S17 E15: OPNET Smart Contracts on Bitcoin L1 with Danny & Chad

0:47Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 15. I am Vlad. This episode is sponsored by SideShift, Braiins Hashpower, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs and Firefish and Cake Wallet. There's going to be a giveaway about one hour into the episode, so stay tuned. And until then, pick a number from 1 to 100 in the chat. You only get to pick one number and the winner gets one Zcash. And our guests today are Danny and Chad from OP_NET, which is this new Bitcoin layer or protocol.

1:20I'm not even sure what I should call it, but it promises to offer smart contracts on Layer 1, Ethereum level, without wrapping, without sidechains, without bridging, without any of these techniques, which seem sort of mandatory in the context. But you guys came up with something different, which got a lot of hate, which makes me like it even more. So it's good to have you, Danny and Chad. Let's talk about OP_NET.

1:47Danny PlainviewYeah, nice to meet you, man. Thank you for having us. Yes. What to call OP_NET? That is a thing that a lot of people are confused by. The term that has been used to call things similar to OP_NET so far has been metaprotocol. We have coined the term consensus protocol because we fixed the one issue that all metaprotocols have, which is consensus between the states of these protocols that are on Bitcoin. Like, a metaprotocol is things like Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20, et cetera, et cetera. This is where you're putting a very, very simple concept.

2:26It actually even goes back to, like, 2014 with Mastercoin and all sorts of other stuff. But basically, you're just putting arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions then using an off-chain indexer to say what that on-chain data is doing and keep track of the state. When you're doing stuff like Ordinals, it's very simple because this stuff is just NFTs. So there's not a lot of math to keep track of. There's really just this image and then where is that image living. But when it comes to DeFi or smart contracts, there's a lot of math that is involved in these smart contracts and kind of keeping track of all the state of these super complex things.

3:08So there's been this big problem of none of these other metaprotocols can do all of that math and come to the same deterministic state. There's no consensus between them. And that's what we've made. So we have smart contracts on Bitcoin layer one, yeah, with no bridging, no sidechains, no gas token. It's all just Bitcoin.

3:29Vlad CosteaOkay, so it almost sounds like Counterparty, which is something that I played with a few years ago, except that you have EVM compatibility. Am I right?

3:39Chad MasterNot exactly. So Counterparty might be a close comparison, but Counterparty required you to hold their gas token in order to transact. I mean, that I guess would probably be the closest thing to it. But the difference here is that with OP_NET, you're only ever making Bitcoin transactions. So you are not needing to hold any other asset. You have Bitcoin in your Bitcoin wallet and you're able to connect to the dApps and use the dApps and interact with smart contracts just by using your Bitcoin in a Bitcoin wallet.

4:12There's no added steps. There's nothing else to interact with. So I would say that would be one of the core differences between something like Counterparty and this. And it's actually not EVM compatible directly. It's a Wasm virtual machine build. And so the smart contracts are not Solidity. There's a few quirks about EVM that are really not optimized towards Bitcoin. And so we built a custom VM that acts and mimics a lot of the pieces of EVM that are great. Like a lot of the endpoints are very, very similar.

4:48The developer experience and environment is very, very similar. But the smart contracts are written in TypeScript, not Solidity. And there's Rust compatibility. Wasm compiles to like 30 different languages. So you can build compilers to other languages as well. So it's more modular. And then we built it with Bitcoin in mind. So the gas handling is slightly different. To the layman, it'll look and feel ETH-esque, but the back end is a little bit different than Ethereum. But it's modeled off of ETH. So that's the long explanation.

5:27Vlad CosteaYeah. So it sounds a lot like Counterparty, except that you don't have the XCP token. And I was going to ask you, what are the limits of this system? Because obviously you're going to have on-chain transactions. I guess your transactions are using OP_RETURN to insert data onto the blockchain. And this data...

5:49Danny PlainviewNo, sorry. We don't use OP_RETURN whatsoever.

5:52Chad MasterThat's another difference between Counterparty, for example. Interesting. Go ahead, Danny.

5:56Danny PlainviewYes, so we use the witness field and everything is a standard Bitcoin transaction. So there's no, like, tricks around the ordering of the opcodes. It is all fully compliant. It works on legacy. It works on SegWit and it works on Taproot. So it's not dependent on Tapscript. Obviously, we like the transaction refund, so it's the cheapest way to do it, but it does work with legacy as well. And yes, there is no... Sorry, you said the limitations of this are basically the limitations of Bitcoin.

6:31So the speed of an OP_NET transaction is the same speed as a Bitcoin layer one transaction, because it is a Bitcoin layer one transaction. The amount of transactions that can happen every block is limited to Bitcoin's limitation of transactions per block. So yeah, it's fully Turing complete. It is, like, capable of doing the same kind of execution as any other smart contract chain, like EVM or Solana, et cetera. But it is just limited by Bitcoin's limitations because we built this to work on Bitcoin layer one, but yeah, no sidechain.

7:14Vlad CosteaYeah, sorry for the cat interruption. I don't know what this boy wants. Now he's scratching my lap, biting. Anyway, what was I going to mention about this? So you're not using OP_RETURN, you're not using EVM. So from this point of view, you're different from both something like Counterparty or Omni, and also something like Citrea, which uses EVM and fully embraces it.

7:42Chad MasterThat's right. Yeah, I mean, I would say, I mean, another core difference is that we're leveraging a lot of Bitcoin's native scripting, where some of these earlier metaprotocols didn't take advantage of the scripting that Bitcoin has natively. There's a lot of pieces to the OP_NET architecture that are thought out and designed really to maximize what you can do with BTC. So again, leveraging Bitcoin's native scripting, we're taking advantage of a few elements of Bitcoin that haven't really been utilized fully.

8:17We're, I mean, for example, like all the smart contract addresses, when you're generating a smart contract, when I'm deploying a smart contract, right, a brand new address is created on Bitcoin that holds that smart contract. That address is a specialized address type that then users are interacting with that Bitcoin address, sending their contract call data through Bitcoin transactions to that Bitcoin address. And so, again, like the state is fully deterministic and that allows for deterministic execution to happen on the node side. And so, again, there's a few quirks, but there are a lot of these pieces that differentiate it from something like Omni using this sequencer model or something like Counterparty that just stuffs all of this data into OP_RETURN.

9:08You don't have this like fully recreatable state that's immutable on Bitcoin.

9:14Danny PlainviewSo it's like client-side validation, or it's, yeah, unique endpoints that you're trusting. Like, okay, with Ordinals, right? Magic Eden just shut down and everybody in the Ordinals space was freaking out because all of this collection data is all on Magic Eden's servers that is giving the ord endpoint with all of their stuff layered on top of it. But there's no, none of that's actually on chain. Right.

9:38Chad MasterThe irony of a lot of this stuff, like Ordinals, for example, is that all of this data is on chain, but all the ownership of this data is completely off-chain ownership. And you have to rely on a centralized point to be able to interpret this data. So it's like you can't own, for example, with Ordinals, they're telling you that you're able to put data on a satoshi and then you own that satoshi. That's not how Bitcoin works at all.

10:07That only works through...

10:10Danny Plainview...the lens of Ordinals. Yeah, that's the protocol. So the difference, that's why we call this a consensus protocol, because there is a deterministic state that is posted to Bitcoin through all of these transactions, the bytecode of the smart contracts themselves and the call data for interacting. This entire state of the OP_NET network is recreatable from 100% of on-chain data, where anyone will get the exact same state as the next guy. If I were to run an ord client today that uses like an older version of the ord client, or...

10:48Chad MasterOr are you going to edit your own ord client?

10:49Danny PlainviewI can edit, yeah. And I will still be a valid Ordinals client provider. There's no Ordinals network, right? There's just individuals who run the ord client, and you just hope...

10:59Chad MasterYou're hoping that this guy's ord client and that guy's ord client, if you're a wallet provider or a marketplace, you're just praying that these guys have the same client version or they haven't edited their database locally. So you're relying on these individualized points of risk or centralization. It's very brittle and it's fragile. And you're not able to do anything complex. And that's why there hasn't been anything that complex that has emerged from stuff like Ordinals.

11:33That's really where we came in, and we decided as soon as we saw this Ordinals tech emerge and we were interested in like, OK, we want to invest in Bitcoin DeFi. We want to see Bitcoin advance in terms of what can I do with my Bitcoin as an asset? And we were excited about Ordinals early on until we really dug in. We realized the only thing that is going to be able to be viable here are just NFTs, which NFTs can be very fun, but there's boom-bust cycles for this stuff because it's just pure speculation.

12:03You're not able to build anything that really provides value to the Bitcoin asset or the wide range of things.

12:10Danny PlainviewOkay, sorry. There's just clear, like, PMF for doing stuff on Bitcoin layer one. Like, if NFTs on Bitcoin were able to get five to ten billion dollar market cap combined, and then BRC-20s, which was like just the most basic version of tokens, but no DeFi, that was another 10, 15 billion dollars of cumulative market cap, imagine what happens when there is Uniswap, Aave, stablecoins, OHM, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of these great DeFi games from Ethereum, like you've already done NFTs and shitcoins on Bitcoin. That was enough to bring 20 billion dollars of value cumulatively.

12:50What happens? There's probably five times that amount is interested in playing these DeFi games. There's another air quote for you. These DeFi games on Bitcoin layer one. And just nobody's been able to do it yet, because you can't, to have this model that works for BRC-20 and Ordinals, to do it for smart contracts. You need consensus and just nobody's ever been able to do that before. So, yeah.

13:17Chad MasterAnd it's built to scale, too. It's built to scale past just DeFi. It's built to scale towards institutionally friendly activity. Guys like Michael Saylor have been quoted many times over the course of the past few years demanding tokenized assets on the blockchain. What blockchain will they use for that? Ethereum? Solana? Bitcoin should be a viable option for tokenizing equities or debt or real estate or whatever.

13:41Danny PlainviewNobody gives, any of these people who want to tokenize assets, they're never going to use, like, Citrea to do that, because there's no liquidity on Citrea. Why would I tokenize a billion dollar fund and then put it onto a chain that is like kind of tied to Bitcoin but has 10 million dollars worth of TVL? Like, nobody cares about that. Everybody wants to, when they say they want to tokenize stuff on Bitcoin, they want the asset to be able to interact with Bitcoin immediately. All of the Bitcoin on Bitcoin layer one, not the small amount of Bitcoin that's in this L2, the small amount of Bitcoin that's in this sidechain, the small amount of Bitcoin that's in this wrapped Bitcoin on another, I don't know... Like, they don't care about that. They want liquidity.

14:17Chad MasterThere's been a problem with every layer two so far on Bitcoin that has not been a payment-focused layer two, is that they just fork Ethereum and they build a bridge to Bitcoin. And some have more complicated mechanisms for bridging or posting data back to Bitcoin. But in reality, the experience is much closer to using Ethereum and having a bridge to BTC than, I mean, me as a user, if I'm just looking at the actual user experience and I have BTC right now and I'm interested in bridging off of Bitcoin, which every Bitcoin layer two is asking you to do.

14:54The question I have to ask is, is there a bigger opportunity for me in terms of liquidity or application use case or whatever in just bridging to ETH than going to a Bitcoin layer two? As of right now, the answer is yes. Like, ETH is a much better Bitcoin layer two than any existing Bitcoin layer two solution because my first step is I leave Bitcoin regardless. So if I'm leaving Bitcoin, I'm not even using BTC anymore.

15:16Danny PlainviewThey don't give a shit about, yeah, the rollup being posted to Bitcoin. Nobody actually cares about this stuff. They care about liquidity. They care about security. They care about where, especially when we're talking about the big money that likes Bitcoin. If MicroStrategy is going to tokenize somewhere, they're going to do it on Bitcoin layer one. Yeah.

15:37Chad MasterThat's a long rant.

15:38Vlad CosteaWell, yeah. You, Chad, mentioned the magic word there. And before I mentioned what the magic word is, someone asked me in the chat if I see the chat. Yes, I do. Yes, I see it. And you should choose a number from 1 to 100 to participate in the contest, which I'm going to mention more about in a few minutes. But you, Chad, mentioned the word scaling. Yeah. And you're still limited by the four megabyte block size limit and you're still limited by the 10 minute block time.

16:07And how is this going to work in a high fee environment where maybe some participants are going to have their transactions stuck in the mempool for a long time?

16:17Chad MasterYeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a few answers to this question. I mean, obviously, this is a huge question on Bitcoin in general. I mean, this is not even a question for us per se, but just in general, Bitcoin gets adopted on a global level. How are 8 billion people in the world going to use Bitcoin if we only have 6,000 transactions per block, right? Every 10 minutes. It's not our limitation, it's Bitcoin's limitation. So our idea here is that we're building functionality before scale. What we've seen over the course of the past five plus years is a disgusting level of inactivity on Bitcoin.

16:53People not using the Bitcoin blockchain, which the Bitcoin blockchain was built to be used. That's what it was designed for. People are supposed to make Bitcoin transactions. And if people aren't making Bitcoin transactions to pay for stuff, which they're not, right, that's not my opinion. That's just what we've seen over the course of the past, let's just call it five years. If they're not making Bitcoin transactions to pay for stuff, then who is using the Bitcoin blockchain and why are people using the Bitcoin blockchain? And even around the scaling conversation, there's a million different arguments in the scaling conversation.

17:27But the problem is we've never seen Bitcoin at any time recently being in a position, except for during the peak of Ordinals hype, be in a position of sustained high fees, where there's even demand for scale. There's a theoretical demand for scale where we all know that 8 billion people can't transact on a network that does 6,000 transactions per block. But there's no way for, you know, there hasn't been a period where there's been like a year or two years or three years where every single Bitcoin block has demand for that block space.

18:00And so what happens in a high fee environment, again, our mandate has been in building this protocol, build reasons why people may use the Bitcoin blockchain. And it can't just be because people want to make shitcoins. It has to be because people can build stuff that provides enough value to Bitcoiners or people who hold the Bitcoin asset that they're interested and there's an economic incentive for them to make Bitcoin transactions. Once we see an extended period of time where there's a high demand for block space, one, I think that the type of activity that is non-desirable to a lot of Bitcoiners inevitably sort of gets priced out of the market because, you know, take it down the line of theoretical possibility here.

18:40You have stablecoins on BTC and lending protocols and all these great DeFi aspects. And then people come in, major players or institutions start tokenizing assets on Bitcoin and huge liquidity starts flowing into the system. A lot of the less valuable activity, if it's going to be $100 to make a Bitcoin transaction, only the highest value transactions are going to be on Layer 1 Bitcoin. And then, again, the question around scale starts to get asked here. And, you know, we don't want to take a political position on putting forth a change to Bitcoin that actually, you know, allows for more transactions on BTC or any scaling solution for Bitcoin itself.

19:19We built this protocol. We have ways that we can scale the protocol itself natively. We have ways that we can scale the protocol vertically or horizontally. And if Bitcoin, if there's enough demand for a change for Bitcoin to be made, it's a net positive for the protocol, of course, because it allows for more throughput on Layer 1. And that is sort of our position is, you know, we're building functionality before scale. We're creating demand for making Bitcoin transactions and using the Bitcoin blockchain and building applications that provide value to Bitcoin.

19:48And the scaling conversation, if it gets ignited from there, is something that I think is for those who are heavily invested in, you know, the future of Bitcoin and how they want to see Bitcoin scale. It's for the community to really decide on what's the best option for BTC in the future. Does it mean that any Bitcoin as payments solution is just shunted to the Lightning Network and the Lightning Network gains a ton of adoption? Is it, you know, a total ossification movement? The fee market on Bitcoin just totally levels itself out in terms of the type of activity people are doing and all the payments just go to the Lightning Network.

20:23And that's where you're transacting with Bitcoin in a cheap way if you're trying to buy your bananas and stuff. That might be a possibility. Is it a BIP that changes, you know, the speed or throughput of Bitcoin? Yeah, I guess that's the answer. It's a long answer, but that's the answer.

20:46Vlad CosteaYou actually got a couple of very interesting questions from the chat, like very specific. I'm not sure if you guys asked your friends to ask questions, but they're quite interesting. There is someone named TenGenNode, and he says, "Hi, Vlad, is the OP_20S basically MakerDAO but native to Bitcoin? And how do you deal with those 10-minute wait times for liquidations?"

21:11Danny PlainviewWell, that is a very specific question. No idea who that is. Great question. Yeah, OP_20S. So, okay, let's talk about OP_20 first. So OP_20 is the token standard for OP_NET tokens to be issued with. It's based off of the ERC-20 model and what it does, but it's not a fork of it. It actually has some improvements. But it's just a standard token model. OP_20S is something unique that we created that is essentially an extension of the OP_20 base token standard that is specific for stablecoins that wish to interact with the NativeSwap application that we've made, which allows you to swap Bitcoin for OP_20 tokens.

21:54And so basically what this does is it allows you to set an oracle price for your stablecoin. And you can call this every three blocks, every 10 blocks, every block, whatever, and essentially set the peg of that token to the price of what Bitcoin is to $1. How many sats is $1 in BTC? And then that will allow the NativeSwap pool to always be priced at $1 in BTC, which therefore allows you to have stablecoin swaps for the first time ever on Bitcoin layer one, which really is like the mass unlock moment for everything we've been talking about, where people are going to start using this, blah, blah, blah.

22:41The story we're telling is great, but the actual use case and liquidity and opportunity to make money comes with stablecoins and BTC. That is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar market that has zero dollars in TVL right now. It is insane that Bitcoin has, call it, between one and a half and two trillion dollars of market value. And there's no way to swap a single dollar of Bitcoin into a stablecoin without using a different chain or custody of some sort or KYC. Like, there's no trustless way, there's no way to stay on Bitcoin and swap 1 BTC for however much that 1 BTC is worth in dollars without leaving Bitcoin.

23:29And so that to me feels very naturally like a, wow, this technology is offering more freedom to Bitcoin holders. That is what we are truly after. If you compare Bitcoin to any of the other cryptocurrencies or blockchains, whatever, with the exception of Bitcoin forks like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, whatever, every other chain has way more freedom. If I'm a holder of Ethereum or Solana or even Binance, like BNB, right, I can at least do stuff with my money and I don't have to custody or KYC myself. Like I can go swap my BNB for a thousand dollars in one second and it's done.

24:08I just go to a dApp. I go to PancakeSwap and I do it. For Bitcoin, that is not an option. And so Bitcoiners have no freedom. They're not able to do anything with their Bitcoin that doesn't require trust. And the whole point of Bitcoin is don't trust, verify. It's just this very core value that I really don't see why anyone would be against this as a concept. This is a net positive thing for Bitcoin and crypto. This is allowing Bitcoin to be used in more ways. And that should just bring everyone back home to Bitcoin because nobody's building any app stuff.

24:46They're just building blockchains and there's nothing cool happening.

24:49Chad MasterYeah. In the wider world of non-Bitcoin ecosystem stuff, there's very little of interest going on in terms of what are people building, what are people making. I mean, the dominating narratives are stablecoins are getting wide adoption globally and Bitcoin is getting adopted by institutions and governments. And those are the dominating narratives. There hasn't been a ton of interesting innovations outside of perp DEXs, which already existed, but they've made better perp DEXs, and then prediction markets. So if those are the primary use cases for this technology, which essentially is, I mean, what are we talking about here?

25:32Gambling, a different form of gambling, strengthening fiat currency, and then Bitcoin, which is like this ultimate decentralized technology. I would say that there's one out of all of those that I think is interesting to me at least. And that's really, you know, that's where we want to focus. That's where we want to advance the plot. And I think a lot of the, well, a lot of the non-Bitcoin chains have done a lot of interesting and really cool things. At the end of the day, I mean, I think a predominantly dominant narrative earlier in Ethereum's development was, OK, well, great, ETH will do all this stuff and then eventually it'll all make its way back to Bitcoin.

26:12I know the maxi mindset has shifted, I guess, since then, but at a certain point in time, that's what Bitcoin maximalism meant. And to us, I mean, to me, that's what it means is that all these great innovations that exist on non-Bitcoin chains, they were test nets and test versions for what does have product market fit. And it's very easy to identify what kind of applications. So to answer that guy's question about the 10-minute block times and liquidations, I mean, it's up to developers to figure out ways to mitigate and design good applications and good protocols.

26:41We know the basics of what works because we can look at ETH or Solana and say, hey, these applications worked. These applications didn't. This had major hacks. This was a terrible idea. That was an amazing idea. You could literally just build that for BTC and do it in a way that provides value to Bitcoin holders and to the blockchain itself. So, I mean, it's kind of a non-answer, but that is the answer, is that it's up to the developers to develop something amazing. Like that's the value proposition here.

27:10We're not paying people to develop on this protocol. The value proposition is if you can build something that really provides value to the market and you build it well, you're building on the chain with the most users and the most liquidity.

27:24Vlad CosteaOK, that sounds nice. But you, Danny, made a statement that there is no way to swap BTC for a stablecoin without doing KYC and without leaving the chain. I mean, technically, let me put on. So I've been searching for hats around me, but I can't find any hat. I was going to put on my Bitcoin toxic maximalist hat and say, you know, there's Liquid. And for some people, Liquid, even though it's a trusted federation that has trade-offs, for them Liquid is Bitcoin. And there is some USDT on Liquid.

27:55And I looked it up right now on the tether.to website under the transparency section. It says that there is 97 million dollars that was authorized on Liquid. Yes. But there is in circulation only 33 million, which is abysmal. Like if you look at how much of it there is on Ethereum, there is 93 billion dollars. On Cosmos, there is 100 million dollars. Where's the big one? Solana is 3 billion dollars. Tron is 84.6 billion dollars. And maybe it's changing from day to day. But my point is that there is sort of a Bitcoin layer-ish, which is not a sidechain, like not in the true sense, but it's like a separate blockchain that uses BTC, the token.

28:49And you can swap for USDT there, presuming that the federation allows you to join and then leave with the money, because that's another thing.

29:00Danny PlainviewYeah, what if I want to swap more than 30 million dollars? We're talking about Bitcoin here. 30 million dollar swaps happen on Ethereum relatively often, especially during the bull market. If I'm a Bitcoiner and I want to use Bitcoin DeFi, 30 million USD in Bitcoin is less than 400 Bitcoin. If I want to swap 500 BTC for a stable, I have to go to the Liquid Network, I have to bridge from Bitcoin to Liquid. And then what I was saying before is that the liquidity fragmentation of all of these Bitcoin layer twos or whatever, it just defeats the entire purpose of interacting with Bitcoin in the first place.

29:37The whole point of doing Bitcoin DeFi is to have access to the Bitcoin liquidity in essentially as minimal blocks as possible. So if I have to go from Bitcoin to bridge to Liquid, that's going to take probably 5 to 10 blocks, especially for a 50 million dollar bridge. And now I'm on this other chain. And then I have to hope that my exchange supports Liquid USDT. It's so many trade-offs versus I have a stablecoin on Bitcoin layer one. I want to swap 100 million dollars of Bitcoin for USDT.

30:13It's there and I'm done in less than three blocks.

30:16Chad MasterAnd you named it as well. I mean, at the end of the day, you're bridging, you're leaving BTC. I really, one, respect the Liquid guys. I appreciate what they've built and a lot of really respected Bitcoin devs had a huge hand in building that. But at the end of the day, I mean, again, what's my first step is I leave BTC. There are Bitcoiners who use Liquid, 100%. They've done a good job of building out their ecosystem. But at the end of the day, like, okay, if I'm a major institution, for example, I don't have the ability to go and interact with a bridge when it comes to I'm using other people's money, I'm custodying money for people.

30:54I don't have the ability if I'm trying to access yield or make my Bitcoin become productive in some way, shape or form, I don't have the ability to interact with a bridge. If I'm a holder who has a lot of Bitcoin, the first step being a bridge is it's a massive amount of risk. I think the point Danny is really trying to make is that, you know, there needs to be a way to do this without giving up any added trust assumption and without compromising in any way, shape or form.

31:19That's really the idea.

31:25Vlad CosteaYeah, I was looking at Liquid right now. It's a ghost town still. They have like 10 transactions per block, for the amount of money that they raised and the amount of effort that they put into this and the marketing that this got. I think it's really disappointing. But then again, it's none of my business. Let me put on my other toxic maximalist hat that says "I'm running Lightning." And there's going to be at some point some sort of Tether on the Lightning Network. They're working on it.

32:00They have been working on it. It was supposed to be RGB first, which is sort of this layer on top of Lightning. And then Lightning Labs decided to do something that was initially called Taro. And then they changed the name into Taproot Assets. Yep. I haven't heard much from this. I don't know if it's happening. I don't know if it's coming, when it's coming. But if it does come and people say that it's technically superior to using the Bitcoin base layer because it's faster and supposedly it's going to have lower fees and somewhat of a better privacy.

32:36How are you going to respond to that?

32:38Danny PlainviewSorry, it's just totally missing the mark, because this is still, things that are Taproot-related are thinking about crypto for payments. That is the old, that is like crypto 2011 meta, right? That is clearly not what anybody is using crypto for on a mass scale or using it for financial instruments or using it to recreate financial markets. And whether people like that or not, that is what the majority of crypto is used for. Specifically on the Bitcoin side, probably ninety nine point nine nine percent of the volume done across Bitcoin, the asset per day is done in some kind of trade.

33:24It's not people sending Bitcoin to pay for stuff like nobody's doing that. Tether is the same way. Everybody uses Tether to trade with. There's very few legitimate like like day to day businesses that are using Tether as a payment option. It's for trading. That's what a majority of all these assets are used for. And so Taproot Assets, or even just the, I'm not going to call them out specifically, but just like the idea of putting Tether or any stable onto Lightning is totally missing the mark, because you're not going to be able to do DeFi with it still. Like, you're there.

33:58There will not be, what you're not introducing is a fully smart contract programmability layer into Taproot as well. Actually, I believe this is what Ark Labs is doing. That's why I find them actually kind of interesting, because they're like trying to work out a programmable version of Lightning, which I think is just a whole better idea than the entire idea of doing Lightning the way that it is now. Let's say Tether issues, or USDC or whatever, MakerDAO, whatever, issues a stable on Taproot Assets.

34:32OK, great. Right now, I can in this very niche and illiquid layer, I can send ten dollars Tether from me to my coffee guy like who cares? Nobody cares about that. At least the majority of people don't. The majority of people care about making these markets more liquid and bringing more functionality or opportunity to the assets, Bitcoin and assets that are based upon Bitcoin.

34:58Chad MasterYeah. So, okay, for example, like the profile of the Bitcoin holder has shifted significantly over the course of the past few years. Right. You have all these institutions and governments and it's getting more and more like that. And the demand for Bitcoin becoming a more productive asset or dare I say Bitcoin yield is growing and growing and growing. The options for Bitcoin yield as it stands right now are nearly nonexistent in a system that is revolving around Bitcoin itself. There are options for Bitcoin yield in terms of financial engineering.

35:31So something like how Michael Saylor does it, where it's not open to the public to do this. Right. This is something that he can do with his company. And we saw a lot of other DATs try to do it and then not have as much success. So it's clearly something that is open to him and he can issue financial products that other people can buy that are taking advantage of his financial engineering. Or you have to engage with some sort of centralized counterparty or middleman in order to either put your Bitcoin up as collateral or take a loan out against your BTC.

36:05That's a really basic function of the stock market. Let's just say for someone who holds, let's just say 20 million dollars worth of an asset. They can go to a bank, they can get a loan out against that asset. They don't have to sell their underlying, but they can still have liquid value. Without having to realize the tax hit on it. I mean, this is what something like Aave is so awesome at doing is allowing for you, the user, to not have to sell your crypto.

36:33You can just take a loan against it and then you're not engaging with a centralized party. It's a decentralized system. So it's amazing. Right. Like that is one of the coolest things that exists, I think, out of blockchain technology. And the fact that you can't do that with Bitcoin is one, I think it's a massive market. And two, it's just one use case for having a stablecoin within a Bitcoin ecosystem. Right. It's not that everybody who holds Bitcoin is just dying to swap it into a stablecoin because, again, you're essentially selling your BTC in that case.

37:04Right. It's one, of course, having the option to escape Bitcoin's volatility while staying within the Bitcoin network, I think, is valuable. Two, having access to a stable value on BTC allows you, if you have an application development environment, allows you to build applications that take advantage of both of those things. And the third is at scale. There's a lot of other more complex financial products and tooling that can be built if you have both of those things within the Bitcoin, within the Bitcoin network itself. So that's sort of, again, just to highlight Danny's point in terms of stablecoins on Bitcoin being used for payments.

37:44I also sort of tend to agree it's a little bit missing the mark in terms of what I think the overall total capturable market for this really looks like.

37:54Vlad CosteaI can already see why the Bitcoin Knots people will not like OP_NET. And there are two reasons. First of all, you're all for financializing Bitcoin and you believe that there is a market for stablecoins and they're going to say, wait a second, Bitcoin is the money and it's the only form of money that we want to have on this network. They don't want any sort of competing token or something that may or may not change the incentives of the Bitcoin miners, because that's another conversation to be had, whether or not or what happens when you're going to have these tokens which become more valuable than BTC itself and you're going to have a large transfer, which is larger than the block size, not the block size, than the block reward that the miner gets.

38:44And in that situation, you're basically creating an incentive for the miners to try to reorg, double spend, try to steal, act in some sort of dishonest way. And the other reason is that, of course, you're adding data that they don't like. You're basically inscribing smart contracts, or not smart contracts, but the smart contract data, which gets interpreted off chain. You're putting that onto Bitcoin and they think that this is spam. I'm going to let you defend yourselves on these two points that you're spamming the network and you're creating like another kind of money on the Bitcoin chain, which is not BTC.

39:28Danny PlainviewI just don't care, is what I would say. First of all, I literally don't care what these people think. I've been in Bitcoin since 2013, since I was a kid, and Bitcoin to me means freedom. And so if you are able to do this stuff and abide by the laws of Bitcoin, first set by the code of Bitcoin, which is set by consensus, then it's fair game and Bitcoin doesn't care about your feelings and neither do I. So spam and that whole definition of that, it's an argument that I try to not even get into, because it's just nonsense.

40:03It's completely nonsense. Secondly, I would say the BIP-110ers are an extremely vocal minority. I mean, a lot of these people are not the people who actually call the shots on Bitcoin. These are not like massive Bitcoin whales that share the opinion that Bitcoin is money or blah, blah, blah. This is like a cult that is just very loud. They've been around for a long time also, well before it was called BIP-110. These people have been kicking around. So, yeah, we just don't care.

40:34Like you're allowed to do this. And this has been tried by many, many people since the inception of Bitcoin, basically. Yeah, like Omni Layer, Mastercoin. That stuff was awesome. The only reason why that kind of fuel for experimentation stopped on Bitcoin layer 1 was because when Vitalik came in and also tried to do this on Bitcoin layer 1, he decided, you know, this place is toxic, and the devs are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Like, 2013 Bitcoin was way worse than it is now.

41:06He couldn't get anything passed, and it was just total... Nothing was happening. So he left to make Ethereum on another blockchain, and it worked and it works well to this day. It's the best smart contract blockchain, right, is Ethereum. And so, yeah, the want to experiment and kind of make this happen on Bitcoin layer 1 just went away for the majority of people. But there's always been like a niche amount. Like, you brought up Counterparty earlier. There have always been a handful of attempts to do smart contracts on Bitcoin Layer 1, or at least in a way that is close to Bitcoin Layer 1.

41:43And yeah, we believe that we've made the one that is actually Bitcoin layer 1. We've tried to take as many lessons that we could away from the previous attempts. We're very well versed in all of the other attempts to do this. We know what worked from them, what didn't. And we think this... We love Bitcoin. We really love Bitcoin. If we didn't love Bitcoin, we would have just made a Bitcoin Layer 2, made a gas token and rode off into the sunset like the hundred other Bitcoin layer 2s over the past few years did, right?

42:13Also, by the way...

42:16Chad MasterTo emphasize, to provide an alternative response as well in terms of spam, right? More willing to engage in a spam conversation. But from my perspective, and from a lot of people's perspective in the market, when it comes to spam and the argument on Ordinals specifically, that Ordinals are bloating the UTXO set. Whether that is negligible over time is a different conversation. But the way that the Ordinals protocol works and why this is even a relevant conversation right now is that every single ordinal is like a minimum size UTXO. And your ownership of that asset is tied to this UTXO.

42:57So everyone just holds these tiny UTXOs in their wallet. The size of the Bitcoin blockchain explodes in terms of the amount of data that you're carrying, which is, in my opinion, the spam argument, the... the FUD on the spam argument is that, yeah, that's really bad for Bitcoin because it makes it more expensive to run a node. Okay, understandable. I'm with you there. Merits of Ordinals and NFTs on Bitcoin aside, the design of the Ordinals protocol is inherently, whether it's mildly damaging to Bitcoin or it's massively damaging to Bitcoin is up for debate, but it is damaging to Bitcoin.

43:33The way that we designed our protocol is that our protocol is account based. So your ownership of assets is not tied to individual UTXOs that you have to hold in your wallet. All the assets are virtual assets. So your contract calls are Bitcoin transactions, but those themselves are small Bitcoin transactions that can be consolidated. So we're actually not bloating the UTXO set whatsoever, right? It's the UTXO set, like Bitcoin is meant to be, is supposed to expand and contract over time. And so that is the same way for us, right?

44:05We're not making these non-consolidatable UTXOs that tie your ownership of these assets, that are tied to your ownership of these assets. Your contract calls are consolidatable UTXOs, which means that the overall size, no matter how many more transactions per block are OP_NET transactions, the overall size of the UTXO set doesn't increase over time permanently. So it's not spamming the Bitcoin blockchain in the same way that Ordinals is. If your argument is anything that isn't, I'm paying for bananas with Bitcoin or I'm sending Bitcoin from me to you is spam, then that's a more philosophical argument.

44:43It has nothing to do with the technical side of what's good or bad for Bitcoin. So yeah, making a financial incentive to make Bitcoin transactions, as long as they're not transactions that are damaging the Bitcoin network, I don't believe that's spam. That's my opinion. And like Danny says, kind of like who cares? When it comes to creating an environment where, you know, there are assets on Bitcoin that might be more valuable than, I mean, nothing's going to be more valuable than the cumulative value of Bitcoin itself.

45:13That's, I would say the upper limit of, you know, what the value that can be created here. We've never seen an asset on an individual blockchain exceed the value of the blockchain itself.

45:26Vlad CosteaBut it doesn't have to be the blockchain itself. It just needs to be the transaction in the next block, which gives an incentive to reorg. So the miners right now get 3.125 BTC per block. But if you're going to have like a Rare Pepe, which is worth five Bitcoin, and the miners are aware of that, there can be like a battle.

45:48Danny PlainviewBut our assets aren't based on UTXOs. Our assets are based on, it's account-based. So there is no, like, the difference with this is, yeah, like things like Rare Pepes or Ordinals, et cetera, yes, there is miner MEV. There's MEV that is now introduced to try and, like, fight over that RBF, the purchase of a single UTXO to fill the PSBT. But all of our stuff works on contract calls. So even if your transaction gets pushed to the next block, as long as your slippage is set or as long as your contract call goes through, you should be fine.

46:29The MEV is going to be very weird, because there has not been an account-based protocol that is not UTXO-based really in a very long time, maybe ever. There's BRC-20, Runes, everything else is UTXO-based.

46:47Chad MasterYeah, this doesn't work like Ethereum either in the sense that there's like a validator that has a copy of the blockchain that can see your transaction. And then we don't know who's going to mine the next Bitcoin block. So MEV in the traditional sense is not exactly possible with this protocol. There's kind of decentralized MEV, where you see a transaction in the mempool. And theoretically, you can submit a transaction. With a higher gas fee, and a higher priority fee, which is the transaction ordering that happens after the Bitcoin block.

47:19So I'll explain this first before we get into MEV. But basically, with any OP_NET-related transaction, you're paying three fees. You're paying the Bitcoin layer one fee to miners to get your transaction onto Bitcoin. So whatever sats per vbyte is, you're paying that. Second fee you're paying is for execution of whatever smart contract you're interacting with. The third fee that you're paying is an optional fee, which is the priority fee. So that's a transaction ordering fee. So Bitcoin block passes. You submitted your transaction with a Bitcoin fee rate that got you into that next block.

47:49You're in this block. How do OP_NET nodes then process the transactions within that block? They're not processing them by the order that they get confirmed in that block, because then Bitcoin miners have the ability to just reorder transactions within the block and then just create a total rate, basically. So the transactions within that block are ordered by their priority fee. So it's a transaction ordering fee that's paid that basically says regardless of where you get confirmed within the Bitcoin block, as long as you're in the Bitcoin block, the OP_NET nodes are going to execute based on this secondary ordering fee, not on where you got confirmed within that block, which completely hamstrings miners from being able to engage in this MEV attack vector.

48:32So those are pieces to this. Now, when you think about MEV, I mean, yes, theoretically, you can build a bot or something that is tracking where people are sending transactions and either sending transactions with a higher priority fee than them. But then you as the user have the ability to, well, one, it will be very difficult to be able to sandwich somebody because you have to submit a transaction with a higher priority fee than them, just one above them. And also submit a transaction with a priority fee that's just below them to guarantee that you get the sandwich just right.

49:07So it's not going to be how Ethereum or Solana MEV works. And then you, as the user, the 10-minute block time says you can RBF your own transaction, submit with a higher fee, and now you can un-MEV yourself, basically. So it's not going to be MEV in the traditional way that we see it on other chains. I'm not saying it's not going to be possible, but it's not going to be coming from miners. It would be from users and it would be way harder to do. And there will be mitigation for it. And I do think that products will come to the market that help mitigate this as well. Private mempool relays, if you have a very, very high value transaction that you do not want to have any attack vector for, you can submit directly with a mining pool and they'll include you in the next block that they mine.

49:50I mean, these sort of services as of right now are widely underutilized or used to submit non-standard transactions. But I think when it comes to being protected from public mempool activity, that will become a service that becomes much more valuable over time. So something like MARA will, I think, be able to provide a really extremely valuable service to the market and any mining pool will be able to do so.

50:14Vlad CosteaRight. I still have some questions, but I got to plug some ads at this point.

50:19Chad MasterNo problem.

50:19Vlad CosteaI will start by asking you guys if you have Cake Wallet on your phone.

50:23Chad MasterI do not. I do not have Cake Wallet on my phone.

50:26Vlad CosteaIf you do get Cake Wallet on your phone, I'm going to send you each half of a Zcash, which is like $100 right now. And you can swap it inside of the wallet for BTC if that's what you want, or you can zodl, that's the term for holding Zcash. So, yeah, this is my task for you. And I also want to ask you, where do you get your Bitcoin news?

50:50Danny PlainviewMy Bitcoin news?

50:51Vlad CosteaYes.

50:53Danny PlainviewFrom a collection of the X algorithm, that's what I would say.

50:57Chad MasterBitcoin University, Matthew Kratter, Bitcoin University.

51:00Vlad CosteaOh, no.

51:04God have mercy on your soul. Anyway, when was the last time you checked out news.bitcoin.com, which is basically the website that 10 years ago was saying that Bitcoin Cash is faster. And it wasn't 10, it was more like 8. But it was saying that Bitcoin Cash is faster and cheaper to transact than Bitcoin. And now they became orange and they rebranded, they know the difference between BTC and BCH. And I tend to think that they have a pretty balanced news reporting. So check it out.

51:38I think you guys will be surprised that there is some stuff in there. I'm not sure if there's anything about you. You made some waves recently. Let me check if they actually said anything on news.bitcoin.com about OP_NET.

51:53Chad MasterI'm on their website right now. It looks like a great website.

51:59Vlad CosteaI don't think there's anything about OP_NET. Maybe I should tell them that you guys are sort of a big deal right now on Bitcoin. I think someone pointed out that more than 20% of the transactions over the last few days were from OP_NET.

52:14Chad MasterYeah, I mean, we anticipate it ramping up significantly. I mean, right now our DEX isn't live. So there's really no way to even trade these assets right now. There's just a few collections minted and a few tokens minted and people are deploying a lot of contracts prepping their applications. So I think that we'll see, over the course of the next few weeks to months... Hopefully, we want to target that number being at least 40% or 50% of all Bitcoin transactions are OP_NET-related. Obviously, down the line, we'd hope that that number gets to a very high number, 80%, 90%.

52:51Vlad CosteaI can only imagine the reactions after that happens. There's going to be like a huge meltdown of the magnitude that we haven't seen since 2016 when Trump won. There's people screaming on camera into the void, be like, ah!

53:06Chad MasterI mean, the idea behind Bitcoin is that like if there's enough consensus, something can be done. So either there's something that happens in regards to scaling or whether it's ossification and people are OK with the type of activity that's happening. Or again, the fee market should price out, like, any of the super, super degenerate activity. So if we reach an adoption level of 80, 90% of transactions, then we're seeing major institutional transactions or high value transactions that provide value or utility to the Bitcoin asset. So, I mean, people may be upset, but there's going to be, I think, an equal amount of people who are going to be excited and actively use this stuff.

53:44Vlad CosteaYeah. So did you guys install Cake Wallet?

53:46Chad MasterI just did.

53:48Danny PlainviewBro, I can't, because I have to log into my...

53:50Vlad CosteaIf you set up a Zcash wallet, I'm going to make the transfer. And I also want to remind the people listening that they have 10 minutes left to pick a number from one to 100, which they can type in the chat. I can see both the chats on Twitter slash X and YouTube. So wherever you are, I'm going to see your number. And you only get to choose one number.

54:09And if you choose two numbers, only the more recent one is going to count. So don't try to cheat. Actually, don't try to choose too many numbers. Like, if you exceed two numbers, I'm going to disqualify you because that's really not fair. You should just choose one number. Anyway, another sponsor I want to plug is LayerTwo Labs. And they're trying to build sidechains for every interesting use case out there. They already have the software. It's on layertwolabs.com/download. Are you guys aware of Paul Sztorc's work?

54:40Chad MasterYes, with drivechains. In fact, you know, a theory of ours is that, let's just say Bitcoin ossifies, there's going to be high demand for layer 2 activity, right? I maybe shit on some layer 2s previously in this podcast. But I think that if there's demand for scale, then scaling solutions that are good will be widely adopted. And so I think that anyone who has prepared or built or has been working on Bitcoin scaling solutions that aren't, like, change Bitcoin's code, but building on a layer 2 or secondary layers, anyone who's able to do that in a way that properly scales the type of activity, if we're the catalyst for this, that properly scales the type of activity that we're doing, are very well positioned, I think, for extreme success and adoption.

55:28I think that's sort of been our opinion on this. We don't want to change Bitcoin's code. And so scaling solutions seemingly on a secondary layer will be the way that this activity scales over time. So I would love to have a conversation with him, to be honest.

55:46Vlad CosteaWell, I think the difference between Lightning or Ark or Liquid or other layer 2s and drivechains is that drivechains are paying transaction fees directly to the miners. So if there's a million users on some Ethereum drivechain or some Zcash drivechain, then all of these transaction fees will go to the miners and Bitcoin will only continue to be prosperous because I think this is the biggest bet that Satoshi made. It's in the white paper. It assumes that when the block rewards are going to diminish, the transaction fees will compensate.

56:22And I don't think we have seen too much of that.

56:26Chad MasterYeah, I mean, that is our core, you know, what's the why, the real why behind why would we do this? You know, aside from trying to serve a gap in the market, is that we think that there's a reason why people need to be making Bitcoin transactions. As you said, that's a core piece of Bitcoin's architecture. That's the reason why, you know, that was Satoshi's vision for how the network, you know, after the last Bitcoin is mined, how is Bitcoin going to be maintained? There needs to be a reason why people are using the network and paying fees.

57:02So again, that is our why. You know, why do we build this? To create a reason why people make Bitcoin transactions. And it can't be something arbitrary. So there has to be, it's a permissionless and decentralized system. It allows anyone to build anything. So, you know, someone will build something, whether it's us or somebody else, that creates enough demand for these transactions where the fee market, hopefully over time, fulfills that exact vision in 50 or 100 years of, you know, subsidizing the security of Bitcoin, the security budget of BTC.

57:32Because some of the answers I've heard from other people are like, well, governments are going to subsidize Bitcoin mining, or energy is just going to magically become cheap enough, where it's going to be basically free to mine Bitcoin. Maybe. Are we willing to bet Bitcoin's entire viability on a maybe or on governments just giving free energy? I'm not. We're not. We're two plebs in the market. We have the ability to do this and we did it, you know?

57:58Vlad CosteaYeah, I do like the sound of that. If you want to test the drivechains, the URL is layertwolabs.com/download. And I still have to promote SideShift, which is like the cooler version of ShapeShift. So, ShapeShift came along first. I think that was 2016, 17 or something. Erik Voorhees, he became very popular with this, but then he added KYC in 2018 or 19. And there was a moment when a lot of businesses that were integrating ShapeShift added SideShift. And SideShift is the cooler one that doesn't do KYC unless, of course, you sign up and you choose to have an account on it.

58:41But it's not mandatory. And until you guys figure out the liquidity for swapping Bitcoin for stablecoins or vice versa, you can do that on SideShift and the liquidity is pretty great. They have low fees and you can even accept meme coins from your friends on Solana or whatever. And then you swap them for Bitcoin on SideShift. Like, you have a lot of trading pairs and I think it's interesting. You don't even have to touch the meme coins or whatever. You just paste your Bitcoin address into SideShift and then you give the Solana address to your friend.

59:16And he thinks he's giving you some sort of funny meme coin, but he's actually swapping it for Bitcoin. And you get that to your wallet and you just get what you want. SideShift.ai, check it out. And last but not least, there is Braiins Hashpower, which is a service for renting hashpower. If you want to 51% attack BSV, don't sue me, Craig. I'm just saying it's possible. I'm not telling people they should do it. But if you want to do something interesting, like try to hit a block with a lottery ticket.

59:49I think with like $20, you can rent the equivalent of a thousand tiny Bitaxes for a couple of hours. And it can be interesting. Like you can try lottery tickets to hit a full block. You can try to hit a Bitcoin Cash block if you think you have better chances. The possibilities are endless and the URL is hashpower.braiins.com, with a double I. Now, I'm going to ask you, Chad, I saw that you pasted your Zcash address from Cake. Let me scan it. Try to show your QR code to the camera.

1:00:33Just a bit farther from the camera. A bit more? A bit more? Okay, got it. So, I'm going to send you half a Zcash. Usually, it's a full Zcash for every guest, but I guess I have to split it this time around. There's two of you. I don't want to deplete the budget. So, for amount, I'm going to do 0.5.

1:01:09Why can't I do fractions, Cake Wallet? What happened?

1:01:16Interesting.

1:01:20I'm just going to send you one because this is awkward.

1:01:23Chad MasterI'll share it with Danny.

1:01:25Danny PlainviewYeah, I couldn't download it.

1:01:31Vlad CosteaSo, Cake Wallet really appreciates that you are here and offers you this giveaway of one Zcash, which you can hold or zodl or swap for Bitcoin. It's your choice. Now, I have to give one Zcash to someone from the comments. Basically, I asked the both of you to choose a number from 1 to 100 before we started.

1:01:57After we reveal the numbers, we're going to have to decide what we do with them. If we add them or we multiply or we subtract, we got to do some operation to get a final number or we can do an average. What do you think?

1:02:13Chad MasterHmm. Danny, it's up to you.

1:02:20Danny PlainviewWhat if we add the sum of all the numbers individually?

1:02:26Vlad CosteaThere are only two numbers.

1:02:27Danny PlainviewYeah, but if we have like 55 and 25, we'd add 5, 5, 2 and 5.

1:02:35Vlad CosteaOkay. That sounds like fun.

1:02:37Danny PlainviewNice.

1:02:38Vlad CosteaThat's good. So, what are your numbers?

1:02:41Danny PlainviewAll right. Let me pull it up. I wrote it down. My number is 100.

1:02:45Chad MasterMine's 14.

1:02:47Vlad Costea14. So, that's 1 plus 1 plus 4. That's a 6. Is there a 6 in the chat?

1:02:52So, from this point onwards, I'm not going to count any answers. The one who's closest to 6 and I see a 17. I see a 22, but that's far away from 6. 37. You're not lucky. Uh-oh. 17 is the closest so far. Oh, there's a 5 from How Hiroki. He said 5. Let's see if there's any number that's closer. If there's a 7, I don't know what I should do. But if there's an exact 6, I'm going to give it to that person.

1:03:31Uh-huh. Oh, my God. People actually are commenting and interacting with our conversation as opposed to just picking numbers, which is really nice. I love you guys. 69. Nice. Two people lost. It was 69.

1:03:50Scrolling.

1:03:55Okay. Someone said 6, but it was like a minute ago so it doesn't count. Okay. So, Hiroki is the winner. I'm going to contact you, sir. I'm going to send you a message after this interview. Congratulations. You won. So, you're at How Hiroki on YouTube. He has like a penguin avatar. I'm going to send you the transaction after the show. Now, let's get back to talking about OP_NET. Thanks to all the sponsors for making this possible. And who is this for? That's the best question. Because I've seen so many Layer 2 attempts, so many protocols, so many roll-ups, attempts to do sidechains.

1:04:37And they get a lot of hype. Or in the case of Citrea and you guys, they get a lot of hate from the BIP-110 slash 444 guys. And then the launch happens and it's kind of underwhelming. Like, people assume that, whoa, it's going to blow Bitcoin. It's going to increase the transaction fees and whatever. The activity is not as high as expected. Maybe it's the bear market. Maybe it's just that Bitcoiners HODL and they don't use the coin as much as we would like. So, the question is, who is your target audience for this?

1:05:13Danny PlainviewI would say initially the target audience is going to be builders. Builders and the tinkerers and the people who just simply want to have fun and do something cool. First and foremost, we have made this with the dream of doing smart contracts and all of the cool fun stuff from every other blockchain on Bitcoin. The long-term vision of what that could be and what we're working towards is institutions and giant funds and asset managers and RWAs all on Bitcoin. But day one right now, who is this for?

1:05:51This is for people who want to do something cool with their Bitcoin. They want to do something new. They want to play around. Don't, like, ape your life savings into the first meme coin you see, but this is a playground for Bitcoin in a new way that hasn't ever been done before in this way. The user experience has never been, for smart contracts on Bitcoin, I put Bitcoin in my Bitcoin wallet and I go to the website and I just click a button and it works. It takes 10 minutes, maybe.

1:06:19It's always been, I got to bridge somewhere, I got to do something else. There's all these trade-offs. So that alone, I think, is for anyone who has any kind of interest in playing with their Bitcoin or doing stuff with Bitcoin. It's builders and tinkerers, people who like DeFi. And then long term, it'll mature into what we hope to see is more of like any other complex, mature DeFi ecosystem where you have multiple billions of dollars of TVL. But right now is the fun time. So I don't know why people are getting so angry about it, because it's the opportunity to just have fun.

1:06:57Chad MasterYeah, I mean, look, this is for anyone who holds Bitcoin. If you hold a Bitcoin asset, this is for you. You can use it. You don't have to use it. There will be a lot of things that are built and there are going to be things that even if you don't like the overall concept, will provide value to you as a Bitcoiner. I would just say keep an open mind. And there are going to be things, we build this to be permissionless.

1:07:19So people are building stuff that maybe people hate, like people might not like. But there may be an equal or more amount of people who really love that shit. Meme coins or degen stuff. But at the end of the day, this is for anyone who holds Bitcoin. And long term, it's going to be for people who I feel like as the ecosystem will mature, it will mostly be used by people who want to use their Bitcoin as productive capital. They want their Bitcoin to turn into productive capital.

1:07:47That is, we're not trying to change Bitcoin to not be money, but being productive money or being able to use your money in ways that doesn't just mean I pay for something. That is still money. Money does a lot of things. Yes, payments is one of them. Value transfer is one. But you can do a lot with your money. And so being able to use Bitcoin in a productive way, that's really like the long term target audience. But the initial phase of this rollout is going to be a lot of builders.

1:08:13It's going to be a lot of people building stuff and throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. And we welcome the experimentation.

1:08:22Vlad CosteaI think that's a good answer, but we still need to see the users coming. And I see this also like a Lightning problem, like there is no protocol in this whole space that got as much advertising and virtue signaling and forced use at some events than Lightning. It was encouraged. It was pushed. Everyone was trying to run a node for a while. There were like commodified devices that you could buy to run a Lightning node. People were saying that you should switch to Lightning. It was like the biggest thing for like a couple of years, but it still did not take off.

1:09:00Ironically, it was Tron that took off. Do you see anyone advertising Tron? You don't. Do you see anyone saying, oh, my God, I feel so free because I'm using WBTC on Ethereum? No, but that's like 50 times bigger than Lightning. Yes.

1:09:17Chad MasterI mean, again, it really begs the question of, is Bitcoin a really viable currency for payments? That's the question, right? Lightning was the solution, the widely championed solution to bring the answer to that question. And Bitcoin is going to be for payments. We're going to buy everything with Bitcoin. But I mean, it's not like there's a world where that doesn't happen. But I do think that there's a lot of work that needs to be done that is very hard work and not rewarding work that needs to be done to make that happen, including like building full circular economies around BTC, where you're getting paid in Bitcoin and you're spending it.

1:10:00And everywhere around you, everyone's transacting in Bitcoin so that because, again, like the fallacy of I'm going to use my Bitcoin as payment, but also Bitcoin is like the store of value, is that if Bitcoin is going to go up to a billion dollars, which is like the mindset of holding BTC for the long term or two million dollars per coin or something. Well, why would I buy my banana with Bitcoin now, just like the guy who bought pizza with Bitcoin and then he lost out on like 200 million dollars?

1:10:26Like, why would you do that? It goes against two of the fundamental principles that most people who hold Bitcoin are using, which is that Bitcoin is this asset that's going to go up to a gajillion dollars. But also, this is like this great payment method. So, yeah, I mean, again, I think that until we get to a point where fiat currency fully collapses, and we need this decentralized money, there needs to be a reason why people are using the Bitcoin blockchain. I mean, we're trying to provide an answer to that.

1:10:55That says you can use your Bitcoin in ways that potentially can make you more Bitcoin or utilize your Bitcoin in new and novel ways that don't require you to just, you know, trade Bitcoin, which is this value, this asset that's going to go up 10 or 20 or 100x over the course of the next 10 or 20 years for a good or commodity that you're just eating or something. So, I mean, yeah, we're trying to fill that gap. That's really a core reason why something like this, I think, has demand in the market or will have demand in the market.

1:11:35Because, yeah, I mean, we've seen Lightning adoption. I'm fully with you on that one, you know. I mean, they changed Bitcoin to really facilitate lighting. Taproot was really there to make lighting happen. So, yeah, I mean, it just hasn't happened so far. I mean, I think that if it becomes, for me personally, like, why would I use the Lightning Network if I download a new wallet and deal with their UX, et cetera, if it costs me basically nothing to make a Bitcoin transaction right now? I don't care about waiting 10 minutes.

1:12:06You know, if I need to send Bitcoin from me to Danny, I'm not using the Lightning Network. I'll just use the Bitcoin network. It's like zero sats per vbyte for the past, like, four weeks before we launched OP_NET. And then it was like, it's like anywhere between one and a half to five sats per vbyte right now while people are just deploying stuff. Once people start trading and more complex applications become built and it costs me 10 or 20 or $30 to make a Bitcoin transaction, then maybe I will use the Lightning Network where it might be extremely cheap to send my Bitcoin to Danny or something.

1:12:36But, yeah, I mean, I just think that there needs to be like a better use case for why. Why would I use the Lightning Network if I could just use Bitcoin right now?

1:12:47Vlad CosteaThat's a good point, but we still have to see it in practice. We have to see it happen. I believe that usually most of the times Bitcoin doesn't have a tech issue. Like, there's a lot of good stuff that's being built. It has a culture issue with people who are very much against anything that they learned like a decade ago and they got so anchored into that stuff and they just wanted to see it happen. But my question to you right now is if we're going to have Bitcoin as this financial layer where people are going to be doing all of these operations, where they borrow stablecoins, they do DeFi on Bitcoin, they do everything that you see today on Ethereum on the Bitcoin base layer.

1:13:27Is it still peer-to-peer electronic cash or is it like some sort of bank replacement?

1:13:38Chad MasterI mean, I think it's a good question. Danny, do you have an opinion on this before I give mine?

1:13:45Danny PlainviewBitcoin being a bank, like, is it a replacement for fiat, right? That's the basis of the question, right? Is Bitcoin a viable replacement for fiat?

1:13:55Chad MasterOr if we have OP_NET and everyone's just using Bitcoin in apps, for example, does Bitcoin change from the white paper?

1:14:05Danny PlainviewI don't think so at all, because Bitcoin already is not what the white paper is. This is where you get into what is Bitcoin and what is BTC versus what is Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin is not at all today, the Bitcoin Core v30 or whatever, is not at all what the white paper laid out 16, 17 years ago now. It's gone through so much change. This is like a piece of code, right? It's not the same code that was specced 17 years ago. It's maintained by people who had nothing to do with creating it.

1:14:43And there have been multiple forks where old versions of the code are forked off. There's basically Bitcoin Cash and BSV, right? Those are also Bitcoin, but they're just not BTC. They are BCH and they are BSV. And the one that is called BTC is the one that everybody calls Bitcoin now. But even that is really not Bitcoin. So the really schizo take is, like, the closest thing to Bitcoin, actually, like what the white paper laid out as a concept, is something like MakerDAO, like a decentralized stablecoin that is a freedom money. That to me is what the white paper laid out, an idea of freedom money and a freedom network.

1:15:29It was all based around nobody can stop this, and there is value to it, also, that can't be controlled. And so, no, I don't think Bitcoin even today is the Bitcoin of the white paper. I don't think that. Again, I just don't like to like a lot of the time, I see people on the timeline, right, in Bitcoin, Twitter, just like go on. They will spend hours debating about, like, the white paper or what is Bitcoin. And I have done that in my life, been in Bitcoin for a long time.

1:15:59But I just don't see any point to it anymore because like, who cares? Who cares if it is what the white paper said or not? It's the same answer to the BIP-110 guys, like, who gives a shit? Nobody. I don't think BlackRock or Michael Saylor or Foundry, like, they don't care about what any of us have to think about it because they are playing the game of Bitcoin, not on ideals and beliefs, but on incentives. And that is all that matters. Like because Bitcoin is money and value is introduced into how the thing evolves and lives, literally the only thing that matters is incentives.

1:16:39And if somebody has a problem with the thing that I'm doing or you're doing or Chad's doing or we collectively are doing because they are mad that the incentive model of that thing is better than their incentive model. Like Bitcoin as payments and as transactions is the least valuable thing that Bitcoin layer one could ever be used for. Like, nobody... Bitcoin, with it being the transfer of Bitcoin as the only thing that Bitcoin should be used for, is like 200 transfers every hour. Nobody actually does that because it's slow and it's expensive and you can't do anything with it. There's no programmability.

1:17:15So the incentive model for Bitcoin right now is totally broken. And nobody said, there is no law that governs that you are not allowed to do this stuff. So I don't care. I don't care if it's in the view of the original white paper or not, because it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is incentives.

1:17:39Chad MasterThat's right. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't say it better myself. We are not going to be the driving force for Bitcoin not being what the white paper laid out. Like the white paper laid out something. That's not what Bitcoin is exactly today. The idea of Bitcoin in the white paper was not, oh, everyone's just going to hoard this asset to infinity. And then it's like going to go up forever because there's only 21 million of them. That's not what the white paper laid out.

1:18:05Vlad CosteaSo there's not even a mention of the 21 million coins in the white paper.

1:18:11Chad MasterYeah. So that's like, if we're talking about, are we going to be the ones who changed Bitcoin, where we're the catalyst in this? I don't think so. I think that we're actually being more true to what Bitcoin is supposed to be, which is it's a network that's supposed to be used. So we're trying to provide reasons why people are going to use the Bitcoin network. That's our mission. Our mission is not to change Bitcoin at a code-base level. We're trying to provide more use cases for what you can do with Bitcoin, not just the asset, but the network itself, and provide incentives for people to do so.

1:18:46And not only for people to do so, but people to build things that make people do so. Right? Again, everything about this is supposed to be an incentive-driven system. So an open source protocol that's permissionless allows anyone to build stuff. There should be an incentive for people to build things that provide value to the market. It's up to the market to decide, did someone build something that provides value? Then will I use it? That is really the basis of this entire system that we've created. And again, we have no grand political mission to change Bitcoin's code or anything like that.

1:19:20We're allowed to do this. Bitcoin allows for you to do this. And we're going to do it because I think that there's one demand in the market for it. And I think there needs to be a reason why people make Bitcoin transactions. And yeah, store of value is not a core tenet of the white paper. And that's what Bitcoin is today. So people just hoard it and they don't use it. And that's also not Bitcoin.

1:19:39Vlad CosteaBut if you're going to be using Bitcoin as a collateral asset or something that people use in DeFi, it's still sort of a store of value because it's not the direct asset that people use for payments. It's just the asset that people use for taking loans or for participating into something that's going to use a stablecoin economy.

1:20:00Chad MasterAbsolutely. I mean, listen, I would say that we're not, again, I'm not trying to change how people even are, I'm not even trying to change the store of value narrative either. I mean, again, that's an emergent narrative that came around about BTC and it's given it a lot of gas in terms of its adoption in the wider financial world. I mean, I think that there's a number of things that can emerge from this, and I think one of them is, okay, again, if you price payments for goods and services, which people don't really use Bitcoin for right now anyway, but if you price that out of the Bitcoin market and there emerges to be demand for it, where are people going to be forced to do this?

1:20:38On the Lightning Network, the rails that were widely championed and hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into the development of. Okay, that, I think, is very bullish for Bitcoin as payments if you are interested in, you know, Bitcoin's adoption on a wider scale in terms of a payment method. That can be a catalyst of our protocol. It's not something that we built the protocol to force per se. That wasn't our original motivation, but that will be a, I mean, that can be a potential conclusion or indirect result of the protocol gaining wide adoption.

1:21:13I mean...

1:21:14Danny PlainviewYeah, but Bitcoin as payments is retarded. Like, I'm sorry. It's just stupid as fuck. Nobody ever is going to do that ever. It doesn't work because Bitcoin has turned into this gold thing. Nobody uses ETH for payments, and it's way cheaper and faster already. Nobody's ever used another moving-priced asset as payments. That just doesn't make any sense. That is, oh my God, part of the problem with the people who looked at the white paper for an answer is they're literally incapable of thinking about the white paper as being this one specific person who is the guy who made it.

1:21:48So he has some merit to what he thinks, for sure. But it's just his, it's just what he thinks about it. Like he also, Satoshi Nakamoto does not control Bitcoin. He made this thing, the system that he put out into the world at the end of the day. At a certain point, his level of control over it was so little that he fucking left the whole thing. Like, so everyone who, like, looks to try and see, oh, this one opinion of what this tech is, which is not what it is now, that is the, this holy, like, protected idea that needs to be so sacred and abide by our interpretations.

1:22:24Like people talk about the Bible. Like it's just, it doesn't matter. It's one guideline to understand what this technology of Bitcoin is that is in the original white paper. It's not even fully accurate because Bitcoin is not most of what that is now today. And anyone who tries to tell you that you can't do stuff because of some reason that isn't like the code says you can't do that. Some reason that is ideological or religious almost is just like totally retarded. For lack of a better term, I literally don't care what you have to say to me because there's nothing you can do to stop me.

1:22:58Like you literally have to kill me. Like I don't need you to stop any of this because the code says you can't. So it's fair.

1:23:08Vlad CosteaYeah. I think the broader question is whether or not Bitcoin is and will stay permissionless. Whether or not you can build without asking others what they think about it, or whether or not it should exist on Bitcoin. I think this goes all the way back to colored coins and Satoshi Dice and some early applications that were built and got traction. USDT was initially also built on Bitcoin. We sort of kicked them out and people were complaining in 2018 that a large percentage of transactions on Bitcoin are USDT transactions.

1:23:43And that's when they decided that they should switch to Ethereum. And then they went to Tron and Solana. And right now I think the transaction volume of USDT is usually two times bigger in a 24-hour timeframe than Bitcoin's, which proves that there is demand for this. And I think in the history of Bitcoin we have this tendency to get something very cool that gets a lot of traction. And then some of the very concerned people decide that it should not exist on Bitcoin. So the question that I have for you is what is it going to take to intimidate you to stop building this on the Bitcoin base layer?

1:24:26Chad MasterNothing. I mean, you can, again, if you want to stop us, you have to kill us. Like, yeah, if you want to stop us, you have to kill us. That's it. It's not going to stop.

1:24:38Vlad CosteaIs it going to stop if they kill you? That's the other question. Like, is the cat out of the bag?

1:24:43Chad MasterAlso kind of not, because the protocol itself is an open source and permissionless protocol, that you can kill us and it will still exist and it will still function just fine. You just won't have us coming onto podcasts and shilling it, you know?

1:24:55But it's built to be part of Bitcoin forever. It is attached to BTC. It works on Bitcoin. You can change Bitcoin and OP_NET still works. In order to stop OP_NET for real, you would have to change Bitcoin so that regular Bitcoin transactions also don't work on Bitcoin. You have to fundamentally shift Bitcoin into something that is so different and so bastardized from the original version of BTC that it is completely no longer Bitcoin whatsoever. And the only thing that it has in common with the original Bitcoin is the asset ticker.

1:25:36And that is what you would really have to do to stop OP_NET, actually. But again, I don't want to position this as an antagonistic thing to BTC. Again, we see this as something that's really positive for Bitcoin. And I think that over time history will prove us right that we are putting something out to the public that brings more use cases for Bitcoin and brings wider Bitcoin adoption. It also brings and sucks liquidity and mindshare and developer talent away from non-Bitcoin chains, which is also a huge problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem, is that there are few developers and even the few developers that are here sometimes get chased away.

1:26:15And there's not great incentive to become a Bitcoin developer. So what brings developer mindshare to BTC? Financial incentive to build something great. And we're not giving the incentive, we're just providing the protocol; the incentive system already exists. So yeah, I mean, that's... Don't kill me, please. But even if you did, you really couldn't, you know, it's not really going to stop it either.

1:26:45You effectively have to kill Bitcoin to stop OP_NET.

1:26:48Vlad CosteaYeah, I've heard a similar argument about Counterparty. And I also want to point out that there's this poetic justice dimension to Bitcoin protocols. Because, for example, colored coins, I think, initially were designed so that they can isolate black market activity from, like, legal activity or whatever, just so that they can mark coins from the Silk Road. And that never ended up being used for that. It inspired Ethereum instead. And then we had Counterparty, which was this idea to create companies that are issuing their shares on Bitcoin.

1:27:29And you can have these decentralized marketplaces where you can trade commodities and you can have all of these betting markets. I think that was also part of the experiment. And in the end, it was used mostly for Rare Pepes and Spells of Genesis, which are some of the most legendary collections, and also Bitcoin Heads. Just check out btcheads.com. That's my collection. Anyway, there's also Omni, which was initially, I guess, it was supposed to be like a better version of Counterparty. And it had sort of the same goal to create decentralized companies on the blockchain.

1:28:05And it ended up being mostly used for USDT. And that's where it got born. And that's where I think it was the most successful token out there. And nowadays, it's not being used for anything. And then Ordinals and inscriptions were created for the purpose of putting JPEGs on the blockchain, but they ended up being used for much more interesting stuff like they sort of indirectly inspired BitVM. And also, you guys are using some of the same technology to put smart contracts into Bitcoin. So if NFTs and stupid JPEGs and whatever the Knots people are complaining about ended up creating a smart contracting layer on Bitcoin, I think there is a silver lining to that.

1:28:55Chad MasterWe hope so. We hope so as well. I mean, again, I would love for a future where you don't have to go to traditional financial markets to purchase stocks or assets. And you can get exposure to everything Michael Saylor is doing natively with your Bitcoin, without having to leave Bitcoin, or you don't have to sell your Bitcoin if you need capital. You could just take a loan out against it in a decentralized way without engaging with a centralized party. I mean, that would be a future that I would really look forward to. And yeah, I mean, we'll just have to see the emergent use cases for this technology.

1:29:34As you said, as the ones who came up with the idea for this or who pushed it through and made it happen, we have no real concept as to what the main adoption of this technology will actually be. We have our ideas for it. We've built out tools and DeFi protocols, et cetera, that we think will provide value and leverage our technology in a way that will provide use cases. But I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty what people are going to be using this in one or two or five years for, if they're going to be using it at all.

1:30:15Vlad CosteaYou actually have an interesting question, which has an obvious answer, but I still feel like it's useful to address it, because I think many people think about this. So let me find the exact comment. So it's from A R U P B. I'm not sure how you're supposed to read that. But he says, Is there any airdrop rewards or team token allocation for early users?

1:30:42Danny PlainviewThere's no token for OP_NET. There's like applications that are building that have tokens. So like, there's a DEX. We built the DEX, it's called MotoSwap. That is the MOTO token. There's a community, like, the first OP_NET token, OP_20 token. It's called Orange Pill. They did have an airdrop, and I think the token is still minting now for, what, another day and a half. And there's a ton of others as well. There's people doing a competition called vibecode.finance, and there were over 400 dApps that entered, 122 of them had deployed smart contracts, and probably between 50 to 60 of them are, like, stuff that could be deployed day one.

1:31:29So there's a ton of stuff launching right now. There's one that just did a presale called SLOHM, which is a fork of something called Olympus DAO on Bitcoin. They raised $250,000 in under 24 hours, which is pretty nasty. It's pretty cool.

1:31:45Chad MasterYeah. I mean, there's not incentives from us, but there will be a lot of opportunity, I think, from early adopters who engage with early projects and stuff. I mean, I think that that model has proven to be somewhat viable for user retention, airdrops, et cetera. So, you know, again, I would engage directly with projects or teams who are building stuff to get, like, a specific answer for that. But I think there's also like the more you're involved with the community around the developers and within the OP_NET community itself, or like the MotoSwap community, which is like our community that we've cultivated for the DEX application, the more clear of opportunities if you're like hunting early airdrops or trying to, you know, be an early adopter, you'll be able to find those opportunities much more clearly if you really get involved.

1:32:42Vlad CosteaThere's also Neo in the chat and he's asking, are OP_20 tokens fully native and secure compared to BRC-20?

1:32:51Danny PlainviewYeah, yeah. So they are fully, deterministically, exist on Bitcoin layer one. There is no indexer mismatching that can happen.

1:32:59Chad MasterIt's actually way more secure.

1:33:00Danny PlainviewYeah, yeah, yes. Yes. Short answer, yes.

1:33:04Chad MasterYeah, it's way more secure. For example, there have been multiple instances of indexer mismatch states with BRC-20 that have had to have complex political resolutions across those who run BRC-20 indexers, because BRC-20s are Ordinals, which have this off-chain ownership on the Ordinals indexer, and then they build a second indexer to index the Ordinals indexer, for a specific type of Ordinals inscription that is the BRC-20 standard. So you're like three levels off of BTC and there's no consensus across any of these. So again, you're relying on centralized sources of potential truth.

1:33:50So that's not really super secure at all when it comes to BRC-20s. OP_NET is completely different. Everything is immutable, provable and deterministically executable on Bitcoin with smart contracts. So that is, yeah, short answer is it's far more secure, actually.

1:34:12Vlad CosteaInteresting. So there's also another question from ARUPB, and I was meaning to ask this also. So what DeFi applications are live now and what's the real fee experience?

1:34:28Danny PlainviewYes, so there is staking live for the MotoSwap MOTO token that just launched yesterday, and then the MotoSwap DEX itself will be launching later this week. And then that's kind of when all of the suite of different people...

1:34:44Chad MasterYeah, so that's what we've made. We made the MotoSwap application. You have Bitcoin to token swaps, token-token pairs, liquidity farming, yield farming, easy deployment of tokens and those types of farms as well. That is like a core pillar of any, if you have assets on Bitcoin, you have to be able to trade them for BTC somehow. And so that is kind of like the first thing that you'll really be able to do. So there's nothing live right now, aside from the staking, but this will go live this week.

1:35:21And then there's going to be a ton of stuff that launches, a bunch of stuff that's going to launch on top of that, building off of that tech, but also a bunch of other applications and use cases. I mean, there's bridging assets from non-Bitcoin chains to BTC, because now you can have, instead of wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum, you can, I mean, there's not a ton of use case for this, but just from a theoretical standpoint, you can have wrapped Ethereum on Bitcoin now in the exact same way, right?

1:35:52But obviously, early use cases for this would be like stablecoins or other assets that are not on BTC can bridge easily to Bitcoin now. There's going to be all sorts of DeFi applications that launch over the course of time. I mean, you can check out, there's a ton on Twitter. There's like, again, there's a few hundred applications that are either in development or ready to launch soon. So, you know, obviously I would do your own research and check out, make sure projects get audited properly, and you're kind of, again, these are individual teams that are not us.

1:36:24So you'd have to make sure that whatever you're engaging with is you have to do your own research on them. Obviously, AI tooling is, I think, really helpful in regards to sussing out the safety of whatever smart contract you're engaging with or application you're engaging with. But yeah, that's sort of the, there's going to be an emerging ecosystem of a ton of builders. It's just, you know, we just launched this protocol last week. So a lot of people are deploying now or finalizing audits or starting their builds now.

1:36:54So we'll see, I think, a hockey stick of activity over the course of the next, anywhere between two and six months.

1:37:03Vlad CosteaYeah, it's good that you're committed to this and you're optimistic about it. And I'm also happy with the questions from the community. They're amazing. Another one that I have is mostly connected to a piece of FUD or criticism that I read on Twitter, which said that your protocol is basically AI slop and it's vibe coded or something. So you guys said that you were in development for about three years and you spent a lot of money on audits. But what's the story? Like, did you code it manually?

1:37:37Did you use AI for creating this?

1:37:40Danny PlainviewNone of this was made with AI. No, we made something called vibecode.finance, which is a, it was just a competition, like a builder competition we did that used, we encouraged people to use our MCP that we built called Bob, which is trained on Bitcoin and OP_NET documentation, how to build stuff. And we gave it to them as like an easy starting point to build stuff. Right. So we did a competition called vibecode.finance. And some of the BIP-110 guys, who are just, like, old retarded boomers, they just didn't know what any of that meant.

1:38:12And they were like, oh, OP_NET was vibe coded, which was very funny.

1:38:17Chad MasterYeah, very funny accusation. There's a pattern I see in regards to a lot of these fellows on Twitter using AI, but I don't think they really truly understand how to use AI. So there's like an element of bias that AI will put on whatever responses it's giving you, based on the prompting that you're giving it. So if you're giving it a prompt that is asking it to respond in a way that's biased one direction or another, it's not going to give you an objective source of truth. There's prompt engineering that you have to do to make sure that AI is answering in an unbiased and objective way.

1:38:51And you just see a lot of people not doing that. And so they'll just like post some AI response or AI analysis of something because they prompted it like, tell me why this is really, really bad. Tell me, tell me, tell me, give me all the reasons why this is really terrible. And then AI will just like slop out a bunch of like totally made up shit. That's just confirmation bias. But this is like, you know, pretty classic, like, non-technical approach to new technology, right? Like some of these people would be the same people who like had relationships with their AIs and stuff because like they were, the AI was telling them that they're so great and so smart and stuff or whatever.

1:39:39And like then ChatGPT changed the model and it was less affirming to them. And then they're like, that was my best friend. So yeah, I would say that you see a lot of that out there. But yeah, no, this was not coded with AI. That's psychotic to say, if you actually analyze the GitHub, you'll see that that's just simply not the case.

1:40:01Vlad CosteaOkay, so how many developers are currently on your team? And to which extent would you say that the protocol, which is called OP_NET, for those of you who tuned in later and can't read the title for some reason. So to which extent is it censorship resistant or decentralized? Is it possible for users to run an OP_NET node to make the data more resilient or to have some redundant storage for it? Or is it possible to just nuke one server and the whole system makes no sense anymore?

1:40:34Danny PlainviewNo, it's a fully decentralized system. So there's a network of OP_NET nodes. Right now we operate about 12 of them. But anybody can run an OP_NET node. We have full archival nodes now. We plan to have a version of the light client out sometime in the next six to 12 months. The archival node is very intense right now. It's about four and a half terabytes because it indexes every UTXO and every single Bitcoin pubkey that has ever been revealed, ever. So shit ton of data. And if you're not in the game of running using data centers and stuff like that, I would just wait until the light client is out.

1:41:15You can run like a 90 to 200 gigabyte, what we hope, sized version of the node. Yeah, I mean, there's one big, the main mastermind developer behind OP_NET is a magical mysterious man, goes by the name Anakun. He's got Twitter at Anakun, A-N-A-K-U-N. If you go look at his GitHub, you will see this kid is an absolute machine, crazy 1000x dev. And yeah, if you think that an AI could do that kind of stuff, you're kidding yourself. So that's what we got going on over here.

1:42:04I do think we have to go. I'm sorry, we had other... I didn't realize it was already 11. Is there any, was there any other final questions? I can't see the chat. I don't know what the chat is.

1:42:21Vlad CosteaYeah. There are actually two questions. One is very short, the other one is a bit more complex.

1:42:29Danny PlainviewYeah, no problem.

1:42:29Vlad CosteaWhat just happened there? I got balloons. Anyway.

1:42:32Chad MasterThere's like 12 developers on the team, though, just so it's like a full, there's a full team of developers behind us.

1:42:36Vlad CosteaSo the question which is more difficult is, can you FUD yourselves and basically present the biggest criticism to your own work so far that you're planning to fix? And the short and easy one is, where can people follow you and keep up with what's happening with OP_NET? And I also forgot to ask you what kind of wallets people can use today, like what kind of UX and whatever. So I guess I have three questions and you don't have much time.

1:43:04Danny PlainviewOne more time, I'm so sorry.

1:43:07Vlad CosteaFUD yourselves, tell people where they can follow you, and what wallets can they download today to try OP_NET.

1:43:14Danny PlainviewAll right. FUD ourselves is: we're Jewish, Israeli, baby, yeah, all of that, whatever you want, 666, all of the devil stuff. And we're trying to take over Bitcoin to have it for our Satanist want of smart contracts on Bitcoin. That would be the FUD. All that's true. You can look it up. Look it up, man. You dig hard enough on the Internet, you'll find all of that's true. Where can you use the protocol? We have something called OP_WALLET, which is just a normal Bitcoin wallet that interacts with all of the OP_NET apps, MotoSwap, the DEX, and other sorts of cool stuff. And what was the third one?

1:44:00Chad MasterCake Wallet can integrate OP_NET, though. They just have to choose to do so themselves. Cake Wallet next, maybe? They could, maybe. Cake Wallet, integrate OP_NET. Go ahead.

1:44:10Danny PlainviewSo what was the third?

1:44:13Vlad CosteaWhere can people follow you?

1:44:15Danny PlainviewFollow us on Twitter, @opnetbtc. That's where pretty much everything we do is. And yeah, MotoSwap on Twitter as well, if you want to swap some tokens. And check out vibecode.finance if you want to see the ecosystem so far.

1:44:32Vlad CosteaOkay, but still, if someone wants to try OP_NET right now, what's the best way to do it?

1:44:37Danny PlainviewYou get the OP_WALLET app, which is in the Chrome store. It'll be in the iOS and the Google Play store soon as well. And then go ahead on over to motoswap.org and you'll be able to start swapping some tokens on the current network.

1:44:52Chad MasterAnd if you want to be a real blockchain surfer, you can go to OPScan, opscan.org, and that's where you can see all the smart contracts and all the tokens and all the activity that's happening and track all the transactions and do all that super fun stuff if you're a researcher. So yeah, that's pretty much what it is. It's not a bridge, by the way, to the wallet either. Like, you can import your existing Bitcoin seed phrase into the wallet and it's just a Bitcoin wallet. It just has built-in OP_NET support.

1:45:23Vlad CosteaSounds good. Give that a try. Thank you very much, Chad. Thank you very much, Daniel. Did I get that correctly?

1:45:31Danny PlainviewYes, sir.

1:45:32Vlad CosteaIt's the type, Danny. I called you Daniel. I'm so old.

1:45:36Danny PlainviewIt's okay.

1:45:37Vlad CosteaThank you very much. I'll see you in the next one. And thanks to the sponsors. Once again, Cake Wallet, the ones who gave away the free Zcash; SideShift.ai, where you can swap your coins before these guys have good liquidity; Braiins Hashpower, which is where you can rent hashpower for whatever tiny project you may have; Bitcoin.com News, where you read the news; LayerTwo Labs for the future of Bitcoin. I'll see you in the next one. Thank you very much. Subscribe.

1:46:04Danny PlainviewThanks, guys. Take it easy.