 USD, right? But, oh, it wasn't open sourced, and I did work for some guys and they didn't launch it, I believe, after all.

37:26But yeah, we had a different conversation.

37:28So from them, I've got information about that first gathering of, well, soon to be Ethereum team in Miami, for example, right? So I've got that information from those guys I worked with on that wallet with auto hedging and so on. So yeah, it was quite small community, just three or four exchanges and yeah, a lot of crazy stuff. I don't know if you know about like Fontas pumps, and so on.

38:16So BTC shoutbox, all those crazy things.

38:24Vlad CosteaNow, what I could find about you is that you did some presentations for some conferences in 2014-2015, like FC financial cryptography. And you're talking about pruning data, optimizing transaction fees. And you also had this interesting idea. I guess this was 2014 or something, or 2013, before Zerocash, the paper. I think it was during the Zerocoin era, when you wanted to combine Zerocoin with CoinJoin. And it was called ZeroJoin, I think.

39:00Alex ChepurnoyOh, but it was after Zerocash.

39:09Yeah, actually, but what's good about ZeroJoin, so it's a super simple protocol, right? And yeah, in Ergo we have a mixer, Ergo mixer, which is implemented just on application level. So basically, it's a mixer, but it's non-custodial, non-interactive, smart contracts based. A little bit similar to what people in Bitcoin ecosystem try to do with the SNICKER protocol. But yeah, they failed to deliver it, because I believe some complexities. Which you have when you try to implement such things as non-custodial mixers on Bitcoin.

39:55So this SNICKER protocol was announced around 2020 and yeah, our work from 2017, the very initial version, I believe 2017.

40:10Yeah, like that. And about financial cryptography. Yeah, I've attended a few times that wonderful conference and yeah, we just spent some time with very good people like Zooko or Yonatan there. They also did attend back in the 2010s. It was very pleasant atmosphere, a lot of old cypherpunks also from 2000s, 1990s. And so on. So yeah, kind of, yeah, I met Adam Back also back in 2017 there. So yeah, it was a very nice conference, unfortunately, in recent years.

40:56So since COVID, I didn't manage to attend it again.

41:02So hopefully, 26 or 27. Yeah, I would be able to join. But back in FC 2018, for example, I've presented a work about transaction, not just on that, but fees, right, in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, showing that, yeah, it would be good, well, telling in short, it would be good to have a demurrage, right, in Bitcoin. So some fee for storing data in UTXO set. And well, now we see some discussions in the Bitcoin community, right, because, well, there is growing uncertainty about tail emission.

41:57Right. And then, yeah, well, with time, we have more and more hot discussions in the Bitcoin community, as well as other communities.

42:14So in Ethereum, for example, there are discussions still since 2015 about storage rents, right, and so on. Well, other communities are also discussing. In Ergo, we have had storage rents, demurrage since day one. So we are now collecting data from the main net, which can be useful for other communities, hopefully, including Bitcoin. And so in Bitcoin, right, as tail emission is going to be more and more problematic for miners. Yeah, well, there are talks what to do, so to introduce additional emission or to introduce demurrage storage rent.

42:58So I believe for demurrage is cleaner option, and also it's a better option in the presence of different kind of dust, right. UTXO set dust as well as, well, attempts to use Bitcoin as a data layer with inscriptions, runes and so on. Right. So I believe it's a more market driven way to resolve all those issues, right, than to have a lot of wars about op return size and so on. So to me, well, it's better to leave all those questions to markets, right.

43:48Let's markets decide just, yeah, be built by users charge for storage and then your market will decide, well, what's reasonable there when people are using Bitcoin as storage.

44:13What do you think about that? Maybe you have better oversight, well, from Bitcoin community about this matter. So a lot of hot talks, but in my Twitter bubble, yeah, I'm probably catching up only with some of them.

44:35Vlad CosteaI think a lot of people lost their minds over the last three years since we got the ordinal inscriptions. And it was this guy who basically figured out how to use SegWit and Taproot to create NFTs on Bitcoin, but the kind where you don't just create a token, but also have the data like the JPEG associated with it. And it was basically a year after the NFT mania and you had a bunch of Ethereum people realizing that this is a much better and possibly more permanent way of doing tokens.

45:14So they came to Bitcoin and a bunch of Puritans realized that this is not the way in which they want Bitcoin to be used. And they called it like a hack or something that cheats the rules and they searched for justification to censor this, to stop it. The first reaction was like, let's hard fork away and have a new chain. I think Jimmy Song was that guy who said it. And that's insane, really. And to me, it's very weird because they're opposed to having more people using Bitcoin because it's obviously not the only use case to issue these tokens.

45:54They're also going to buy it. They're also going to transact it for financial purposes. And I can also argue that each of these tokens, every time it gets transferred, it pays a transaction fee to the miners. So it is financial. But I don't know. It's very strange that there's this faction that got radicalized and they have their own mining pool and they have their own implementation of the Bitcoin node software, which is just a fork of Bitcoin Core. It's not a complete rewrite. And they have all of these crazy ideas like, hey, let's confiscate all the UTXOs smaller than 1000 satoshis.

46:35And a few years ago, this would be insane. If anyone came up with this, they would get laughed at. But these people are so desperate to prove that they're right. And they're so invested in this conversation that they're actually saying, oh, this is interesting. It can make my node like my UTXO set 30 percent smaller so I can run this on my old Raspberry Pi. And it's insane, really. I don't know how we got here. I just know that this is stalling any meaningful progress. It's the kind of cultural war that only divides people and does not generate anything.

47:14Like they destroyed, I think, the bull market with this because they tried to compromise the censorship resistance of Bitcoin by saying we can add filters. So we can also have like a list of types of transactions that are fine, which only leads to a slippery slope where you're going to have the US government saying, hey, why don't you also enforce this list of blacklisted transactions, not transactions, addresses. So your node does not broadcast them anymore. And it just leads to Bitcoin being more captured if we're going to go that path.

47:56And with the whole idea of confiscating small UTXOs, it also attacks this narrative that Bitcoin cannot be confiscated, because once you deal with small UTXOs, what's going to stop you from resisting the pressure to do it with larger ones? You've already done it. You proved that it can work. But of course, you can also argue that Ethereum had their DAO hack moment in 2016. And a lot of people were concerned that once they rolled back the blockchain to save the investors, they would do this all the time, but they did not.

48:38It was one incident in the beginning of the network, and they did that. And afterwards, even though Vitalik was under a lot of pressure and people said, well, a lot of money was packed from this exchange or whatever, they never actually did it. And they're taking steps towards trying to make it not possible, even if there's willingness to do it, to make it politically more difficult. So I don't know where we're going with this. I just know that we're not having any meaningful upgrade in Bitcoin.

49:13We were supposed to have some sort of covenant soft fork or opcat or something. And these were discussed for a couple of years. And every time we seemed to agree on something, there was something else that came along and distracted everyone's attention and created infighting and mistrust in the community. I think there are a lot of spooks infiltrated and just trying to make everyone hate each other.

49:44Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so a lot of political games here, right, by different parties with very different incentives and goals. So, yeah, it's kind of a gridlock, right, situation. And, well, it's going on for many years. So, the block size civil war was about that also. So, the Bitcoin community did a lot of attempts to get somewhat consolidated decision, right, but then we've got into multiple forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and so on. And, yeah, well, that Ethereum DAO hack is also a good example because it resulted into a split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

50:41And back then, just like two weeks after Ethereum Classic was born, I was on some podcast actually defending the idea of immutability and so on, so defending Classic. It was very fragile back then. There was a big chance of it to die before some Chinese miners started to support Classic. So, there was maybe a single exchange back then supporting it and very few miners. So, it was fragile, but then, yeah, well, some people organized around. And, well, I believe why Ethereum community is avoiding rollbacks since DAO hack is the appearance of Classic, right?

51:43So, well, there is chance any new harsh decision by Ethereum decision makers would be resulted in more forks. Well, I hope that they should have some fear, right, when they're making such decisions. And, yeah, well, going back to UTXO sets, drama and so on. So, I think you're absolutely right. So, once you are showing regulators, you can filter out certain UTXO set on the blockchain, right? They will start asking questions, obviously, why you are not censoring for more, right?

52:37So, why you are not filtering out UTXO set, which they are attributing to DPRK, for example, or groups or whoever, and then more and more and more.

52:54And, yeah, you made up, well, censoring like most of financial interactions on Bitcoin, right? So, yeah, it's like opening Pandora's box after all. And I think, after all, it should be about markets deciding everything, right? So, well, UTXO sets parameters, so it could be done via this storage rent fee, right? And then having a market where miners and users decide what's reasonable to store in the UTXO set.

53:43And there are many other things out there which are done in non-markets-driven way on Bitcoin blockchain, as well as other blockchains, right?

53:59So, for example, bootstrapping new nodes, so you are feeding them with data on a purely voluntary basis. So, I think, well, as a somewhat ideal environment, we should have markets everywhere, right? So, even if you just joined the network, maybe other peers should provide you credits like in BitTorrent, right? So, first you can download something for free, but then you need to give back blockchain data to other peers, right? So, that's working nicely in BitTorrent. And I think cryptocurrency peer-to-peer networks also should adopt something like that.

54:49So, yeah, it should be about markets everywhere, right? Free markets making decisions, not groups of people clashing with each other, right? This is what we see right now in Bitcoin ecosystem.

55:11Vlad CosteaWhat I see a lot in Bitcoin is people being afraid of markets and saying the markets are wrong, the markets are irrational, the markets are not maximalist or pure enough. The markets are shitcoining, right? And we don't want to have the shitcoining on Bitcoin. So, you should gatekeep it, you should keep these people away, just give them their tiny sandboxes where they can play and leave Bitcoin alone. But the question is who's going to pay the transaction fees to pay the miners? That's the most pressing question in Bitcoin.

55:40That's the biggest uncertainty, much bigger than quantum attacks or whatever it is that people express as concerns. The one uncertainty in the design of Bitcoin is whether or not people will pay transaction fees to make up for the diminishing mining revenue. That's part of the bet that Satoshi Nakamoto made with the Bitcoin design. That once the rewards are small, and that's going to happen every four years, which is 210,000 blocks, there's going to be enough transaction fees to compensate. And the conversation was always, well, we should have small blocks and big fees, right?

56:21Like $100 fees. But we have seen that they're not sustainable. And we don't really have periods in history when people were willing to pay for that, especially when you have altcoins that can provide maybe not the same amount of thermodynamic security, but decent enough finality and like one cent per transaction. So I think if anything, we should be happy that more people are using Bitcoin, as opposed to trying to gatekeep and say, well, it should only be used for this use case, which doesn't have too many users, by the way.

57:01And they also say that you should use Lightning and liquid and whatever, which doesn't pay the miners in any way. It's not a long-term sustainable solution.

57:15Alex ChepurnoyExactly. So if we are talking about network security, then empowering miners is the most critical thing, right? So then I think, well, it's worth to pay attention to, again, merged mining sidechains, right? Because they are providing additional revenue streams to miners from activities on merged mining sidechains. Well, talking about Lightning and liquid, so I think Lightning, so I've been to initial presentations of Lightning back in 2015, early 2015 in San Francisco, had some talks with Tadge and so on.

58:08So, well, I think the original idea is good, right?

58:14So you have the most secure off-chain cash and yeah, purely peer-to-peer base, right? So, well, I open channel with you and well, we do financial interactions, but in practice, you know, it's not working this way. So we need to communicate via hubs, right? So those liquidity hubs are basically kind of banks, right? Then, yeah, it's not so peer-to-peer anymore. And well, we have excessive collateralization requirements, right? Because of these multi-hop interactions and so on.

59:00So, well, I think Lightning has kind of failed, right?

59:07Well, I hope I wouldn't be hated for stating this, but I don't see much adoption of Lightning, right? So it's still very limited. I think by design, the Lightning is limited. So it's worth to explore more options here, right? Maybe with somewhat minimally trusted. So that's what's... I'm designing for Ergo, so having some minimally trusted watchtowers, which cannot steal your funds, for example, or intervening, well, financial interactions between peers, but tracking off-chain nodes, for example, right?

59:58And well, so such systems would be better in practice than peer-to-peer.

1:00:04I'm also fond of all those new designs, such as Fedimint, Scrit cash, Cashu. So I think, well, we need for many designs here in off-chain cash, right? And then time will show which ones are attractive to real-world users, basically to streets around the globe. But it will take a long time, it seems, right? And well, it's hard to predict.

1:00:43And well, probably, yeah, after a long time to be taken, it wouldn't provide much value to miners still, right? So it's a thing which is bringing value to users mostly. And for miners, the most attractive way, if they are not touching the core protocol at all, is to develop merge-mined sidechains, right? But then we need for some changes in the core protocol again to make sidechains more attractive, right, like those BIPs 300, 301. So yeah, it's kind of a lock, right, on multiple levels, it seems.

1:01:33Vlad CosteaI agree with you. I'm not sure if I like, I mean, I do get the appeal of Cashu and Fedimints and stuff like this, but it sort of defeats the purpose. Like, why do we have Bitcoin in the first place? What is Bitcoin? Well, it's a decentralized way to do Chaumian eCash. And then people come and they say, well, how about we build Chaumian eCash on top of Bitcoin, which is centralized, it's pretty private, it's scalable, but it's not Bitcoin. It's not censorship-resistant, it doesn't have the same qualities.

1:02:11Of course, it's much better than ETFs or whatever paper Bitcoin institutions are making nowadays. But we're supposed to scale this to allow anyone to be able to use it. But it seems like there's like an asterisk, like Bitcoin is for everyone as long as you can pay for it. If you can't pay for it, you're gonna get like a second-class experience which relies on banks and custodians.

1:02:43Alex ChepurnoyAll right. But it's somewhat extreme view also, right? So maybe you can have something in between. So you may have the possibility to pay with Bitcoin, but in most cases, it's just too expensive, right? And then you go to slightly worse rails, right? Like Chaumian off-chain cash and using it because it's cheap, right? And in most cases, it does work. And if you are doing micro payments, for example, then somewhat compromised security is not an issue, right? I mean, if you have lost like a few dollars in some of chain cash, then yeah, it's pretty okay, right?

1:03:37It's not that terrible. But yeah, if you are moving like thousands or millions to overseas, for example, then yeah, you have this unsensorable layer one. So that's not that bad, right? After all. Yeah, well, you just need to take care about basic things such as, well, security of mining. So well, security budget for miners, then somewhat contractual capabilities to give developers a chance to play with different off-chain schemes, as well as on-chain derivatives, trust-minimized derivatives, right?

1:04:31And different off-chain schemes with different security guarantees, different trust assumptions and so on, right?

1:04:38And then yeah, well, markets will choose what's viable and what's not. When you have just, well, contractually poor system, where people are just running rune-based meme coins, for example, that's worse, right? Because, well, here we have money of a worse kind, actually, some meme coins, most of them are pure garbage, right? If we are considering them as money. Well, yeah.

1:05:18Vlad CosteaThey're users still. These people who talk about keeping Bitcoin for financial purposes, they're not transacting. They're just holding, so they're not paying the miners. Someone has to.

1:05:31Alex ChepurnoyRight, so someone has to. So then, yeah, well, solution is to go away from those disastrous forms of money such as meme coins, right? To somewhat more reasonable, even maybe having less security as Bitcoin, on-chain Bitcoin, right? But then you need to change the protocol, right? And here, well, it seems the community is stuck, right? And so, well, in Ergo, everything was made, so support for off-chain protocols and trust-minimized on-chain derivatives and so on.

1:06:19So it was made before the launch, right, to avoid those wars and to bring markets to everywhere.

1:06:28Because all those issues were clearly seen back in 2015, 2016, right? So this block size civil war, the first civil war, it clearly shown, right, the limits of extending the core protocol. So back in 2010, 9-11, there were some hard forks of Bitcoin rights, quite drastic changes in op codes and so on. So it was time to innovate quickly. But with time, you know, as system is growing and very different parties are joining with different agendas, different goals, different incentives.

1:07:16So you are getting into gridlock, right?

1:07:18So then it's better to develop something full fledged. But it wasn't possible to do that back in Satoshi times, right, simply because it was too novel thing.

1:07:37Vlad CosteaI have a lot of respect for people who are experimenting with stuff. And they're also using something which is Bitcoin compatible. Like, I do want to ask you if Ergo is something that Bitcoin can just take and use at some point in the future, or which parts of it?

1:08:00Alex ChepurnoySo I think many ideas can be taken, such as this demurrage, right? So well, it's already in play on the mainnet. So the data have been collected and then maybe used against, well, Bitcoin data to do some estimation. So, Bitcoin UTXO set, it would be quite a drastic change to the Bitcoin protocol, but it seems so well.

1:08:34Maybe it's unavoidable, right? After all, it would be better than other alternatives. They would be even more drastic, such as changing emission, for example, right? Because, well, it's better to consider emission to be set in stone, right? Otherwise, one of the main propositions of Bitcoin would be broken. Then, yeah, there were a lot of proposals for Bitcoin, such as Bitcoin-NG, to introduce, well, a better optimization of bandwidth, as well as information. So in Ergo, we are going to introduce sub-blocks in a very, very soft-fork way, right?

1:09:30Right, so sub-blocks are basically kind of micro-blocks between the main blocks, which are backed by a lower difficulty, so basically like mining shares, but bringing transactions, so we have faster confirmations and a better organization for them.

1:09:55But it's soft forkish and I believe it can be then. Brought to Bitcoin without hard forks, right? So in a soft forkish way. So, yeah, well, we've studied the Bitcoin science of soft forkability for years, right? And adopted it in Ergo. We have the same after all. So hard forks are avoided at any cost to avoid splits in the community, right? So when I used to be an NXT core developer, so they did hard forks like crazy, like every few months, one hard fork after another.

1:10:40And that's how community got destroyed after all these endless wars, right, over features brought by those hard forks.

1:10:54So hard forks are quite toxic. In many cases, if you have a diverse enough community, right, so it's better to avoid them. Then yeah, this sub-blocks, about contractual capabilities and other things. There could be another aspect of ergo design, which can be brought back into Bitcoin, which NiPoPoWs, non-interactive proof of proof of work. Right, so They're quite superior for building a super-efficient, SPV clients. Right, so, if you want to build somewhat super-efficient SPV clients connected, for example, via LoRaWAN, so just long-range radio waves or, well, in some remote area, instead of having all the headers, downloading them, you can download just very few, basically, headers of special kinds, and they're forming proof.

1:12:15And then you have the same well, security guarantees as when you download all the headers. Right, so instead of downloading megabytes of headers, you download just like 100 kilobytes of this NiPoPoW proof and then yeah you can ask for proofs of transactions right against well the recent headers you have after processing the proof and initially the team which worked with us professor Kiayias and his PhD students so they got those results for Bitcoin, right?

1:13:01Then it was implemented in ergo and then they also did somewhat implementation for Bitcoin Cash and they did that in just a velvet-forking way, so without need to lock on miners' side, so without the need for majority of miners to support that. So just some miners, it was some big Bitcoin Cash mining pool actually just writing this proof-related data into Coinbase transactions.

1:13:49Just one hash, Merkle root, to be written into Coinbase transactions.

1:13:59So yeah, this could be adopted for Bitcoin, right? Because, well, I know a lot of guys in the Bitcoin community which are also playing with mesh networks, with getting Bitcoin data from satellites, right, and so on, transmitting Bitcoin-related data over long-range radio waves and so on. So, yeah, for those folks, it would be very nice to have ultra-efficient, secure SPV clients. It would be much better than to trust some service, just. And yeah, well, we can think about more things here.

1:14:45So yeah, there are such things as I explained and more which can be brought back into Bitcoin and without hard forks even, because I understand and you also have understanding that it's not possible to fork hard fork the Bitcoin protocol right, these days, no chance to improve it this way.

1:15:12Vlad CosteaI think there's gonna be a hard fork to fix a time stamping issue, which is many years away, but that one can be terrible if we don't fix it. And also agree that for adding quantum resistance, it would be more elegant if we just hard forked and gave everyone the chance to claim their UTXOs, as opposed to soft forking, and then there's the race of just being able to use the available block space to move your coins from the old address types to the new quantum resistant address types, and that leaves behind a lot of vulnerable coins.

1:15:55I don't know.

1:15:57Alex ChepurnoyOh, that's true. So for quantum resistance, hard fork is a much cleaner option, but, yeah, I would like to see how quantum resistance got deployed on Bitcoin blockchain, because, yeah, you know, there are a lot of post quantum schemes to start with and so on, and then the deployment, I think there will be a lot of hard discussions. Well, maybe already are, but yeah, well, it would be very challenging, right, to consider some deployment option suitable for everyone here.

1:16:47Vlad CosteaEven choosing the signature types is difficult, because all of them are much larger than what Bitcoin is currently using with ECDSA. So you're going to have much larger transactions, which maybe for those who want high fees in Bitcoin are good, like Lamport or Winternitz or whatever, but I don't know, it's very delicate. You're going to occupy much more block space with your post quantum transactions.

1:17:17Alex ChepurnoyRight, so hash-based signatures are big and yeah lattice-based are quite risky I believe and yeah also bigger so yeah there are no so good options here right so there is no magic silver post-bullet, which can just replace the elliptic curves base cryptography with something new, right, and also without getting a lot of drawbacks, such as bigger signature size.

1:18:05Well, quite new cryptography, which can be broken after all in a few years. So, well, as happened a lot with earlier lattice-based schemes and so on, so on, so on.

1:18:21So, yeah, well, post quantum security is a very challenging topic for blockchains specifically.

1:18:34Vlad CosteaIt is, and I think the only proposal that we have that's being actively improved and discussed upon is BIP 360.

1:18:48But I think overall, people should understand the risks of soft forking and why it's more elegant to hard fork, and if we're going to hard fork, we can also fix some issues that developers are currently having. But to be honest, the more you think about it, the more you're going to invent an altcoin, I think, because a lot of people will not want to claim their UTXOs and consider that to be the real Bitcoin. They will just claim their UTXOs and dump it.

1:19:24Alex ChepurnoyRight, so a lot of mess here. And yeah, so for hard fork, there is a blog post by Matt Corallo, Great Consensus Cleanup, have you seen that? So it's basically a collection of different ideas, different fixes needed, which require for hard work specifically. So yeah, maybe one day it makes sense to do some kind of final hard work, right, with post quantum security and all those items from the Great Consensus Cleanup list.

1:20:15But yeah, it's quite a messy topic, doing hard forks. But yeah, well, doing soft forks and these are bringing a lot of complexities.

1:20:27So in Ergo, we avoid soft fork... hard forks also, so we are trying to do soft forks all the time. But yeah, after all, it could be resulted in the same kind of Great Consensus Cleanup list, right? Let's see. So yeah, it's messy. It's always messy, especially for engineers, right? So usually, they don't bother in other fields about breaking things. So they're just telling users to upgrade. But here, when you have nobody's system, right?

1:21:13How can you tell some anonymous entities over to internet, all of them to upgrade the nodes?

1:21:22And now it's impossible even to find them, right?

1:21:29Vlad CosteaYeah, these are very hard problems. But it's good to discuss them. It's good for people to think about them. It's much better than waiting until there's an emergency. And then we have to make decisions on the spot and be like, oh, this one makes most sense. Let's accept this. And that's how we end up with more problems.

1:21:52Alex ChepurnoyRight. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, so sometimes after all, you can postpone and postpone and then just have somewhat emergency fork, which would be more disastrous.

1:22:09Vlad CosteaYeah, I think we have a term for that in Bitcoin. It's bike shedding. It was used for all of these covenant soft forks, especially CTV, when it's we seem to get so close to agreeing that it's good. And then someone would come up with a new excuse like, what if this is not the best way to do it? What if we can have a rewrite that also includes this and also improves Lightning and blah, blah, blah. And that would take another six months. And we had a lot of that.

1:22:43Yeah.

1:22:43Alex ChepurnoyOh, yeah. So our community is always bombed with new proposals, basically, right? Yeah, having to discuss them. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's interesting. And that's very challenging, right? To live in such environments, and to continue to develop protocols in such environments.

1:23:09Vlad CosteaYou have a question from Yonatan Sompolinsky. All right, yeah. He's curious about your current tech stack. But before I ask it, let me plug the last sponsor of this episode. It's not last, it just happened. I picked the random order, but it's noones.com, which is a peer to peer marketplace. It's built by Ray Youssef, who previously did Paxful, and he left the project because he was not happy with a US-based company and all the regulations and all the limitations that he had to face. So he created Noones, and O-O-N-E-S, which is focused on empowering people from the global south.

1:23:48That's what he calls it. So you'll find a lot of users from Africa, the Middle East and South America. And by trading, by choosing to trade on Noones, you're empowering these people to get access to coins that even if they're volatile and have like a 10% dip on the daily basis, they're still more stable than their fiat currencies. And they're useful for a lot of people worldwide in ways that you can't even imagine. So check out their peer to peer marketplace. They also have a gift card marketplace, and they also have a spot market and a debit card if you're into that.

1:24:26But personally, I'm not a big fan. Check it out. It's Noones.com. Now, Alex, Yonatan wants to know if you're still using your old version of Nokia, and I think he means the Haskell version of Nokia.

1:24:42Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so still using button phones. They're quite perfect, I believe.

1:24:50Vlad CosteaOh, your daily Phone is a Nokia?

1:24:58Alex ChepurnoyYeah, it's a bit away. So it's Philips now, yeah, with a good battery. So I can forget about charging for one or two weeks, yeah, because I'm not using much also. It's also not distracting you. So I had smartphone for a couple of years, but then realized, you know, it's distracting you all the time, as well as bringing a lot of surveillance and also discharging all the time. So not so convenient even. So yeah, button phones are quite superior in my opinion. But yeah, that's maybe an engineer's perspective, right?

1:25:49So when you have a few laptops and some tablets, and so on, so maybe you don't need for smartphone even. So when you are not on the way, you have some device anyway. And when you're on the way, it's better to take rest, just not to be around the screen. And so, yeah, well, my greetings to Yonatan. Last time I've seen Yonatan back in 2017 maybe. So we discussed some ideas regarding to Kaspa, but there was no such name back then even.

1:26:41And yeah, well, the ideas were not finalized also.

1:26:48And yeah, I'm tracking Kaspa development. So about my tech stack. So it's Scala, Steel, and also Rust. And well, for us, I'm checking some repositories around from time to time, including Rust implementation of Kaspa. Now the reference one. So a lot of interesting ideas there about how to make high-performance peer-to-peer network. And yeah, another repository which I'm checking regularly, progress there is DarkFi. But unfortunately, it's hard to contribute and participate in discussions even there.

1:27:38So I proposed our guys to investigate some things there in regards with potential issues, vulnerabilities.

1:27:51I also made one issue in the repository. So hopefully, I can find time to do more, but oh, it's hard to find time to do anything meaningful outside of Ergo development. But for Kaspa, yeah, I'm watching for development there also. And yeah, there are a lot of interesting challenges there. So when it's network which is producing 10 blocks a second, how can you do complex contracts there? So I would be happy to discuss such things with Yonatan and guys.

1:28:42And sorry, I'm talking a lot. So anything else in the question, not covered? So tech stack and my phone, what else is there?

1:28:59Vlad CosteaI think that was the question from Yonatan. And I'm gonna connect you guys if you haven't met since 2017, I think.

1:29:08Alex ChepurnoyYes. So I...

1:29:09Vlad CosteaAlmost nine years.

1:29:11Alex ChepurnoyI have. So the issue is that I've used email, which is now not available. That's IO mailbox. So yeah, well, if you can pass Yonatan's mail to me, yeah, it would be a pleasure to me to continue our discussions.

1:29:33Vlad CosteaHe's the one who told me I should really, really interview you and said that to him, you're Satoshi.

1:29:41Alex ChepurnoyOh, I'm obviously not. That's why. Oh, because I'm not that kind of developer. So, you know, that was a good Amir's post on that over Twitter, I believe. So you know, Satoshi is not some mystical figure, you know, just like, I don't know, some saint who appeared from a dark forest, you know, then told some inspirational things and then disappeared again in a dark forest. So he was C++ developer after all, you know, and there are certain things which are very specific, very unique.

1:30:42So for example, how does he work with stack and so on.

1:30:45So without going much into details, so you can figure out that Satoshi wasn't, for example, a corporate developer, right, working overnight on Bitcoin. So the guy is kind of a hacker, you know, from what can you see in the code and also kind of OG developer from this Hungarian notation and other things. So yeah, quite unique style of development and not so common for most of C++ developers, right.

1:31:35So I've shown Satoshi's code to some professional C++ developers, so I'm not doing C++ code 2006. So I'm not so proficient in all that stuff nowadays.

1:31:54But yeah, so from what I've got told and from my understanding, yeah, so he was kind of hacker, right, not a corporate developer, at least. I don't know if it's helpful in finding Satoshi. I also don't know why Satoshi. So to me, it's perfectly fine to have an anonymous developer and just discuss ideas, right, because after all, ideas do matter, not the personality of Satoshi. Who knows, maybe his personality is not so good as his ideas.

1:32:40Vlad CosteaThat's exactly what Satoshi would say, right?

1:32:46Alex ChepurnoyYeah, but who knows, maybe he's kind of a very good person, I hope. It's better maybe to leave all those questions unresolved, right, and concentrate on ideas.

1:33:10What do you think about that? Because as a podcast host and as a kind of KOL guy, so you are getting a lot of attention, right, of talking about Satoshi and the possible candidates for Satoshi and so on. But does it worth it after all to look for Satoshi candidates?

1:33:48Vlad CosteaSo I've been doing this for almost seven years now. I don't even know what KOL means. I've seen it a few times. I'm still not sure what it means. But Satoshi is usually a good topic because it shows basically how people think and how they approach it. Like there are people who look at patterns in speech and they search for people who talk like that or type like that, and there are people who look at the code. And the only reason why I mentioned it is that Yonatan mentioned it and said, this guy is my Satoshi, as in you, because he respects the kind of work that you're doing and he likes your implementation in Haskell in 3600 lines of code.

1:34:32He says that's something that only Satoshi can do. So maybe it's an inside joke, but you also said something interesting at the beginning of this episode that you are sure that Adam Back is not Satoshi.

1:34:48Alex ChepurnoyRight. Because I've seen his c++ code at about the same time. And it's totally different. So, there are some things which you can modify in your coding habits to hide your identity, but I believe there are some things which you cannot hide right after all. And so, yeah, well, from that, I think Adam Back is not Satoshi, but he was around because after all, it was a quite small circle, right?

1:35:34And like half of that circle attended financial cryptography back in 2000s, actually, going back to financial cryptography.

1:35:43And going back to Yonatan, so I've seen a lot of rumors that Yonatan is Satoshi. So he appeared when Satoshi disappeared and so on but you know actually a lot of people appeared when Satoshi disappeared so that's not kind of an argument maybe because yeah so Satoshi disappeared when explosive growth of Bitcoin movement started right when WikiLeaks started

1:36:14Vlad CosteaAccepting Bitcoin, that was kind of it.

1:36:17Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so it was the first explosive moment, right, in the Bitcoin community growth, yeah, the WikiLeaks moment exactly, and so yeah, by that principle you can find a lot of Satoshi candidates, you know. Yeah, well Yonatan's work is inspirational anyway and a lot of great ideas, yeah, some of them you've guys discussed how the podcast, so I think after all ideas do matter, right, not personas, yeah.

1:37:08Vlad CosteaI have a question from your history which relates to NXT which back in 2014 seemed like it's gonna be a very big deal and it turned out to not be and I just want to point out that in 2014 we had the so-called Bitcoin 2.0 movement where you had Counterparty, you had Mastercoin, you had BitShares, you had NXT, and you also had like an early idea of Ethereum. And of all of these protocols, the only one that became successful over the years is Ethereum. But it's very counterintuitive because at the time, Ethereum was just a bunch of 19 -year -olds acting like they're professional coders and saying they're gonna do something general purpose.

1:37:56And NXT seemed to be built by actually seasoned developers, guys with gray hair who seem to have actual experience.

1:38:09Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so there were a lot of very skilled developers. Well, starting with Jean-Luc Picard, some anonymous guy, but very strong Java developer and so on. The problem of NXT was its bootstrapping, right? So it was the first proof-of-stake cryptocurrency. And it was one of the earliest ICOs and how it was made. Some guy just made announcements on Bitcointalk, fundraising announcement, and he raised some Bitcoins, I forgot how many, like 20 people, right?

1:39:03And then the whole initial stake, the whole distribution was spread around just 50 guys, 50 nicknames on Bitcointalk, right? So maybe less people after all, maybe half of them were about the same person, who knows, right?

1:39:28But the distribution was very bad. So I believe that was one of the reasons. Another was this crazy founder, Come-from-Beyond, also known as BCnext, also known as Sergey Ivancheglo, so then he founded IOTA, and now he is behind Qubic, right? And the guy is always doing some kind of threshold, so, it was also the case back then. But also, well, endless forking. As I explained before, many people left the NXT community because of endless hard forking.

1:40:19So, there were big whales and developers, because big parties left the community after some forks, just because of disagreement with developers pushing for them. Well, that was after I left, actually, in 2015, I left closer to the end of 2014.

1:40:55But yeah, NXT was big, so it was number three in CoinMarketCap back in June 2014, and yeah, we had CoinMarketCap already for a few months, and yeah, NXT was number three. And yeah, I believe it was the case with BitShares and so on, right, so before big ICOs, the distribution was problem for proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, such as BitShares and NXT and so on. Then for Mastercoin, it was about, yeah, complexities of building on top of Bitcoin for counterparty, Mastercoin and so on.

1:41:45By the way, I've seen some Counterparty interest, so some tweets from Adam Krellenstein, which is quite interesting to see revival 10 years after.

1:41:58But then what was good about Ethereum and what's maybe not well understood, so, well, in the first place, they had the first big ICO, right, and that actually attracted a big army of supporters to the Ethereum movement. And the second thing was proof-of-work mining, and even more, Ethereum was very successful in maintaining ASIC-resistant mining, right, and I believe small miners actually did a lot for Ethereum without efforts being recognized even.

1:42:43So I believe the initial wave of DeFi adoption, it was mostly about miners using such primitives as Maker DAI, right? So CDP-based stablecoin to avoid selling ETH during those harsh days of crypto winter of 2019-20, right, so before DeFi summer, right, so it was about small miners mostly who started using DeFi out of real needs, such as preserving ETH back, but having possibility to pay bills still, right? By using CDPs to mint stablecoin and then pay electricity bills with stablecoin while keeping Ethereum backs intact, waiting for crypto winter to be over.

1:44:04And they also supported network by a lot of other means. So Ethereum had tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of miners, right, from very small scale, like one or two rigs on balcony, to very huge mining firm in China of like 100,000 GPUs.

1:44:31So yeah, it was a huge movement, unfortunately, not recognizable, right, and after all, the controlling party, or developers fight them, I think this was very unfortunate for Ethereum movements at home.

1:44:57Vlad CosteaI also want to ask you mentioned miners, and you also mentioned that you're a fan of merged mining, and also your project Ergo is also using proof of work mining. What is it about proof of work that makes it better than any other proposal that was presented later, and that fascinates other developers nowadays?

1:45:21Alex ChepurnoyOkay, so it's ASIC resistant, right, so still, we don't have ASICs in the network. Other than that, it's very classic, so we did avoid some experimental things on purpose, such as proof of useful work and so on. So yeah, it's quite a popular trend these days, but still a lot of open questions around proof of useful work, and back then Ergo Network was launched back in 2019, so it was a very unchartered territory to explore.

1:46:11And so, yeah, other than that, it's simple GPU-oriented mining, which I think is perfectly fine when you are building a kind of digital gold.

1:46:30So the idea here is to have digital gold, also, well, the possibilities to have on-chain with minimized trust, off-chain cash schemes and so on, so on, right? So to fill the gaps left by Bitcoin, basically. But then, what else? So yeah, it's a pretty classic and straightforward proof of work, and also still ASIC resistant. So many proof of work currencies after Ergo went into different roads by doing ASIC-friendly algorithms, right, with some novel proof of work algorithms.

1:47:32But yeah, well, Ergo is standing on ASIC resistance.

1:47:41Vlad CosteaBut isn't it difficult to stay away from ASIC resistance and try to discourage it, because at some point someone will figure out how to make an ASIC for this algorithm, and then you'll have to change it to something else?

1:47:56Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so ASIC is always possible, right? The only question is about advantage. So Ethereum was extremely good here, so we adopted some things from Ethereum, some are novel, some inherited from Equihash of Zcash, just with more aggressive parameters, and so on. So yeah, well, hopefully ASIC won't provide, well, significant advantage, right? That's enough. So in Ethereum, for example, they had ASICs around the time of switching to proof of stake, but ASICs had just like 30% or 40% of hashrate, which is quite okay, right?

1:48:49So still, GPU miners were around and made money, supported the network.

1:48:54So such a mix is, I think, perfectly fine, right, when you have ASICs along with GPUs, FPGAs, and so on, still.

1:49:08Vlad CosteaYeah, to me, it's very interesting because I think there was so much effort to replace proof-of-work industry-wide and at some point it seemed like proof-of-stake is the future, and everything that's not Bitcoin and maybe a handful of others are not gonna be proof-of-work anymore. But I see a resurgence and people rediscovering it and saying, wait a minute. This is actually good. This makes sense. It leads to a fair distribution of the currency. It actually gives like a base price for the currency because you have to consume electricity in order to produce it.

1:49:45And of course, you can call that the Marxist theory of labor value, which assumes that if you spend this amount of money building something, then it must cost at least that, which is a fallacy, it will be the market that decides. But it's still a psychological factor when people understand that it takes an expenditure of electricity to produce the currency. Like, what do you think about this? How do you approach philosophically proof-of-work?

1:50:18Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so more or less in this way, so I think it's kind of a class of hard assets, right? So you need to buy, so there is no free Bitcoin, right? And there is no free ergo, so miners are always buying new tokens with electricity, right? So you are basically converting one kind of money, kind of assets, right? So electricity to another kind of asset. There are some mechanism, which is pretty much like an auction, which is working like an auction, right?

1:51:05So you put bids with ASICs or GPUs, right?

1:51:10And it's a randomized auction, right? So everyone has a chance, but a chance is getting higher if you are buying more bids, basically. So it's also kind of lottery, right? So the more tickets you are buying, GPUs or ASICs, the more chances to get new tokens, but you need to buy those tickets with electricity. And then, yeah, it's about fair distribution, right? Which is a very attractive topic, I believe, again, in 2025, because we do witness, I don't know if you are following that or not, but if you are on crypto Twitter heavily, then you should follow.

1:52:06So we have a lot of VC rocks or team rocks in 2025, basically, right? So recently it was Sahara AI, so VCs did dump on retail immediately after VC unlock, right? And that's the case that does happen often in 2025. So a lot of tokens and proof of stake networks were suppressed heavily price wise with VCs and teams, right? So it's kind of crazy these days how they dump on retail and retail is now understanding those games, right?

1:52:58And I see more and more hate towards VCs and also team allocations on crypto Twitter.

1:53:09So yeah, then the revival of proof of work is inevitable, right, in this environment of distrust and environment of rug pulling, all those nasty events we do witness regularly this year. But then just very recently, I think there is also another trend which could emerge. So have you heard about denial of service attacks on Sui and Solana?

1:53:50Vlad CosteaI know that Solana is like a shit show which collapses every, well, at least a few times a year. You hear that they go back to Discord to find consensus. I don't know anything about Sui.

1:54:05Alex ChepurnoyYeah, but wait, so the scrap collapsed just because of some popular products being launched and so on. So it wasn't about active attacks, you know, some malicious attacks on the network, just a crappy network per se, right? But for a few days now, they have an intentional denial of service attack on Solana as well as Sui. And so Sui got affected heavily from what I've seen on our crypto Twitter. And then there is another attractive thing about proof of work. So here you have permissionless access, right?

1:54:48So anyone can join. And it's also about the unpredictable nature of block generation, right? So you cannot predict who will generate next block. In Solana, for example, it's known, right? So it's known ahead of time for the block. And then you can target exactly this validator with denial of service attack, right? So you need to do a DOS attack again, one node at a time, right? Basically. Which is quite different security from trying to DOS the whole peer-to-peer network, which is not feasible, I believe.

1:55:40If we are talking about big networks such as Bitcoin or Ergo even. But when, you know, next validator is predictable and actually in many proof of stake protocols, it's the case. So then you need to do attack against the next data just right. It's quite simple, actually, to get such attacks. So it's a very new thing somehow. I don't know why, because I'm predicting such things for years, right?

1:56:21Maybe it's because it's quite a depressive atmosphere now, and so on, right? And so in such a depressed atmosphere, I believe we will see more and more cases when proof of stake networks and tokens would attack each other, right? In order to pull liquidity from competitors. So then it would be not so friendly atmosphere, but actually, well, originally there was understanding. So when I came into the space, there was understanding that you are building for war, right?

1:57:07So back in 2012, it was quite expected. So we had talks all the time that, you know, in a few months regulators will shut down all the centralized exchanges, all three of them.

1:57:23And we are going back to underground, right? Just using LocalBitcoins to on-ramp and off-ramp and so on. And these days, it's quite extreme on the other side, right? So people don't quite understand that cryptocurrency networks should be resilient, should be peer-to-peer and so on. So it's okay for many so-called investors to knowingly buy some trash, which is not decentralized at all, just well in a desperate attempt to see it's growing quickly, right?

1:58:09So it's a totally different mindset, but I think, well, now if the depression will continue, we would see much more attacks, right?

1:58:23And then it will be normal to be getting back to original vision when it was assumed that cryptocurrency networks are built for war.

1:58:38Vlad CosteaAlso, so I want to ask you some rapid-fire questions about Ergo, like some parameters that you chose for the network, because it's always curious, like what kind of block times you have, like what's the block size, how you approach smart contracts and stuff like this. So I want to ask you like a quick succession of questions. But before that, I just want to end this chapter of your past and what you've been doing with papers and stuff, because you also work with IOHK, which is the company started by Charles Hoskinson.

1:59:11And that guy's quite a character. Like if what they say about him is true, that he was working on Ethereum telling people that he's Satoshi and that he was fighting in Vietnam and jumped from a helicopter. I think that's in the book. And I'm curious, what was it like to work with this guy?

1:59:31Alex ChepurnoyOh, actually, I haven't heard any crazy stories from him. So yeah, so he was in Bitcoin Foundation.

1:59:46No, but not really. So he was director of education in Bitcoin Foundation.

1:59:51Vlad CosteaI never knew that.

1:59:53Alex ChepurnoyAnd then, yes. Yeah, so in the early days, we discussed a lot of things such as his past in the Bitcoin Foundation, then BitShares. So he was an original BitShares team, along with Dan Larimer and Li Xiaolai, and then left Ethereum. But I don't know, I haven't heard any crazy things. To be honest. So yeah, he was very picky about Ethereum Foundation decisions. But from what I've seen, Charles was always very accurate.

2:00:31So that's why he left BitShares and then Ethereum.

2:00:37So he left Ethereum just before ICO, right? And he left BitShares also during some concerns about fundraising concern. So yeah, he also made some long Reddit posts around mid-2010s, explaining why, in his opinion, the young guys, Ethereum guys, probably will go to jail because of financial decisions they made in the Foundation. But yeah, well, I think that's quite a reasonable approach, right?

2:01:29So well, when you're coming to this industry with knowledge, right, in a legal or financial sphere, so well, it's everything crazy here, right? And cryptocurrencies. And it was crazy all the time.

2:01:54So you always expect all the things to get collapsed or shut down here. But somehow it's not the case, which is also quite surprising. So yeah, well, Charles was always very accurate about such things. Yeah, which I think is reasonable, right? But it's probably the industry which is crazy. Yeah, about all those stories, Vietnam and so on. Yeah, I haven't heard anything like that.

2:02:33Vlad CosteaI think it was Afghanistan, to be honest. I only said Vietnam because there's a story about him going to Creedence Clearwater Revival concerts. Right. And those were happening in the 70s. Like, I don't think he was even alive to see those. But he was talking about them like he was there to people in the Ethereum team. Maybe none of this is true. And it's just some character assassination or whatever.

2:03:00Alex ChepurnoySo we had a lot of talks back in 2015, 2016. So I don't know about the current moment. But back then, he had quite appealing views to me. Well, he was also a proponent of free markets, freedom of economic interactions, unlimited freedom and so on. So, yeah, he was supporting all those ideas. And yeah, that's already known. So I don't know much about Creedence Clearwater, but he is younger than me.

2:03:50So actually, I've seen his documents at some point. So, yeah, well, I don't know. It's somewhat crazy story.

2:04:03But I don't know details, to be honest. But yeah, so about IOHK. So I was number three employee there. And it was actually, well, very exciting stories. You know, before cryptocurrencies, many cryptography professors were very poor. So I heard some crazy stories that some professors, even top ones in the US had to pay their PhD students out of their own pockets, right? To just continue research, to just continue research in cryptography and making progress.

2:04:56So, Elie Ben-Sasson, for example. Yeah, he also wasn't recognizable, right? Famous and rich before cryptocurrencies.

2:05:11And yeah, the whole space was very poor financially, right? And also not recognizable. And then with cryptocurrencies, the station got much better. And now, well, a lot of professors and former PhD students are working on very good positions, right? Different cryptocurrency-related entities. And, well, one of our pioneers here was Charles with IOHK. So he started to go after well-known people in cryptography and offered them money, right, for this very poor field, very good money, to attract them into cryptocurrency-related research, right?

2:06:14And that's how we met Jonathan, by the way.

2:06:21So Charles proposed Yonatan and Aviv Zohar some grants for developing those ideas about SPECTRE and so on. So some earlier versions of DAG protocols resulted into Kaspa, right? So actually we discussed things like IOHK, giving them grants and then doing implementation of SPECTRE, some experimental implementation of SPECTRE inside IOHK and so on. So it was hard to work with Israeli universities, though, so we didn't manage to get this done, unfortunately.

2:07:12But yeah, well, it was quite an exciting time and a lot of efforts were put by IOHK people and Charles personally to bring top-level research in the cryptocurrency space, right?

2:07:34Because before it was mostly anonymous guys on forums making some claims and have luck to find good ideas to separate them from bad ones and so on. And so around 2014, 2015, finally, we got some good research, some papers. Back then, I read papers for breakfast, basically, all of them. And yeah, there were a lot of very formalizing cryptocurrencies and proposing new ideas based not on just something unknown, driving some anonymous guys on forums, but having a formalized approach to getting new ideas and implementing them.

2:08:40So yeah, those times were quite exciting and I also did some papers in IOHK and also I believe contributed something to the space.

2:08:58Vlad CosteaYou're very modest and I like it. And I want to ask you about Ergo, because obviously you took some ideas and you put them together in a layer one. What is, for example, the block size in Ergo? Like, how many transactions can you fit and what is the block time? How quickly are the blocks being discovered by miners?

2:09:21Alex ChepurnoyAll right, so there is no fixed block size in Ergo, so you can vote on increasing or decreasing it, right? So the whole idea here was to have flexible parameters whenever possible, right? So to be decided via miners' vote. Because after all, it's miners who own the protocol, right? So when a developer is considering some parameters as goods, right? I mean, often it's a very incorrect decision and the things are changing at the time, like bandwidth and so on. So yeah, then it's better to give power to miners to decide that, right?

2:10:04Basically bringing markets to those parameters also. For block time, it's two minutes. So it was based on some research papers from 2014-15. So the idea is to have very secure conservative parameters for global network, where you have multiple hops from Argentina to China, for example, right? And you need to account for those propagation effects. And so the idea is to have the time fixed and to develop other techniques which are going to deploy, such as sublocks, right?

2:10:53Which can be seen as something like Bitcoin-NG or maybe even a DAG protocol.

2:11:03So there is no real duck here in sublocks. And yeah, there are quite a lot of papers on how to build a high-performance proof-of-work protocol. So, you know, going back to... I'm sorry, it's not so quick then, right? Going back to discussion of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, I believe proof-of-stake was popular because of promises of building better performance, right? But actually, proof-of-work is the most performant protocol because there is no need to exchange any information before block generation, right?

2:11:54So you are just working on your own, you are doing work, and then you're propagating block immediately, generating it.

2:12:06So it's an efficient protocol in regards to network utilization. And Ethereum has shown that clearly. So they promised to increase BPS, if I'm not mistaken, but it's the same, right? So it's still one block in 12 seconds. And well, Kaspa is doing more, for example, with proof-of-work, while Ethereum is doing less with proof-of-stake. So it's not that proof-of-work is worse performance, it's actually better than most of proof-of-stake algorithms. So sorry for a long reply.

2:12:50Vlad CosteaNo, it's fine. I'm also curious what's the mining algorithm called and for how long you think it's gonna be ASIC resistant.

2:13:05I think you're muted.

2:13:09Alex ChepurnoyOh, my bad, I'm muted, sorry. So it's called Autolykos, some Greek name, and we have Greek names everywhere in Ergo. So Ergo is also a Greek term, which does mean work. So there is a later translation, which is known therefore, but in Greek that doesn't mean work, just Ergo means work. Then, yeah, about ASIC resistance. So it's a hard topic. So I had some discussions with engineers from Bitmain, so former and present Bitmain folks.

2:13:58It's possible to find them around. And so, you know, it's always possible to do ASIC.

2:14:06So somehow it did ASIC for Monero even, right? But it's just about a few processors connected with general memory or something like that. I don't know much about details, so it's not much advantage just using CPUs. And so similarly, as I described, Ethereum also was good. So there were ASICs, but without some superior advantage over FPGAs or GPUs. So from what I know, well, for such algorithms as Ergo has, there is needs of output of like 20 or 30 million USD per year.

2:15:02But then it's also the question of advantage, right?

2:15:09According to Bitmain engineers, it's not clear, right? And if they cannot tell this in advance, then probably other people around also cannot do this. So hopefully, the advantage ASICs will have won't be that impressive. And then, yeah, the idea is to stick to this particular Autolykos algorithm anyway, right? Because, well, changing algorithms all the time, like Monero or Firo, for example, so it's also quite messy. We also have some proof-of-work based protocols, such as NiPoPoWs, this superior SPV protocol.

2:16:07And it's quite messy to change algorithm and considering also such things as NiPoPoWs and so on.

2:16:19Vlad CosteaYeah, that's a good answer. I'm also curious what smart contracts look like for the language that you must know or learn in order to be able to write them. Is it like Ethereum where you need to know JavaScript? Or do you need to learn Rust or something else?

2:16:39Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so smart contracts here are following Bitcoin model, right? So it's still UTXO and a contract is basically about a locking proposition, right? So it's a program that needs to be unlocked, right? So it's pretty much like Bitcoin, but the approach is different. So the high-level language is called ErgoScript and it's basically a logic language, right? So you basically combine different conditions when funds can be unlocked. And we even have visual tooling, right?

2:17:27Where you can combine different blocks visually, like building multi-sig schemes and attaching time conditions, then some conditions on input, outs, and so on.

2:17:40And the initial such tool was for multi-sig. And currently I'm in India, in New Delhi currently, but a few years ago. I've been to Jaipur where the Ergo community sponsor it's Unstoppable Hackathon at some local university. And so some guys developed this visual tool. So it will be released quickly. So now you can develop quite complex conditions visually without any coding.

2:18:24Vlad CosteaIs there any...

2:18:25Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so...

2:18:26Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if you addressed it directly. Like, if I know C++, can I write Ergo contracts?

2:18:36Alex ChepurnoySo if you know any high-level language like C, Java... Yeah, so you can write ErgoScript quite quickly. And what's also good... So it's 2025 and many people are writing codes via so-called wipe coding, right? And well, from initial experiments, ErgoScript is quite friendly to wipe coding. And currently we are discussing how to make LLM-based contract audits. And yeah, well, the initial results are also quite exciting. Because it's a very simple approach, right? Defining programmable money via ErgoScript and you can give not so much instructions to a coding agent, actually coding, but a code auditing agent, right?

2:19:36Quite a good inequality audit of ErgoScript code done automatically on some issues in contracts I've done by myself with LLM-based approach. So yeah, we are currently discussing this in developer's charts and I will publish some results after collecting community input also. Yeah, there will be some articles published. So yeah, I think it would be quite amazing to have people building more or less secure contracts, simple and also secure without even touching the code maybe, right?

2:20:26Just via visual, no-code tooling or coding agents.

2:20:34Vlad CosteaYeah, that would be cool. Also, how good is the privacy? You mentioned that you have something like a CoinJoin with Zerocoin at the protocol level. And how does it compare with the privacy in Zcash or Monero?

2:20:52Alex ChepurnoyOh, so it's optional privacy, right? And quite loose. You basically have privacy like in Bitcoin just without interactions, right? If you are using CoinJoin, for example. But that actually does matter a lot because when I visited some financial cryptography even back in 2020, I had some talks with guys working in forensics, right? The other side of things. And so they worked even back then on the de-anonymization of Bitcoin Mixer users by over network layer mostly, right?

2:21:48So by getting meta from network packages going to Mixer, right?

2:22:02So then to eliminate this networking layer at all. And actually, it's the same with Monero or Zcash, right? So most of the efforts, similarly, are about watching the network, based on the arrests in the EU. For example, it was the case that a few place operators were arrested from public information. It seems what's foreign.

2:22:52Vlad CosteaAlex, I think you're dropping out. Your connection is not stable. Can you hear me? Your video is frozen.

2:23:03I guess you'll drop out and come back. This is what happens in a live setting. I apologize to everyone who's here and in the chat and listening to this. But I also want to thank to the almost 1000 people who watched this on livestream. It's always amazing to see that even though I do these interviews back to back in a very short amount of time. I had three of them in two days, basically. And it's also exhausting for myself. It's a lot of content that I put out there.

2:23:36I'm going to make sure to space it a bit on Spotify during the uploads to give people a couple of days to listen to the latest one. But where am I going with this? Yeah, I'm proud of you guys. I'm happy that I enjoyed this kind of success among nerds on the Internet because at the end of the day, this podcast is all about just one nerd on the Internet talking from his bedroom with other nerds around the world who are thinking about how to fix the money all day long.

2:24:09And he's back. Let me admit him once again.

2:24:18I'm really sorry, Alex. I'm not sure if you can hear me. Your connection, I guess, is not stable.

2:24:25Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so for some reason, hotel ended my session, so I had to start another networking session. So yeah, just some hotel network rules here. So I've got disconnected automatically and had to start a new session. Sorry for that. Yeah, I'm in some hotel, as explained. And I hope that noisy street is not so noisy, so the noise is suppressed also. So yeah, traveling conditions are a little bit harsh. I'm sorry for that.

2:25:01Vlad CosteaIt's fine. My front light also died and I'm very obscure right now, but it's fine. It's been two and a half hours since we started doing this, and...

2:25:12Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so where it got aborted? Let's start from that point.

2:25:21Vlad CosteaSo the last point, I think, was on privacy.

2:25:27Alex ChepurnoyOh yeah, privacy. So yeah, it's a non-custodial, non-interactive mixer, which is already better than Bitcoin mixers, right? Because you are not surveilled for your interactions with a mixer coordinator. But then we have more contracts application level, right? So to have something like Monero as a cash, you need for core support, right? To enforce people to certain kind of privacy like in Monero, but we are not fond of doing that.

2:26:02You probably need to do hard forking all the time like Monero doing, right? And so as explained before, well, there is a desire to avoid hard forks at any cost. But then, yeah, in addition to ZeroJoin mixer, there is support for stealth addresses. There are some wallets supporting stealth addresses, right? So you can have recipients anonymity just. So more tooling possible. Well, there is research here all the time. And well, what could be good, I think, is to have somewhat private off-chain cash, right?

2:26:52With transparent on-chain reserves, because, well, another idea behind optional privacy here is, well, sometimes you don't need for privacy, right?

2:27:05And sometimes you demand for transparency bill. For example, if you put money into some charity, right, you don't expect for privacy spending. You expect for transparency right here. And so if you have some on-chain reserves for off-chain cash, for example, and this is a very important example, it could be, as we discussed before, yeah, it's one of hopes for, well, large-scale adoption. So yeah, in this setting, yeah, it's better to have the reserves also, right, transparent on-chain reserves with private cash, those reserves are back in.

2:27:59Vlad CosteaI also want to ask you, when you decided to do the monetary policy, what is the max supply, if there's any, and how you're approaching scarcity, and also if there is any pre-mine?

2:28:13Alex ChepurnoySo yeah, it's more or less like in Bitcoin, so it's kept supply. Then, yeah, the difference is this emission, it's not hard-coded as in Bitcoin. The idea here was to make everything contractual, right? And so emission is also a contract, emission to miners, and instead of pre-mine, it was emission to somewhat treasury, because unfortunately, even back in 2019, it was quite clear that you cannot launch a cryptocurrency without heavily sponsoring it, right?

2:29:07So centralized exchanges already asked for money back then, as well as wallets and so on.

2:29:16It's even worse these days, so maybe you know about... ...a recent standoff of Yonatan with Binance, right? Because Binance is not listing Kaspa even, and yeah, it's not listing proof-of-work assets, years to the moon, because it's currently charging not just fixed amount, which is a beacon of community somehow.

2:30:00Vlad CosteaDid you stop to think, or did you end your sentence?

2:30:04Alex ChepurnoyYes, so on my side it was a connection loss message again, sorry. Yeah, so Binance now is not charging just fixed amount, but percent of supply, right? And it's about, from last I heard, about 8%, so not any chance of fair enough proof-of-work assets can be there, right? Kaspa and so on, and this is insane. Because of that, there was some emission going to Treasury, but only for listings and integration, so there was not any team allocation, which was quite full, right? Because, yeah, often developers asked for some allocation, and it was hard to reject such demands, but yeah, there were not any team allocations or any allocations.

2:31:07So there was some oversight for spendings, and yeah, some financial reports were published, and the rest would be published. Hopefully, just someone needs to take care of that. There are accounting books showing that no allocations and so on. So yeah, well, in 2025 it's even more important, yeah, so as I told, now there is trends of retail being upset, right, with all those team allocations and VC allocations, so there were no VCs here, right? So it was purely a grassroots launch.

2:31:56Vlad CosteaThat's nice. Usually people try to find justifications and say, well, since we got some investors and we have some developers, we should give them like 5% or something.

2:32:08Alex ChepurnoyOh man, it's super messy, you know, because when someone else is greasing developers, well, it's the same here, so it took a lot of effort to spread the message, you know, that things are quite different. But yeah, there was also a desire to be different from starters, right, to be like Bitcoin or Monero. Actually, I'm a big fan of Monero as a movement, right, as a kind of community which is capable to do everything. Well, also to do active development, right, to get exchanges and so on without any clear consolidated ruling party, right?

2:33:10This always was exciting to me. I don't know, so what do you think about this? I've seen some tweets of yours in regards with this distinction between Monero and Zcash, for example, right? Zcash has some entities which are making rules, basically, and in Monero it's kind of anarchist kind of community, right?

2:33:44Vlad CosteaWell, so I'm not sure exactly what I should answer to this question, but I do like the difference between them and the fact that they're not trying to solve the same problem in the same way. I think that Zcash started as a fork of Bitcoin with the intention to improve the privacy of Bitcoin as proposed by Zerocash, except that Zerocash was not enabled on Bitcoin, mostly because of the trusted setup. So they needed the funding to be able to remove that trusted setup and refine the protocol to make it scalable, because they started from this point of best privacy, but it did not scale and did not work on most devices.

2:34:27You couldn't use it unless you were running your own full node and it was not user friendly. It was cypherpunk, but not ready for mass adoption. I think now after nine years, it's finally ready for mass adoption. It's finally what it was supposed to be and what we were hoping that Bitcoin would be, with the extra problem that Bitcoin does not want it anymore. And that's why I promote it so much, because I hope that Bitcoiners will take a look at it and reconsider. Monero, on the other hand, is reactionary to Bitcoin and they came out with crypto node as a response to the limitations of Bitcoin and with the intentions to launch a competitor for Bitcoin.

2:35:10So the way that I see it's like a different beast. It's not the same code base. It's not compatible with Bitcoin. On the other hand, it uses a lot of the Bitcoin research, for example, the bulletproofs and dandelion and the confidential transactions. And a lot of the stuff was built by blockstream researchers or just people looking for ways to add more privacy to Bitcoin. Their claim to fame right now is the full chain membership proofs, which is possibly the first time when they come up with something really original.

2:35:45And it's also the most ambitious project that they've had so far.

2:35:50Alex ChepurnoyBut you know, the problem with Monero-style development, the top-level research is very expensive. So when I first met Zooko back in early 2015, he told me something he put personally in the research. Before raising funds, he spent, I don't know whether I can tell numbers, but yeah, very significant numbers he had to pay from his own pocket, right? And yeah, often it's not possible, right, to pay, well, big amounts from pocket professors with a huge risk of getting non-commercial results at the end.

2:36:54The choice of Zcash in regards to organizing development is fully understandable. I appreciate it also. They are advancing research in certain areas quite significantly and quite fast also. That's worth it after all.

2:37:17Vlad CosteaYeah, and Zcash doesn't have a pre-mine, but they have this 20% allocation, which in the beginning was a reward for the founders in the first four years. And then in the next four years, they decided they should give it to the developers. So they called it like the Dev Fund. And they have these bodies which organize around this Dev Fund and they decide where they should allocate it and what they should be paying for to get built. But also pay for something which is controversial, but I think interesting, which is political lobbying.

2:37:50They pay organizations like Coin Center and others in Washington DC. I think that the main goal of this is to not go to jail for building privacy tech, which obviously is a big concern when you're building something that anyone can use to do nefarious actions. But it's also useful, so from what I've seen a couple of days ago at the SEC, it's useful for getting these actors in political office to admit that privacy is normal and is useful and is something that the average person should have on the basis of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which is your right to remain silent and not give information to the government about what you're doing.

2:38:36So if they are able to pull this off and they do make it look like privacy is the new norm, then it will be politically safe for Bitcoin to also add privacy, which I think is the way to go. They're playing this 4D chess all the time where you're not sure if they're just pumping their token or also pushing for research or also helping Bitcoin or just trying to talk to politicians. And I like it. Monero is in a different mindset. They're just saying, well, we want to be cypherpunks and we want to launch this protocol.

2:39:12We don't care who uses it. We don't care what they use it for. And whenever there is a case like last week, I sort of argued that they're cheap because it took a few days for their full chain membership proofs developer Justin Berman to get funded. But they were able to mobilize and fund him in a couple of days after I was under fire for calling them cheap. But that's something admirable. They're able to organize, but honestly, I don't think there's anything more important in Monero right now than full chain membership proofs.

2:39:46And they should not be cheap about it.

2:39:52Alex ChepurnoyRight, that's true. So, yeah, well, that's the difference. So Monero is using research, well, the cryptographer somehow got trees, so FCMP is based on curve trees and curve trees, so they're not researched for Monero specifically, probably, I'm not sure about that need to recheck the paper. But yeah, that's a very interesting perspective, right? Isn't it kind of like a community of pirates, right? Like free individuals?

2:40:38Vlad CosteaI think your connection is once again unstable, Alex. You said Monero are kind of pirates, a community of free individuals, and then you sort of dropped out. I guess he's frozen again.

2:40:57Anyway, until he comes back, and I'm not sure if he can hear me, but I'm sure he will come back. I just want to remind you that this show and this episode is sponsored by SideShift and Bitcoin.com News and LayerTwo Labs, Noones.com, Unstoppable Wallet. Are you back, Alex?

2:41:15Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so the hotel is doing the same games again, so I don't know, it's an extension, I have to restart it, I don't know why. About emissions, so basically it's the same in Ergo, so there is no pre-mine, but for the first two years and a half there was a mission, but not to founders for integrations, right, and to pay all those bastards from centralized exchanges. Actually, what was happening over the long term, because over the long term most of centralized exchanges we paid for disappeared simply, right, so that they got shut down for founders of exchanges, shut down exchanges and so on.

2:42:11So yeah, that's very nice. But the same principle and actually I did consult with Zooko in regards to all those things back in 2017, so I even invited him to be kind of advisor, but we don't have any established structure after all. But yeah, he was busy with Zcash stuff, but provided some insightful information. In particular, in regards to emissions and so on, so initially, for example, we had an idea to copy this slow start Zooko advised against that.

2:43:07Vlad CosteaOkay, I'm not sure if you dropped out once again or you just stopped.

2:43:15Alex ChepurnoyIt's fine now, so I think I've said about emission and all that stuff. I actually think both are admirable, right, both are interesting, so I don't get those words I see sometimes over the crypto Twitter, but crypto Twitter loves drama, loves wars, so that's unavoidable.

2:43:43Vlad CosteaOh, I'm fine with it as long as it doesn't resort to threats and stuff like, oh, I would love to see you getting your ass kicked in a boxing ring, which someone from Monero told me a few days ago. I mean, the future that I think about a lot is one where we are all free to choose whatever we think is best for ourselves, and we can put our money in various projects and see which one is going to succeed. Not, well, let's see if I can kick your ass because I don't like your opinion.

2:44:23I'm just an internet nerd, I express opinions, I don't think there should be any violence. I definitely don't wish violence upon anyone.

2:44:33Alex ChepurnoyYeah, yeah, very important. But yeah, I mean, it's totally fine that people do have different opinions, right, especially as, well, not so much good information in the space, right. I simply, people don't have time from my observations to document things properly even, so the history of cryptocurrencies as well as the present moment is very mythical, right, so people inventing all the time instead of, well, getting to, well, properly done history because it's documented, unfortunately.

2:45:20But yeah, about assets. So yeah, I think it's fine to have multiple assets, yeah, especially if they are work-backed, right, so why not?

2:45:31After all, it's about electricity converted, right, into very interesting forms of money, actually, right, forms of assets where you get your electricity converted in a pool of some digital economy ecosystems, right, and then you have different ecosystems, different economies. I believe they should be interconnected. That's why I'm fond of bridging everything with trust-minimized approach, bridging especially different proof-of-work assets, right, and to see different economies interacting, right, not confronting each other.

2:46:28Vlad CosteaI do see the value in conflicts in the sense that they push people to get better, to improve their protocols, to prove to the others that, look, I actually care and you claimed that this was going to be a scam and I'm actually working on it and there is some value here. So I do like it, but at the same time, there should be some limits that we need to understand because the greater enemy is actually central banking, is infinite money printing, is the state that has an army that they can just deploy upon us and put an end to all of this beautiful dreaming about how we can fix the world.

2:47:11So, yeah, we need to optimize for these threats and also for other types of private crime, which are horrible. I'm not sure if optimize for or optimize against is the term. I'm sure that someone's going to clip that and put it out of context. But anyway, the peaceful revolution, that's what I signed up for.

2:47:38Alex ChepurnoyYeah, about bridging everything. So there is a Rosen Bridge on Ergo, and now connecting Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and there are some community efforts from Firo community as well as Kaspa to bring those blockchains also to this bridge, so then all those networks are interconnected. And then Rosen Bridge guys are working with the help of some guys from Monero community to make a bridge for Monero, and I think it would be quite big, right? So it's an Ergo-centric bridge. It's using ergo as a data layer, right?

2:48:23But then, yeah, if you, for example, are getting Monero integrated, then from Monero you can go to any of the chains mentioned and back. It would be quite a big deal, I believe, because, well, centralized exchanges are in complex relationships with Monero, let's say. They're delisting... Binance and some exchanges are delisting Monero. And so I think Monero should be on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and so on. It would be good to get Monero on most exchanges in an unstoppable way, because currently we have exchanges like Coinbase, for example, allowing to buy any asset on base or some other chains.

2:49:28Also, there are other centralized exchanges allowing you to buy from MM pools on decentralized exchanges on some blockchains, typically, from a centralized exchange UI using centralized exchange on-ramp options. This would be good, right? But this is unstoppable, and this would provide more on-ramp options for Monero. So, I'm quite excited about this. So, hopefully, after FCMP, we can get this quickly enough, right, to have unstoppable on-ramp options for Monero.

2:50:24Vlad CosteaRight now I'm thinking if there's anything about Ergo that I wanted to ask, and I did not so far. Is there anything that you want to mention about it that maybe we haven't?

2:50:39Alex ChepurnoyOh, so maybe it's about peer-to-peer, right? So, people do think that smart contracts are about the same, so on Ethereum, Ergo, and so on. So, they are done in the same way, but with UTXO, so these…

2:51:06Vlad CosteaOh, you dropped out again. I guess it's the hotel policy.

2:51:13I guess you need to restart your connection. I'm not sure if you can still hear this. But in the meantime, I see that we've had a bunch of comments in the chat.

2:51:24Alex ChepurnoyRight. Yeah, I'm again, so…

2:51:27Vlad CosteaOh, you're back. That's good. You can continue now.

2:51:31Alex ChepurnoyYeah, I now can do this in two seconds. Reconnect, rejoin the hotel session. So, yeah, here we can have peer-to-peer finance with UTXO, so design of Ergo blockchain means, for example, that's how Ergo Mixer works, right? So, you create your UTXO, so I create mine, right? And to satisfy them, one needs to create a mixing transaction, right? And there is not any central smart contracts, like all the smart contracts are actually done in Ethereum, right? So, in Ethereum, yeah, this would be about centralized contract, like another cash, with all the pros and cons.

2:52:22So, most of smart contracts on Ethereum do have some admin keys, freeze button, and so on. And as a user, you don't really need for that, right? So, you need to create your financial tool, for example, bonds. We have peer-to-peer bonds application, and in this application, there is direct interaction between borrower and lender, right? So, there is not any centralized monolithic contract, right, with admin keys, freeze button, or whatever. So, it's just about peer-to-peer interactions over the blockchain also.

2:53:08So, this is often missed, but I think this is very important for building self-sovereign, unstoppable finance, right?

2:53:15It should be about peer-to-peer interactions on top of the blockchain also.

2:53:22Vlad CosteaOkay, that sounds interesting. Where do you see this going in five to ten years?

2:53:29Alex ChepurnoyOh, so I think, I hope proof-of-work blockchains would attract more attention, right? Especially, well, in a few years, we will have a lot of idle GPUs, obsolete for AI purposes. So, not so useful there anymore, and they will enter mining, I believe, after all, right? Then I'm thinking about interconnected blockchains. Yeah, well, it's good for everyone, right, to have more on-ramp options everywhere, unstoppable, decentralized on-ramp options. Then, yeah, well, I hope to see more privacy on Ergo and everywhere, right?

2:54:21Then, yeah, well, recently there was launch of more efficient in regards with collateralization, but still unstoppable algorithmic, uncontrollable stablecoin use on Ergo.

2:54:34And I hope that would provide more value in different arbitrage around blockchains. And I hope, yeah, we will develop tools which are more capital efficient, but still unstoppable and decentralized. Then, yeah, well, for off-chain cash, I have a lot of hopes to see more good ChainCash options, especially with possibility to create credits between peers. That means you can create money in a grassroots fashion, right?

2:55:20So, if I have trust to you, then I can provide some credits to you personally without the system enforcing us to do that.

2:55:30And then, yeah, by combining on-chain reserves and off-chain peer-to-peer credits, I think we can get elastic money supply and, yeah, thriving digital economies backed by on-chain assets, right, as well, kind of reserve animal trust. Then what else? Then for sidechain, so we also have different ideas here in Ergo ecosystem, including a merged-mine sidechain with double mining, so Bitcoin plus Ergo merged-miners.

2:56:14Vlad CosteaInteresting, so the Bitcoin miners would get both tokens?

2:56:20Alex ChepurnoySo, yeah, both Bitcoin and Ergo miners would get a token of that double-merge-mined sidechain, and between Ergo and this would be trustless peg contracts already done. And, yeah, then there are some options for pegging with Bitcoin already known, right? So then, yeah, how it's like trustless bridging through this sidechain, and, yeah, a lot of interesting ideas can be done here. So, yeah, well, I can share maybe our Twitter, some papers about that, about these double merged mining ideas.

2:57:05So, yeah, that's, I think, promising directions in building real-world adoption, right?

2:57:15So I'm not fond of the banksterization of Bitcoin, right? So when banksters are coming, they're making things worse, right? So streets around the planet still have trillions in value they can create. So why to sell as to banksters, I mean? Even, you know, money-wise it's not a good choice because, as we can see, banks, funds, they are playing quite dirty games with retail in Bitcoin also, right, these days. So it's better to create tools for streets to create value, right?

2:58:06To create value in communities and to trade between communities using blockchain reserves as a reserve asset with mixed rights, to actually fulfill the original ideas of Satoshi and friends from 2010.

2:58:27Vlad CosteaYeah, I love it. This is what it's supposed to be about. At the same time, yesterday, or last night, I interviewed David Bailey and he's sort of responsible for bringing this wave of bankers and politicians into Bitcoin, first with his conferences and then with his strategic Bitcoin reserve proposal and then, what's it called, Bitcoin backed companies? No, I think, what is it? Bitcoin treasury companies. Okay, so all of this degeneracy, which is downstream of the fiat system that we forgot we were trying to replace, I see it as just the phase.

2:59:09I don't think it's gonna be like this forever. I think these suits are just gonna make their money and then leave. They're gonna dump their bags and look for the next big or interesting thing that's gonna increase their US dollar holdings. But it does bring some extra attention and unfortunately, the average person will not care about this unless there is some legitimation from politicians and bankers, and they're not gonna say it's legit up until the moment when this is possible. And it's sad really. I really wish we could have the grassroots adoption as opposed to the top-down adoption waiting for some sort of authority to tell us, well, Bitcoin is interesting and is good and has been performing pretty well over the last 16 years.

3:00:00I don't know if there's any solution to this. It's just that we are in this phase where we're talking about Bitcoin as a collateral asset, as digital gold, as something that can be used to borrow US dollars against. I don't like it too much. We're not making Bitcoin useful for payments. And there are people working on it, but not nearly enough people caring about it. Right.

3:00:33Alex ChepurnoySo I think it's not bad to have Bitcoin as collateral, just not for banksters, right? So let's Bitcoin be collateral in interactions by, well, having unstoppable trust-minimized derivatives. So yeah, that's how I think our focus should be right in the space.

3:00:59Vlad CosteaIs there anything that gets you super excited about this space and you think might be the future? Is it DAGs? Is it zk-SNARKs or zk-STARKs?

3:01:16Alex ChepurnoySo I think, uh, for me, that's...

3:01:23Vlad CosteaOh, no, I think your connection is playing tricks again.

3:01:29I hope you remember the question you reconnect to the call. I apologize to everyone. I guess by this point, more than 1000 people tuned into this live stream, which is really nice. And I thank you guys and I appreciate it. And don't forget to also subscribe and tell people about the show if you like it.

3:01:54And we're just waiting for Alex. Yeah, you're back.

3:01:57Alex ChepurnoyYeah, so I think they have some automated system, you know, to drop connection when it lasts a long enough time. So I've seen that in some hotels around the world.

3:02:15So, yeah, so to me, yeah, those techniques from cryptography, distributed systems, and so they're just building blocks and we need to be focused on producing good money, right? Because, well, in the supply which is needed, right, the supply, we have demand for from streets around the world.

3:02:47The demand we have from grassroots movements, right? So, yeah, then, yeah, well, all cryptography is good here. So Starks, FCMP, and so I mean, those are just, there are hundreds of them and they're appearing quickly. They're getting solid often also quite quickly. So yeah, let's have more and more of them. But those are just building blocks, right? And we need to be concentrated on how to produce good money in bulk, based on best known kind of reserve assets or proof of work with the currency, right?

3:03:32Because after all, digital gold with limited supply, and yeah, cautious protocol development, forking policies. So yeah, it's quite superior to gold, it could be, right, even.

3:03:46Vlad CosteaYeah, the conversation is that we're going to flip gold in a few years. And that means like going up 30 something x from here.

3:03:59Alex ChepurnoyYeah, but then, you know, there are certain things which must be here, like fixing supply, right? And yeah, as we discussed, then we need to go through different roads when talking about long term stability in the presence of tail emission and so on. Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated story. But yeah, well, all the blocks here are not that crazy, right? And quite doable. So yeah, I'm quite optimistic about this space. But I think also, you know, as we don't have any regulation here, basically, so, well, we will have depression times sometimes.

3:04:57And that's also quite okay, because that's what do we need to get out of garbage right in the space. So, well, unfortunately, we don't have, you know, like, states regulation, which is telling, oh, get this asset out of space, or get that asset out of space. So yeah, it's self-regulating, happily. But then, yeah, sometimes we need to get through harsh times, right? So for depression, when, yeah, bad assets are failing, and good assets are surviving.

3:05:38Vlad CosteaWell, I disagree with you slightly there. I don't think the state should make any regulations to tell us what should exist and what should not. What is legit and what is not. The market will find its way. But unfortunately, the Ponzis and the scams are very attractive. And they will have this casino user base, I guess, people who just want to gamble and they're like, I either make 1000x on this or I lose everything, I don't care. There is this sort of mentality, there's nothing that's gonna stop it.

3:06:15But it's also important to have education. And I know everyone talks about education, even the gamblers, they say they provide education, but to really be able to distinguish between what is legit and what is horrible and you should not look at it. I think I gotta give credit to the Bitcoin maximalists because they were able to distinguish, but their way of distinguishing is that only their asset is the legit one and everything else must be a shitcoin. But they still have this mantra of 99.9% of altcoins being shitcoins, which if you look at CoinMarketCap and they have like a few thousand assets, still leaves room for at least 50 legit ones.

3:07:04And I ask even the most toxic Bitcoin maximalists who joined my show, ask them, can you name like three or five altcoins that you think are legit and not scams? And sometimes they outright make a list, other times they just say something vague like, well, if they've been around for a few years and they still have users and they survived bear markets, then it's probably a good sign that they're not scams. So it sort of becomes obvious, but that's also Ethereum. So if you ask them, is Ethereum a scam, they're going to say, yeah, of course it has this 70% pre-mine and tatatatata.

3:07:40So, yeah, it's hard to find the signal in all of this noise, but I think a good way, a good North Star that I use, beyond the recommendations that people give, in your case, it was Yonatan who said I should interview you. It's also papers that are published. This is usually a good sign, but once again, you can game academia and you can basically publish bullshit by paying the journals and some people do that. So it's not the only metric, but also actually building something and having ideas which maybe are not the most mainstream, but still are trying to experiment with stuff.

3:08:23My girlfriend just brought this to me, I guess for the purpose of showing it to the camera. She modified my iPhone case. I bought this orange case and she drew this Pepe of me on it. Actually not drew, she painted it.

3:08:40Alex ChepurnoyThat's quite funny.

3:08:42Vlad CosteaI also have this in the background. Is it like this? Yeah. So, yeah, very funny. I wish I had the front light, which died, but I can turn it on. It charged like 50%. I can fix my video.

3:09:01Okay, now you can see this in all of its beauty.

3:09:09Right, nice, yeah. I have the fanciest iPhone case right now. I put my phone in it and boom, I'm good to go. I guess she can customize these for people who want them. How much do you charge for this, honey? 10 what? Euro? What, for painting? What? That's very cheap, I gotta talk about business with her. Anyway, yeah, it's cool and she just gave this to me. But it's very hard, as I was saying, to distinguish signal from noise and you need to have like benchmarks or some criteria for something that is useful.

3:09:55And also ideology is important, like if people are here for the right intentions. You can have very smart people just trying to milk retail and just dump some sort of shitcoin on users who realize that they're smart and there's something to it. I think the red guy who created Bitcoin Private is a good example of this, very bright. But he was not honest with what he's building and he just created something with a hidden pre-mine so that he can get rich and basically disappear.

3:10:27Do you remember?

3:10:32Alex ChepurnoyOh, not much. I remember the first CryptoNote deployment. What? Bytecoin. Bytecoin, yeah. I think this Bytecoin versus Monero is a clear example of why ideology is important and why your movement is also important. So you have ideas, then you get people sharing them, right? And then this unstoppable force, right? So when you have Satoshi with some ideas, right? So one guy can be just hit by car one day or whatever, like everyone is dying after all, right?

3:11:22So again, ideas don't matter, right? So once Satoshi published White Paper and expressed a little bit more ideas over the forum, so different people joined, right?

3:11:43So then developed those ideas, maybe come with own and so on.

3:11:54Vlad CosteaOh man, your hotel must really hate our conversation right here. I hope at least someone's watching from the hotel staff and is able to learn something new and they're gaming, they're toying with your internet connection. My front light died once again. It was not supposed to last only a few, a couple of minutes, I think. I'm going to have to charge it again. I'm sorry. So yeah, we're just waiting for Alex to come back. We have been running for more than three hours, which was unexpected when we first started.

3:12:37I realized that he likes to give brief answers. You hear me, Alex, right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, perfectly. So when we first started this interview, I was thinking, oh, this guy doesn't like to talk too much. I think it's going to be short, but I'm pleasantly surprised, like you're a treasure.

3:12:58When I interviewed Vitalik, it was the same. He said he only has two hours, but he stayed for free and he gave full answers to every question. And that's something I respect.

3:13:09Alex ChepurnoyYeah, but actually I'm super tired because I spent a previous night on a train from Jaipur to Delhi. Yes, and I need to get to the airport.

3:13:25Yeah, but I have some time. But yeah, let's maybe wrap it up. So I will have more conversations in the future. Yeah, well, I believe there are always a lot of ideas to discuss here, right? So this space is very fruitful, so you can discuss a lot of topics from, I don't know, like concrete cryptographic schemes or consensus protocol properties to political ideas, right? Well, political philosophical ideas, starting from free markets, discussing various works and so on.

3:14:16Are you quite following this DarkFi space now? Not really?

3:14:22Vlad CosteaI'm going to have like a marathon livestream on new Year's Eve with Amir Taaki. If you want, you can also drop in to say hello to him. So I do follow from afar. I can't say that I open their web page very often. The last time I was on it, I looked at the chat that he built, and I like that he takes his time with it. But at the same time, he said, so last year he said it was going to launch in a few months and it's been a year and he still hasn't launched it.

3:14:57And Amir has to prove a lot because he's very well known for starting projects, which are good ideas, but he's not very good at finishing them.

3:15:07Alex ChepurnoySo it's not about finishing. So from what I've seen from checking source code regularly, there is a lot of rewrite, right, of one piece after another. They're pivoting a lot, but they haven't raised any funds from retail or VCs, so they cannot be judged for that, right? So it's their own business to rewrite a code all the time. But yeah, from what I've seen, it's still far from being in production. But yeah, what's interesting about them, so every Wednesday they are organizing philosophical meeting rooms over dark IRC, discussing different works in regards with philosophy and political matters, all that stuff.

3:16:09So that's very interesting. That's, I believe, how community should be built, right? You need to share ideas and find like-minded people around and build them after all.

3:16:27Vlad CosteaYeah, this is the good way to launch it. But I'm just an impatient nerd, sorry. That's all.

3:16:37Alright, so anything else to discuss? How can people keep up with what's happening in Ergo and what's a good way? Usually when I talk with people and they have their own coin and it's proof of work, I don't tell my listeners, okay, go ahead and buy it. I tell them mine it. That's very educational. It can help you learn how the network works. You can understand from there if you want to spend more time with it or not, but just try to mine it. That's a good way to get started if you're interested.

3:17:12But how can people keep up with what's happening in Ergo? What's the best way to follow the project?

3:17:20Alex ChepurnoyOh, so there are a lot of resources. So currently there are two websites made by different fractions in the community. So ergoplatform.org, ergoblockchain.org. Then we have Telegram groups. A lot of them you can find on those websites. We have Reddit, Twitter. There is some ergoplatform Twitter with 60,000 subscribers. Then this new one, Ergo with a few thousand still, but yeah, it's just like two months old.

3:18:07Then yeah, personal Twitters like mine and so on. So yeah, Joseph Armeanio, worth to follow on Twitter. So yeah, a lot of voices actually we have around and yeah, it's getting more and more diverse.

3:18:26So I hope after all we will have diverse movements like in Bitcoin or Monero. Well, Bitcoin-like is quite challenging, right? For an engineer, because you have a lot of opinions and a little chance to modify anything. But at the same time, it's also exciting, right? When you are basically providing backbone for a variety of ideas, right? It's an unstoppable backbone where people with very different ideas can come and broadcast their ideas and build in isolation and together.

3:19:18Vlad CosteaYeah, That's the most powerful part. The permissionless building. Just anyone can show up anytime and do something amazing without asking for anyone's permission.

3:19:36Okay, Alex, thank you very much for your time and for your energy and for your input. I hope that everyone learned something new today.

3:19:45Alex ChepurnoyYeah, Thank you a lot also. So it seems we are sharing a lot of values.

3:19:53Vlad CosteaWell, you know, if you stick around for such a long time and you did not exit, right? Sell your bags and move to some island and buy your Lambo and whatever. I think it's a good sign that you're here for the right intentions. And it's something that I respect when people stick around and they try new stuff, you know?

3:20:23Thank you very much for everyone out there trying to mine Ergo, see if you can do it. Is it CPU or GPU minable?

3:20:31Alex ChepurnoyIt's a GPU, so mine it, buy it, study it and communicate with us, bring your ideas, your applications and so on. So yeah, let's be together.

3:20:46Vlad CosteaOkay, thank you very much, Alex. Once again, you can follow him on Twitter at Chepurnoy. It's exactly how you see the name in the title of this video and audio on Spotify. And thank you very much. I'll see you in the next one.

3:21:04Alex ChepurnoyThank you everyone. Bye.