S17 E21: Paul Sztorc Hard Forks Bitcoin to Launch Ecash with Drivechains!

0:47Vlad CosteaHello and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is season 17 episode 21 as it turns out. We have Paul Sztorc joining the show once again. It's only been three months since his last appearance when we talked about derangements in Bitcoin and he seems to always have something new that he's doing. Now he's going to tell us about the SHAD and a lot of extra stuff that's spicy. He has a big announcement today. Hi, Paul.

1:15Paul SztorcHello, thanks for having me.

1:17Vlad CosteaSo what do you want to announce, Paul? Why are you here?

1:22Paul SztorcWell, yes, I'm announcing on this show and on other shows that we are doing a hard fork of Bitcoin. A what? Yes, so Bitcoin maximalism. I was a Bitcoin maximalist for basically 15 years but I'm not really sure how far we can go from here without a new competing coin. So basically in late August everyone's coins will split into two and I'm just going to go through my list here of the basics.

1:52Vlad CosteaWait, what? You're moving so fast. Okay, full disclosure, I knew about this. I happen to be one of the people who invested in Paul's project because I think drivechains were never tried. Basically, drivechains are coming this year. Unfortunately, not to Bitcoin but at least we get to see the tech in action. We get to try it on a live network. Not... no longer. So you've heard me advertise on the show that you can try the software on a testnet with a signet actually if you go to layertwolabs.com/download. Still works, but it seems like it's going to come to a layer one which Paul is launching and it's not like a launch from scratch. It's the kind of launch where you get free coins. So if you're listening to this or getting information about, you know, maybe you should consolidate your UTXOs and claim your free coins which you can use with drivechains or you can dump on the market to buy more Bitcoin. It's your choice. Anyway, I guess I took your talking points, Paul.

2:51Paul SztorcNo, that was good. You took a few of them. That's good. I'll try to. Okay, so the L1 is the same as Bitcoin Core. It has a smaller block size, actually, though.

3:00Vlad CosteaOkay, so it's like the Bitcoin Cash of this decade except that instead of having bigger blocks it has smaller blocks and drivechains. Am I framing it correctly?

3:10Paul SztorcThat's right. And even when we activate the drivechains, I'm going to use the same Core Untouched Soft Fork, so that won't even be in the changes for the L1.

3:21Vlad CosteaHow much smaller are the blocks? What size are we talking about?

3:24Paul SztorcBasically one tenth, because they're basically four megabytes now. So making it 400 kilobytes.

3:30Vlad CosteaWhy this number?

3:33Paul SztorcWell, I think the smaller blocks actually have a benefit for decentralization and they make it easier to run a full node and they make it easier to hide the physical location of the node. And really, if you multiply it out, you know, right now the blocks we have on Bitcoin Core can do like maybe two, three thousand transactions every 10 minutes. And that is actually overkill for settling among L2s. That's actually a lot. But it's nowhere near enough to process all the transactions in the world. So, if you already have the L2s that are going to process all the transactions of the world, then you really don't need, you know, thousands of... It's 144 blocks a day, so it's two, three thousand a block. So that's, this is a ton of... You really don't need it, actually.

4:26Vlad CosteaWait, so this means 144 blocks a day. It means you're keeping the 10-minute block time?

4:32Paul SztorcThat's right.

4:33Vlad CosteaSo it's going to be just like Bitcoin Core today, but with 10 times smaller blocks and drivechains. What are the drivechains that will be available at launch?

4:43Paul SztorcThese are merge-mined L2s. We are going to release a few. In particular, we have one that I call Thunder, which is capable of processing all the transactions in the world. It's basically 14 geographically distributed L2s. And you can check the tests and things that we've written. Those are available on GitHub and you can rerun them. They run on GitHub's machines. You can see for yourself that you could like onboard everyone on Earth and have them all transact, you know, three times a day, every day for a whole year or more using this network. So that, that's one. And then the other one would be zSide, which is a lot like Zcash, zk-SNARK privacy to hide the sender, the receiver and the amount.

5:32So this is like two would be the the big two types of drivechain that we're going to launch with. I have a bunch more that I think people may like, so I can get into those also, but yeah, the bread and butter would be just scalability and privacy. Those are kind of important, you know, like, it's like, I think it's a matter of life or death if the cryptocurrency can nail those two things or not. So, so it's, those are the two. But yeah, we have some other ones. So there's some about, like, that are like, one that's called the CoinShift. And that's kind of like Uniswap or some kind of like kind of like a like, do you say it's like a THORChain or like a decentralized like swapping market.

6:22And then I have one based on my old prediction markets project. That was the original Hivemind. Yeah. And then we have a one based on Namecoin called BitNames and one based on assets called BitAssets that's kind of like a Counterparty or like a USDT type chain. So we actually have quite a few. We have one that's has just swaps the signatures for quantum proof signatures. So that one's called Photon. So actually we have a bunch. But I really think the scale and the privacy are the most important I mean it's single-handedly the scalability L2 is like much much better than the entire Lightning Network and everything that's been invested in the Lightning Network is I think kind of a waste of time in comparison. But I, you know, I could be wrong about that.

7:16Vlad CosteaRight, so you mentioned a bunch of sidechains that will be available. I'm actually curious because people will say, wait a second, why can't you have like privacy and scalability? And I'm curious, what are the limits in terms of throughput and size for the zSide sidechain?

7:41Paul SztorcWell, okay, this is an interesting question. I think I don't know the answer, but the question is sort of like is it mostly that people disagree on stuff like block size which is like how much resources does it take to run the full node? Or is it like people want different things and they don't want other... So, so for example, you could have it just be that some people really want like there to be super super large block size chain like a Solana chain or something like that or like you know, like a Tron chain. And on that they're just going to put everything. Privacy, you know, assets, whatever NFTs, whatever you want. EVM, whatever they want to just put into this one thing. Or you could imagine a situation where it's like it's better to have, there's something about the chain itself where it needs some kind of specialization. So, this is an open question as to what the but the the privacy chain's block size is much much smaller because the Thunder is optimized for high throughput and the zSide is just optimized for private usage. I just imagine that that would be smaller. Of course, we can always release a second one that has a different block size.

8:58This is part of the appeal of BIP 300 is that you can have different L2s and they can all compete and they won't necessarily all survive. But that is exactly why you get to ignore the ones you don't like and let other people try them.

9:16Vlad CosteaYeah, so I guess the question that comes next. I know that there's a limit of like 256 sidechains that can be issued according to the BIP, but what's going to happen to those that fail and will the users lose their coins if they happen to be in one of these chains?

9:34Paul SztorcWell, they might. But I think the important thing is that you you should not send coins over, you know, everyone should just be like, they should treat it the same way they would treat anything else that's new, which is that you should not send a lot of coins over there until you see it working in the wild. And then you see it working, you can see for yourself, oh, this has a lot of happy users. It's paying a lot of transaction fees. So the first, there'll be some early adopters who are willing to risk some pocket money on the chain. And then if it's it's if it's very popular, it will have a network effect, and it will then it will be very secure because the mining revenue it produces will, will be high relative to the number of coins on the chain.

10:22And what... I've already forgot. What was the other part of the question?

10:29Vlad CosteaIf they're gonna lose the coins. That was sort of it.

10:32Paul SztorcOh, actually, well, I was kind of getting... Okay, wait, there's an earlier thing I wanted to point out the 256 chain limit L2 limit. It's not really like, it doesn't really apply, because you could just have like a BIP 300, you know, two or something, and just have 256 more, or you could have sidechains of the sidechains. So in practice, it's not limited. But what does yeah what does limit the chains is like their viability, which is that the idea behind these chains is that they are very, very difficult to attack, but it is possible to like close them down and take all the coins off of them in a malicious way. This would involve you know destroying them, and that would mean that they would never produce any more merge mining transaction fees.

11:19So the idea behind this, behind BIP 300 is a very similar idea to Bitcoin itself, which is that in the future, there's no block reward, and that there's but there is transaction fees, and these fees keep miners focused on just producing the next block, honestly, instead of fighting over stealing the coins. And so that's the idea here as well. The problem is when you partition the network, as I've done with drivechain into different chains, different L2 chains. You know, some of them will only have a tiny, some of them may have a ton of transaction fees and some may have very little. So something has zero transaction fees and there's a giant pile of coins on there. Then I would get more nervous. It's, it's definitely possible for the coins to be, so for example, what I was mentioning earlier about scaling to 8 billion users, this would be possible with maybe like 12, 13, 14 of these L2 chains.

12:16Each of these chains only needs to have maybe five or so five to ten thousand coins on them. So this is a situation where there's a five or so thousand coins the coins circulate at an enormous rate. So they have a high velocity and have a high turnover and they're paying lots and lots of transaction fees maybe 10 cents each time but many many times. And then this is a situation where the math is very clear that a chain like that would have a lot of security. So you can see how even this what I'm saying 99.99% of all mining revenue is coming from these large transaction chains but not necessarily it wouldn't there wouldn't necessarily even be 1 million coins on all of them total. So out of the 21 million there would only be you know 1/20th would be on the transacting L2s. Because you have a situation where they they turn over rapidly and they but yeah that it is it is possible. Yeah but that's the thing the good thing is all your coins start on L1 so you it's your choice if you want to venture onto the L2 or not.

13:28The the proper comparison is to say basically, you know what the the sidechain L2s are supposed to be is a replacement for altcoins. So it's like if you have to use Monero or something to do transaction, now instead you just have to go on to the privacy L2. So yeah, could, could Monero collapse, the alt-, you know, the altcoin? It could. And could the drivechain L2 collapse? Yeah, they could.

13:58Vlad CosteaOh, I appreciate the honesty. You didn't say, well, that's impossible. We're gonna see how the market reacts to this new reality. But I think there's an elephant in the room and I need to backtrack, because we haven't mentioned the name of this hard fork.

14:13Paul SztorcYes. Unlike Bitcoin Cash, I picked a completely different name. I think this is much better for everyone. And the name is eCash. And it's the project is on ecash.com. So it's a cool domain. And again, I'm giving people advance warning, four months of advance warning, whereas Bitcoin Cash, you kind of got negative three months. And we're also replaying all the transactions, and it's a sustainable fix. So Bitcoin Cash did one megabyte to eight megabytes, but then it was kind of like unclear what would happen, then you'd have to keep doing, keep changing things. Or if eight was the magic number, then maybe BTC could have just copied that eight at a later time.

15:01And so those are some of the differences. There's more but yeah, the name is eCash.

15:06Vlad CosteaOkay, so in nine years we went from BCash to eCash. Like, the memes are gonna write themselves.

15:15Paul SztorcWell, yeah, I suppose so.

15:17Vlad CosteaYou're, I think you're the first big Bitcoin developer to hard fork since Amaury, so it's been nine years. Nobody had the courage to say, okay, screw you guys, I'm gonna try this idea on my own. Would you say that eCash, which I think is a name that carries a lot of history with it, so it's a bold choice. You own the dot-com domain. There's also an altcoin that uses the name eCash. There is of course David Chaum's historic project. There's also the custodial Lightning thing which people are using on Nostr. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, you're the first big developer since Amaury to do something like this.

16:03And the the respectable part is that you're not trying to say that this is Bitcoin or this is the true Bitcoin or the real vision or Satoshi's vision or whatever that means. You're just saying you're a developer who's been around for, as you said, 15 years or longer and you've been trying to get this idea across. Even have a section on your website, which I think is interesting. You say that in the event that Bitcoin activates BIP 300, you're gonna give up on eCash, which makes me wonder, is this like a ransom or a blackmail towards Bitcoin Core developers?

16:42Paul SztorcWell, I don't know about that. I don't I don't think so. It could be. It would be interesting to think about that but I think what the you know I've had this idea for a very long time and it's sort of like I think a lot of things in Bitcoin have been getting worse each year. So yeah. But it's interesting that many, everyone who has tried this idea has failed. But I think, so like, for example, I think Bitcoin Cash actually failed at the hard fork.

17:16Vlad CosteaBy "this idea" and "failed", do you mean hard forking or drivechains? Because it's an important distinction.

17:23Paul SztorcYeah, everyone who has tried the hard fork have has failed to like overtake Bitcoin with it. But I think really the hard fork isn't that bad at all. It's just everyone gets free money. And so...

17:37Vlad CosteaGuys like Adam Back will say that this is monetary inflation that gets added on top of the 21 million

17:46Paul SztorcI think there's some part of that that's true, but there's an equal part that would say that if if what people are saying is that, you know you have to claim like is Bitcoin BTC is it perfect? You know is it totally without any flaws or any anything? There's nothing improvable about it? If so, then there's no reason for any other coin to exist. And that's kind of what I was getting at on the site which is to say if BIP 300 activates on BTC it will be difficult for this project you know be difficult for eCash to even succeed. But it would have to be a little bit more than that. You know, I think merely activating BIP 300 is not enough. It would have to be like a big cultural revolution in BTC where people say Lightning was a mistake and it doesn't work and we should do more soft forks soft fork is safe and so it would have to be like a huge everyone have to like come around to my way of thinking on a lot of different things for it to be possible. Like so even like are we going to use BitWindow as the front end to Bitcoin Core or you know are we going to use still the Bitcoin Core software and then even people today they don't even use like the Bitcoin Core wallet it doesn't have you know BIP 39 it doesn't have like a 12-word backup. So these are tiny details but I'm just saying like just activating BIP 300 is not enough. Like the miners would have to understand like how to use BIP 300 and they'd have to be excited about it.

19:28And I don't think these things are going to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately for Bitcoin, but fortunately for eCash.

19:39Vlad CosteaRight. So the goal of this interview is to announce that you're launching eCash. Is this also the moment when you exit Bitcoin or are you going to be around?

19:49Paul SztorcNo, I mean well, that's I guess up to other people if they still invite me to various parties or and whatever, but I don't think that people should necessarily sell their BTC. In the hard the hard fork, you should mostly just keep both most people should keep both both coins in a hard fork. Because it takes a lot of specialized knowledge. You know, I I think definitely, you know, the the older project has a huge advantage out of the gate.

20:22Vlad CosteaYeah. I was thinking, are you like a Vitalik now? Are you gonna be hard to approach and you're only gonna show up within your own cult or would you be willing if you get invited to Bitcoin events to mingle, to talk about your experiences, to share some ideas, maybe tell people that they're wrong in their perception because something that we did not mention and I think it's important to say is that eCash is going to be mined with SHA-256 ASICs which means it's competing directly with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and BSV and whatever else for hash rate. There will be miners that decide to mine this if it's more profitable. And if there's a lot of activity on the layer 2s then it might just be, they're gonna be collecting more fees.

21:13And the bigger question is how are miners going to act like are are they gonna be honest because they make a very good Income from this or are they gonna try to steal? That's what Matt Corallo has been saying for a long time, that this leads to MEV, that miners...

21:31Paul SztorcYeah, I don't think any of that is true, though. I mean, you can look at like the miners, they just...

21:34Vlad CosteaNow you get to prove it. That's what I'm saying, right?

21:37Paul SztorcYeah the miners have have never really done anything bad in all of Bitcoin's history, to anyone. Even to like like Bitcoin SV, which everyone hated, that you didn't even have SHA-256 miners attacking Bitcoin SV. When they had like less than 1/20th or, you know, less than one percent less than half a percent of the hash rate. So, so yeah, I don't know. But I think it's good. It's it's you know, cypherpunk engineer's job to be paranoid, I suppose. I think the bigger problem is, like, where do we go from here in BTC world? Like, there's no, there's very few users, the transaction fees are low this is indicating that there's low demand a lot of the users like the original like OG adopting kind of like dark market users have switched to Monero and then other people have switched to like people who want to just like play around and have fun they've switched to like Solana and even Ethereum so so we have very, very low users. With the mining, all that, there's no mining revenue.

22:55The miners are all going bankrupt or pivoting to AI data centers. A lot of stuff isn't even described as mining anymore. The mining stage is now the energy stage, etc, etc. We really can't do any good development in in Bitcoin. So even among developers, we can't get anything done. So we can't even get like a completely optional opt-in ignorable and reversible soft fork, such as OP_CAT that was in the old client. It's only 13 lines of code. It was in the original Satoshi client for more than a year. We can't even get that back in and no one seems to know why exactly.

23:44It's prestigious to propose new big things, but no one can get anything anything practical done. In practice, all of the Lightning usage is custodial, so it's all back to client server and you don't even have your own keys. None of the channels are actually used. I think even in the investing world, like the price has been mostly flat over, it has it has gone up over the last five or six years, but it really hasn't. I don't think, you know, just where does it, where do we go from here? I don't think that, you know, Bitcoin will not continue to do like 10x after 10x. So first of all, there's a ceiling in the price, which is that they can't go, even if you were to take over the whole world, it would hit maybe like 25 million dollars per coin.

24:36So that's pretty good. But the problem is, think about all the people who are going to do that. Think about the last guy to adopt Bitcoin or the last billion people to adopt it. That will be like, you know, it'll be going from 24 million per coin to 25 million per coin. Those people cannot you know, they're not going to get a big ROI at the end. So that the final step has to just be people who are adopting it just to use it. So if you don't have that piece, then the whole thing does become a Ponzi scheme.

25:11Vlad CosteaYeah, I think that's what you call the final rotation in your articles. I get your point, and I think there's a lot of value in experimentation and I also don't understand quite why drivechains were never tried. You're in conversation with the Litecoin people. At some point in 2022, it seemed like drivechains were gonna be the next soft fork for a few months. It was like the talk that everyone was bringing to conferences. And then it sort of lost its steam. I still don't understand why. You even had at some point on your website, a section where you had the opinions of core developers and whether or not they like BIP 300.

26:02And it was very hard to find disagreements even at the time. Like, maybe there are three people in the world who don't agree with this. And it's a soft fork. It's not a hard fork. It's weird that the same unanimity argument that was being used against Bitcoin XT by Theymos in 2014-15, that you need everyone to agree, and if there's one person who objects, then it's not happening, is being used for soft forks.

26:36Paul SztorcIt's very easy to find a person who disagrees usually, if they don't know anything about what they're talking about. It's easy to find it. So, so I think yeah, I don't know. So, the issue is it's you have to do this pull request through Bitcoin Core, and then meanwhile, they're changing their software all the time. So, you kind of have this like rebase problem. And you have to put a bunch of effort in, and then you become vulnerable, because you've put you put months of effort into the the pull request to the latest version. Meanwhile, they're changing the version. And then if they don't, you know, it's just like you have a you have basically a hierarchy, where some people are responsible for merging the changes, and they they kind of run things however they want to run them.

27:28Bitcoin Core is run in a way that, you know, stuff has to not be controversial. So that's that's what they've decided. I think that's ultimately itself going to be a very controversial decision because, you know, it's just... an organization that never does anything controversial is probably doomed. And that's kind of my point. But a lot of people sort of seem to like this type of thing, you know, they seem to like the gridlock but I think that's just because they have no idea what they are missing out on and they don't they also don't they don't understand how competitive the software world can be.

28:08Vlad CosteaNo, but they dismiss the software part outright. They say it's only about the store of value thing, or it's about the community, and it's about the immaculate conception. And they're gonna find something that Bitcoin has and something else cannot. But I think we have been talking about stuff that is important, but at the same time, not the most controversial. At least not yet. Like, your hard forking, maybe some people will disagree with the approach, but if I was in your position, I would have done this like five years ago or something, because you know, it gets frustrating after a while but before we get to the most controversial part, I gotta ask you two things.

28:58The first one is, do you see eCash as being like the chain that welcomes the builders? Because I think my job as a podcaster is to interview a lot of builders. And if you just go through the backlog or the catalog of my work, you're gonna realize that I interview a lot of frustrated guys who are like, just this one soft fork, please. Just let me get to work. And do you think that these guys can come build on eCash?

29:28Paul SztorcYeah, there are many stories. In fact, just about every all of the big altcoins, There's a story where the person tried to do it on Bitcoin for years so, obviously, for Ethereum, that was the case. Where Vitalik, he was an employee of eToro... he helped create Bitcoin Magazine. He was like a Bitcoiner. He tried to do Ethereum on Bitcoin.

29:50Vlad CosteaHe still is. I interviewed him last year. He said he still uses Bitcoin. So it's not like just because he started something else.

29:57Paul SztorcBut I'm saying even the Ethereum idea itself, he tried to do on Bitcoin first, and same thing for when they tried to start Namecoin. Same thing for when David Vorick's project Siacoin. Same thing for, I'm pretty sure, just about every successful altcoin. You know, obviously Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver and the other large blockers campaigned relentlessly to get the large block size that they wanted. So they tried to get, they tried to do the thing on BTC but then they could not, is my point.

30:43So this is gives people exactly what they need, which is opportunity it just gets out of the way and it says you can have total autonomy over your own project, and it will use real Bitcoin, and you are accountable to the actual users. Because if you please if you do a good job of pleasing the users and they pay a lot of transaction fees, then the chain will be a success. So, I think that they will, yes. And I think people actually whenever anyone does any kind of altcoin, a lot of the people who become altcoiners do it with a kind of sense of resignation and they're very upset about what they were forced to do.

31:24Vlad CosteaI was gonna mention the fact that the previous time when you were on the show, I told you that almost everyone in Bitcoin was wrong about Ethereum. And you told me that everyone expected Ethereum to roll the dice and get a dice from one to five, but they rolled the six. And I think the reason why they rolled the six is not because Ethereum was so excellent, because they did have their early issues. And to be honest it was not much better than let's say what was the other big one that was competing against it and was proof of stake. I'm gonna remember it later. So maybe it wasn't better than Mastercoin or Counterparty out of the gate.

32:05Paul SztorcPeercoin, maybe?

32:07Vlad CosteaYeah, that was also around at the time. BitShares and... huh, anyway, maybe it wasn't the best implementation of Bitcoin 2.0 because that's what it was called at the time.

32:26But it was the block size wars that propped it up essentially, because some people gave up on Bitcoin around the time in 2017. And they said, wait up. Just give me a second. I can build the same thing on Ethereum and just add some extra layers of complexity on top of it, which maybe is not the most elegant way to do it, but it captures the imagination of builders. I think if it wasn't for the block size wars, Ethereum would not be the second biggest chain. So, it was also the context of when it was around and what was happening that propped it and brought it to the second place to make it like I guess it's like the 10% of the crypto market coin today, which is kind of huge. And I also think that in some respects, you are late with launching eCash, because you've had this idea for a decade and you've refined it, you've polished it, and you've hoped all this time that Bitcoin is gonna care. But I think it's also the time, because once again, I don't think I've seen so many frustrated developers in any industry ever. Like you can basically attract all of this energy and all of this creativity that was supposed to be happening on Bitcoin and get them to build on eCash so that they can prove their tech. Maybe Bitcoin will care, maybe Bitcoin will not care, but we're gonna see how this plays out, but it's good to have these sandboxes where people can just build without worrying or asking for permission.

34:05Paul SztorcYeah, we're in a very curious situation where a developer wants to write some software and a user wants to use the software, and they're willing to pay a transaction fee for that software to use the software. You know, per transaction, and a different miner is willing to elect that transaction fee and mine that transaction. And so, all these people want something. But we don't but we're not having it. So, that's that's the bizarre situation that we're in in BTC. And instead, we're not only I said, lot of the developers are frustrated, but you know, really like what is the usage like the on-chain usage of BTC and what is where... you know, the miners are not staying loyal to BTC. They're jumping ship to AI data centers.

35:05So even like, so you can look at like Marathon. They removed... MARA removed like all references to Bitcoin from their, like, web page like two years ago. The miner mag... miner magazines changed to energy mag. Everything is just changing to energy. The Bitcoin conference, the mining stage has changed to the energy stage. So, it's just, I you know, it's like, where do we go from here? A lot of people think, oh, what we need is to just have more treasury companies, get more people to buy Bitcoin. But how does that even help anything? Everyone who buys Bitcoin, you know, someone else had to sell it to them. So I don't think that that's not going to help.

35:52Vlad CosteaYeah. And I also noticed that Michael Saylor has been buying large chunks of Bitcoin lately. But the market doesn't care anymore and hasn't cared in maybe a year or longer. I'm bad with keeping the track of time. But whenever he buys, he creates a larger point of failure because eventually his Stretch or whatever, STRC, Ponzi is gonna implode and he's gonna have to sell Bitcoin to cover the losses to pay back the investors or whatever. And it's gonna be bad for the market. So we have to understand it's a terrible point of failure, which makes me ask, since everyone is able to claim their coins one to one on the eCash chain, aren't you concerned that this is gonna be basically something that happens within the first week that Saylor and BlackRock and all of these institutions are gonna claim their eCash and dump it on the market to buy more Bitcoin?

36:55Paul SztorcWell, I think they certainly can if they want. I don't really see that as a big problem. If you think about it, there's no, why should anyone, you know, first of all, who are they selling it to? They have to, if they're selling it, someone else is buying it. So maybe at a very low price. But it's a good thing. You know, in general, the network effects are very strong and you want it to be popularity contests, and you don't want any, you don't want a lot of people to think, oh, this project isn't very good. So, uh, but each of these people is gonna have to like, you know, sit down and really think about how can they can they get more money by keeping the eCash or by selling it. And if they sell it, they'll sell it to someone who thinks the reverse.

37:43And I think this project is not gonna win by being like continuously more popular than Bitcoin like at all points in time. I don't think that's happening. But what this project offers is a way to get all, you know, get more users transacting and to get more transaction fees collected and then, you know, ultimately get much more mining revenues and more proof of work, ultimately obtaining a huge share or maybe even 99% of the hash revenue. And so, in that way, this would be the only sustainable project in the long run.

38:29Vlad CosteaYou think that you're opening up the floodgates, because I tweeted this that basically Bitcoin is valuable right now or so valuable, because you have all of these tribes, small communities that live inside of their own echo chambers. You have the libertarians and cypherpunks who are happy to transact without asking for permission. You have the Austrian economists who care about the 21 million limit and the scarcity. You have the institutions that really like the idea that they can collateralize Bitcoin to borrow dollars against it. Also the DeFi people. You have the Ordinals people who are putting their art on the blockchain, because the block space is also scarce. You have the BitVM people who are finding hacky ways to put stuff on Bitcoin that nobody really asked for, but at the same time is interesting.

39:25You have a lot of these small tribes. And I think that the value of Bitcoin is the sum of all of these parts. And when you have small parts exiting and deciding that they want to create their own chain as is your case, Maybe there are currently Bitcoin investors who were hoping that Bitcoin is going to get BIP 300. They're going to be listening to this interview or another one or reading what's on the eCash website, which is ecash.com. They're going to say, well, it seems like this is not going to happen anymore and they're going to lose faith in the project. And that's going to drive some users to maybe leave Bitcoin to try eCash or maybe it's going to make some people sell. I'm not giving financial advice. I'm just saying hypothetically this can happen.

40:12And if you're opening up the floodgates by hard forking, it's possible that other subsets are also going to hard fork and do the same and just see what the market thinks, how valuable this is. My prediction for this year is that Bitcoin is going to have at least two hard forks from what I see. I think your hard fork is like the builders one of the people who have been wanting to bring value to Bitcoin, but they could not. And you just want to prove that your ideas are good because there's only so many years in our lifetime that we're healthy and productive and young and energetic and want to change the world. And sometimes the longer you wait, the worse it gets. And there's also the Puritans who are very deranged about the Ordinals and they want to create like a pure version of Bitcoin and they have their own mining pool, they have their own node client.

41:08I think it's just a matter of time until the Bitcoin Knots people are going to hard fork and they're going to see what the market thinks about this idea of a pure chain where they have gatekeepers for what kind of transactions you can include. Now I'm not sure if this is a question. No, it is a question. Do you think that you're opening the floodgates for more hard forks?

41:36Paul SztorcI think the hard fork is actually a pretty good idea overall. Like if you compare it to an altcoin, altcoin is like you're asserting this whole new idea but no one is credited. With the hard fork, every Bitcoiner who owns like 0.003 Bitcoin, now they're in this new thing. So I think the hard fork is actually a stronger competitor. And even though Bitcoin Cash made a lot of mistakes, when it really debuted in November 2017, it made it to the number two spot on CoinMarketCap for one day. That was the famous tweet about "congrats on this, seriously." So for all the other altcoins that had ever been made, including Ethereum, when Bitcoin Cash debuted, it briefly made it to the number two spot.

42:27So it was like BTC was a certain spot and then Bitcoin Cash was number two. So actually, I think the hard forks have a lot of viability. And I think they're stronger, the interesting thing about the hard fork is it it poses a conflict of interest which is to say, between the Bitcoin investor who would be pro hard fork, but then all the people running the institutions will have to be against. So this would be like Bitcoin Core. You know, the GitHub, the Bitcoin GitHub repository, maybe someone who runs like a media company in Bitcoin or something like that. Because what you say with the hard fork is that what everyone's doing, the developers, the cultural leaders, what everyone's doing is wrong.

43:20And and you give the investors free money. So, of course the anyone who owns Bitcoin and has self-custody of their Bitcoin, they should just be pro hard fork because you just get tons and tons of free coins on the off chance that one of them succeeds, you do very well and in return for doing nothing. So, the investor has to put zero effort, zero risk, zero cost. They get free money, they get large upside. So, of course they should be pro hard fork. So, given that that's the case, I think it's hard to explain why haven't we had more good hard forks. Part of the reason is there's no upside to contributing to the hard fork before it happens, I suppose. But I think part of it is just that there's this conflict of interest between you know, because the hard fork does make it harder for like whoever's, you know, whatever it is, Jimmy Song or whatever, someone's got to have a take and they could be wrong.

44:20And so it's easy to just say, well, just dismiss all that. It's also hard. It's very hard for us, for example, whoever's leading Bitcoin Core, because they're saying, well, hey, we were running the project and now it's like now there's a competitor. So everyone prefers that not to have too much competition at work. So I think all that's very interesting. I think we hopefully we will have more hard forks. I think they are good for they're a good way to have a conversation about the future of Bitcoin and we should not just blindly trust. You know, I really think that people have grown complacent, like there's just been no competition in Bitcoin, so people have gotten very lazy.

45:17Vlad CosteaI agree with this. And you have like a Bible verse, I think, on the eCash website, which I'm sure is gonna attract some Bitcoiners because it seems like Christianity is popular in this community, which says that iron forges iron.

45:34Paul SztorcYeah, we pronounce it iron, though. But, you know, the metal. Iron sharpens iron. Yeah, sharpens. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like competitors bring out the best in each other. You need something real to sharpen something else. I thought it was clever with the irony of like, you know gold. And yeah, but that's a good one. You know a couple good Bible quotes here and there so I throw them out sometimes.

46:07Vlad CosteaYou went to Sunday school?

46:10Paul SztorcI did. I got a couple, I have a couple different copies of the Bible from my bookshelf. I have one that's in the original Hebrew and Greek.

46:21Vlad CosteaCan you read that?

46:23Paul SztorcIt has the translation beneath it.

46:27Vlad CosteaOh, beautiful.

46:28Paul SztorcIt is a really small font.

46:29Vlad CosteaThat's how I have the works of Aristotle, like in parallel. The original and the translation on the same page. Anyway, I diverged a bit too much. I'm gonna get to the most controversial part, but before that, drum roll, I'm gonna plug the sponsors. SideShift, I hope they support eCash. Braiins Hashpower you can use that to mine eCash. OrangeRock I hope they open the trading for eCash. LayerTwo Labs, they're building eCash. I hope they build drivechains too. Cake Wallet, I hope that they're gonna support eCash, too. Those were my sponsor plugs for today. Thanks to the sponsors for making this possible and of course they're biased, but you should check them out. They're cool. They support Bitcoin with pretty good use cases, which maybe some orthodox people are not endorsing. OrangeRock is actually a new sponsor. They're from the Bitcoin.com News team and they built this interface for trading with privacy and having a lot of trading pairs inside of your app. It's actually pretty cool. I hope that they're gonna support eCash because I want to see competition. Not because I'm an investor, okay? I couldn't care less at this point. I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing this because I care and I want to see drivechains getting out there and proving what they can do and making Bitcoin...

48:06You know, sometimes when you can't get the girl you want, you have to get her best friend or whatever to make her jealous to prove what a good lover you can be and how you can take care of a girl. It's kind of like this. But anyway, Paul, let's get to the most controversial part, which gives me the impression that there's like a 50% chance that this is gonna flip Bitcoin and you want to take it into consideration because there is the question of what you do with Satoshi's coins. And all the other hard forks so far, they just didn't touch them. But you decided to get half of Satoshi's coins and basically give Satoshi half of what he mined on eCash. And of course you don't have to do this because Satoshi created Bitcoin. He has BTC, but you were basically thinking, okay, in the event that Satoshi comes back and wants to use this or this becomes bigger than Bitcoin, Satoshi can still claim some free coins as a tribute that he put a lot of work into this and laid the foundation of the project.

49:13But 50% of the coins are on sale. I actually bought a few of them. Not a lot because I'm not super rich, but I was happy to support the project. The point, I guess, is to fund the development and bootstrap eCash. And yeah, I think this is the most controversial part and most people are gonna be, you know, confused, to say the least. They're gonna be like, oh, you're stealing from Satoshi or whatever, but he did not create Zcash... not Zcash, eCash.

49:48Paul SztorcYeah, I certainly think this will be the most controversial part. I think, you know, it's there's a lot of things to say, though, about why it's a very good idea. One is that we already have a version where... There is no, you know, there's no reassignment of Satoshi's coins. And that's the BIP 300 idea on BTC. So you can, that's the idea, the free version of the idea is just sitting right there. But then the hard fork is a less desirable path. So the hard fork takes a lot of work, I think. Not only does it take a lot of development work, but it also takes a lot of, you know, you're starting a new project, you have no network effect. So, I think the hard fork is very difficult to pull off.

50:34And now you have the question of if you do a pure hard fork where there's nothing in it, for you could call it the creators, but it's really much more than the creators, there's something to explain. If you, if you do a pure hard fork, credits everyone one-to-one, it's very difficult to get any, like, investment in the project. You have to do all of your work after the moment of the fork. You know what I mean? Like you can't like invest in the project. I'm not talking about financially. I'm talking about like you can't Why would you why would you pay any attention to the project or shill the project? Or get excited about the project. It needs to be a way where you can profit off of the people who are doubting the project, disproportionately.

51:22In other words, you have to be able to buy and sell it. But how can you buy and sell it before the fork? Because you can't because you have to credit everyone at the time of the fork with the one-to-one coins. So this is kind of maybe splitting the difference between just like a an altcoin where the maybe the creators give themselves you know, a disproportionate stake in the coin to kind of help it make sure that it's a success. And then the pure hard fork idea. But yeah, if people don't like this idea and I myself I'm not a huge fan of it, but the alternative is just to activate BIP 300 on BTC. But of course, I think that will probably never happen.

52:14So, really if you're going to go through all the trials and tribulations of the hard fork, which is going to be very difficult, you have to launch a new project, you have a new brand, you have to convert people, you have to compete against BTC. That's basically what is needed. Think about it: if you, if you only do the pure fork, everything after the fork, that's when you have to like start saying, okay, I'm going to buy a bunch of coins and then I'm going to you know, talk with people about how great this is. I think the moment of the fork is a very important point and you have to have all of your ducks in a row. You want to you want to have a lot of investment pre-fork so that by the time it actually happens with normal people, a lot of the stuff has been worked out.

53:06But yeah, I'm sure this will be a very controversial part of the project. But hey, if people don't like it, then they can just sell. That's what I encourage you to... We have to give it a slightly selfish angle because we want it to we want it to be like a disproportionate benefit to to beating the stigma basically.

53:31Vlad CosteaYeah, I get that. To be honest, if I was in your position, I would take like 100% of Satoshi's coins and just bootstrap and market the hell out of it. Because the assumption as of lately is that we're gonna end up freezing Satoshi's coins in Bitcoin as per BIP 361.

53:53Paul SztorcYeah I'd just like to randomly point out that I had this plan was like many years old and it's just a weird coincidence that all this quantum stuff has been talking about.

54:03Vlad CosteaOh, yeah.

54:04Paul SztorcBut there's a lot of weird overlaps. So for example, these are like the coins that are not paid to pubkey hash, so just pay to pubkey. So the public key is there, so you don't it's not obscured by hash. And it is kind of the case that Satoshi had the... he had this special miner that people can read about, the Patoshi miner. And he it was very fast and he had it wait five minutes in between blocks. So there is a weird, bizarre sense in which he altruistically was running this miner to keep the network moving with 10-minute blocks, but he wasn't as interested in taking the coins for himself.

54:46So there is a weird altruism dimension to it.

54:52Vlad CosteaYeah, and now we're talking in Bitcoin about freezing the coins or allowing the first quantum computer that actually works with the required qubits to actually steal Satoshi's coins, which means that possibly Google is going to dump a lot of Bitcoin on the market in a few years.

55:11Paul SztorcIn my conception of the idea, it was important that if the project is a huge success, like let's say the project were to surpass BTC and even we were to hit this 25 million dollar per coin ceiling after defeating all the fiat currencies. If it theoretically did that, Satoshi's net worth would go up because even though he would have half of the coins after you you know, in purchasing power the price the exchange rate would would be much higher than you know, which is twice of I guess it's 75,000 today. So, as long as the price of if the price of eCash were to beat 150k, his net worth is actually going up as a result of the the project existing.

56:03I wanted to have that angle in there. Who knows when, for as for quantum, people would need to know the date at which a quantum computer capable of breaking ECDSA becomes cheaply available to construct and operate. We should have prediction markets on that so that people can learn exactly when that date is. This is one of my many... I don't think... I should also say is, you know, I was on this prediction markets beat since 2013. In Bitcoin, I was saying, we got to have prediction markets on Bitcoin. So this is just one of my many. And so I, you know, I've predicted an awful lot of things in Bitcoin that I, you know, there were 10 or 15 years ago that I was the whole 100% correct about.

56:54I'm not saying that that means I'm going to be correct about eCash, but it does mean that I just think like you know, I'm often very early and so I think that people should think about that very carefully when I give them this free stuff.

57:15Vlad CosteaYeah so basically for clarification everyone is gonna get one-to-one eCash according to how much Bitcoin they hold except for Satoshi, who can only claim half of what he mined in Bitcoin. And Satoshi can probably claim one million BCH, one million BSV, one million XEC.

57:36Paul SztorcRight. He... yeah, and he's never claimed any of that.

57:40Vlad CosteaOf course. He's gonna be able to claim 550k.

57:44Paul SztorcYeah, and if we don't sell them, I'll probably just we probably just won't take them. You know, so it'll probably you'll probably have more than half. But who knows? I mean, we've been selling them, so...

57:55Vlad CosteaI guess it's useful to have them on the market.

57:58Paul SztorcTo raise money for development, but it's also to give people skin in the game at the time of the fork. These are both very important, because again, my view is that the the moment of the fork, you want to have, it's kind of bizarre, because really my, what I would, one way of explaining it would be to say, I don't want to like sell people like a weird dream. Like I hated the way the ICOs worked, and even the way Ethereum worked, because they did they raised for it would be totally unfinished. And then they would do all this fundraising, and then it would launch and it, it would still need a lot of work. But with this, I wanted to really have something mostly done at the time of the fork. That's kind of difficult to pull off if there's absolutely no way anyone can have a disproportionate benefit if it succeeds.

58:51Vlad CosteaWait, so are you saying that you have been working towards the fork for a long time or actually when was it that you decided to...

58:59Paul SztorcWell, I know, I thought about it for many, many years. I always thought, like, if Bitcoin, like, what's the alternative? If, if Bitcoin makes some kind of severe mistake, it'll have to be a hard fork. And I, you know, even the scaling war, I was very concerned about both sides. It seemed like both sides just wanted to win and not... So even, like, back in 2015, I was kind of thinking about this. I think this makes it a much more interesting story, honestly, because I was like waiting patiently. And meanwhile, Bitcoin has been doing very, very well. But now I've decided, well, I'm just not sure like how where do we go from here?

59:46Like are we really going to get to like 200k and a million dollars per coin with just like treasury companies and custodial Lightning and everyone lying to each other. That's another thing, is the Bitcoin community used to be very truth-oriented, but now it's completely, it's very much not, to put it mildly.

1:00:09Vlad CosteaAnd you also get rewarded for larping or pretending that everything is fine. But anyway, let me put on my Giacomo Zucco hat or whatever, and he's gonna say, wait a second, this guy has been farming engagement, has been getting followers, building his platform, just so he can launch an affinity scam because what you said can be framed in this way, also. Like, you were always thinking about doing the hard fork, and the only reason why you hung out with Bitcoiners up until this point was that you're gonna launch your own quote unquote shitcoin, which is not Bitcoin. Is any of this fair or would you say that your contributions to Bitcoin were not sincere?

1:00:59Paul SztorcWell, I kind of think you could flip the question around, and you could say, if you were really sincere, like imagine someone's contributing to Bitcoin, and they think this is the number one idea that Bitcoin needs, and it's very, very low risk, and it has enormous upside. And then you champion that idea for a while, and then you know, like at a certain point, you have to do something. You have like a... because it's like really all the other ideas I think are just really terrible. I mean, I it's I'm not saying that drivechain is the best idea in the whole world, and that it could and that it's a sure thing or whatever. I'm not saying any of that. But how is it even possible for me to do that Lightning debate or whatever? You know, like I so, and then like the best idea we have now is a Bitcoin treasury company, which is to say that you should sell all your Bitcoin and get basically a some stock certificates that the creator can the stock certificates can create you know, add to the supply at any time. It's so, I don't know. I just don't see a lot of other good ideas around is the problem.

1:02:14Now the question is, like, was it just the whole time doing an affinity scam? Like, I don't know, like the, I would, you know, I think why would... well, okay, if that's what people think. I mean, it's kind of suspicious that I'm giving away the free... so like the free CUSF version of BIP 300, you know, it's still like right there the whole time. So I guess you kind of have to equivocate on whether or not you think the idea is good or not. You know what I mean? Like, is BIP 300 a good idea? If it is a good idea, then I was the one who was scammed, right? Because I have this good idea, and you know, it's not going anywhere. But if you think the idea is bad, then you have nothing to worry about from the fork, because the fork can't possibly succeed.

1:03:04It's just some bad idea.

1:03:07Vlad CosteaThere's also the conversation to be had about what happens post fork and maybe that this makes this case stronger for a hard fork, where people can play with the coins that they claim for free. Because we have seen a lot of these well-funded projects in Bitcoin launching and then having almost no users. Now, I don't want to knock on Citrea, because I think it's very interesting. And I think they also do some useful stuff, and their main target is to get some liquidity that's currently in wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum. So, it's not directly targeting, you know, the Bitcoin pleb or whatever. That's not the user who should consider it but even under these circumstances, it was not as successful after launch as expected. And that's not because the idea is not good, it's not because the tech is not good.

1:04:01There's also the Spiderchain by Botanix. There's a bunch of these that are launching and are gonna be launching. I think also Robin Linus's idea for a BitVM3 with garbled circuits and that's Liam Eagen and they want to launch something that's called shielded client-side validation on Bitcoin. That's also a good idea. But if it launches and then nobody uses it or you get 10 users who are enthusiastic about it, then it's a disaster. And I think Bitcoin, before having, and you can agree with me on this, before having any technical issue or forking issue or developer crisis, it has a cultural problem where people are just in this stasis where they're afraid to do anything with their coins. They just want to keep them in cold storage and HODL and wait indefinitely. But if you want to prove that something like drivechains is a good idea.

1:04:55You need something with lower risk. And I think that the hard fork is the right platform to launch this. People can actually see how the tech works. If they want to lobby for it on Bitcoin, they can keep going and demand it from the core developers, or the miners who might activate it. But it can also remain like an eCash thing, just to have the drivechain. And maybe we're gonna see how the market reacts to this. The way in which I was thinking about the soft fork for drivechains was like and I think you also said that after BIP 300, Bitcoin can ossify safely. If it's gonna be an altcoin that takes away all the use cases of other altcoins, it's like the altcoin to end all altcoins.

1:05:41I don't know if it's I think it's like a horrible parallel to the propaganda of the first world war, which was calling it the war to end all wars, like the greatest of them all. But there's a merit to this idea, and we can see how the market reacts, and the Bitcoin holders can test can actually use their Bitcoin, which they're gonna claim as eCash one-to-one, to see if they like the tech, if it's useful to them, if they can build something. Now, I think with Claude or whatever, it's easier than ever to build applications on top of various blockchains. There's like a very large library of open source projects that you can fork. And this can actually work specifically because it's a hard fork,

1:06:27because the risk is perceived as being lower, people can have more fun. And I think the biggest challenge that you're facing is to get users, to get them to care about the chain, to get them to use it every day, to engage, to want to build value, to add something that is not there already.

1:06:51Paul SztorcI think there's something very different about what I've been doing versus, you know, Citrea or Botanix or whatever. Which is to say I don't know. Maybe I could be wrong about this, but I think the the core idea behind drivechain was that there are these people who disagree, you know, very passionately. So, there was, it was not a lot of indifference during the block size war, you know? There was a lot of passion. There was really really emotion. And people were very they really cared about the outcome a lot. So there wasn't like this indifference. And whereas I do think these these modern things, these are like nerd sniping, and they are like very impressive technical toys, and they are I think those things would struggle to get users, because the user is just going to think, oh, does it work for my use case yes or no. And people are not even going to care. They're not even going to care about the tech. You know, like Monero, they just know it's slightly more it's more private than Bitcoin, and then the darknet market requires them to use it.

1:08:09So what I think this could go is something like the project launches, a few investors see that, you know, bag holders, they see that it has a potential to make it in the long run. And then, you know, okay, so like what happened with with BTC is numerous times it would go parabolic, you know, it would go like super, super, you know, there'd be like a huge run up in the price. When this happened, there would be lots and lots of people buying and selling BTC. Of course, there's lots of people selling because you can lock in, you could sell 1% of your BTC hoard at a very, very high price.

1:08:55A lot of people would do that. And of course, a lot of people are buying because the price going up and up and up. Everyone's thinking, oh, a new paradigm, you know? But what would always happen is that of course, in that case, we would get killed by the the fees and the block size limit would that would cut everyone off because eventually the fees would be 10, 15, 20, 50 dollars per person. And some people would say, I'm gonna wait and then other people would say this is the future of money and they would get a little confused. And yeah, Lightning Network doesn't work. But with this project, the idea would be to launch some L2s that have this potential to go parabolic when users discover them. And they'd say, well, this is the thing that I like to use. And then I have an uninterrupted exponential growth where it just, you know, it just keeps growing and growing and growing.

1:09:47It becomes a big event. And with the shared hashing algorithm, that would mean that eventually, if the eCash price accelerates enough, you know, the difficulty only adjusts in a very linear way. So, if the market price is accelerating, it would be starving BTC of hash rate. And that would be like the so, but yeah, the question of getting users, that is the that is of course the number one priority. But I think it's kind of like this project is a little more meta than that, because I'm saying that any developer who thinks that they've hit a use case, they can launch the project here.

1:10:32And that's what you really want is you want a world where the developer can just do their thing and then they have feedback from their real users. So yeah, there's no guarantee that any of this will work at all, but I think it does have the potential to actually survive and win in a way that other stuff does not. Other stuff. I, I you know, I don't really see the point of, you know, I don't know, I don't really see even the point of like, what's the point even, like, of Ark? Because ultimately most of the Lightning usage is custodial and no one's gonna want to have these channels be open. Like the whole thing it really doesn't work at all. So I don't know. And you know, even for other things or same for, you know, Botanix and whatever.

1:11:21I mean, I just kind of don't see the point.

1:11:24Vlad CosteaWell, I do see the point in experimentation, but this is like being held hostage in an environment that's hostile towards your idea. And it's very hard to get users. And of course, you're like the Robin Hanson of Bitcoin. And maybe a lot of people haven't read anything from Robin Hanson. But what's good to understand is that the way in which Satoshi solved the double spending problem is not computer science. It's actually game theory. It's this assumption that it's more profitable to not double spend and to participate honestly in the system. And you're just taking this idea and pushing it further to see how it works, how miners are going to behave in this environment where they collect revenue from multiple chains, and whether or not they're gonna be tempted to steal or make an honest living just farming from these sidechains. Where was I going with this? Yeah, game theory and Robin Hanson. Check out The Elephant in the Brain. It's the book that you recommended last time.

1:12:35Paul SztorcYeah, it's very good. I think, like, it's... well, it's just hard to know what to make of it all, because, you know, to me BIP 300 is just counting to 13,000. And it's an opt-in, reversible, ignorable soft fork that your node, it doesn't even need to know that anything is happening. You just ignore it. How could that even possibly be controversial? To say nothing of like OP_CAT and whatever, OP_CTV like, oh, these are all, these OP_NOP soft forks are just nothing. So the very fact that it's controversial at all, I think is very suspicious because the what I'm doing is opening the door to open the door to L2 competition.

1:13:22So, I think only if you think your L2 really sucks, would you be against drivechain so, that's why I'm actually worried that there's much more corruption than than we thought.

1:13:37Vlad CosteaI know some people who will say that you're late with this idea, and that there's already some interesting academic and also practical research into scaling on the base layer without having extremely large blocks bloating or whatever. And they're gonna point out to something like Kaspa or Mimblewimble or whatever. Do you see these becoming layer 2s or do you think that you can have an actual base layer that's better than what we inherit from Satoshi that you can integrate into eCash, so that you're gonna have even more efficient layer 2s?

1:14:15Paul SztorcWell, I don't think, I think it's a smart thing to keep the L1 the same as Bitcoin Core because there's so many tiny details. You know, Bitcoin Core has been attacked to death and even the people running it now accidentally introduce CVEs that they have to secretly fix. So I don't think it's a good idea to change L1. And again, a soft fork doesn't really even change L1 that's part of why this is all a circus. But so I wouldn't want to change L1 too much. If I did, I would just do more CUSF soft forks that don't edit any of the code of Bitcoin L1. So we could do OP_CAT and whatever, OP_CTV I don't think, you know, it's possible that there's some other technology that is much better than what I've come up with.

1:15:04That I don't, I don't even pretend to be like a great technologist. I just think that BIP 300 is this thing that lets different people who disagree over what the full node should do. Just get their way. And that's all that it is. I happen to have also produced like with Thunder, we have these tests and you can see that it can process, you know, whatever, 960 megabyte block. I think, you know, you I have the exact benchmarks, you know, published in our contest that we ran. And so very, very quickly. And these are just on normal GitHub runner computers that anyone can redo or test them for themselves. So I don't really need anything newer. We already have, what we have is already enough. The world is has changed since back in Satoshi's day and back during the block size war in 2015.

1:15:56Bandwidth was the bottleneck. Well actually bandwidth has increased so much relative to transaction density of the world or transaction rate of the world. That it bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck anyway. So I think this is another thing where people forget that 10 years is a long time in the world of technology. And in fact, if we had the same, it would be very interesting if Bitcoin had the same history. Like, let's say it started in 2009, January 3 2009, and let's say that, somehow, Bitcoin was invented later in the internet's history, you know, it's invented in 2019, 10 years later.

1:16:43And we're now six years in, but it has who knows? I don't know how to keep everything else in an apples-to-apples comparison, but maybe it would have like a, let's just say it has a one megabyte block size, even though I don't even know. I don't think that would make any sense. But I think if we were at the current levels that we have, where, you know, like now you have like a Call of Duty update is like 28 gigabytes or something. And people routinely just they just start that. You know, and then they go grab something to eat, and then they go back and they to their Xbox or something. And so, so I don't know what I'm not sure what to make of how the block size war would have gone in a world where the hard drive and bandwidth costs are very, very low.

1:17:32Of course, we're all also much wealthier now. So maybe internet costs $70 a month here, but it also costs $70 a month back in like 2006 or something. But, you know, incomes have gone up and there's been inflation.

1:17:50Vlad CosteaSo would you pay 70 bucks for your internet?

1:17:57Paul SztorcWell, you know, some people have deals where they can get temporarily, they can get $50, and it depends on how competitive your... if your area is a monopoly, then you're kind of screwed.

1:18:07Vlad CosteaWhat's your internet speed, Paul?

1:18:09Paul SztorcYou know, it's fine, it's fine. It's a perfectly good speed.

1:18:12Vlad CosteaI have two gigabits per second for 15 bucks.

1:18:17Paul SztorcOh, really? Nice. It's pretty cheap, don't you think?

1:18:23Vlad CosteaI do think like Romania has the third fastest internet infrastructure in the world after Japan and Korea. Korea yeah.

1:18:33Paul SztorcYeah, it's very heterogeneous here. So there's like some places they have multiple providers, and, but yeah, no, they get... it's expensive too, I think. Yeah, but these, again, these are big differences. So like back then, it was only like... it was like Roger Ver in Japan, he had Japan internet. So he was a large blocker. And then Luke was in like rural... Luke Dashjr was in like rural Florida. So he had like... These are also things that were different. There was no Starlink.

1:19:04Vlad CosteaI think there was also, so don't quote me on this, but I remember hearing this from some Dutch people, that in the Netherlands, there is like the lowest speed internet provider that still uses old dial-up infrastructure that they're selling for a very high price compared to what that tech is really worth. And Wladimir Van der Laan is from the Netherlands, so maybe that he was dealing with that reality when the block size wars were happening, even though he was pretty neutral on record.

1:19:39Paul SztorcMm, possible.

1:19:41Vlad CosteaBut that's an interesting way of framing it, because you get to see different realities around the world, and then you shape your understanding.

1:19:50Paul SztorcAnyway, all I was trying to say was that you asked about, isn't it possible something better would be, but this is the thing is like, I don't know if we even need any... anything better. But of course that is possible. But I was just thinking like, okay, we want to be able to let everyone transact. We want to be able to let other people do. There should be some like insanely huge block L2s that intentionally have a very expensive node and that very few people will run. Just so that there can be weird stuff happening there. And there should be other stuff too, like, you know, basically, when you have a custodial Lightning, it's basically an infinite, infinite, you would just call it like a centralized L2 that as the node cost is infinite, because you can't run the full node.

1:20:45This is another thing to maybe bring up is that it turns out most people find running a real Lightning node to be very, very, very difficult.

1:20:53Vlad CosteaI can confirm that. Like so I think I have a Raspberry Pi that I used to use for an experiment. I ran a Lightning node for about two years. It was fun in the beginning. We were opening channels with each other, saying, yeah, this is the future of payments whatever. And then you have to deal with the reality that people force-close their channels. And then you have to rebalance your channels. And then you realize that you're not routing anything. And it's just like a full-time job after a while. It's not fun.

1:21:24Paul SztorcRight. So, here's the thing. Useful if you want to make a real apples to apples comparison you know, you put on your economics hat, you have to say, okay, what's more expensive? Running a large block L2 node where it does have higher, you know, hard disk and CPU usage and bandwidth requirements? Yeah, but you just click a button and it just does all this work. How hard is that in comparison to running a Lightning node, which may have smaller bandwidth, smaller disk, smaller CPU, but it may be it may like you have to invest money, you have to have liquidity, you have to have actual funds there to open and close the channels.

1:22:13So, the actual cost of running the Lightning node in practice is probably more than running, you know, whatever the BCH node at scale or a Bitcoin SV node even at scale. I don't know about that, but I just think this is a... so, who are the real large blockers, if you think about it?

1:22:30Vlad CosteaWell, they're gonna say you don't have to run your own node. You can use something like Phoenix, which lets you open your own channels at least. And they're operating their own infrastructure, but it becomes centralized. I think I'm responsible for paying one of the highest fees in the history of Lightning. When I bought my car, I used the Lightning Network on Kraken. And sending large amounts made me pay like $50 fees on the Lightning Network. And that's funny. It's sort of laughable. I have screenshots of it just to remind myself. That is laughable. Because I've used this centralized service, which allows me to open channels with them. And they charge whatever fee they want. So, it's not like I really have a choice.

1:23:18I guess the choice that I had was to go back to on-chain. So I could basically close my channels and withdraw my funds from Lightning and pay just $1 for the on-chain fee. But I wanted to see what it's like to use Kraken with Lightning. They banned my account since then. Doesn't matter anymore. Thank you Kraken. They asked me for... So here in Europe they have some AML requirements which are ridiculous. Like they ask you for payment statements going back five years, and I was like, really?

1:23:47Paul SztorcThat's too bad. That sounds like more of a Europe thing than a Kraken thing. But if I run into Jesse... I heard that he, they're starting like some kind of Magic: The Gathering tournament in Las Vegas. So...

1:24:00Vlad CosteaI'm gonna have some trading cards too.

1:24:04Paul SztorcKeep it running, damn. I'll try to say, "Bring back Vlad." But it does, isn't that more like a Europe thing? Isn't it like, 'cause sometimes we Americans, we hear about what's going on in Europe and we just think, wow, really? Like, you know, that you can, you can have a violent revolution and overthrow your government like we did. I remember, it's always allowed.

1:24:22Vlad CosteaI was talking with Super Testnet and I, I told him, I think it was exactly the car conversation. He was like, why didn't you pay it with cash? And I was like, you can only pay cash up to 2,000 euro. Like, what?

1:24:35Paul SztorcYeah, I remember I got to Europe and then it's like, that was when the limits were like new or something. This was around 2017. And then earlier also, I think maybe it was like in Italy. And people were saying, oh, yeah, you know, you can only take out so much from the ATM.

1:24:53Vlad CosteaOh, it's the same here. I think there's a daily limit of 600.

1:24:58Paul SztorcThey started doing that in the United States, but I don't I don't remember. I think it was years afterwards. Now we're almost 10 years out of... and I just remember at the time, when I was in Italy, I was just thinking like, what the heck? Like, that's not true, is it? And I was trying to think like, will they? And I was like, I guess I never really tried to just like withdraw as much money as possible from the ATM. So I had no idea. But then they started adding that. But it's, I think that's mostly just more... I was always attributing that, in America, it did seem like it was very organically tracking the, we have a cashless society now, you know, because credit cards were everywhere. You had tap to pay. You know, you had the QR code scanner with COVID. So I thought it was tracking a little bit more organically, whereas in Europe, it really did seem like they were trying to gut cash, that people wanted, people wanted to use cash, but they were, like, powers that be were coming down, coming down on the ATM user. That was the impression.

1:26:01Like I was just thinking like, what the heck? And they're like, yeah, we can only withdraw like a thousand euros, like a month or something. And I was like, what? I'm so confused. I would have been like, maybe like you go to the, whatever. Who cares? I care. They were doing that. That's the funny... that was the joke that I told. I was like, oh, this is... wow, Europe's gonna be a big... Bitcoin is gonna be a big hit in Europe. I was like, I hope they tighten them even more. You only get, you only get 50 euros a year.

1:26:32Vlad CosteaYeah, but they're also regulating the on-ramps. Like, I told you what happened with Kraken. They're just making it more difficult for people to use it without giving a lot of silly papers. And I just don't feel comfortable giving this information because I know what's gonna happen with the KYC data, I think. The largest company that deals with KYC data in Europe got hacked like a month ago. They have the records of tens of millions of people. Or hundreds.

1:27:08Paul SztorcIt's very depressing when it's like, yeah, the French, there's like the hack, and then they have everyone's, like, home address and everything. That's, it's kind of miserable. Oh, and then, like, of course, I don't know what it was, but somehow, and then I just get endless, like, robocalls and stuff. Somehow, somehow my phone number is, I assume, in the thing, and people always try, and they, you know, they try various scams. They've been trying to hack me for years. They haven't succeeded yet. And sometimes, you know, because they, they're calling, they have a good story. And sometimes they, you know, often they've been... they hack other people that you know, especially on Telegram.

1:27:50Vlad CosteaYeah. Yeah.

1:27:52Paul SztorcYeah, you gotta be safe out there. It's very, very...

1:27:56Vlad CosteaHappens to me every week. Very dangerous. I got a message from an old friend and she said, like, hey, we haven't talked in a while, we gotta catch up. You want to do a call? Like, okay, sure. And then they send you this Microsoft Teams link, which is slightly, like, messed up. If you look at it, there's like two scrambled letters.

1:28:13Paul SztorcReally tough. Yeah, no, it's tough. They're good. They're very good. They do it, they do it full time. And then they're like, oh, yeah, you need an update or whatever. They do it, they scam full time.

1:28:23Vlad CosteaYou join the call and then they say, oh, we cannot hear you. Can you update your Zoom or whatever? And you're gonna feel embarrassed. You're gonna click the link. If you're using Windows, you're more exposed to this, so it's better to not use Windows. If you're using Linux...

1:28:37Paul SztorcDon't store any coins on a Windows machine, or do any...

1:28:41Vlad CosteaIf you're using Linux, they're not competent enough, I presume. But I think they're North Korean hackers, because when this happened to me last time, I went to a search engine and I typed Kim... Kim Jong Un. Is that the name of the leader? I searched for gay porn involving him. And of course there is. There is the rule 34: on the internet there is porn of everything. And I just copied that picture and sent it to the person pretending to be my friend. And they instantly blocked me. All the messages vanished in front of my eyes. And I was like, okay, those were North Korean hackers, because if it was my friend...

1:29:27Paul SztorcThat's funny. The friend would just be like, what is this about?

1:29:30Vlad CosteaYeah, exactly. He would be like, oh, this is funny. That's good. They blocked me instantly, cut out all the communications. I think it's a good approach, except that, you know, I had to store that on my computer for a few seconds. And now it's in my browsing history that I searched for gay porn involving...

1:29:49Paul SztorcYeah, all of the, uh... just think with all the cookies, and everyone's gonna, you know, the algorithm is gonna start feeding you that once it catches on.

1:29:59Vlad CosteaOh, no, I don't want to think about that. That's fair. Anyway, coming back to eCash, what would you say is like the bullish case for it? Do you see this...

1:30:09Paul SztorcBecause, okay, it's possible that what I've discovered is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the derangements of Bitcoin, as far as all the smart ideas out there that you know, that like you know, think about these people, like a Super Testnet or whatever. Like, you know, there's no way forward for the ideas. And maybe it's like, you know, others... the stuff that's in vogue right now, treasury companies, whatever, Lightning Network, maybe that's even a million times worse than I thought. Like, you know, the treasury companies are a great way, hypothetically, I'm not accusing anyone of a fraud, I gotta, like, have like a fake lawyer note that I fake read or something. But either, treasury companies are a great way to just move a bunch of money from people into a crypto wallet and then you just take all the BTC or whatever for yourself and then you say, oh, we got hacked or it didn't work out.

1:31:06Meanwhile, it's just embezzled the money. So it's possible that there's there's all the existing stuff in BTC is so much worse and it's all being propped together by like, that's that's a possibility. And that actually the underlying Bitcoin idea is so strong that just by just by just getting rid of that junk, it will just rock and everything will be the way it was like in 2012, 2014 type era. There'd be just like huge optimism. And that it's also possible that the the block size debate was more about how to handle disagreement in the block sizes. And so it was like people naturally disagree, but how do we handle the hard fork without splitting the community. And it's also possible that the only reason Ethereum got big at all in 2016 was because BTC community was failing to resolve the block size dispute.

1:32:00All of that stuff would indicate that if you had a coin where there you could be have disputes settled by different L2s that compete. If you had that, then that would be like a really, really, really good idea. And that would mean that this would just like leap into action. It's also possible that many investors are tired of both Bitcoin maximalism, but they're also tired of terrible altcoins. So, I'm reminded of when they did the video... the Bitcoin... It was, I think it was maybe 2023, and the guy was like, oh, raise your hand if you own Bitcoin. And then he was like, great, it seems like... raise your hand if you own Ethereum. And the guy's like, really? At the Bitcoin Conference? Because it's like 80% of the people also raised their hand. So, I wouldn't have raised my hand in that situation. But if you if most of the people in the in the wider audience are actually just like curious about all the different coins,

1:32:54now you say, well, here's a coin that can do everything that may, you know, attract people. So yeah, the bullish case would be like that this just takes off, and then and then we we start peeling off the rational people from BTC, and we we amplify on BTC like the Lightning and the treasury company, ossify people, and we just amplify them over there. So the whole thing just becomes Lightning Treasury Project, and then it will just enter a death spiral. It's already very difficult to be honest in the BTC community. There's a war against the truth.

1:33:37Vlad CosteaeCash holders or eCash users are going to be able to claim their eCash one-to-one.

1:33:43Paul SztorcYeah, you don't even really have to say the word claim. Like, it will just, it'll just be there waiting for you forever.

1:33:48Vlad CosteaHow will this play out? So if you're gonna have the treasury companies doing something stupid, what's gonna happen to the eCash?

1:34:00Paul SztorcWell, if you don't own, if you you need to own, if you want to get the eCash, like if you have already custodied your BTC with someone, they will also have custody of eCash. So that's already a decision that you might have made. If you leave your money on an exchange or you leave it with the ETF, they will get it. And then you can either just, you can sue them or you can say, I want that, or you could withdraw to self-custody. I think it would be a lot of chaos, but I'm kind of looking forward to that part of it. I think that that part will be the fun chaos. We need a little bit more like we gotta like, you know, we need to shake things up just a little bit. I don't know, things where the way things are going is actually... yeah.

1:34:48Vlad CosteaAre you trying to get people to withdraw their Bitcoin from exchanges, Paul?

1:34:53Paul SztorcI'm hoping the exchanges will just say like we'll credit we'll credit it to you. I think that's not that hard because especially because the L1 is the same as Bitcoin Core. So it's not like their tech team will have to like learn a whole new thing. I think that's what's best. If they don't, if they say that they're not going to do that and you want eCash, then you have to temporarily take it off the exchange for the... at the time of the fork, and then you can put it right back on. This is funny because back in the day, the advice was to never have any money on the exchange. And if whenever you wanted to use the exchange, you would put your money on, swap it and then pull it right back off because they'd all been... So now I guess that's reversed.

1:35:43Vlad CosteaBut this could be actually funny if eCash turns out to be a much stronger incentive to withdraw your coins from exchanges than Trace Mayer's Proof of Keys. Like, yeah, to actually see the Bitcoin blockchain getting a lot of transactions out of exchanges into people's wallets just because they want to claim their eCash. They have three months for it, right?

1:36:05Paul SztorcReally four months, because it's late August. So four more months. And I think, yeah, and that's very true. Like, what do you get out of like, this is the revenge of the self-custody because the network only recognizes you if you have a UTXO in the network. So, yeah, if you have someone else... but this is the point that those of, like, a Trace Mayer and those of us who say not your keys, not your coins. This is a point that we have often made. And what we say is like, you don't actually own any Bitcoin if you, if someone else has the keys, they own the Bitcoin, you have some weird relationship with them.

1:36:51You know what I mean? Like if you ever, you have your coins with Kraken, Kraken has a giant pile of BTC, you have a relationship with Kraken, same with the ETF. The ETF has all the Bitcoin. You don't actually own any Bitcoin. Same with the treasury companies. If you own MicroStrategy or Strategy, you don't own any Bitcoin. You own, you know, they own the Bitcoin. You have some relationship with them. Usually that says they say they they might give you some money later as a result.

1:37:26Vlad CosteaI think this is like the biggest takeaway from this interview like withdraw your coins into self-custody.

1:37:34Paul SztorcOr at least practice it or get used to the idea that you might need to do it, because first of all, if you're really good at it, then they probably will just credit everyone that they won't, the issue won't come up. But they might, you know, everyone is different too. They might, they would be wild, but you can imagine maybe what if Kraken does and Coinbase doesn't. I'm not sure, uh, you know, who knows.

1:37:58Vlad CosteaYou can also petition your exchange. If you're so in love with your custodian, you can petition them to support eCash on day one so that you can claim your coins. They can appear as eCash.

1:38:09Paul SztorcYeah, certainly, that's very validating. It'd be very validating for eCash to be immediately supported on the exchange. Sometimes the exchanges try to charge money to get listed. I don't think we'll have to do that at all for a wide variety of reasons. One of which is there's already the CoinShift L2 that already lets you swap BTC for eCash but the second one is that there will just be... I don't know. There'll just be chaos if they don't, and especially with the transaction replay. So, so I anticipate that some will.

1:38:44Vlad CosteaSo what is the claiming process like? Is it just like Bitcoin Cash?

1:38:48Paul SztorcNo, you're just syncing the node. If you sync the node, you have to... yeah, I guess there is a little bit of, because when you sync the node, it will have no idea what your private key is in the BTC world. But if you use the private key... Yeah, and this is very important that I think a lot of people will not want to do this on day one. The smart thing to do if you're a normal person is to wait for a little while to see, you know, because what I'm going to tell you, oh, yeah, this isn't like a virus that will just steal your private keys but but yeah, you need to use the private key from your BTC world in the new software.

1:39:30Vlad CosteaDo you have to sign a message from your wallet?

1:39:36Paul SztorcWell, technically every transaction is a message. Technically every transaction is a message, you know, so, so yes.

1:39:44Vlad CosteaSo you're gonna download the eCash client, which is...

1:39:50Paul SztorcYeah, but it'll be, again, the L1 client. It will be, it'll be hard for bugs to hide there, but it'll be possible. But the L1 client will basically just be Bitcoin Core with small block size and one weird transaction that alters Satoshi's coins and some other things like having a different name and having a one-time change in the difficulty to its minimum value. That's just to create the hard fork in the first place. But other than that, there won't be any changes.

1:40:22Vlad CosteaMan, Paul, this is why I like you so much and this is why I trust that you're honest because you're such a bad marketer. Like, I was trying to get you to say something positive like how to claim and you're like, oh I would wait. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe it's a virus. Okay, man.

1:40:40Paul SztorcWell, yeah, a lot of people would say, oh, yeah, put your private keys, type your private keys into this thing like, that in 99 out of 100 cases that'd be a virus. But, yeah, people can just, you know, you would want, you would want to just wait like a few days, because just think about it, like everyone would notice like when the when it had reached a point where you know what I mean like a if it were that type of scam it wouldn't be able to last more than a few days, because someone would pull the trigger and take all that. But, you know, that's what I'm trying to say. So a normal person should wait before manipulating their private keys. But, yeah, all you do is import them,

1:41:27and then your coins are just waiting for you over there. And if you use them in our software, you can split them off so that they stop replaying. Whereas if you send them somewhere in BTC, the eCash will probably also go there even after the fork. Not necessarily, but probably.

1:41:49Vlad CosteaOkay, so in practical terms, you export your wallet file from Bitcoin Core and you import it into the eCash client, right?

1:41:57Paul SztorcRight, and the eCash client just thinks it's the same chain history. So it just says, oh, you also... if you owned 7.123 coins in BTC world, you own 7.123 in eCash world.

1:42:11Vlad CosteaIf you have a passphrase on your wallet, will it ask for it?

1:42:17Paul SztorcThat depends on how they set it up, but yeah, you need to get the actual private keys, so probably.

1:42:28Vlad CosteaDoes it work with Electrum?

1:42:31Paul SztorcI mean, it should. Yes, this is the same, it's the same private key situation.

1:42:40Vlad CosteaBecause this idea that you need to withdraw your Bitcoin is very vague. You need to withdraw your Bitcoin into Bitcoin Core most likely to enjoy the full functionality of claiming your eCash.

1:42:55Paul SztorcYeah, I mean, I think Electrum is very good. It doesn't require you to download the entire blockchain, which is like 800 gigabytes.

1:43:09Vlad CosteaLet me ask you something else if, let's say that in the first week of eCash's existence, you're gonna see people inscribing ordinals and creating collections of NFTs on eCash and they're willing to pay the price because in dollar terms, it's not very expensive. What are you gonna do about that? Are you gonna encourage it?

1:43:30Paul SztorcNo, I'm encoura-... yeah, I encourage that. All, anyone who pays transaction fees is a real user. So that's good. That's a sign of health.

1:43:39Vlad CosteaBut they can effectively deter other users from onboarding layer 2s?

1:43:48Paul SztorcI don't really think so, because the Thunder chain has a lot of space there. And then there's a BitAssets chain that is just for issuing stuff like that.

1:43:58Vlad CosteaBut isn't there a peg-in process where you need to get one transaction on the base layer?

1:44:04Paul SztorcWell, the, yeah, you want on L1, then the L1 would be a little crowded at first. And in fact, one idea that I... don't think is not that, but basically the idea with the L1 is to have the equilibrium block size be small. So that I may have it shrink down. I haven't, you know, this would be like kind of a last minute change, but a very simple one. May have it shrink down to its one-tenth, like, over a short period of time, you know, over a period, instead of instantly. Just because it'll be crazy during the time of the split. But the goal is to have it just be in equilibrium, the more decentralized small block version. Now, the question is, like, L1 is going to be crowded.

1:44:52But anyone can just send coins from L1 to L2 at any time. And then you can onboard people directly to the L2, even without, even if they were never on L1. So it doesn't really bother me that much, how crowded L1 is. I think it'll actually settle down in L1 at some point.

1:45:18Vlad CosteaIn your design for drivechains on Bitcoin, you decided for 13,000 blocks as a number that guarantees a reasonable amount of security? Did you decide to stick to 13,000 for eCash? Because I recall you said that it could be safe even with much less than that.

1:45:39Paul SztorcI did. It's true that originally it was two to four weeks. Then I changed it to three to six months because people brought up this concern about dishonest miners. And, but yeah, then they step... they still kept complaining about it. So I think the, it's possible they had no idea what they were complaining about, really, but I decided to keep it anyway.

1:46:04Vlad CosteaOkay. So basically what you're going to be running in terms of BIP 300 on eCash is exactly what can be activated off the shelf on Bitcoin with no modifications.

1:46:20Paul SztorcYeah, the L1 will be the same as Bitcoin Core, and the BIP 300 part will be activated by the Core Untouched Soft Fork, by the activator. That's also the same. That will be exactly the same way how you would activate on BTC.

1:46:36Vlad CosteaYeah it's interesting because the Zcash team, which also forked Bitcoin but to start a new blockchain, they also made sure that they maintain compatibility one-to-one with Bitcoin. And basically, what they're building is the latest version of Zerocash which was the paper that was first proposed for Bitcoin and they're still hoping that someday Bitcoin is gonna pick it up. They keep on improving it, but it's still one-to-one compatible with Bitcoin if that ever becomes part of the conversation. So, you're taking the same approach.

1:47:15Paul SztorcRight. Well, it's easier to just maintain one thing. And yeah, I do think it's possible that, you know, it's still possible that miners will just decide... uh, before... yeah, before I go, I guess I should... I forgot my... I have an event. I'm not going to talk about, I'm certainly not going to talk about this while on stage in Las Vegas, because I'm speaking in Las Vegas on day... day three, at 3 p.m. But on day two, I have a little thing in the Satoshi Social Room. I have like a little party. The end of day two, free drinks, and it's from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. It's possible that I called it the 51% Hashrate Happy Hour, so it's possible that all the miners will just meet there and just, you know, start to activate soft forks.

1:48:04But, as I mentioned earlier, it would require more than just activating the soft forks. We have to have like an actual cultural revolution in BTC where people just admit that not only was Lightning Network not only does it not work, but it was a mistake and it was a mistake to shill it so hard and it was a mistake to like kind of cancel people for telling the truth about how terrible it is and but that's exactly what we did with many other things, you know, the soft fork process. Like, all the like cool people have been kind of kicked out and all the villains have just buried themselves in. But yeah, I only have a little bit more time.

1:48:45Vlad CosteaYeah. So I'm gonna make the most of it. Um, you think you're gonna be uninvited from events now that you're basically the creator?

1:48:55Paul SztorcGood question. But I think, who even cares? Because at this point, all the events are kind of terrible, you know, and everyone's like running out of money, like, everything has been done. And what's the point of coming to an event if it's just about the treasury companies or something, you know, and I mean, or if it's just a Lightning event, you know, what? So I don't know, like, what are the good events anymore?

1:49:20Vlad CosteaI've had fun in the Ethereum conferences, to be honest, because that's where you discover people building without asking for permission. And sometimes they have good ideas.

1:49:28Paul SztorcAnd if Michael Saylor succeeds in defining Bitcoin as like a very tame thing, then there's no reason to have a conference, you know, there's no reason for people to even talk about it. There's no reason to have a conversation about it. Like, no one has a conversation about like two-by-fours or something, you know what I mean? You have a conversation about like a great ethical dispute or like a new law or like a war or something or business model, something creative, a new piece of art, new piece of music. That's what you'd have a discussion about. But if it's something, a settled issue, and it's a boring one, then there's no reason to have any of this culture. There's no reason to have any parties or any conferences or any magazines or any tweets.

1:50:14There's nothing to talk about. Because it's just a stock ticker.

1:50:18Vlad CosteaI have two more questions and I'll let you go. One of them can be answered quite quickly. The other one could be another hour of conversation, but it's your challenge to basically answer in a short manner. I'll start with the short one. Where can people, assuming that they became interested in eCash right now and they want to buy some coins, where can they do that?

1:50:42Paul SztorcI'm not sure that people will unless they are an accredited investor or they're outside the US. But yeah, you should definitely follow me on Twitter, Truthcoin on Twitter. And the website is ecash.com, so I would stay glued to that for updates.

1:51:02Vlad CosteaIs it still hidden under a password or is it public?

1:51:09Paul SztorcI'm going to have a, most of it, I'm gonna have a lot of it unhidden by the time the announcement is made.

1:51:17Vlad CosteaOkay, now the second question. Just for the record, how much time do you have right now?

1:51:22Paul SztorcLike a little bit.

1:51:23Vlad CosteaOkay. Right now, you're the CEO of LayerTwo Labs, and you're launching an altcoin which is called eCash, which is competing with Bitcoin. I can argue that this is a centralized project. And what will it take or at what point will you decide that you can step down and the project can become truly decentralized?

1:51:48Paul SztorcWell, that's a good question. I think when whenever anything is created, it has to start centralized. You know, everyone like William Shakespeare, he invented different words. So he was like the inventor of the word like elbow and eyeball for example. But then once they're in use, there's that. So I actually think that we, this, the... what the drivechain idea does, that no one else has done before, it actually does decentralized development. Because before, everyone has their, their dev team and someone has to decide what the next version of the full node software is. And if you dissent from that, you kind of have to hard fork and do... or start an altcoin and do your own project. And so really this is the first project to decentralize development and allow different developers that disagree with each other to mostly... So I think that's a very important point to keep in mind. And also reducing the block size, that was my old definition of node centralization. That makes it easier to run a node, so it increases decentralization.

1:52:57I think my hope is that the BIP 300, the CUSF activator, I think that that is a very completable project and so that thing can ossify, so to speak and then with L1 being a copy of Bitcoin Core, that also can kind of run basically on autopilot. And then even our front-end graphical user interface, I imagine a lot of work being done on that, but it's since it's a separate modular graphical user interface, people could easily fork that at the drop of a hat and make their own. So I actually think it would be very very soon after the moment of the fork that it will just I mean it may almost instantly become the most decentralized cryptocurrency.

1:53:49But yeah, in order to bring it from not existing into the world in a viable way, it does require someone to do something. So yeah, there's a transition period. But yeah, I think this is much better than, like, I hated when, like, the ICO people do this stuff, they get all this money in advance and stuff would take a long time before the project was ready to launch. So I didn't like that at all.

1:54:18Vlad CosteaYeah. Can you disclose how large the team of developers is currently working on building eCash and how many developers you can onboard and is incentivized to build, let's say, leaving Ethereum or Zcash or whatever to build on eCash?

1:54:35Paul SztorcWell, I think the big draw is that why would you I think the big draw is that if in a world where everyone, you know, there's there's one coin that can kind of do everything and then everything else is sort of fractured, it's, it's like, what has, what maximizes the chance of building something that users will actually use? And it could easily someone could easily say, Oh, Ethereum already has these strong network effects. Ethereum has this history of running. It's the number two. I would totally, if someone wants to believe that, I would say that makes a lot of sense. And they should think that. That's a very logical thing to think. But I also think it's kind of like you know, BTC is the number one cryptocurrency community. Now we're going to have... it's going to be BTC, but you can also do all these things.

1:55:27So why not just take all the ideas that actually work, plug them in here. I think the big draw is not like hiring developers and getting them to do cool projects. We really want, if a developer has an idea that they really like and they think is good, they want to stand out and get recognition for that. And that's part of what this offers. So in addition to, we are doing all that stuff and we have full-time developers. We have around nine or so full-time developers. But this is working on all different things. But I think if you, it's like trying to make something happen that's just not going to happen. If you try to like hire the most developers and say produce all the best software, what I'm really looking for is like somewhere out there, the, you know, 15-year-old genius or whatever, and they have this new project.

1:56:22If they launch it as a new L2 sidechain, everyone will know that it's not a pump and dump.

1:56:29Vlad CosteaOh, that's a good point.

1:56:31Paul SztorcAnd so then this is their way to actually sort themselves to the top of the list of people's attention. And then if the project's good, it will attract users. And we want to have people who... we want to avoid the, we want to avoid like a kind of political world of like, GitHub, pull requests political development. You know, just think of these people like we mentioned before, all the frustrated developers. So these are like when you have that creative idea, you want to be able to exercise it.

1:57:11Vlad CosteaI completely agree.

1:57:14Paul SztorcAnd so then what if you're like working on like, number 75 coin on CoinMarketCap, you have a really, really good idea, you think it's really good. But just commercially, it's so difficult to make. Like, say you're working on Bitcoin SV, which is like, I don't even know where it is on CoinMarketCap, but it's, it's wherever it is. It's on the second page or something. And but you have a really good idea. Well, what do you do? Are you really gonna stick, stay on that? Or maybe you should try? It depends on if everyone else is trying as well. But you should try on a coin if other people are also trying there. So yeah, I'm hoping that the hard fork is still as viable now as it was in 2017.

1:58:00When it became easily, you know, a leaderboard point.

1:58:06Vlad CosteaI think it's culturally taboo, but this is like an advantage of the project, because you're breaking the conventional, you're proving that there's still some way of protesting basically against the policy of Bitcoin Core and the way it's been managed. You can compete and basically you can help each other. If you remember, there was that moment in 2018 when a Bitcoin Cash developer was able to find an inflation bug in Bitcoin Core. And you can argue that this was a net benefit, the fact that Bitcoin Cash was able to do that. Or maybe you can argue that if there was the Bitcoin Cash developer still working on Bitcoin, maybe that would never happen. There's no way of knowing it. Maybe it's counterfactual.

1:58:59But you're gonna have more developers working on the same code base except that it has smaller blocks, but still, there's more eyeballs and more actually smart people rocking with this code base. And I genuinely hope that it's gonna be a worthy competitor. If, and I do believe that eCash is more interesting than Bitcoin Cash, if it's gonna have the same market cap as Bitcoin Cash... right now Bitcoin Cash is at, I'm actually looking. So, for the record, you mentioned BSV, it's 110 in the ranking of coins on the second page of CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin Cash is actually 13th. In a world where, and I present this argument a lot, in a world where Bitcoin is winning, Bitcoin Cash would be also like below the top 100 ranking. Right now, Bitcoin Cash is bigger than Monero, at 8.9 billion dollars, and the price per coin is 445.

2:00:07So, there is a market for this, and I do believe that ultimately, eCash is more useful because it has the drivechains and the developers can build a lot of really cool stuff. At the same time, Bitcoin Cash has more of a network effect, has been on the market for nine years now. And is listed on payments processors and exchanges and whatever. So, there's a lot of work to do on this front. But technologically, and I like to think that I'm a technologist... I'm not much of an Austrian economist. I'm not much of maybe that I am a bit of a cypherpunk, but I do like the idea of progressing through technology, and I reject the concept that one iteration that we had 17 years ago is gonna be permanently the one that will prevail, and we should not touch it or update it or change it.

2:01:07I think it's software, and it does need to change with the times and become better. And while I agree with the monetary policy, I can also disagree with some design choices for the software. So, I wish you all the luck in the world, Paul. Not just because, once again, I'm invested in this project. Not with a lot, but I still have skin in the game. And I hope that I guess the best case scenario for it is that it's gonna flip Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is gonna fail so miserably, this can actually become the dominant currency. If it's gonna be just as big as Bitcoin Cash, there's a lot of value in that.

2:01:50Paul SztorcAnd, right. So, that's kind of some important stuff to keep in mind is that you know, it would still be a success if it just forces us to have a conversation about the derangements.

2:02:06Vlad CosteaIf it pushes Bitcoin to improve. Like, I presume you're not gonna sell your Bitcoin for eCash, right?

2:02:11Paul SztorcRight. Yeah, I don't think people should necessarily do that.

2:02:16Vlad CosteaSo, if you're gonna be holding both coins and one of them is pushing together to improve and gets more users, more developers, more value overall, I think it's a net benefit. So, if anything, I see it as a hedge kind of investment. Or inverse, whatever you call it. I'm not the investor type, either. I just get excited about tech. So, yeah. If you think this is a good idea, let me know in the comments. Let me know what you think. Let me know if there's anything that we might have missed. I know it's gonna be very controversial once everyone finds out. And they're gonna discover all the details one by one. And I know because I had the same process. Like, I was shocked at first, like, wait a second, the hard fork? We don't do that anymore. Nobody's gonna support this, and you're gonna burn your reputation, Paul, and nobody's gonna want to invite you to conferences anymore. And then I discovered the whole SHAD thing, which is Satoshi Half-Airdrop, which means that Satoshi only gets half of his coins while everyone gets one-to-one their Bitcoin in eCash. I mean, that's also something that takes time to think and fully digest, but it's very hard to bootstrap something, and when you think about it, all the pure forks, if anything, were not very successful in this space, and it's the harsh reality. Like, Ethereum Classic, you can argue it was much fairer than Ethereum ETH, but it did not have the same dev team, did not have the same funding. It was just a lot of virtue signaling that did not produce too much.

2:04:04I don't want to knock on them. I consider some of them to be friends of mine, but it just was not as disruptive as Ethereum. Sometimes the fact that you have a lot of money to pay developers to do research and build stuff, there's a lot of value in that. And the space progresses because of it. And Bitcoin benefited indirectly from it, from Ethereum. Now we have some ideas that are coming back to Bitcoin. There are some good ideas from Ethereum, which are existent in eCash on... what do you call it? It's not EthSide anymore.

2:04:42Paul SztorcOh no, EthSide was our clone of Ethereum.

2:04:46Vlad CosteaSo you gave up on that.

2:04:48Paul SztorcWell, I wasn't personally that interested in it. So, even though we made it, you can still look up the old version, but I just didn't really... But well, I'm sure either someone will bring it back, some EVM because it's so popular. But I wasn't that interested in it. What I was thinking was, what are the actual things that people use Ethereum for? Like the assets and identity, can we just specialize on those? But yeah, there's going to have to be an EVM L2, but I was just thinking I don't really want to. But that's the other thing about this project is when people want to if people think that eCash should do this or should do something else, nothing's stopping you from also doing that.

2:05:45But yeah, we had one at some point called EthSide. I personally lost interest in it, because I don't really think anything that's happening on Ethereum is actually that interesting, if you really think about it. A lot of the stuff that they work on is like trying to do scalability via optimistic rollups. But that's very similar to what drivechain has been the whole time for the last 10 years. So, I already think I've covered that whole thing. And even the idea that you could do whatever you want with Ethereum, it's like I'll just do a more specific version of that with sidechains itself.

2:06:29Anyway, I have to go, though.

2:06:30Vlad CosteaYeah, yeah, yeah. The fact that I knew about EthSide is just proof that I've been following this project for a long time. I'm a big fan of it. That's why I invested in it. I hope it succeeds. Check it out. Not financial advice, but give it like a few nights of thinking, like, huh, what if this works? What if it doesn't? There's risk involved, but you never accomplish anything significant...

2:06:56Paul SztorcI'll be back for the controversy. We can do a long whatever.

2:07:02Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. Once people start reacting to this, we can do another episode.

2:07:06Paul SztorcYeah, I'm sure there'll be some funny stuff to come out of it.

2:07:10Vlad CosteaThank you very much, Paul. Thanks for everyone listening to this. Thanks to the sponsors. LayerTwo Labs, obviously. Braiins Hashpower, you can use it to actually mine eCash. OrangeRock, I hope they list eCash for trading. Cake Wallet, I hope they list eCash for SPV. And SideShift.ai, I hope that they let people swap anything into eCash. Thank you very much for listening. I'll see you in the next one. Best of luck, Paul. Thank you.