S17 E5: Paul Sztorc on Bitcoin Derangements

0:47Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 5. We are live with Paul Sztorc, who has written a very brilliant article about Bitcoin derangements. And that's going to be like the main topic. For those of you who are not on YouTube and cannot see what we're talking about, it's on his blog, which is truthcoin.info. And I'm gonna spell out the URL for those of you who are able to type. It's slash blog slash derangements. It was published on the 16th of July, 2025.

1:20It has been updated ever since. And it's just so good. We're gonna talk about this. Hi, Paul.

1:26Paul SztorcWhen you liked it, you know, I was when I read it, I just think like, it looks so ugly, like on the page. It's just this like broken list of just text. And it doesn't look great. But really, it has the highest alpha out of everything in the whole industry, because it is it is kind of about the inevitable destruction of Bitcoin in a way. I mean, that's not really what it's about. But that's the question that it asks us to confront. And so a lot of people think that's so bizarre, that they can't even wrap their head around that even being a possibility.

2:00But it is nonetheless important to dwell on all these mistakes and why it is they none of them have been corrected for so long.

2:11Vlad CosteaRight. So yeah, how do you define a derangement? Is it like the Trump derangement syndrome where people can't stop talking about something and they blame everything on it?

2:19Paul SztorcIt's not quite, but it's a similar thing where there's just something is persistently wrong, and it is not fixed. So like, you go to your... you go to the post office, and you think, Oh, I forgot the letter I was going to mail, you go back home, and you get the letter and you go back to the post office. And then you think, oh, the post office is already closed. You come back the next day, and you send but eventually the problem is solved. Eventually, you can make it to the post office and mail the card, you know.

2:48But these derangements are like, someone, you know, they go to the post office and like, you didn't put a stamp on this. And then like, okay, and then they try again without putting the stamp on or they go, the post office closes at 5pm every day, they go at 501, and it's closed, and they try over and over and over again forever, and they never fix the problem. And that's the derangements are just these mistakes that never get corrected. And it's kind of like this scar tissue that like doesn't like heal.

3:22They're just these wounds in Bitcoin that just, they are just, for some reason, we don't have a kind of rational, corrective process for them. And so it's kind of, it's like the fall of the Roman Empire question of like, well, let's just keep getting worse and worse and worse until this all just accumulates into an unfixable situation, which hopefully the answer is no. But if there is, we should definitely figure out like what we're going to do, because it's pretty important topic. But yeah, it's just takes the form of just an ugly list with bullet points.

4:03It kind of would have been better as slides or something maybe, but it's just so much text. But yeah, I just typed that out as a list. And then it's my article, but the actual content of the article is top shelf, but I think this presentation isn't very good. Maybe people will like, people don't really read anymore, so maybe they'll get a lot out of this podcast format. But yeah, why don't you just let me know whatever you think people would be interested in. We could just go down the list or whatever you think.

4:33Vlad CosteaYeah, I also want, before we start diving into the specific topics, I want to mention that you actually classified these, like you have the severe derangements, you have the medium derangements, and you have like the minor derangements. I guess it's important to talk about the severe ones. And I also want to jump a bit to the conclusion section, because you say something which is very important. And I want people to pick this up very early on. You mentioned that there is like a battle between the truth oriented and loyalty oriented.

5:22I think this is beautiful. It describes very well what's happening with the culture and where people are right now. A lot of them are afraid to tell the truth, because they're tied to some sort of loyalty situation, like they are friends with someone, or they're associated with some organization or their advisors in some sort of treasury company or whatever. And they can't say exactly what it is that they're doing or what is wrong. They will just pretend that everything is fine. I see. So in contrast to this article that you posted, I see more people talking about how Bitcoin is winning and how we are already the winners and we are part of the mainstream and it's over.

5:49Like the battle is over. We shouldn't try to do anything anymore. Bitcoin is complete.

5:55Paul SztorcBitcoin fixes this. It's, you know, infinity divided by 21 billion, etc. Fix the money, fix the world. There is no second best. That type of thing, yeah. So it's weird because the article, the gist of the article is that nothing can fix this accumulated disaster. But I hasten to add that I'm certainly a Bitcoiner myself. I'm heavily invested in Bitcoin financially and career-wise and intellectually and reputationally. I don't think that it necessarily means that anyone who owns Bitcoin today will lose their money or will regret it. That's not what I'm saying.

6:39But what I am saying is that the current culture is, it's bizarre to say, but the current culture is so bad that it almost can't be fixed. Maybe it can. I hope I'm wrong about that. But I think it's very bad news overall, but it's just put into like a little humble article with a humble list. But hey, I'll let you then. But yeah, that is a very common theme that eventually in a rational world, everyone's loads with the truth. They notice the problem and they say, oh, what are we going to do about this problem?

7:11Or we can't fix it. We'll escalate up to the big brains. It goes up from the sergeant and it goes up to the general. They fix it. Or it would go up to like Greg Maxwell or whatever to go up to the intellectual top of the tower. But in a deranged situation, it's like, we don't talk about that problem here and it just gets worse and worse. And it's much more of like a Soviet type of a thing. So you could speak maybe to the Romanian experience of like this problem is being swept under the rug.

7:46And then of course that has artificial stability for a very long time before the big black Swan event just erupts. And then I don't know, did you like kill that guy or something? You had like the most hated dictator of all time or something. So I don't know.

8:01Vlad CosteaNo, I guess he was just the only one of all the Warsaw Pact dictators to not peacefully give up on power and he had to be removed by force. So that's why it was such a big deal.

8:14Paul SztorcHe stayed in power for a little longer. He had the artificial stability and then he had an extremely unstable, what I assume is he had beaten to death or something by the angry mob of Romanians. No, he wasn't.

8:26Vlad CosteaHe was shot. They put him on trial. It was all staged very precisely. They flew him with a helicopter and the pilot turned out to be a traitor. And he left him on an open field. And then he was picked up by someone who looked like a normal civilian who was like, oh, I'm just passing by. Do you want to go somewhere? You seem lost. And he took them to a place where they got put on trial very fast. They got accused of a lot of stuff that they did not do, but they could not defend themselves.

8:57But they sort of deserved some sort of punishment. I disagree that they should have been killed so fast. They knew so much. They possessed so much information that could be used later, but they just wanted a clean slate, they wanted it in the past. I understand that, too.

9:12Paul SztorcBut yeah, that's sort of where it went wrong with the one-day trials. And then you're just like, well, now we'll never know. Anyway, back on topic, though. Why don't you just take us back into the article?

9:25Vlad CosteaI also want to disappoint you with something, because where is it? I'm on Bitcoin Talk right now. I'm checking my messages. I actually sent a DM to Greg Maxwell. And on his profile right now, which is gmaxwell on Bitcoin Talk, he has a new web page, which is nt4tn.net. And he calls himself a retired software engineer.

9:52Paul SztorcNo, he hasn't been active for a very long time. I think it's debatable. The whole thing is debatable. Did he pretend to stop working during the block size war because he was being threatened or something? But I also think just literally he hasn't contributed anything. Like if you think of like that he used to be very very very very active on Bitcoin Talk and he would post all these ideas, CoinJoin and even CoinWitness, which later kind of became zk-SNARKs. All that stuff was like posted about by him in like, whatever, like 2012 or some cases even earlier, like in a theoretical paragraph and then later fleshed out.

10:30Vlad CosteaNo, but my point is that you had this description where you said that it goes up to the generals and the Greg Maxwells, but there's no more Greg Maxwell to speak of.

10:39Paul SztorcYeah, but that's that's implied in the article. Like where have all the leaders gone? And in fact, I take a couple shots at people later on in the lesser derangements. I say, you know, some of the people have basically abandoned us, like a lot of people just quietly left. But even people like, okay, like Pete Rizzo is like a friend of mine. I like him, but he, you know, because of the algorithm, they just post all caps lock junk all day.

11:09Vlad CosteaOh, no, he's getting punished right now by the changed algorithm.

11:13Paul SztorcBut this is the thing, he's following the algorithm, instead of just posting what he thinks is important. Now, I agree that you know, if the game has stupid rules, then play stupid games, win stupid prizes, but he is trying to follow the algorithm. But it was just like, yeah, that was just all caps lock, you're not bullish enough, rocket emoji, like stuff that, you know, a retard would write. So that, but that, but you know, he's like, he has this preeminent knowledge of all this Bitcoin history and stuff. And you know, Adam Back, another friend and one of the people who supported me for a very long time, you know, on socially, you know, on Bitcoin Twitter and stuff.

11:58And I'm very grateful for that, but it's kind of like, they're just posting stuff about like the price and retracements and blah, blah, blah, like technical, like price chart, technical in quotes, because that's all, that is all just a bunch of superstitious garbage. And instead they should be, you know, they should be taking the lead in a technological sense. So, but yeah, there is no, there is no leader. People didn't even know, for example, that like I pointed that out about the official policy from Bitcoin Core is if anything's controversial, they won't touch it.

12:38Then you had crazy, Jonas Nick was accusing me of just fabricating that out of nowhere. He had no idea that Ava Chow has tweeted publicly multiple times that that is the policy. So he didn't even know that that was the policy. And he just assumed that I was like, I don't know, concocting a wholesale fabrication to like slander Bitcoin Core, but he doesn't even know that that's explicitly was said in writing. It's always been said, and so people don't even realize. So there is no, there's no leadership, all these conspiracies about Bitcoin Core being captured.

13:14It's worse than that. There is no, there is no organizational structure at all. There's just Ava Chow being too cowardly to face any decision and just writing everything off as controversial or just taking all this, you know, merging more unit tests.

13:31Vlad CosteaIt's much deeper than that because controversial is subjective, like controversial to whom? Is it just some troll? Doesn't have consensus or is it just this council of well-trained and how should I put it? Fluent and C++ core developers or whatever who are working on the core project. The point is that if you read Roger Ver's book, which is called Hijacking Bitcoin, he describes the situation with theymos from, I think it was the summer of 2015, when basically he did not allow any conversation to happen on our Bitcoin about Bitcoin XT, which was supposed to be hard fork, because he considered that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin.

14:21It goes all the way there, where he described consensus as having nearly anonymous acceptance among the elites. And right now they took the same criteria, which was, which were being used for hard forks, and they applied them for soft forks, which are optional, which is very interesting.

14:41Paul SztorcExactly. No, this is an extremely important point. The word consensus means, the human, the actual English word means that everyone in the room agrees. It has never been how any real group of humans operates and has never been how Bitcoin Core operates. Now Bitcoin Core is a group of people, but very misleadingly there's an equivocation where the same word consensus is used by the software to describe the bytes in the blockchain, where everyone has to have the exact same bytes, in the exact same order. That is necessary for Bitcoin to function and that is how it works.

15:20And so people kind of play this like maybe kind of hypnosis shell game. They don't realize they're doing it, perhaps. But yeah, it was a consensus in the software, consensus among humans, total consensus required for a hard fork. By the way, that's not true. Just kind of an overwhelming majority would really be what was literally an actual description of what's happening. But then, and then the whole point of the soft fork being invented in 2012 is that it does not require consensus. So that the fact that people are now backfilling that requirement, that's like saying, you know, the whole point of like using, flying in an airplane is that we don't need to use a boat, but then you keep the, you know, you take off with the airplane and the airplane just like glides across the surface of the water or something, you know.

16:06It's like we're taking a plane, we're gonna take a plane from London, New York or something and it's gonna go like, you're in like a 747 like on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. So that's very, all this is very depressing. The idea that soft forks require consent, that is one of the derangements. The fact that nothing can get done. We haven't had any soft forks in many years. There's no hope of having any in the future. The miners have abdicated their role even to care about their own bottom line.

16:35The mining pools mostly care about competing as other pools, so they don't even, they're not even happy when the Bitcoin price goes up or when transaction fees go up and the ASIC manufacturers would be the beneficiaries and the people who own the ASICs would be beneficiaries, but they're diffused. So yeah, there's unfortunately a lot of like these problems, these derangements, these are problems that persist and they're not really getting any better. And so I think it points to a question of, you know, start over with something new or try to continue to fix what might be broken beyond repair.

17:16Vlad CosteaYeah, it's a very useful conversation to be had because going back to the block size wars, I don't think at the time the conversation was that BTC was going to become a store of value and BCH was going to become the medium of exchange. And then we're going to see which one the market picks. It was all about, okay, this one is going to activate SegWit and try the Lightning Network, which is a layer 2, and this other one is going to try on-chain scaling, increase the block size.

17:46It was two technical approaches to achieve the same problem, which was to make Bitcoin work as money. But somewhere along the way, Lightning never delivered, not in the way that they promised because there is always going to be someone on the beach in El Salvador saying, what do you mean I use Lightning every day?

18:05BCH never took off for different reasons. First of all, because they kept on fighting. They had a lot of infighting and they had two different forks that emerged from BCH. There was BSV and then also the e-cash one. I think it's XEC. And they also had Craig Wright, who sort of destroyed everything. They made the movement look sort of crazy and cultish. And I guess also the market was not mature enough to handle these.

18:41Paul SztorcYeah, it's a separate issue. I think why Bitcoin Cash did not do very well. And I have been on the Bitcoin Cash podcast trying to explain it to them. And they're not super thrilled, you know, but I think I have a big list. I had a big list as my green table that I published about. But there's so many things to say like, so if we could just go, just change gears and just talk about Bitcoin Cash for a while. Because I think part of the problem with the with the BTC, Bitcoin Core derangements, is that there's no competition keeping everything healthy.

19:17There's just one good project. Then there's like Ethereum and then there's like some other projects. But if those other projects were, you know, hot on our tail or nipping at our heels, that would, you wouldn't be able to have these derangements. People would get rid of them. It's like if you're fighting a war and one person has like, you know, one side has like a bunch of DEI, like irrelevant hiring criteria, and then the other side, they're, you know, they're hopeless. They're never going to win the war.

19:47Well, then you would fix the DEI problem. But if they were, if it was like World War II and everyone is racing and they're both innovating as fast as possible. Then you would, you would get really creative really fast. You'd start the Manhattan Project. You would start, you know, industrialization of mass producing airplanes and stuff like that. So a lot to say, but yeah, why did Bitcoin Cash not succeed? Really bad. Well, the idea wasn't good and the execution wasn't that good either. The idea of just hard forking once to the eight megabyte block is kind of like, what was so special about the number eight, right?

20:28Either just remove the cap or don't. And then if you do eight, won't you have to do 32 again? And then this whole headache, it kind of made it seem like they didn't understand this whole, this hard fork was why everyone was suffering because they didn't know how to handle that. So now we're just going to just hard fork all the time, I guess. Keeping the name, I think, added a lot of stigma to the project and like anxiety over who's going to be, you know, fighting over what's the real Bitcoin.

21:01The idea of large block L1, I'm not an advocate of that. I think we scale in layers. So I agree that we don't, we want the small block L1, large block L2. Because you can't do the reverse.

21:18Just like weird timing.

21:20Vlad CosteaTo be honest, sorry for interrupting you. I think Bitcoin Cash is doing a good job right now because they activated some of the Satoshi era upcodes. And ironically they're building layer twos right now.

21:33Paul SztorcYes. I think it would have been easier for them. Like if they had, because what instead happened was Amaury Séchet did his thing in August. While everyone was still distracted with SegWit2x, people like Jameson Lopp and Eric Voorhees were talking on Twitter at the time it was called Twitter, kids. And they were talking about how, like, is Bitcoin Cash the new large block project? And then the large blocker group said, no, of course, SegWit2x is still happening. So then you have people selling and buying coins during this interim period.

22:12And then it kind of just launched like as a surprise. The better thing would have been to pick a new name, give months worth of advance notice and say, thanks, but no thanks. We, on this, you know, BTC team, we're going to swap for a different team and just tell everyone, hold both coins. You win no matter what happens. That was partly what Dan Kra... Remember Dan Krawisz used to say that. He used to say, hold both coins. And that was in his genius phase. But unfortunately, I mean, I really like Dan Krawisz a lot.

22:46I think his mind is a joy. Oh, Daniel Krawisz.

22:49Vlad CosteaOkay.

22:50Paul SztorcYeah, he's crazy, but he's really something else. He believes in this guy. You know, there's this debate in biology about, I don't want to get into the details and like there's a lot of math behind it also. But there's basically about, there's this continuum of belief on this thing called signaling. And Zahavi is all the way on one side as with Daniel Krawisz. Okay. And, and then there's another side of the story that doesn't agree with this at all.

23:19But Zahavi basically says that the way you prove to your girlfriend that you're worth it, that you're a good person is to like basically grow as many defective mutations as possible and like become like a decrepit. Because you can say, despite having this really heavy peacock tail that's useless and attracts predators and it doesn't help you fly. And despite all that, I'm still alive. Okay. Now I happen to be very skeptical of this, as are many biologists who say the signaling works the other way. Like the reason when a lion roars, it's because they're really healthy.

23:53They can make a loud, deep roar. And the roar is something that, you know, a little tiny mouse can't do. And so the signaling goes kind of the other way or that there's many variations of this and we don't want to get into it. But my belief is that this Zahavi theory destroyed Daniel Krawisz's mind and destroyed Bitcoin SV because Dan Krawisz was like, oh, this Craig Wright, he is the useless peacock feathers. He is the dumb thing that I can attach to my intelligence. And I can say, despite being weighed down by all this stupid crap, this project is still alive.

24:31And the problem with this Zahavi theory is it causes you to evolve like having only one eye and one leg and like being like misshapen and like just dying of disease. And also that the women will notice you. And I don't know, like I just. But this is an open, this is considered a possibility. This is kind of an open question in biology that people are researching. But this is an extreme view. A lot of people have other views, like women evolve a certain taste for sort of like the peacock tail that causes the men to.

25:06They have like views that are in the middle and views that are like. So I don't. There are different views about honest signaling. But I just wanted to go on this ramble about this because it's funny to me. I really like Dan Krawisz, but his explicit belief is that the more the more bad something is, the more good it is. So he has this contradiction living inside of him. And then that was Bitcoin SV. So he was like, great, this is exactly what I needed, the worst idea ever.

25:40But, you know, I don't know. I mean, if you go all

25:45Vlad CosteaThe way back to 2012, I think Dan Kaminsky was the first one to make a presentation at a hackers event where he basically said in order for Bitcoin to scale to have today's. Level of transactions that Visa has, it needs to have one terabyte blocks, not terabyte, one gigabyte blocks. And you need to have this type of processor with like 64 cores. And you also need to have this amount of storage like he did the napkin map back in 2011 or 2012. And this idea of having what later Calvin Ayre or whatever his last name is referred to as the giga megs.

26:28It took so from 2012 until 2018 or 19 when SV came around, it's been quite a few years and people had enough time to think about it and consider it. And it was not something novel. It was just the first time when someone put this into practice. What really sucks and is awful about SV is the fact that they enabled confiscation. So they did something along these lines to make it easy to confiscate the coins. They also say that they're like the legally compliant. So if there was a court order that the police.

27:03Paul SztorcBut this is all fake. This is all downstream of Craig's own insanity. You know what I mean? Like he painted himself into a corner because at first Craig was going to be like, I'm the real Greg Maxwell and I'm Satoshi and I have a million. I have an ace of spades. I'm the highest card in the deck because because I'm Satoshi. And so then he was going to say like, you know, in the block size war, that would have mattered a lot because most of the technical elite were small blockers. And I should say that also I was a small blocker and I still am an L1 small blocker.

27:35And I kind of agree with theymos that explicitly promoting a hard fork, that would be like promoting, you know, fiat currency. It's like promoting a competitor to Bitcoin. They should have. I happen to also think, not to give too many threads, but I think that theymos's actions actually helped Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin XT and hurt the small block movement. But that's just my opinion. I don't know if that. So I think he didn't realize that he was doing a, I think he was doing Streisand effect and he was giving cover to all the bad arguments in Bitcoin Cash land by saying, oh, listen, this is all censored or whatever.

28:19But yeah, Craig, of course, is crazy. So, I mean, this is related to the derangements point because it's kind of like if Bitcoin is going to collapse, it kind of has to collapse. There has to be a competitor has to collapse into something. And the question is what? And the answer is, you know, everything else is also deranged. So, I mean, like obviously the fiat currencies are terrible. 99% of the altcoins are scams. Ethereum is really not that good. And so, you know, I'm still like 99% Bitcoiner for now, but these problems are here.

28:51And the reason I wanted to bring this up is because, yeah, Craig is obviously like an example of a derangement, you know, on the large blocker side that was in BCH and that was then in BSV. And Craig, you know, he couldn't really, what could he do? You know, he said at first he was saying, I'm the technical guy, but then it was tough. What was he going to say once you had other technical people, such as Amaury, trying to ask him basic questions or then when they have an actual dispute about that thing, CTOR, canonical transaction ordering or these other questions they wanted to ask.

29:28Then it's revealed that he doesn't actually know that much. And then it was like, oh, he's a misunderstood genius or whatever, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, but then it ultimately becomes clear that he's not that either, you know. So, but yeah, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug and everyone wants, you know, once they become a bag holder, they won't. Hear a word against, which is partly why the derangements article, like a bunch of Bitcoiners are just going to, well, they're not going to read it at all.

30:01Or if they read it, they're not going to read it like in the right mood of mind of like actually being curious about what it says. They're going to scan it for various phrases and then they're just going to say, this is hostile to Bitcoin. This is not, you know, this is not what I'm used to hearing. I'm used to hearing. I'm used to opening Twitter and seeing Bitcoin as hope and an AI image and, you know, because I'm an idiot. And then it's like, okay, well, yeah.

30:28So should we talk about like any of them? Do you have any that you like, should we just maybe read them? Why don't you like read just the titles of them all so that, because people have some idea of what it is I'm so against. But really what I'm really against is this, the fact that the culture cannot like admit its mistakes, even when they're like obvious mistakes or things like the SegWit witness discount things where just like everyone is just has a wrong belief, but it just doesn't even matter.

31:02Like nothing matters. So maybe we should give people some idea of what the article is about. I don't know if you want to answer.

31:10Vlad CosteaSo I was going to mention that you became quite iconoclastic from the beginning, and that's why some people will get to this page, which is truthcoin.info slash blog slash derangements. And you start out with lightning and a lot of Bitcoiners will read this and be like, oh, it's just Paul being Paul. There's nothing interesting here. But I have a lot to say about this because you also went to TabConf and you are not planning to go to TabConf. And then you got sort of persuaded by Michael Tidwell and you got on stage and you did a presentation.

31:44And then the format was brilliant. And that helped you actually be able to get people to debate you and also get people to agree with you, which was really beautiful. And it's interesting how the sentiment changes year after year to the point where, yeah, you were right all along, but it's very hard. I was right.

32:04Paul SztorcTheir heart isn't really in it. You could see at TabConf, their heart really wasn't even in defending it. There was really, there were a few passionate defenders who are like the dumbest people in the room who were like, you know, no offense, but like Shinobi and stuff. The TabConf room is full of like real engineers. And then you just have like some people, you know, they had a lot of passion. That was like two people.

32:28Vlad CosteaAlso, Shinobi's objections were mostly semantic. Like he felt like you were generalizing and he just wanted to point out to the exceptions to your rule. But he did not disagree overall to what you were saying.

32:42Paul SztorcYeah, there was no one who really disagreed. And then there are some people who are like, you know, we get like, I hate to say this too, because I feel mean, but like we get like the Twitter marketing guy for like a lightning. Like they will disagree on Twitter, but like they're paid to do that. It's fake. And they're not, you know, and meanwhile, we've got Tadge Dryja on the stage with me for 10 minutes. Like I think Tadge Dryja outranks Alex Gladstein and Hannah.

33:08Vlad CosteaFor people who don't know who that is, it's because you haven't read the lightning white paper, by the way.

33:14Paul SztorcThe inventor of the lightning network. And he came on and he didn't, you know, and you know, I've known Tadge for many years and he's a great guy and he has a lot of integrity. And he always, as I said in the talk, Tadge has always been trying to pump the brakes on all of the nonsense of lightning. So yeah, he certainly didn't do anything wrong. His invention is brilliant. And he was always totally honest about it. But yeah, he comes on stage and then he doesn't say like, Oh, you're wrong about this, and this.

33:45And this is the central point and blah, blah, blah. He comes on stage and he's basically kind of just like, can we change the subject Utreexo or something? Because I'm more interested in that than the lightning network. That's like what he said.

33:59So, you know, so yeah, like that is, you know, that you're playing chess and the person tips over the king, basically. But some of these people, like they don't even realize.

34:08Vlad CosteaHe says, can we play checkers?

34:10Paul SztorcThey still think like, well, yeah, people, that's right. Alex Gladstein doesn't know we're playing chess. He still thinks that because he's got an email from someone who says they're from Kenya and they use the lightning network, that that means that it's good. And then he gets Primal-to-Primal zap on Nostr. And again, like it's funny, I ended up making fun of... Primal is an ingenious idea and a great product for making Nostr much more convenient and basically usable.

34:37But of course, the problem is not Nostr. It's the problem is the lightning icon. But really, none of this would be a problem if Bitcoin had a culture that was reasonable or if the lightning people haven't. It's unfortunate. The lightning network. I mean, there's basically nothing in Bitcoin culture that it hasn't somehow destroyed. It has seeped into every crack and it has ruined almost everything. And it is like just and anyone who tells the truth is like then will suffer like socially. This has gone on for many, many, many years.

35:13Once I was at, I don't know, building on Bitcoin in Amsterdam and like someone, I think it was Ben Arc or someone. I hate to name drop because super, super, super great guy. But people would come up to me like at the bar. We'd all be at the bar, huge bar, 50 Bitcoiners in a room. And people would be like, yeah, you're so right about everything. And you're right about I think maybe I published the security budget stuff at the time. And they're like, you just have to stop criticizing the lightning network because if you do, then no one and people won't listen to you as much.

35:43And, you know, when I was doing the fundraising for LayerTwo Labs originally, it had like this huge 60 slide deck for like the big conversation. There's like one slide in there about the lightning network. Isn't that good? And we can do better. And people would be like, oh, you can't say that. Blah, blah, blah. Now revealed to be the truth. But yeah, it's the biggest sacred cow of them all. You cannot criticize the lightning network, even though it is literally destroying everything. And, you know, like that guy to do, I hate to say this again, like I don't want to do this.

36:16But people have to understand the truth about what's happening, which is that when the guy went to PubKey in New York, they said this was the first Bitcoin transaction from a president of the United States, Donald Trump, to the bar to buy for like a beer or hamburger or whatever. I'm pretty sure that Trump does not drink alcohol, so I don't know what it was. But then they use the stupid lightning thing that doesn't work. If they used on chain, it would have to work. You know, it wouldn't be confirmed, but it would work.

36:45And you could hold up. But instead, they just shut it off and then they have to cover the whole thing up. And then anyone who brings this up, they have to proactively discredit. So it's just a huge engine. Yeah, just engine pumping out evil in all directions. And that's why I have to talk about it. I don't want to embarrass these people. I don't want to embarrass Alex Gladstein or the PubKey owner. I don't really care about them at all. And I hope that they lead long and happy lives of peace or whatever.

37:15But people in the audience have to understand, like there is a huge immune system that will discredit the honest people, not the neutral people. Neutral people who just kind of stay out of it. Everyone who tells you the truth about how bad the lightning network is will get the extra lies being told about them to discredit them. And of course, because these people, all the people honest about the lightning network sucking, they have integrity. People are going to look for ways to criticize them, but they're not going to find any because these are the people with integrity.

37:49These are the good guys. And then they're going to make up a bunch of ones about how, whatever, fiatjaf, you know, he was saying just burn lightning to the ground. He was one of the first people saying it in like 2023 or something. And similarly, so you become inconvenient. You've done nothing wrong and you become inconvenient. So, you know, it's because you've done nothing wrong that they have to then. But this is a perfect example of the derangement. In a sane world, lightning would never have even been invented.

38:20Like it may have been invented, but it wouldn't have been. We built a world where lightning came out and then everyone just started, you know, log rolling and talking about how great it was. And it's created this huge culture where everyone thinks lightning is great. So, of course, when the guy says, oh, we have to have the president of the United States in our bar. Then you have to say, oh, let's use a lightning wallet because that's what you would think in this context. So everyone's an innocent victim of the evil of the lightning network.

38:55But in a sane world, we would never even reach this point. And if we did, everyone would say, well, why did that transaction not work? And they would investigate and you would fix the problem and it would never happen again. But since the real truth is that the Lightning Network is a terrible technology and it's likely to happen again. And it will happen again if you unless you use custodial lightning, which is a huge contradiction, which is custodial lightning is basically saying not using lightning. That's just the only way lightning works is when you don't use it, when you use custodial lightning.

39:23Custodial lightning, again, is another thing where we would never even be you would get laughed out of the room. It's like a bunch of engineers building an elevator to reach the top of the Burj Khalifa or the Empire State Building. And you get into the elevator and you have to climb the stairs in order to get up to the next floor. And they're like, no, that's what the elevator is for. The whole point of the lightning network is so that it's not custodial. But anyway, the lightning network is the biggest sacred cow of them all.

39:50It is also the biggest. Disaster and it has seeped into Bitcoin culture. It causes everyone to lie to everyone else. It causes widespread, like, fraud, basically, and huge malinvestment. It distracts the engineers by keeping them working on useless nonsense. It encourages people to be vague and use a lot of prestige words, confusing words, inbound liquidity, submarine swap. That's confusing to the user. The reason they do that is because you don't want everyone to know, you don't want everyone to see clearly what a disaster the situation is.

40:28So they always say, oh, blah, blah, blah, flood and loot. And yeah, we got really smart people working on it, blah, blah, blah. It is just an engine of making things worse and it's just spreading disaster. And so that's why it has to be first on the list. It is the biggest derangement of them all. But we have lots of other derangements. And when I wrote, when I made that list, the treasury companies were still very popular. But I put the treasury companies on the list because they're a terrible idea and they don't make any sense.

40:56There's no reason to have someone else buy Bitcoin for you. You should be buying your own Bitcoin. That's like the custodial lightning. It's like, wait a minute, I thought I was doing that. You know, it should be your Bitcoin. We're just giving up your precious Bitcoin to someone in exchange for worthless paper stock that they can print at any time. But because of Michael Saylor, everyone thinks this is the greatest idea ever. And they thought, you know, what we need is we need to do more of this idea.

41:23We need to franchise this and we need to do all these other treasury companies because this is the way to just print. Remember Magic Flywheel, infinite money glitch. Turns out, no, micro strategy is now down more than 50% since that article was published. It's a lot harder to publish an article like that when it's like on the way up, up. Now, months later, I've been again proven right, like I will be proven right on every other of the points and the people who tried to copy the treasury strategies, they are down even more, whatever.

41:58You know, I like David Bailey a lot. His thing is down like it's hard to do the accounting because you don't know like how exactly when what is the real stock price that people got in at. But it's down like more than 50% from even where I think people got got in on it. Or Nakamoto, aka KindlyMD. So and then you can see from the recent interview that with what Bitcoin did, Danny interview, how defensive and hollow it all is, he has some simple questions about a tiny detail about and then you have to like everyone has to, so you see that, that example is that interview, the recent Michael Saylor interview on what Bitcoin did is a perfect example of the derangement at work in a sane world.

42:47People would just talk about, oh, this is a problem and this is going well. And in fact, this I think we could push the envelope on this and this. Well, this is still an open question. Oh, yeah, this is a fundamental issue. So if you every time you want to like imagine something at SpaceX or something going like that, it was OK. Every time you go to space, you need more rocket fuel. So we're not fixing that. But we can fix this other thing. And the new version will actually be 10 centimeters wider.

43:15And so, yeah, in engineering, it's usually when you the engineering, the problem with engineering is sometimes the engineers build something that certainly exists. But I'll stop talking in a second. But what you really need is a someone, a key, a key goal, like a key metric. So like in a race, you want to finish with the fastest time. So a race or like a video game speed run. These are very rational things because there's a clear measure of who won by and why and what everyone's supposed to be doing.

43:53But then in the deranged world, it's just Michael Saylor trying to coerce and psychologically manipulate Danny into not asking him certain questions, trying to steer people away from the truth, because the truth is not good.

44:13Vlad CosteaThe truth is inconvenient. The truth stands in the way of actually progressing, and Michael Saylor is not a fan of any of this. He's been trying to there is a reason why he started buying domains, which I guess he has for a long time. But he redirected domains to some sort of Saylor Academy Bitcoin education website, where he's trying to tell people what he wants them to know about Bitcoin and see it from his point of view. And on board a bunch of suits and institutions and whatever from the perspective of the narrative that he's projecting onto Bitcoin.

44:51And he's angry that he's losing the plot and he's losing the battle overall because the strategy, for example, what was it, the company Metaplanet from Japan, which is also sort of owned or handled by David Bailey, I'm not 100% sure. But what they did was to copy the strategy of micro strategy to buy Bitcoin in the same way. And they assumed that it's this infinite money glitch. Yeah, but it's not that's not how markets work.

45:21Paul SztorcYeah, if it was like you can see how like when a new company comes out that changes things like Wal-Mart, but all the products you like in like one big box store. So they put a lot of smaller stores out of business. But people are like, oh, this is convenient. And then Amazon did like, you know, shipping and stuff to the these are. But when people come up with a new business model, that's good, everyone either has to compete against it, like in a do have some kind of comparative advantage in a different way, product differentiation, or they have to like kind of adopt it.

45:55So it's like, for example, when airlines didn't used to have apps, phone apps, they didn't used to have online check in. But of course, once a few people start doing that, then eventually everyone has to do it. So ironically, Michael Saylor tried to use this metaphor in his conversation. I mean, there's so many things wrong with the with the debate. It's impossible to know where to begin, but he tried to do this electricity metaphor. But really, that's what that was exactly what Danny had just asked him.

46:30He had just asked Michael Saylor, like, oh, if you're doing these preferreds, do these other people have to do it? And then Michael Saylor says, well, yeah, when someone has electricity, then other people will do it as well. But that's exactly so it's kind of it's truly bizarre if you really watch it like he ducks the question, but then he uses a metaphor that explains why he shouldn't have ducked the question, but it's always like this.

46:56Vlad CosteaIt's just that we haven't paid attention. Yeah, that was the question that was getting from investors early on, 2022 or something. And they were asking him, so what if Bitcoin fails? And he was like, oh, what if the sun explodes or whatever, or what if the Earth starts spinning?

47:14Paul SztorcAnd so am I. I like metaphor, too. But you're right. What I meant, what I should also have said is that I think Saylor is also weirdly a victim in a way, because everyone has been lying to Saylor also. They've just been sucking up to him because he's rich. So they haven't been telling him the even though I think he's also a deranged person himself. But there was no hope because, of course, everyone's telling him that lightning is going to fix all Bitcoin's scale. And then if Michael Saylor will say something like lightning and these other layer two and layer three protocols, so just like makeup stuff.

47:52He's just constantly bullshitting about nonsense. But it's like, who would be telling him the bad news? Really, no one. So I don't know, like you can. But what I do know is this is not a recipe for a healthy Bitcoin culture where everyone's lying to everyone else. And so that's just this is one. This is one during the Treasury company. It's just one derangement. But you see in the post, can we read? Do you have it in front of you? I can also put I have like multiple bullet points about like why the Treasury companies are not good.

48:26And this was, again, at the height. This was like in the summer. This was like at the height of their popularity and everyone was saying

48:33Vlad CosteaBitcoin summer, that's what they call it,

48:35Paul SztorcAnd everyone was saying, you've got to get in on these are just going to print money. And instead they've all destroyed money. And then people like, how did you know that would happen before it happened? It's like, you know, the idea isn't a good idea. There's no reason to give your Bitcoin away for paper stock. They say they're going to buy Bitcoin. They've got to pay their own salaries. They've got to maybe pay, who knows what kind of tax fee situation they're in with their, the custodians.

49:05People could lose them. They could lose the money, you know, like FTX was taking care of people's Bitcoin. So they lost all, you know, lost the guy was stealing everyone's coin. So there's absolutely no reason to do any of that. All of that is a terrible idea. Jim Chanos was 100% correct when he said it was his agency costs. So the MNAV should always be less than one because it's a bad idea. It's basically he was being very polite. That's a very polite way of saying the idea is stupid.

49:33It's like saying someone else should like be spending time with your girlfriend or something. What I mean, in general, you know, it's like, oh, they should spend all the time with, you know, you're supposed to have this Bitcoin for your own convenience yield, and your own property right. On the coin. And it's like, oh, yeah, we'll, we'll take off. Just give us all of your cash right now. And we'll take, we'll take good care of it. And it's a terrible idea.

50:04Vlad CosteaI just want to praise the LayerTwo Labs marketing department or whoever decided that it's a good idea to overdub the conversation between Michael Saylor and Danny. That was hilarious. That was one of the best memes. But it was second to the Brazilian models reading the script of Luke Dashjr.

50:21Paul SztorcYou know, the problem is that was so good. We cooked so hard on that one. And now he doesn't want to do any other because he's afraid because it was so good. He doesn't want to do but he did the dub. So we got a second I got to tell him we've got to do another live action thing or you're fired. So that we get another idea out there. Now, too much success.

50:45Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if it's serious cat or someone else, but congratulations. It was very good. And speaking of LayerTwo Labs, they're sponsoring this show and I got to plug it. Go to layertwolabs.com slash download, get the software and also register to the Drivechain Talk Telegram group, which is at DC Insiders. You're going to find a lot of funny jokes and a lot of action there. A lot of alpha.

51:09Paul SztorcI mean, okay, so our software actually does scale 8 billion people. It does onboard 8 billion people. We tested this. So this is related to the Bitcoin Cash, the giga megs. We have a script that simulates what it would be like if, you know, a certain number of transactions were made. And now, you know, things are very different now in 2026 than they were in the block size war started, which is now more than 10 years ago in the even the heated scaling Bitcoin era that was 2015.

51:41It was September and December of 2015. So it was late 2015. So just barely 10 years. But now it's actually possible to, you can run the script and it is possible to do the process, this number of transactions. And another thing that must be pointed out is that if you want 8 billion people using your software, then those transactions have to be processed somewhere. I mean, the ideal thing would be only the sender and the recipient have to, but actually that I think it should be obvious that that doesn't work because ultimately we all have to agree on the state of the, because the world has lots and lots of people, all of which could transact to each other.

52:28So it should be obvious that there has to be some kind of meshing together of everything, but yeah, we've, we've done all this. We have, you know, the Z side fork that uses the crates, the rust crate from the brilliant technicians at the Zcash alt coin. And we have a privacy L2 that uses that library. We now have a quantum proof, which is brand new. We just have L2 we swapped out for quantum resistance signatures. BIP 300 already does not use anything that it doesn't use. The BIP 300 part doesn't use signature.

53:06So it is not vulnerable to quantum computer or ECDSA like break or anything like that. So yeah, we have all this, we have great stuff on there and it's really good and it's much better than the lightning network. So it's not just, I'm not just a critic, although I think at this point, anyone who is a critic, you know, is doing the Lord's work, so to speak, because the whole thing is, has produced these interlocking problems where again, if you tell the truth about, hey, if you say the emperor has no clothes and you say, oh, that guy tried to make a lightning transaction, but it didn't work.

53:47Now you're an enemy of Bitcoin and everyone hates you. Or again, not for being neutral, but for telling the truth about what you actually saw with your own eyes. So then it just becomes, you know, it's just like a giant Jungian shadow. There's like this evil Frankenstein's monster of just overlapping derangements. And yeah, who cares if lightning, whether or not lightning works, if it's just going to be in a treasury company. So they all overlap. All of them overlap. They're all of them are evil and they all overlap.

54:16And I think, you know, we add, we certainly add new derangements every year. I don't know if they necessarily grow or get worse. Lightning has gotten worse and worse and worse, and now it's finally shrinking a little bit, but it's so big that who knows how much damage will be done. But yeah, I don't know. Did you have any on the list that you were kind of like surprised by or you were like, oh, I didn't even know that that wasn't true or something?

54:43Vlad CosteaNo, I sort of agree with you on all points. I went through this a few times and I was like, this is so good. It's like a good compilation of everything wrong. I wish more people would just take one per day or whatever and just think about it. Yeah, but we have a question in the chat from weird robot. He says, if someone wants to get involved and learn about drivechains, what's a good place to start?

55:07Paul SztorcYeah, just layertwolabs.com slash download and try the software and yeah, it should work. We have new mobile wallets coming, but of course the mobile wallet is not that fun. But the really fun thing is you get BitWindow shows you, lets you see into the blockchain and see all this cool stuff that's going on. And we are resetting the chain this particular week, so unfortunately this is not the best. Probably you want to go to the DC insiders telegram, t.me slash DC insiders. But yeah, if you download, if you just download the software from layertwolabs.com slash download, and then you just try around, we have a faucet, we have two networks with fake coins.

55:50You can, by the way, the software also will connect if you ask it to, it will connect to a regular Bitcoin Core v30 network, or at least v29, I think v30 maybe this week. And you can use BitWindow with real coins. The only problem with that is our software is new and in particular BitWindow is designed to be like a more of a move fast break things part. Whereas the other stuff is not designed to be that way, but like, you know, the enforcer and the L2 full node software.

56:24But yeah, BitWindow is supposed to be kind of like more fun and interesting and a little bit more. Because it is a fully cosmetic graphical user interface, you can swap out, you can fork that and make a different version without needing to like go through a Bitcoin Core bureaucracy nonsense, which is the root of a lot of these problems. You could just fork BitWindow and have your own BitWindow and then you can change the colors or just rewrite or just delete, tear things up. So yeah, but I think the real way to actually get involved is to try the software and that will give you a really deep connection to what is actually happening.

57:01And you get to see for itself all the good and the bad, because to do the full node, you have to sync. If you want to sync, our signet is pretty small, but it's still like two gigabytes because we've ran it through maybe 500,000 blocks or so. But we are going to reset it. After running it for more than a year, this is the one week that we are resetting it. So it should be easier than ever to do the L2L signet. And then the ForkNet, which resembles Bitcoin Core, you need the full like 700 gigabyte, 800 gigabyte blockchain for that.

57:35The 800 gigabyte, we got to do, we got to look at the homage. That's, I mean, it's funny because, you know, as someone who speaks a lot, it's easy to just say the wrong thing, but that is funny. That's just a funny, what does he think? Like, doesn't, does he use a computer? Calvin Ayre, what an incredible, what a legend, but also maybe a crazy person. But, but yeah, so that's, yeah. Be in the Telegram group, t.me slash DC insiders, talk on topic. These people on there sometimes ramble off topic and I have to go and delete everything.

58:16Got a bunch of, we got a bunch of kooky people. But we got great people in there.

58:21Vlad CosteaYou even have Vitalik in there who just sometimes hangs out in there.

58:26Paul SztorcHe shitposts a little, sometimes necroposts, would be like, I don't really agree with this. We have some great people in there.

58:35Vlad CosteaAnd I think it was because of my interview with Vitalik when I plugged the Telegram channel.

58:41Paul SztorcYeah, we had to like lock it down. Exactly.

58:43Vlad CosteaYou've got a lot of spammers.

58:45Paul SztorcLots and things, yeah. But hey, it's part of being big, I guess. But yeah, so being in the Telegram group, follow me on Twitter. It's not that I need the followers, but that is a good way to learn about, I'm obviously going to tweet about stuff. And then trying the software is a very serious thing. You can see for yourself, oh, this part of the software isn't as fun or this is really fun. This is really cool. What a cool idea. How does this work? And that's good.

59:19And we need people to test and we need people to find bugs. We have upgraded the front end, the graphical interface part a lot. But as a result, it's become less reliable. This is the growing pain. It's just a zigzag type of a thing. So before the user interface sucked, now it's good, but it sometimes doesn't work. Especially on Windows. God damn, this Windows operating system is just cursed and they're just ruining everything with it. It's awful. Whatever. But the point is, I think that, yeah, the Mac people have it the best because we have most of the people who test our Mac, and of course, Linux, those work better than the Windows one is temperamental.

1:00:11And because not enough people even test with it. So if, yeah, that would help if you do. And then you can actually learn for yourself, you can see, oh, okay, you can download, you go click the window and you click to the sidechains tab, you click, you can download Thunder, which is my L2 sidechain. And then my plan is to have 14 of these geographically distributed L2s. So you have like North America Thunder, Southeast Asia Thunder, whatever, Europe Thunder, et cetera. And then you can run, you can go on GitHub and look up the scripts and you can see, oh, this is actually, we've tested this and we've improved the performance and it has been tested at a rate, like a stopwatch.

1:00:54It's been tested at a rate that would allow 8 billion people to onboard and use. Lightning can't even do something like that. No one would even write a test like that because it's not possible because in order to onboard people to the Lightning network, they need a channel. There's not enough L1 block space to give channels to everyone. So they can't even conceive of writing a test that we have already written in past. So yeah, I think hanging out in the telegram is a good, very good option.

1:01:27And because that's where we hang out.

1:01:30Vlad CosteaI also want to mention something because you spoke along the lines of forking the code and changing the color. I saw a post on the drivechain talk telegram channel about forking blue wallets and now it's called red and it's in test flight on iOS.

1:01:48Paul SztorcThat's right. We have a mobile wallet.

1:01:50Vlad CosteaIt's going to be like the SPV way of trying the drivechains without syncing your node.

1:01:55Paul SztorcYeah, I think so. That is the idea. BlueWallet is great. And so I thought, well, also, even though I really like Electrum, you can only get it on mobile Android. You can't get it on iOS. So I was like, Oh, even though I love Electrum, I think great piece of software. But we were like, well, let's get both. And then a blue wallet is really good. And we wanted to pay homage, but we didn't want it to be like Bitcoin cash where the name is too similar.

1:02:24So we just changed to red wallet. I hope they don't mind. But this is experimental and it basically it works. The L1 sending and receiving money works. So will it ever work for all the L2s? Well, yeah, eventually. But you know, we only just started this part up. But yeah, if you want, which should be possible, I think we're changing this as we speak before you had to be like invited to the test. But now I think it will be anyone with the link and can try it out.

1:02:57Of course, there's nothing really that groundbreaking about a mobile wallet. You know what I mean? Like there's no like drivechain technology per se in the mobile wallet. The drivechain technology is about having competing L2s, letting anyone start up a new L2 without like changing code in Bitcoin core or something like that. Letting the L2s just live and die on their own transaction fees. And so we won't need to be centrally planned by Bitcoin core and we won't need Bitcoin core to be infallible because not only are they not infallible, but they are basically part of the derangement at this point.

1:03:42So, and the idea is that competition will cure everything. So if there's something wrong, like, oh, everyone's using, so you have L1. L1 lets you move among the different L2s. And then, oh, if this L2 is not adding, you know, Nick Carter is going to say this L2 is not adding quantum resistant signatures, then they can either say, well, we don't care about that because it's not a big deal. And maybe they're right. Or they can say, okay, we'll add the quantum signatures, or someone can fork the code, create a different L2 that's almost exactly the same, add the quantum resistant signatures.

1:04:22And now we have that option as users. We have that option, optional different L2.

1:04:27Vlad CosteaPlus there is no consensus on which signatures are better for Bitcoin. Like you have the Winternitz ones, you have the Lamport ones, you have a bunch of hybrids. Like it's still a very experimental phase and maybe that you're going to have different sidechains that approach quantum resistance in a different way.

1:04:45Paul SztorcPrecisely right. And there'll also be a lot of bike shedding. So people will just have endless debates because the debate really isn't about which signature is better. Let's say, imagine a situation where there's four types of quantum resistant signature. We'll just make this up. We'll just call them A, B, C, D. And actually A and B are much better than C and D. It's not totally clear. This is a fake scenario I just invented now. But in the world we have now, what will happen? Everyone will feel a need to weigh in on A and B being better than C and D, but then they won't agree on A versus B.

1:05:23Because A and B are kind of like equally good. Both of them would get the job done, say, maybe. Or maybe all four of them would get the job done, but A and B are just clearly better than C and D. So what will happen is there'll be lots and lots and lots of discussion and nothing will actually get done. Because people will say, oh, how do we know? And then they'll make hats, they'll make baseball hats that say, oh, I'm team A. And then they'll put stuff in their Twitter name and they'll say, oh, are you an A or a B?

1:05:55They'll have this big fight over it. And the whole thing will be a complete no offense, just fucking waste of everyone's time, which is annoying. And then what would happen in a sane universe, in a sane universe that has drivechain already, or it has any kind of L2 competition? But what it would do is it would say like, oh, okay, we want a quantum resistant option. Someone would look, they would invest a little bit of time. They would say, oh, A, B, C, D. They're thinking about it for like one or two weeks and say, yeah, A and B seem better.

1:06:26They'd just pick one and put it in. And then no one would even ever talk about this again. They would just say, this is the quantum resistant option. And then maybe like some obscure, arcane academic people would be like, oh, did you know they actually, they picked B, but A would have been slightly better. 18 months later, we realized A would have been slightly better in these obscure ways that really no one cares about. That's an insane way to run the project. But that is how we run the project.

1:06:55It will all be bike shedding. All the soft fork talk has been bike shedding. So it has all just been about the political reputation of the people talking instead of the cost benefit analysis on adding the soft fork. Because all of the OP_NOP and OP_SUCCESS, OP_TRUE, all of these style of soft fork carry absolutely no risk whatsoever. And they are ignorable, opt-in and easily reversible. So they have basically as little risk as you could possibly ever have. This is like the theoretical minimum level of risk that anything could have.

1:07:36And in fact, random other changes such as Matt Corallo's change to remove 600 millionths of a second from a matrix multiplication or something that ended up having an inflation bug. And I'm not saying that Matt Corallo did the wrong thing or even that he made a mistake. Because whenever anyone does any software development or whenever anyone does anything, there will be tiny little mistakes here and there. That is healthy and that is totally normal. And the only reason I bring that up is to say that was not Matt Corallo's 600 second matrix multiplier, 600 millionths of a second matrix multiplication.

1:08:17That was not a hard fork. That was not a soft fork. That was not a proposal. That was not a BIP. But it accidentally had an inflation bug and it would have hard forked unexpectedly. So we have that and then we have, that's like the normal, you know, that's the baseline. And then we have, you know, and all of that actually happened. That wasn't like a theoretical thing that was made in the Bitcoin Core. Again, it had a super obscure bug, the recent one, where it would just delete your wallet and delete all of your coins.

1:08:46Now, super obscure, yes. But still, like, that's not good. The Bitcoin Core should not be, you know, it's definitely the number one job is that it should not delete all the users' coins. We don't want that. But this is the baseline for software development is that when you do it, there are tiny mistakes. And by doing nothing, you also have huge mistakes. You have a hard bleed and you have dependencies and you have all kinds of stuff. Vulnerabilities are discovered and then they have to be disclosed and you have to have this thing.

1:09:24So by not doing anything, you have a risk. And then by doing something, you have a risk. This is the baseline level of risk. The soft fork that are the OP_NOP, OP_TRUE, OP_SUCCESS, they are beneath that threshold of just the normal everyday risk. They are like literally as low risk as you could possibly hit with any idea. But yet, we bike shed. You know what I mean? So this is like a case where you have ideas A, B, C, D, A through G. All of them have some big benefit to Bitcoin and zero cost, zero risk.

1:09:57No cost in the sense of any other, would cost any other software change. Things that are not hard to solve for, since they're just refactoring code, maintaining code. So these are all, A through G are all good, but instead we get none of them. And no one does anything about it. And if you try to do anything about it, you are accused of trying to attack Bitcoin or trying to break Bitcoin. So actually, again, everything is flipped. All the good people get criticized. And the people who are doing the wrong thing, the apathy, the negligence of Ava Chow and the spinelessness that they won't engage because they are worried about how the controversy will affect them.

1:10:42The selfishness, that is rewarded. And again, with the OP_RETURN with Luke and they make a bunch of attention about this fake issue. They get rewarded with the attention. The whole community is distracted for two years. So these are the big problems, which are that we have this scar tissue that won't heal, but also like it has a deranging effect on the community.

1:11:11Vlad CosteaTo be honest, I feel like the biggest derangement is Ordinals and basically the aftermath of people discovering how to do NFTs on Bitcoin, like not discovering. This is nothing new. It's been done before with colored coins and Counterparty and Omni. And basically this trend came to Bitcoin once again. And the people who got on board to Bitcoin via memes and narratives about what it is and how it works. They sort of fell for the whole story that this is an attack and this is something that needs to get patched.

1:11:45Like, this is a CVE, as Luke Dashjr submitted it. And then he built this cult around his idea that Bitcoin needs to receive a lot of filters. And he should be the one who is put in charge of deciding what is a good transaction and what is not. And I think Casey sort of broke Bitcoiners, like spiritually. Yes. Because there are a lot of derangements that followed when they realized that their plans are not working, when the goalposts kept moving. At first they were saying, we're going to filter Bitcoin and it's going to remain pure.

1:12:22And then they said, well, we can't filter everything. Well, we can just filter this. Well, filters are working. This was, I think, Super Testnet who joined my show and said this, that filters are working because they make your node use less bandwidth. That was his argument. And I'm like, that's not what filters working actually means. It was supposed to keep the network secure. It's not about just your node. He's like, yeah, but it helps my node save some bandwidth, maybe in some countries.

1:12:53Paul SztorcYeah, that's not the criterion, though. He knows perfectly well you could do blocks only or you could just shut your node off and then it would be using no bandwidth. That's not the point. If you still want to measure confirmations, you can run it in blocks only. You can run it with no mempool. You can just say, I don't want any mempool. That will save a lot of bandwidth. It's actually reverse. I hate to get bogged down in the technical weeds, but the whole point of a lot of this stuff was we want the mempool to match the actual block.

1:13:26I'm just going to give people a two-minute technical dump. I know everyone's going to find this boring and crazy.

1:13:32Vlad CosteaThat's why the show exists.

1:13:34Paul SztorcYeah, this show is definitely your place for it.

1:13:42If the mempool really matches with the next block that's found, then it's redundant. The way the software used to work was every Bitcoin node would download the transactions twice. First, it would download them whenever someone broadcast them in real time. Then, when someone found a block, they would send you the whole block. Back then, it didn't matter that you downloaded them twice because they were basically empty. There was Hal Finney's transaction to Satoshi, or vice versa. There's only three transactions per block, and it doesn't matter. Eventually, everyone realized, this is actually really stupid.

1:14:18We don't want to download them twice. We already have them in the mempool. They came up with these clever things that people have heard of, maybe. These are these various near blocks, whatever, compact blocks. Xthin, it was called in Bitcoin Cash. There was this thing called Erlay. There's all these things, these ideas about the... What was that one that had the photon light name? I forgot. Do you remember the name? People can find it. The point is, people invented all this stuff, the Bloom filters. They invented all this stuff so that if you have a mempool where you have basically the same block, and the block comes in, it says, oh, we already have these transactions.

1:15:02I only download them once instead of twice. It's doing more with less. It's just very smart. Now, the whole reason with the OP_RETURN drama, it was why they wanted to get rid of that, is because the mempool, when people just broadcast directly to Slipstream, where they broadcast directly to the miner, they broadcast directly to Marathon, or whatever, the transaction accelerator. Now, they don't match anymore. When the block is found, it has the ordinal, but it doesn't match the expected block. So, actually, the bandwidth, we're now back into the...

1:15:38It sabotages the efficiency of the Bloom filters. So, Super Testnet is actually wrong. I like Super Testnet a lot. It's a friend and a super nice guy. But, actually, the bandwidth usage goes up when it doesn't match, because you cannot take advantage of these technologies that were invented. So, that was why Bitcoin Core was like, well, hey, these transactions are making it in anyway. They're harming the node when it doesn't match. So, let's just make it match. We'll have our mempool match. And that's why it is a desirable thing to have your mempool match, Marathon mining pool, their mempool.

1:16:17You want the mempools to match. It actually saves bandwidth. And there's another thing that I have to point out. When the transactions are broadcast across the network, they kind of evenly diffuse through the network in a random, chaotic way. And this is good. When the block is found, in contrast, there's this pulse across the network. Everyone tries to download the exact same file at the same time. So, all of a sudden... It may not have mattered now, but back in 2015, you could tell, clever hacker people could tell, and the Internet service provider, and certainly the government and the NSA in the United States, they could tell who was running a Bitcoin node because a block would be found, and bang, suddenly all these people want to download a one megabyte file at the same time.

1:17:10But that's not the case if you take advantage of these bloom filters. So, all this stuff was a good... removing OP_RETURN was always a good idea. Whoever pays for the transaction is the rightful owner. Luke's plan to go down the list and start censoring people because they make transactions that he doesn't like, that is what will stop it from being money. So, this whole argument about, oh, Bitcoin is for money, it's not for JPEGs, that is the stupidest thing in the world. Once you censor someone's ability to use their money the way they want to use it, that's what makes it not money anymore.

1:17:45So, it's only money if you can use it for the JPEGs, actually. So, they're just wrong about everything. But instead, we had to spend multiple years, two and a half years, talking about this issue where one side…

1:17:57Vlad CosteaI've seen it come back.

1:17:59A couple of days ago, I've seen Hodlonaut post about it, and the infinity divided by 21 million guy, or 21 divided… No, I think it's infinity divided by 21 million. He was posting about this, and it seems like it doesn't go away. It gets engagement, it gets… Some companies have figured out ways to sell products because of this. They sell nodes in a box that you plug to the wall, and you get to choose between Core or Knots.

1:18:27Paul SztorcYeah, user's choice. And everyone knows that the Knots node actually, when push comes to shove, it does not reject… it will take the block full of JPEGs. So, it does absolutely nothing whatsoever. But all this has been repeated. All this was obvious in the first week or two. And the people who are arguing, both sides have basically not changed their arguments, I think. Like everyone's been saying the whole time. I think a lot of it is misexplained, though. So, what a lot of people have tried to say is something like, everyone hates spam, but we don't know what to do about it.

1:19:07But this is actually not my view. I think it's good. Anyone who pays, if you pay transaction fees on L1, that's good. So, it doesn't matter if it's a JPEG. And in fact, plenty of people have pointed out that the JPEG transaction is actually easier for your full node to process. Because what's difficult for your node is to check many signatures. So, if you have this big JPEG crowding out a bunch of transactions that have signatures, that is much easier. People often, they will sync a node and they'll say, oh, my node synced really fast.

1:19:40It was syncing really fast until this point. And now it's going really slow. What they don't know is that they've reached the default assumevalid check in the software, where before that point, the Bitcoin software does not check. It checks everything about the math of the transaction, you know, like that you send five coins from A to B and the five minus five plus five, but it doesn't check the ECDSA signature or the whatever signature. And so after a certain point, it starts actually checking those. So then it's like, oh, my node was going so fast and now it's so slow.

1:20:17Why is that? My computer slow down? No, it's because the signature checking is like, you know, you should consult Jameson Lopp or someone, someone actually timed it as to what, but this is some huge percentage. It's on the order of like 30% or maybe even 30%, 70% or something like that. But the point is this huge percentage of the work and the time spent downloading and checking the blockchain is checking the signatures.

1:20:46And so if you have an OP_RETURN image, it crowds out a bunch of signatures. Well, then your node can take a vacation. And it doesn't have to work as hard. Your computer is actually easier for you to download the blockchain. It's easier for you to validate your own incoming transactions. So all these things make Bitcoin more useful as money. If they're willing to pay more for L1 block space, they crowd out a bunch of quote real transactions. By real, they mean people who didn't value the network and they weren't willing to pay the transaction fee.

1:21:16So this whole thing again is a situation where all the good people have been. In this particular case, it does seem like Luke is like totally losing the issue. Which he should, because it's wrong. But it is the fact that we even had to talk about it for... And that we still... How is it not a closed issue? I don't understand. But it bodes very badly for... Just imagine how are we going to... What happens when an actual problem comes along? We're not going to be able to solve that if we can't solve this tiny...

1:21:54This is the tiniest toothpick of a problem. We should be able to crush this problem in about five seconds and get on with our lives, but we are still talking about it.

1:22:06Vlad CosteaYeah, and that's horrible. The way in which this was presented and the way in which they went on a witch hunt to basically provide personal arguments from the lives of the core developers and nothing about their work per se. I've seen so many attacks on Gloria Zhao and Ava Chow and whatever. I hate to interrupt.

1:22:29Paul SztorcYou know that I just love to just talk and talk and talk. But I'm just going to get this in quickly about... Then I'll let you give everyone the details. But this is a perfect example of then they did the right thing and then they get attacked. So this is this deranging effect that I'm talking about is... But now why don't you tell everyone about this crazy... People are so rude for no reason, you know?

1:22:50Vlad CosteaYeah, but the funny part is that, okay, Bitcoin Core v30 had a bug which was deleting like secondary wallet files that you had in your installation. And if you did not back them up, you could have lost your coins. This was a very big deal, but they made a much bigger deal of who Gloria Zhao dated before she got into Bitcoin and how she got into Bitcoin. They established this whole conspiracy theory about why she's there and how she got promoted. And there's the Bitcoin University guy who only makes everything worse.

1:23:29He likes to put fuel on fire and just ignite every possible detail. I wish this was more about facts and more about what's actually happening. But these guys don't like facts. They just want their narrative about what they think Bitcoin is to be proven right. And they're just going to follow someone who proves them right. They're going to become part of this echo chamber. There's a reward for virtue signaling inside of this echo chamber. You get invited to conferences. You receive some products from whatever companies are fueling this conflict.

1:24:05You might even get a job at ocean mining. And this comes at the expense of having an actual conversation about something which was supposed to get into the code to get merged. For a while it seemed like CTV was just going to get activated. And there are some arguments in favor of it. It was also a time when OP_CAT was supposed to get activated. But we did not get to that point. Every time there was this social distraction that led us nowhere productive. And I think this is a very big derangement, which has more to do with the culture than with the development itself.

1:24:45Because I don't think there's any other money network in the world which discourages users from actually using it.

1:24:54Paul SztorcYeah, precisely.

1:24:56Vlad CosteaI don't think there's any other place in the world where developers are feeling frustrated and miserable and they feel like they're spending a decade of their life pushing for something and it leads to no end.

1:25:10Paul SztorcWhatever you think. People could have whatever opinion about me that they want. But let's just take Jeremy Rubin. We're talking like these are generational talent people. You know what I mean? I don't want to say this is like the Lebron James or whatever of like a Bitcoin or something because who knows. But the point is this is like an MIT-educated, passionate, super specialist pouring years of time into something. And again, because it's an OP_NOP thing, it has no risk. People don't believe that, but it's true.

1:25:44This is one of the other derangements is that people don't understand like what the soft fork is at all. So you have all kinds of people who think it's a change to the... If you think that a soft fork is a change to the Bitcoin protocol that is only half right, and if you don't understand which half of it is not right, then you don't understand why it was invented in the first place because it lets you just run the old protocol without any downside as long as you don't try the new feature.

1:26:09So of course, if you want to use the new feature, you have to update. But if you don't want to use the feature, you do not have to update and you have suffered no penalties as a result.

1:26:21So these are like common sense things that everyone used to know, but today the opposite is taken for granted that of course, hey, the soft fork, it might break Bitcoin, whatever. And so yeah, CTV, again, you have like this kind of talent. Normally, think of another industry, if someone went into, I don't know, farming or chemistry or something, and they go in and they're MIT educated. I'm not saying that if you go to MIT, your ideas are automatically great. I'm just saying, let's say you have a serious person who takes a serious look at something, there's something they've spent 10 years working in 24-7 and they spent like a year or two on a particular thing for free to give away.

1:27:13And then people just say, oh, you know, we don't want it. And it's like, that is just literally insane. The fact that anyone would even do that. And the issue is that it affects the prestige economy, which is also corrupt. So it's like, if you get your soft fork and then you get credit, you get too much credit. Everyone says, aha, this person sent authority on Bitcoin. We can't have that. Then they might disagree with what whoever, anyone says sailor says or something. So yeah, unfortunately, a lot of these things are all like combined.

1:27:47So like there's like Swan, Michael Saylor, the crazy Bitcoin university guy.

1:27:57Yeah, these are all like the people who have no actual talent. And they are just, well, their talent is virtue signaling on Twitter and putting other people down, making it seem as though they hate shit-coining, even though a lot of these people are like very late to the game or they sell something else. I mean, basically MSTR stock is a shit coin, you know? And so is the Bitcoin university, the fee or whatever to buy, you know, these are like competing. You could buy Bitcoin with that money, but instead Jeremy Rubin's giving away technology for free.

1:28:34His idea is one of the only ones other than mine that would let you increase the number of coins that you can buy. In a way, you know, there's a lot of details. Mine is better at this than his in this one way. But the point is, his is one where you could actually onboard more people to the Lightning Network with one single L1 transaction.

1:28:56Yeah, like no one is interested in that. But this is because of course, no one actually uses the Lightning Network. They think they do, but they're really using Primal-to-Primal zap or something else. The whole thing is like a giant self-reinforcing error. The whole thing is just like, from the beginning, the whole thing is like a huge fraud. So no one is actually using the Lightning Network. The people who do, they realize that you need CTV, but then they have to go back into a room full of people who they know that the plan is to just keep quiet about, sweep the problems under the rug and say, Lightning will fix everything.

1:29:29And then the same thing, you have Michael Saylor saying, Oh, this will all be on Lightning and these other L2, layer two and layer three protocols just make up something. The whole thing is a self-reinforcing illusion and lie, unfortunately. So unfortunately, the termites have spread very far and they have been eating the whole time. So it's hard to say, it's hard to know exactly what to make of it. I'm glad you like the article. And then remember, I put that in July and I was just kind of like, I kind of knew I had like one or two...

1:29:58Vlad CosteaHave you added more stuff to it since July?

1:30:02Paul SztorcI think I only added like a few smaller ones. I don't know. I think I can look and maybe anyone can look. I think it's might be publicly hosted on GitHub pages or something. Anyone can probably look in, but I, but I mostly, I had, if I have, I've only added like two or three, maybe like three or four, or maybe I clarified the conclusion or something. Sometimes like I added, I think, I don't know if I went back and added like the lightning debate, just maybe add that to the, or if I think of like another point, oh, I should have put this point.

1:30:31Maybe put like another point.

1:30:34Vlad CosteaSomething else, which is underrated about the way in which you structured this is that you put a lot of URLs, like sources to back up your claims. So it's not just you saying what you think. You're actually presenting sources to everything.

1:30:49Paul SztorcYeah. One of those bullet points can have more thought behind it than like, you know, everything that, you know, whoever, take your pick, anything that, you know, Bitcoin university guy said in his entire life or about Bitcoin anyway. So some of those, yeah, some of the, are like just devastating links or even just links like images or something. So, but yeah, it is, it's hard to know what to make of it all. And, but I think what's interesting about it is that the process can go in reverse also, like people will, when rationality returns, everyone will want to purge all the junk at the same time.

1:31:36So they'll just say, we don't want any of this. These are the people who failed us in the past and we don't want to hear from them and we don't want any of this. And there'll be like a truth and reconciliation.

1:31:46Vlad CosteaNo, I don't think so. I don't think so. Like these guys were wrong so many times. Like you're going to have Jimmy Song rebranding. You're going to have Saifedean rebranding. They'll just adapt to the new thing. They'll say, yeah, I always thought this. It's just that I did not figure it out sooner or something like this. Like I had my doubts, but yeah, this is correct. This is the way we should go. Everything is bullish for Bitcoin. We're winning.

1:32:13Paul SztorcI do think it's too much. There's too much cognitive dissonance. So people will have to say, Oh yeah, I always hated like, even though it's the biggest, because it is the biggest sacred cow, everyone will be saying, Oh, I always hated it. It'll be like, you know, it'd be like a COVID lockdowns or I don't know, you know, there'll be lots of stuff where people will just, they can't, it's such a big idea to face that they won't, they won't be able to do it because anyone who could do it would have already, you know, they would have figured it out.

1:32:43So, although again, the people with integrity are in short supply, but,

1:32:48Vlad CosteaYeah, but actually tried to build something which is very different from someone like Jimmy Song. Like what did he ever build?

1:32:55Paul SztorcYeah, the builders know, cause you have to get your hands dirty. So the builders know about something in a way that is unparalleled. You actually need every single step of it to work. You know, you need to know, Oh, okay. Like you can't just do, this is what a lot of people do. Well, like Peter Todd will do this where he'll like half understand an idea and he'll like take out a little napkin and he'll, he'll write down how he thinks it works. And then he'll say, oh, but step seven is the problem.

1:33:24But if you actually like build the software, you need to actually have the, which is ironic because of course, Peter does build some things, but not that many. But yeah, some of these people build nothing at all. Jimmy is a very interesting guy where he, like I can't understand why he, like he seemed to understand the difference between the hard and soft fork like many years ago. And then now he's like forgotten it. He's like gone the other way. Or I don't know if it's like an act or if it's maybe he never understood it, but he was very...

1:33:58Vlad CosteaLike the cowboy hat. Because I've heard he was so different before he put that on.

1:34:03Paul SztorcI don't understand it.

1:34:07But yeah, I think, and then you kind of, you have to wonder like what, like, what was the, how much did he really under, did he maybe not understand it the whole time? I don't know. But, and then like the temptation is just oversimplify. Like Jimmy's like, Oh, what is it? Like Fiat ruins everything or like God, Bitcoin was sent by God. Thank God for Bitcoin.

1:34:34Vlad CosteaIt's a book. You can buy that.

1:34:36Paul SztorcAnd, and my, you know, and I have to say, Jimmy signed a copy of that book for my friend who is a devout Christian and I'm very, and Jimmy's a super nice guy. But I mean like, I don't know, like we have to just attach every good thing to Bitcoin and then we have to every evil thing to Fiat. I remember like when he did this, he did a debate with Roger Ver on the cruise

1:35:06Vlad CosteaAnd, but his argument was like Bitcoin Cash is fiat. Actually Tone Vays was supposed to debate. No, no, no. Jimmy Song was supposed to debate. And then he was like, no, I want my own microphone because Roger is talking more than me. And then he rage quit and Tone Vays took over.

1:35:17Paul SztorcAnd then he came back, though. He left the stage, but then he came back. I don't know. That's mean to bring up, but he was just saying like, Oh, it's like, it's a Keynesian, Bitcoin Cash is a Keynesian. And it's like, okay.

1:35:33I mean, like I wasn't a supporter of Bitcoin Cash. I was not, but it's not like, that's not what that means. Like, this is just like, it's like a hypnosis. It's just like a word. It's like, Oh, Vlad, you want to be a good friend, right? I know you're a good person and a good friend. Being a friend is good. So you want to help me and the way for you to help me is to be nice to me. And the way for you to be nice to me is to, you don't give me $20.

1:36:00You know, it's like a hypnosis. It's just like a word association hypnosis. And you think like these people, like, you know, their brains like work at all. Like, I don't know what to say sometimes.

1:36:12Vlad CosteaYeah. I'm going to do exactly what you said that I should do like an hour ago and go through all the arrangements so that people get a perspective of what's happening. And this is the list. This is the list. So large derangements, the lightning network, which we covered in the first part of our conversation. The second one is the non-mined L2s. And we got to talk about this because today Citrea launched on the Bitcoin mainnet. And I'm pretty sure that you have opinions about that. But let me finish the list first.

1:36:43Let me remember to come back to this one. The third one is the final rotation where you go big or you go home. This is also an interesting perspective. The fourth one is finished product versus hard work needed.

1:37:00Paul SztorcThis is a narrative of Bitcoin.

1:37:02Like, is it actually have we already won or do we actually have a lot of work to do?

1:37:08Vlad CosteaThe fifth one on which we spent a lot of time is paralyzed development. The sixth one, which is very important, is the neglect of Libbitcoin. The seventh one is brain drain. And I sort of hinted at it. There's this quote by Robin Linus. There's the purity tests, which once again are part of the culture. And then you have the medium derangements, which are the MEV superstitions, the security budget, the Stratum V2, rise of federations with quotation marks for federations. Unilateral exit, BTCPay Server replacing BitPay, the SegWit discount.

1:37:54This is a very big one. I was surprised because you brought a lot of receipts about what people have been saying over the years, and I was not even aware that they believed this. The stock to flow stupid idea, which some people still believe in. There are websites that actually track it and they're like, wait, it was actually right all along. You just change it

1:38:17Paul SztorcAround to something else. It was right the whole time.

1:38:20Vlad CosteaThe ninth one is the 2025 upper turn BS. We sort of covered this already.

1:38:26The Bitcoin treasury companies, I think it was the second topic that we covered. Eleven is sailors were on innovation. We talked about this too. The twelfth one, which I found interesting, and you brought a lot of receipts here, is the useless taproot. You're right. It's not the Schnorr upgrades that we were promised for many years. The thirteenth medium derangement is utterly bizarre nonsense said about my own project. You have receipts here too. The fourteenth one, prediction market neglect. Once again, someone from the Ethereum land came along and built this and it succeeded.

1:39:07Paul SztorcYeah, it's something that I had already advocated for in 2012. And it's not as

1:39:12Vlad CosteaGood as the stuff that you built. I heard Super Testnet saying that he wants to build his own prediction market on lightning or something. And then he told me that he spoke to you and you gave him like a bunch of math that you did like 10 years ago or something. And he was still trying to wrap his head around it. And he was like, man, this guy really knows his stuff.

1:39:33Paul SztorcYeah, I was saying Bitcoin in 2013, but now we have to watch Polymarket and even other stuff like whatever, like Chainlink. These are not as great examples. But the fact that they're culturally so big and there was 15 years ago. So it's kind of like why, like how many other ideas? Are people pushing for that just won't come to Bitcoin, even though we have a 15 year lead and we're just going to blow it.

1:40:03Vlad CosteaYeah. And then you have the smaller derangements, which are the ASICBoost, Blocked, SegWit Activation, the Cringe Ethereum Bashing. This one is actually, I would say, much more major than you describe it, because for many years people have been saying Ethereum is going to fail. It's like trash, whatever. It's the worst piece of code I've ever seen. It's an affinity scam. Vitalik is going to leave the project. You have this live stream for Bitcoin Uncensored going on on the LayerTwo Labs page. And DeRose and Junseth we're also guilty of saying that Vitalik is going to exit scam.

1:40:40He's going to dump his coins and leave and do something else and whatever. That never happened. Proof of stake actually happened. It was a nothing burger. A lot of the FUD that was spread about the project turned out to not be true. It was not declared a security by the SEC.

1:40:52You are 100% correct.

1:40:56Paul SztorcBut I have to say, this is kind of like, okay, let's say that someone's rolling a dice and me and Junseth and everyone, we said it'll probably be one through five. And someone said, no, it's going to be a six. But before the dice lands, we are right. But then it landed on six and we were like, so I would say all the evidence pointed to all those things would happen. And also there were innumerable projects, you know, NXT, whatever, you know the name.

1:41:25I forgot them all. Yeah, BitShares. My brain was deleting them all to preserve my own sanity. You know, AngelShares, ProtoShares. Yeah, exactly. There's all these projects for which all those things exactly happened, like in that order. And Junseth and I and everyone, we were all correct about that. So all the evidence pointed to, I think, I think that was very fair. And the other thing to say is Ethereum was a much worse project in 2015 when all these memes were crafted, these ideas about how it sucks.

1:41:59And of course they didn't do. They said, I've told my story many times, I think I've told it to you, about people were so certain about proof of stake. Oh, and there was always three months away and it was like, oh, they were just so certain that they would get it. And then year after year went by and they never had it, but now they finally do have it. So I tip my hat to them for surviving the gauntlet of, you know, and they made it this far and a lot of the stuff they have fixed and improved enormously.

1:42:32But yeah, it's really in 2015, there was every reason to believe it was like a total scam. And 99% of the projects were scams and people just Auroracoin and we just never hear about them. And then if there was one that worked, everyone would have been like, ah, but John said Auroracoin wouldn't succeed. But he didn't understand network effects and how giving coins to the population of Iceland was a good idea. So I just wanted to pause and say, but it has now, why do I put it as a derangement?

1:43:07Is because people are still repeating the stuff that like we said in 2015, they're still repeating it, even though it applies, you know, certainly much less than 50% of as much as it doesn't really apply. It should not, they should not be repeating a lot of these things. But people do, they do the cringe bashing and they say like, oh, it's not ultrasound money. I have that example, I think, where they said ultrasound money, the people bashing Ethereum think that they just took our phrase. But they're actually referring to the fact that their protocol destroys coins over time.

1:43:42Whereas ours is still adding coins until the year 21, whatever, and we're still adding to get to that. We're going from 19 million to 20 million to 21 million. So actually they have, they have a small point and it, but instead everyone's just like, oh, can you believe these people think that they have sound money? And then they say, well, that's, oh, okay. What we meant by sound money is that there's no Vitalik or what we meant by sound money is that there's, there's no software development.

1:44:08And then of course, crazy Michael Saylor was saying the reason why Bitcoin will defeat Ethereum is, and then it's like the stupidest reason in the universe and it didn't even happen. But his reason was like, Ethereum will be deemed a security. Like, again, this is like Bitcoin 101, no one cares what, who deems what something else. Being deemed is nothing, but then he was saying Bitcoin will never be deemed a security and Ethereum will. And that will mean that, and then Ethereum was ultimately deemed to be in the same category as Bitcoin.

1:44:43So it didn't even happen. And it was just the whole, the whole thing is just like, your eyes just roll right out of your head. You can't believe like, where do we find these people?

1:44:50Vlad CosteaAnd then even Solana.

1:44:51Paul SztorcYeah. Yeah. That is funny. Solana with the A16Z, like immediate 20% cut or whatever. I mean, I don't know exactly what it was, but it was like, you know, that was very, people were really pushing the envelope on that project. So in terms of concentration of, they'd really turned that like into a startup. So it's funny, again, you have stuff like that and then you have, but then there's never like really any accountability for all these wrong opinions, how everyone's just wrong about everything all the time.

1:45:23But anyway, I wanted to just take a break there and elaborate on Ethereum.

1:45:27Vlad CosteaOh yeah. And I also want to add the fact that it might be possible that the winner of the block size wars was Ethereum. A lot of people wanted to build stuff on Bitcoin, just migrated. They did not wait for the big block size version of Bitcoin or something.

1:45:43Paul SztorcI think both sides lost is what I would say, really. The large blockers and small blockers both lost the block size war. We were better off before we were poised.

1:45:55Vlad CosteaThat's not an opinion. If you look at where Ethereum was before 2017 and where it actually ended up by the end of 2017, it became sort of like the default number two. And then it had its own class of quote unquote, Ethereum killers like Neo and what's the big one by Dan Larimer, EOS and all the others that we don't talk about anymore. But it sort of became a market trend to try to build a better Ethereum. And flip Ethereum, which never happened. And it's sort of, I used to hate Ethereum, but now I sort of respect it.

1:46:32I'm like, you know, these guys.

1:46:33Paul SztorcIt has like a, it is a kind of opposition party and it is kind of, well, it's the only competition that there is. So the competition keeps people a little honest. And so that is good. What we wanted was, the whole time what we wanted was competition and sidechains, which were again theorized in 2014. They would have solved this problem, but Blockstream never delivered the sidechains. And now we can't, we don't seem to, we don't yet have like enough of a political movement. I think for that, and even the miners, they are, you know, very apathetic to all.

1:47:14Not just BIP 300, but they just like, they are not, they do not want to take responsibility for having an opinion. And they would prefer to have no opinion. And they just, you can see for yourself, like who, where's the representation of like 51% hash rate, like on, at like op next or something. Or like, or anywhere. Like what is their opinion even? No one even knows. They don't even give an opinion. They can't even be bothered to show up to some extent. I mean, I know that they go, but what, you know, they are not invited on stage to like give their opinion, which they should be.

1:47:56They should, we should be like, okay, there should be a thing where representation from Foundry or whatever can go on stage and say, well, these are the softworks we like. Or they should just be saying, well, we don't, we don't want to do any softworks because we don't think it's a priority. But instead just no one has any idea like what is going on. The whole thing has become a little too decentralized in the sense of like nothing can get done. So the usage of the decentralization is to protect our rights from interference by a third party.

1:48:34But in this case, we have a kind of bureaucracy and a kind of cowardice and a just overall disinterest and neglect. So I don't, that would be an important thing. I've argued for this in the past. Up next or at the Las Vegas conference, there should be some kind of like minor, a 51% hash rate explains their point of view type of a thing. Now, of course, there's no single person, but you would like, you know what I mean, you would invite the head of research from Foundry or whoever it is.

1:49:17I don't know. You would invite like each of the pools all have someone they could send and they could send and then they would be there in this little room, you know, on stage. And then people could say, oh, so what do you think? And then, you know, what would they say now is they would say, well, we've never heard of any of these. We have no idea what's going on. Right. But then the question

1:49:35Vlad CosteaIs, that's also a consequence of scaling the mining industry where you've got a bunch of suits who know nothing about mining, but know a lot more about electricity and logistics.

1:49:44Paul SztorcAnd I agree about that. But I also think when the scale is bigger, now it's easier to just employ, just spend $200,000 a year. You have someone full time. It was like you're. You're whatever guy, you know, you're you're technical guy, you're a researcher. And this would be like a job like having like a chief legal officer or like a chief marketing officer or like a chief financial officer. You'd have like your chief, whatever, like Bitcoin growth officer or something like that. And you would say, OK, which of these softworks is either going to raise the price market price of Bitcoin by adding new features that people want or increase transaction fee revenues to miners?

1:50:26And they would have people write reports on that. Instead, no one wants to because everyone secretly believes that or they're afraid to look. They're afraid of what they would find because they're afraid if they look, they're going to find that whatever lightning sucks or whatever. And that is, you know, so then they just want to want to talk about it.

1:50:47Vlad CosteaAlso want to mention that in 2015, I think Slush Pool was the first mining pool to support Bitcoin XT and they got DDoS attacked.

1:50:57Paul SztorcYeah, I think that was because miners at that time. But yeah, miners at the time were large blockers and like for a long while after. And maybe they still are, as far as anyone knows. Now they're kind of just like it's almost even worse because now they just have no opinion about anything, even their own bottom line. It seems to me, as strange as that sounds, I think part of it is that the mining turnover is very high. You know what I mean? Like if let's say everyone just bought the ASICs wear out, you know, over time.

1:51:31And then you bought the ASICs for a long time. So instead you bought one ASIC and let's say there's only a million ASICs in the world. And if you have one, you have one millionth. Well then everyone would care a lot about like increasing transaction fees, increasing L1, increasing like the exchange rate of Bitcoin. Because now you have this little thing that's printing 1%, but they have to spend so much money replacing it and finding the cheap power. So maybe they're distracted. They don't care as much about growth.

1:51:59Of course the block subsidy is still pretty high relative to the transaction fees. So maybe it will fix itself in a few years. Although of course it's always smarter to intelligently foresee what will happen versus scramble later on in an emergency situation. That is a very foolish way to behave, but maybe it will be improved or fixed later when eventually the fees are high, a higher percentage of the block reward has halved. Many times miners will say, well, listen, if we don't have, you know, what are you doing?

1:52:44The miner will go up the, you know, up the chain of command, not the blockchain, but it'll go up the chain and it will say, they'll call whoever will call the end user. The end miner will call Foundry USA and they'll say, what are you doing to get us more transaction fees? And Foundry USA will call whoever, like, I don't know, Bitmain or I don't know, whoever they'll have like maybe an organization for this or something. I just would like there to be some, something based on knowledge.

1:53:17So right now there is no such thing. There's just not having an opinion and everyone ignoring, everyone thinks, well, that's too controversial, so it won't work, you know, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of neglect. And this is, again, all these are things that will, you know, they will like kill the project eventually. Like the fact, the soft fork is so harmless and so useful that the very fact that for whatever reason we can't do it, that proves that the community is sort of doomed to some extent, you know, because it's like, you're not going to go for that.

1:53:59And it's not even that hard to understand. I mean, it's, it's kind of advanced, but it's not, we were doing the soft forks in 2012 and we invented them for this purpose, the safe upgrade that not everyone has to take at the same time.

1:54:18Vlad CosteaI think it's like the Luke Dashjr. Like definition of the soft fork has sort of ruined the outcomes. Like when he said that soft forks are basically hard forks that you activate slowly over time.

1:54:33Paul SztorcYeah, he's wrong about, he is wrong about that, but he has a very different conception of what it is, but I don't think anyone really shares his view. And hopefully one of the good things about the collapse of his weird narrative, I think that people have realized that he is kind of a crazy. And, you know, there was just to spend all this time telling everyone that, like, they would OP_RETURN would kill Bitcoin. The OP_RETURN expanding it would make Bitcoin just another shitcoin.

1:55:06Vlad CosteaBut now we're even more convinced. They're like, oh, look at this. Since Bitcoin Core v30 launched, the price went down. It was 125,000 and there's this correlation of events that happened. And they're like, oh, there's this bug that was in the code and could delete wallet files. Of course it's killing Bitcoin.

1:55:27Paul SztorcWell, that's the problem. If Core had their act together, they would not be open to this kind of counterattack. But it's because Core is also terrible. So Luke and Core are both terrible. No offense to them. I'm calling them terrible, like to their face. But, you know, Luke is wrong about the OP_RETURN and the sensationalist nonsense argument is itself deranging and absurd. But Core, like, they also don't have their act together. Like they should not govern based on controversy. That just opens the door to being manipulated by fake controversy, which is exactly what has happened numerous times, as you pointed out, as we discussed.

1:56:17And we can discuss more. There are numerous examples of that we can talk about. So the cows come home. But like Core does not have a kind of accountability for making mistakes. So if there were people who were getting kicked out of the organization constantly because either they made mistakes or they acted too slowly and they dragged their feet. And so you only have the best. See, a meritocracy means like half the people are being fired, like every cycle. So a meritocracy means the best rise to the top and the worst of being kicked out.

1:57:01So if your organization isn't firing people, because everyone would always say, people would say, oh, Core is a meritocracy. You hear this over and over and over again. This is itself a derangement. This has never been true at all. But just the fact that people say it speaks to just, you know, how stupid they are. Because of course, if it's really a meritocracy...

1:57:22Vlad CosteaI believe it's like the ivory tower of the smartest people who know exactly what's happening. Yeah. And so they got crushed by the market. And it's beautiful that we have markets and altcoins, by the way, because we can see where there's going to be this developer who says, wait a second, I want to build this on Bitcoin. It doesn't work. So if you don't let me build this because of the upper turn limit or something else, then I'm going to launch an altcoin. And then the ivory tower wise men will say, ha ha ha, you're a loser.

1:57:53You're just going to end up scamming people and it's going to go to zero. Then it doesn't go to zero. And the market actually gives us information. It shows us, okay, there's something here. That's why you also have an Ethereum drivechain.

1:58:06Paul SztorcRight. But I think the bigger issue is that, like, there's no, like, what kind of oversight would there even be on these people? Like, how do you know if, what is the criterion on, you know, is Gloria Zhao doing a good job or whatever? Like, again, in the case of like a race or speed run or something, you have people compete, one person wins, they have the best time. So they at least have some qualification for commenting on everyone else. They could say, well, I beat that guy because I did this, I took this shortcut and they didn't.

1:58:42Or I beat this guy because I did, I did carb loading or something. You know, the first place guy has some authority to comment on why they won versus the other people. And of course, the mere fact that you have one rational participant, that causes everyone else to become more rational. But with this situation, we have a situation where, like, these people just do nothing. The core just does nothing and they refactor and they do tests and they do formatting. And then they basically live off of the prestige of being associated with Bitcoin.

1:59:27They're like a Bitcoin affinity scam. And they just say, we are the core maintainers, even though they don't really do anything. And they put out the core version and just because of the prestige, they're associated with core. And so then they can like, you know, whatever, like get attention from like, I don't know, the MIT Media Lab or something. Or they can get OpenSats grants. So they get some money from this and they're, they are literally like a kind of, they're kind of like a Ron Swanson bureaucrat.

1:59:56They just want to avoid. Attention. They want to avoid criticism. And so they just hide under the radar. And so they don't, we don't have something where, for example, one core maintainer says this, another core maintainer says something else. There's some kind of external test. And then one of them is defeated like in an election. One group is fired and removed and they're crying and they're really upset. They're suffering. That's what we need is more suffering.

2:00:28Vlad CosteaThat's not really how it works because as long as they get funding, they're going to keep on contributing. Yeah.

2:00:35Paul SztorcBut this is what I mean.

2:00:36Vlad CosteaThere's no way to get fired other than not receiving any more grants. But I think that some of these companies found like a hack into this. Like they're going to pay a Bitcoin core developer like $200,000 a year or whatever they get paid.

2:00:49Paul SztorcThe company also does the affinity scam. They say we support Bitcoin development. We're good for Bitcoin. We equal Bitcoin. They have a thing. So what they don't, what they don't say is, here are all the things Bitcoin Core is doing wrong that my company is going to do something about, which is that would be the actual ethical thing to do. But that would require them to know the difference between a good thing and a bad thing, which many of them don't. But yeah, the whole thing, unfortunately, is, so if Bitcoin Core had their act together and people are really, really happy with it, you know, Luke would say, that would be like Luke putting out a tweet instead of saying like, oh, everything's opportune is going to ruin Bitcoin.

2:01:29And Bitcoin is just going to be like another altcoin. This would be like, as if Luke put out a tweet saying like Elon Musk is going to ruin SpaceX or something, and it's going to ruin the ride. Everyone would just be like, what the hell? Like, you know, they are, I mean, maybe he will, maybe he won't. But the point is SpaceX, they do a lot of iterating. They have like a business model, a Starlink. They actually have the rockets that you can see them take off and land.

2:01:52And there's a lot of stakes. And there's a lot of people working on very specific things. And it is the number one space company. So people see for themselves the, you know, with their own two eyes, they see the external results and people can drive the Tesla and stuff. And maybe you just, people disagree on if it's a good car, if Elon is a good guy. But the point is that, the point is that, you know, if Core had its act together, you would just be like, well, this is just some comment made by Luke, but, you know, Core is great.

2:02:30So we won't need to do anything like a light break or something.

2:02:39Vlad CosteaYeah, sorry about that. I'm trying to fix it on the go. But I think this is a very beautiful transition into Libbitcoin, because it's one of the major derangements that you listed. It is. It's something that's been around for longer than a decade. Amir Taaki actually built Libbitcoin as a response to Gavin Andresen always changing things without too much accountability in the early days. And then it sort of fell into obscurity for a few years. There was development for it. It's just that it did not get much attention.

2:03:11What's interesting about Libbitcoin, and I have to check if you put the sources for it here. It was like a major point of contention in the summer of 2013, when that character John Dillon was active, who was supposedly working for intelligence. He's very important in the narrative of the big blockers, because

2:03:34Paul SztorcYeah, I think a little over important. I don't think because what the guy says is he says he self reports as like a kind of offhand comment. When he's talking to Peter Todd, he says, Oh, I work for an intelligence agency. But the way I read it is he's just kind of saying, haha, how ironic that out of all the people I've gotten, I've gotten interested in Bitcoin, but I happen to coincidentally, and wouldn't that look weird. He like just freely volunteers this information. So I don't think it's really that important.

2:04:06But, but plenty of people, plenty of other people do. They think it's very, very, very, very important. And they think this is actually proof. This was proof of a long concealed truth that intelligence agencies hired Peter Todd to sabotage everything. And so that's what they think. But I'm kind of a little skeptical.

2:04:23Vlad CosteaYeah, but basically what John Dillon did in the summer of 2013 was to participate in the bounty for the CoinJoin wallet, which was launched by Greg Maxwell, theymos and also Pieter Wuille. They were the three cosigners of the multisig with the bounty. And John Dillon put some Bitcoin in there and said, now that I'm a stakeholder in this, you should also ask me before you give the bounty. And Amir Taaki tried to claim the bounty with Dark Wallet, which is something I think it was the first CoinJoin wallet ever built for Bitcoin.

2:04:58Vitalik Buterin actually coded for that one before launching Ethereum. They never got the bounty for it. And John Dillon explained that he did not like the fact that it was using Libbitcoin instead of Bitcoin Core, which always found fascinating. It's part of I think if you go to agorism.net, which I think is Amir Taaki's website, it's listed in there like the whole email link. I think it's also on Bitcoin Talk if you dig deeper. I read everything. I posted a long thread about it. And I think this is an often times this.

2:05:33How should I put it? It's a fact that doesn't get the attention that it deserves. That this was like the Michael Saylor of his time. Just putting some Bitcoin there. Putting some money and saying from now on, if you want to make a change or you want to do something, you have to ask me.

2:05:51Paul SztorcYeah. He unilaterally donated into the fund. And then he was like, since this is our money. And then he didn't like. But of course, at the time, I mean, it's reasonable to be skeptical of Libbitcoin, I think, because Bitcoin Core is the standard that everyone has used all this time. So it is suspicious to switch to something else. And certainly Libbitcoin is not perfect. But what it is it is much more. I mean, it's much better in every way of that is measurable. And so it's suspicious that there isn't more of a conversation about it.

2:06:28So the neglect of it is very bizarre, because if you sync Bitcoin Core, it takes more than a day. But if you sync Libbitcoin, it's like now the theoretical limit is just the bandwidth. You know, you need to just download the blockchain. That is the, you know, he has got it down to like the 53-minute, like, theoretical minimum or something. So we're very close to that. And so the question is, why is Bitcoin Core so slow? And I think the answer is nothing good.

2:07:02It's just because it's a bureaucracy. It's because it's an anti meritocracy. And it's just a bureaucracy. It's not a meritocracy. It is a bureaucracy. And they don't want to like, you know, make bold changes as far as the software architecture or not in terms of like the design or the protocol where it does. Of course, to some extent it is reasonable that people would be, but again, Libbitcoin is, that's something that does like basically exactly what Bitcoin Core does. Just the exact same thing. So you can easily write tests where you just feed both pieces of software the same thing and see if they get the result back.

2:07:45Now, I'm not sure. Almost certainly there are many RPCs and other things that Libbitcoin doesn't support and probably vice versa. But the point is, if people were serious, you would think that there would be more attention on something that is so much, so obviously better when you have on one hand, you have Bitcoin Core, you have all this funding. You have teams of people working for years, 24 seven, and yet they're smoked by someone else like him and like two friends working, like part-time over the same time period.

2:08:22Vlad CosteaBy him, you mean Eric Voskuil?

2:08:23Paul SztorcEric Voskuil, that's right.

2:08:25Vlad CosteaHe's the maintainer currently of Libbitcoin. And he was able to do some amazing things with synchronizing a full node in less than one hour. Right.

2:08:36Paul SztorcSo again, that's kind of like, it's kind of hard to describe, but it's kind of like we take a six hour flight from New York to San Francisco. But then Eric has this experimental craft that he's been working on for years and that him and his friends use, you know, all the supporters of Libbitcoin use it. We were talking, he was using it, etc. And you know, like it can then get you there in 15 minutes. It goes from from New York to San Francisco in 15 minutes.

2:09:11And it just works. And it's right there. And the question is, for what? What are they doing that, you know, is it the car? Is it like a big, is there, is there a huge flaw? Is there a huge, you know, is there a huge lie about it all? And you look and it doesn't seem like there is. And so you just think like, what is going on? But yeah, but instead, just no one talks about it. So I think that's really weird. I mean, but yeah, everyone's not talking about it because they think, oh, my, the guy next to me is not talking about it.

2:09:45And he must have a good reason. So it's all just peer pressure. It's all just. The whole thing's stupid, honestly. So yeah, that's why I put it in the big category, because there's just no explaining it.

2:09:56Vlad CosteaOkay, but other than this synchronization, I know that you're someone who spends all your waking hours testing new stuff and trying to make optimizations for your thunder site. I don't know about that.

2:10:08Paul SztorcNo, I don't even. I'm very lazy, honestly.

2:10:11Vlad CosteaOkay, don't don't say that on the live stream. But my point is right now, what is special about Libbitcoin? I take everything seriously.

2:10:20Paul SztorcI take I take results seriously and accountability. So what we did for the thunder thing is I just ran a contest and I said, whoever can improve, we wrote a stopwatch function. It obliterates the block to test blockchain, generates completely random transactions, connects these blocks. And so it's and then times how long does it take to actually for the software to validate the blocks? And I just said, whoever wins will get cash. And I reran the contest several weeks, week after week after week after week. And that's how we optimized thunder.

2:10:53And I did that. I did that in the summer. Now, notice Bitcoin Core doesn't do anything like that. There's no competition. There's no stakes. So they just talk until they're done talking and they have their bureaucratic slop and they just they just grow fat, sucking on the teat of whatever the fuck these grants, you know, whoever's giving them this money. So but yeah, like it would be better if they had a contest and there was a loser who was disappointed and a winner who got some kind of special recognition.

2:11:25That's how you get evolution.

2:11:30And so I I wanted to optimize thunder and that's what I did. So I did it. And, you know, I'm not going to say it wasn't that hard, but it's like, yeah, if you want to do something and you have money and you have time and you have an internet connection, like you can do it.

2:11:47Vlad CosteaSo the question is, what is so good about the Bitcoin? I know.

2:11:53Paul SztorcWell, I mean, we could have Eric Voskuil on. He could give us his details about like, I think he rewrote like he just rewrote a lot of stuff, like from scratch, which maybe is a terrible idea, but maybe not. I think he did. He aggressively parallelized so that a lot of stuff could take place out of order. I think he had a couple of insights about like, you only need to care. Like you can just you can do. He had some insights about some stuff can be done out of order.

2:12:27Like you would think you have to bring in the first block, check everything in the first block, update the CXO set, then do the second block. I think he had some kind of insight that you could just do them all out of order and have this table, like have this big table of them all and just have them all cancel each other out at the very end or something. And I'm not sure exactly. But he had, you know, I think he just honestly just did some grinding on it.

2:12:51Like what you do when you're a software engineer doing this type of thing, you usually you make some kind of test or some kind of chart or some kind of thing. And you say, what out of all the things the software is doing, which things are taking the most time? You you look at those things. And then I think you just put in a little bit more time. But here's the question is, how can it be that like, you know, one guy plus friends, how can they how can they be beating Bitcoin Core by a factor of more than 24?

2:13:19Which is one more than one day versus less than one hour. How can that how can that be? And I just think that it's bizarre. It's just it perfectly fits the pattern of derangement that it's just yet another thing that everyone kind of takes for granted. A core must be so good, but actually they are much worse than a random volunteer. So but like but no one can do anything about it and no one will do anything about it, and it'll probably just get worse. So, yeah, I don't know. But yeah, you should definitely have him out.

2:13:51I'm sure he knows in detail exactly what exactly what he did. But there's no like you could look, you could poke around for evidence that like, oh, they just like skipping a bunch of steps or something. I think they don't even have assumevalid. I could be wrong about that. But I think they don't even. So this thing that Core does to save a bunch of time, they do all the work. They don't even do any assume them do any assumevalid and they still faster. I think I think that's the case.

2:14:22So someone could double check that. But it's it is bizarre. And you just think, you know, you just kind of feel like what is going on here? Such a big mystery.

2:14:32Vlad CosteaBut there's also the other question, like if it's so much better and it's able to achieve these results, then why aren't more people using it?

2:14:40Paul SztorcIt's a good it's a completely fair question. And I think that the reason is that you have different categories of users. So like obviously someone like Coinbase, they're going to use Bitcoin Core and they don't care if it takes a day to sync and they're going to run multiple versions. You know, they're going to run multiple instances of the exact same version and even old versions. And they're going to I assume I can only assume they have some kind of trip wire where if any of the versions disagree with each other, it throws this alarm and people get paged and stuff like that.

2:15:13But I assume that's how it works. I assume they don't just like, oh, let's just use the Bitcoin. So I assume they have a sophisticated thing to figure out if people are really sending them Bitcoin or not because they're a big exchange. And then you have lots of people just use, you know, they just use SPV or they don't run a full node at all. It's custodial. They don't care. So I think these are the reasons and people do prefer the standard. You really want to be on the same exact network as everyone else.

2:15:41So they don't want. So it is a big risk just to switch. So it's kind of like they have it's a risk to switch and it's like, well, is it worth it? The answer is probably no. But it does speak to something about the way the software is. Something about the design by committee software process is objectively falling behind.

2:16:11Vlad CosteaIt's an interesting thought exercise. Maybe it's also pure marketing. And the fact that the average person in Bitcoin has no idea that this exists is not aware of the merits. And maybe that they don't trust one guy and his two friends, which is, I guess, a fair argument. But the question is, why isn't there more testing of this? Why doesn't anyone just put like $100,000 or something to pay people to make it look nice and just work on it?

2:16:45Paul SztorcI hate to flip the question around, but the fact that people haven't switched from core to Libbitcoin in a way that is itself part of the derangement. Because it's like, oh, like maybe just no one cares about if something's better or not. You know, it's just like, it's all just peer pressure. It's all just groupthink.

2:17:07So yeah, I don't know. A lot of these have their own questions.

2:17:09Vlad CosteaOr maybe that we're just larping about any development and as long as the number goes up, nobody cares about anything else. Exactly, yes.

2:17:20Paul SztorcBut I should explain the, I got to explain the final rotation because I think very few people know what I'm talking about. But this refers to the idea of people, the rotation is people switching out their... They have fiat and they swap it for Bitcoin in their daily lives. Now the last people to do this, they have to be real users. They cannot be NGU, number go up, investors. Because the number can't go up by the time they swap out. They're the last ones swapping out at the highest price.

2:17:54This is a totally straightforward, logical argument. The early people can say, oh, I swapped my, all of my cash for Bitcoin because I knew that one day Bitcoin would be really big. And then when it is big, now they have more money, they have more purchasing power. They can buy mansions, they can buy the Citadel, they can buy a yacht, you know. They can call that yacht the Citadel, that would be funny. And so, but the last people, the final rotation, they cannot, they cannot do that.

2:18:25They have to be real users. Otherwise the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme. The whole Bitcoin project. This is the one event that determines whether or not it was a Ponzi scheme the whole time that collapses and goes to zero. Or whether or not it was the next big thing and it goes to tens of millions of dollars per coin. Again, this is an all important issue. The logic is, I think, quite obvious and yet very few people are talking about it. And then you still, you have people such a sailor who say, oh, it will never be used by lots of people.

2:19:00It will just be digital property. It will just be Manhattan real estate or whatever that means. I'm still trying to figure out what some of these things mean. It makes perfect sense that you just give him your hard-earned Bitcoin in return for MSTR stock that he can print at any time. It makes perfect sense if you can, if you just think about it. But so like the final rotation is like, we have to actually have users. This is again, because it was something that Roger Ver also said, or that the large blockers also sometimes said, this became like, whoa, you can't say that.

2:19:36Even though it's true. So again, we have the true thing is being walled off just because it was among the set of things that Roger Ver said at one point. He also said the sky is blue, I'm sure, you know, but like.

2:19:55It would be funny to see how far you can push the envelope on that. Just like any true thing Roger Ver said, if it's rejected by BTC, Twitter or something, I don't know. But so this is the question. Because you can only go up. You can only 10x so many times. You do a log scale and you have, where did Bitcoin start? Less than like a penny per coin. The final destination is like, whatever, like 15, 20 million dollars. That's at that point Bitcoin has replaced. The pie is gobbled up the whole pie of money in the world.

2:20:33And it is at 100%. So it will still go up from there because GDP grows up and the ratio of world's broad money to GDP value that also has been going up. So it will still go up by like 7% in purchasing power terms. But you can't get any more. You won't get any more like, you know, you won't get any more. You won't get any benefit for being early into Bitcoin because now it's 100% adoption. So the bonus you get for being early is reduced to zero.

2:21:06The final people have to be users. You have this log scale. It goes 10x, 10x. Now we're at 100,000x. So we can only do 10x like two more times. So we only have basically two more rotations to go. The final one has to be 8 billion people using Bitcoin. But for some reason, this has become. Like a weird thing to say, even though it's common sense, it is like basically indisputable. I mean, people dispute it, but they can't really dispute it. And I think one of the reasons why is that this calls, it just shifts more attention on Lightning and the fact that Lightning cannot accomplish this task.

2:21:48Forces people, Oh, I have to admit that Lightning didn't work. I don't want to do that. So instead, I'll just say that, you know, I'll just say whatever. I'll just say it's paper Bitcoin summer or something. I don't know. They'll just say like that the value of Bitcoin will go up because MicroStrategy is buying more, which, by the way, cannot possibly be true. Or that, you know, El Salvador is buying more or something. If real people in these organizations were actually adopting it and purging themselves a fiat and saying we're switching, we're using Bitcoin.

2:22:25To transact as users, then that would count. So, yeah, there was a long standing debate, like store of value versus medium of exchange, but really we need both. We need to win the store of value war and the medium of exchange war, or we will lose. It's like a castle where you have like a front gate and a back gate. We need to win on all sides or we will go to zero. And we have no choice. That is, if you don't like it, then, you know, we're going to.

2:22:56You know, that's like this is inevitable battle coming down the road. And either it will be there will be some crypto coin that wins and is a store of value and is used by eight billion people, in which case Bitcoin will certainly go to zero in that case. Or there will just be that or it won't happen. And then people will still be using fiat, but then it will be the Ponzification. It will just be a Ponzi scheme because we just think about it. We have two rotations to go.

2:23:30Let's say we do the other rotation. We go 10x from 100,000 to $1 million. But now everyone realizes we can't do the next 10x because that's the last one and we can't do it without eight billion users. And you look around and you think, oh, what have we got? Oh, lightning network. It doesn't work. And oh, CTV, but we can't activate it. So then people realize, oh, actually we can't do the last rotation. We can't do the last 10x without help from real people, the actual El Salvador farmer or whatever, coffee farmer or something.

2:24:12And so then it becomes a Ponzi and then it just becomes everyone will just sell and leave, especially if it becomes obvious that something else will do that. And that other thing could be a different cryptocurrency. It could be a different hard fork of Bitcoin. It could be some other variant or it could be fiat or it could be like WeChat Pay or Venmo or something or Strike or these other things. It could be some. But when people realize that or, you know, USDT, they'll be thinking, oh, OK, it can't.

2:24:51The fact that Bitcoin is the sovereign capital that people can't take away from you, that is enormously beneficial. But if there's something else that has that exact property and eight billion people use it, then there is no room for Bitcoin in that world. Bitcoin would just become, you know, like some other, you know, it would just be like Steemit or whatever. It would just be it would be like the Myspace, Facebook type thing. So anyway, I just want to explain that one. A lot of people don't grasp that one, I think.

2:25:26Vlad CosteaOh, I think the average 50 page libertarian slash Austrian economist argument against that is that money printing is infinite. So, of course, there's going to be another 10x because of supply.

2:25:37Paul SztorcI was speaking like in terms of like purchasing power. So it's true that the fiat currencies are all doomed, which is great for Bitcoin for now. It's possible that the US, you know, if the US economy adds just a little bit, it's kind of bizarre because every country in the world is screwing up their fiat currencies. But actually, if the US government and the US government, the US economy can just get like a little extra, like 1% growth per year. I know it's like it's actually kind of a lot if you really look at the history of it growing at a very regular rate for a long time.

2:26:19But then we can actually pay off all this national debt. It sounds astounding because all this stuff is cannot be. We have all these these debts. But yeah, if we can't or if growth is lower or worse, excuse me, then there'll be just huge sovereign debt crisis and there'll be lots of money printing that independence will be fake and they will print a lot of money. And but I was not referring to this. This is the other thing is that if it was just Bitcoin versus fiat, then none of these derangements would matter.

2:27:01But it's just this is the world. You know, the world is really a blank slate and anyone could copy Bitcoin or study it. You know, like the Ethereum people are doing every day, the Ethereum people are plotting. They're saying, how can we overthrow Bitcoin? Ah, these are the weak points. We're going to outcompete them on such and such. So people could be inventing stuff all the time every day. And that is the when one of those things succeeds, it will be clear that Bitcoin Core as an organization has failed.

2:27:38But it will not necessarily mean that like, you know, fiat, the Bitcoiners were wrong about anything or that, you know, fiat currencies are good. So, yeah, they will they will print and a lot of them are doomed. You know, who wants to own like a central African currency or even really Latin American currency? A lot of this stuff is already pegged to the U.S. Dollar in some form. Eastern Caribbean is like a lot of stuff is already dollarized and then the Internet will add more network effects.

2:28:15So there will be more consolidation, I think. But that's not my point about the the 10x. Like if they could 10x, that would just be like a free intermediate rotation. You see what I mean? Like if they if they as an inflation hedge, you would benefit if they printed a ton of money. And that is a good reason to own Bitcoin. But it doesn't change the fact that the whole thing is a Ponzi if we don't have the final. I guess not. I guess you could actually make an argument that just says this is just I'm just going to temporarily ride in this undetermined Ponzi universe, because I think there'll be so much money printing that this is just something this is like owning a owning famous art or owning commodities.

2:29:05It's like owning a giant truck full of copper or something. And the government is going to print them. And I just want to have my money out of cash. But you see what I mean? Just ditching cash. If you did, if you just ditched cash and you bought anything and then the government does money printing, you are still better off. So you see, this argument doesn't really have anything to do with Bitcoin per se. It's just getting your money out of fiat, which, yeah, as someone trained in economics have to say, you know, they will.

2:29:35These fiat currencies are, you know, they're not a great place to store your money. They are a really great place to store a small amount of money for the stuff that you need to buy, but you should get out and buy other things and buy anything else. So.

2:29:53Vlad CosteaBut yeah, I just want to announce that there's Jay Berg in the chat, and he exclaimed "sports", that's all he said.

2:30:06Paul SztorcYeah, I don't know if anyone has any, if people are curious about any, one of the derangements in particular. We just listed them off, so I don't know if anyone is like, oh, what's that one about? And they didn't want to open the article and look and read the bullet points. Yeah, once again.

2:30:22Vlad CosteaSo if you're on YouTube, you can find it in the description. If you're not on YouTube and you're on Twitter or you're going to find yourself on Spotify in a couple of days, it's truthcoin.info slash blog slash derangements. And even after this show ends, you can still go to the LayerTwo Labs Telegram chat, which is DC Insiders. And you can ask questions there if you still have them. Paul, I want to talk about these non-mineable L2s or non-mined L2s, but I want to ask you to get a drink because you seem a bit tired.

2:30:56And in the meantime, I will do the ads, which I forgot to do. Refill my water. Yeah. So let's start with SideShift, which is also a friend of LayerTwo Labs. And they are this platform where you can swap something that someone wants to pay you in, but you don't really want. For example, stable coins, they're the prime example of something that you don't want to hold long term. Maybe that you think that we're still in a bull market and you don't want to hold into this or you care very much about censorship resistance.

2:31:26And let's say that someone wants to send you 100 bucks in USDT and you don't want to set up a wallet for that, like a Tron wallet and pay gas fees and whatever. You just want to stay away from that. All you have to do is go to SideShift.ai and you paste your Bitcoin address in there. You click the shift button and then you copy the USDT address. You send it to the person wanting to send you the 100 bucks in USDT. And you're just going to get once the transaction settles, you're just going to get Bitcoin to your wallet.

2:32:00SideShift, really good friends of LayerTwo Labs also. Also, I got a plug, Braiins, which is the oldest Bitcoin company in the world. They used to be known as Slush Pool and before that they were a Bitcoin mining.cz. And what they did recently was to launch a hashrate marketplace, which is called hashpower.braiins.com. It's Braiins with a double I. What's interesting about it is that you can basically rent the equivalent of a thousand Bitaxe Supras, which I see that they're very popular small home mining devices. And you can rent that for like $5 per hour.

2:32:38And it's interesting because you can use the hashrate either as a lottery ticket or you can use it to 51% attack. I'm not going to say what. I don't want to be held legally liable for that, but you can use it for anything you want. It's sort of anonymous, so you can use your imagination to basically use the hashrate in any way that you want. It's SHA-256 and you can bid for it at Braiins hashpower. And I also have to plug Bitcoin.com News, which used to be green and they were saying that BCH is faster and has lower fees than BTC.

2:33:15But now they went through a major rebranding, which made them orange. And I do like their news because they're more balanced than Bitcoin Magazine or CoinDesk. And you find a lot of information there, including gold, which I was surprised. OK, I sort of respect it. It's coverage on markets. They added gold into the mix. And did I forget anyone? Yes, I did forget. NoOnes.com, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace for the global South. So if you care about this justice dimension of Bitcoin and what it can do to countries that you never hear about on the news, you go to NoOnes and you trade there and you're going to get liquidity into the hands of Nigerians and people who want to hustle their way into building wealth.

2:34:04Check it out. It's NoOnes.com. Thank you, Paul, for getting refreshed and sitting for my ads. I plugged them like two hours and 30 minutes into the show, so I hope that there were enough people still listening out there. And let's get to the derangements. This one is about non-mined layer twos. And just today, Citrea launched. It's something that's built using BitVM. It's trying to emulate the features of Ethereum on something that's called a sovereign rollup. I think it's interesting in some ways for the use cases, sort of cannibalizes with what the Ethereum drivechain is trying to accomplish.

2:34:48I think it's called ETH side, but it still doesn't pay fees to the miners. And I think this is a conversation that needs to be had.

2:35:00Paul SztorcI don't know if, you know, weren't they originally doing a spider chains, which is like a two-of-two multisig thing. I'm not sure they may have, everyone may have switched.

2:35:08Vlad CosteaThey got on using that at all. Like I heard about it like two years ago and then poof. I didn't think so.

2:35:15Paul SztorcAnd then of course you jump on the BitVM bandwagon, as many people did. So I don't know, I actually am not familiar. And the last I remembered was they were doing, I mean, maybe I'm misremembering. I don't think so though. Weren't they doing, Citrea was originally doing this spider chain thing. Or was that someone else? No, it's BitVM.

2:35:38Vlad CosteaI actually have a helmet here because one of their team members came to me in Romania and I was like number 65 on their trusted setup ceremony.

2:35:48Paul SztorcYeah, but this was my, this was when I, this was the last time the conference was in Miami, I think. Maybe or maybe not. I don't know what I'm talking about. I shouldn't even just like, you know, but like the point is, it's not, you know, they could have a great project or maybe they don't. But I think, what I'm trying, the point about the non-mined L2s that may apply to them, you know, because they may have switched it to something that is mined L2. I don't think so. Because basically no one is.

2:36:23But no, it's not the L2s.

2:36:26Vlad CosteaThey just have that the rollups, which are inscribed on the base layer are gonna increase the transaction fees because they're putting data there.

2:36:35Paul SztorcYeah. Okay. So for, to make the, to break this down in a way that people can understand, there's the L, there's, you have L1 and L2, you make one transaction. This is sometimes called a lift transaction, but it's like, you know, or deposit, but the coins move from L1 to L2. Then they move on L2. They move from L2 to L2, maybe an unlimited number of times. Then they come, they drop back down or they withdraw back from L2, back to L1. Now everything has this feature.

2:37:10Every L2 must have this somehow. And they all add to the L1 fees when you transfer in and out. And all of them, by virtue of making L1 transaction potentially more productive, they may raise people's willingness to pay, because they might say, well, you know what, all I need to do is pay for one layer one transaction fee, and I can do infinite L2. This is like part of the lightning pitch. So there's a, people won't, it won't matter that people have to pay $50 per L1 transaction fee, because once you do, then that's the only one you have to pay in your entire life.

2:37:53And so people, that was kind of like the pitch. Very few people ever did like the math or even the napkin math or even any other kind of like simulation or explanation of how it would all work. And then some people were saying, oh, you had people who said, and some of these people debated me in a recorded debate. But yeah, then you had some people saying, oh yeah, it won't matter if it's 50 or 100 or $2,000 per L1 transaction. And this will be like when you buy your child their first car, you'll get them, you'll buy them their first lightning channel.

2:38:26It sounds incredible, but people are actually saying this type of thing. They'll say, yeah, this is how it'll work in 100 years. And then everyone will buy and then you'll work all day and you'll save up for three months or for three years, and you can finally afford the L1 transaction for your son. And now he can be on the lightning network. People would say stuff like that.

2:38:53With BitVM, you know, I just commented that Robin Linus has said multiple times that BIP 300 is preferable to BitVM, but that BIP 300 doesn't exist. So you have to work with what we have, which is a totally reasonable thing to say. But like he said many times in public and on recorded camera and whatever, he has said like that BitVM is a very bizarre hack and it involves all these extra steps and is convoluted. And it also requires covenants, requires some kind of covenant as of even BitVM v3, which I think was presented, what was that, in November.

2:39:34So they came up with v4.

2:39:37They have a v4 now.

2:39:39Vlad CosteaIt's like 2000 times more efficient.

2:39:41Paul SztorcOh, yeah, because it was actually versions one and two, I think it was more than four megabytes, even the one of the transactions in the sequence. I don't remember which and I'm not that interested in it. But one of them was more than four megabytes. So it was like it wouldn't fit. Even if it got, you know, like it was not possible. But then of course, they knew they would shrink it over time. So they've been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. I think it finally. So now if it's over 2000, you know, they're making it much better.

2:40:13And it might be great. But this is all adjacent to the point about the fact that they're non-mined. So let me explain why is it important whether or not they're mined? The L2s. And it goes like this. Let's imagine a hypothetical world where Bitcoin is very, very successful. And 8 billion people are actually using it. You have 8 billion people using it. And then some percentages of people are like children or whatever. But basically you have like certain number of households and they make three transactions a day or something worldwide average.

2:40:50This is like on the order of like 8, 9, 10 trillion transactions per year. When I last did the math, which is like the year 2024. And this value doubles every 11 years. So it would be 20 trillion in 2034 based on my research, which is, you know, it's like napkin math research. But I did some research unlike everyone else. So I looked into it a little bit. Now you imagine a world where this is successful. We got 9 trillion transactions per year and they each pay 10 cent transaction fee.

2:41:26Again, these are just some numbers for the sake of just getting it out there. This is just, and again, I don't think this is that sophisticated of a thing. This is why I call it a derangement because I don't think this is like cold fusion here. I'm just saying, what would the world look like if everyone used Bitcoin? It could be lightning. It could be Ark. It could be nothing. It could be whatever. It could be custodial. I'm just saying, let's just put this down. Here's the number of people.

2:41:55Here's transactions per day. Here's transactions per year. Here is the fee that people would pay. This is a much lower fee than the total effective fee for visa. And for some of these other things, is it as low as free? But then of course, like with WeChat pay, there's like an implied fee, which is that the government's like spying on you all the time and can lock you out of your money. So there's kind of like, how do you apples to apples compare it? But with the credit cards, the fee are much higher.

2:42:23It's always like 1% plus 50 cents per transaction or something. Of course, the merchant pays the fee, but obviously they pass it on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Obviously they must. So I don't think this is that sophisticated of an analysis. You just write down some napkin math and like, what does the world look like when we have succeeded?

2:42:50And what this looks like is 9 trillion transactions, $900 billion a year in transaction fee revenue. Now the question is, this money has to go to someone. If the L2s are mined L2s, they have merged mined L2s and the money goes to the L1 miners, then the miners are the same group of people, the same group of people get paid on all the layers. So there's no possibility of a conflict of interest. The miners don't care if they make, as long as it's the same amount of money, they say, oh, do I get 10 billion from L1 or do I get 100 million from L1 and then 99.9 billion from L2?

2:43:35It's the same amount of money. So we just get to ignore this question. We have a totally peaceful ignoring of this part. But what if it goes to someone else? And this is the question of the non-mined L2s, which is what if it goes to like the Ark super node or what if in the case of the ZK roll up like sequencer, I don't know exactly what their thing is because as I just said, like, as of like 15 minutes ago, I thought they were doing the spider chain thing.

2:44:02That's just, I guess they abandoned that. So, see, here's the thing though is if you abandon that, maybe they'll abandon the new thing and then I don't know. But what I'm getting at is you have either, okay, so like the Ark super node or like the LN LSP, Lightning Service Provider, or the Federation member, like the Fedimint group. With the non-mined L2s, someone is getting this money or maybe you have some kind of argument where, you know, like due to increased competition, the user doesn't have to pay this 10 cent fee.

2:44:45And so it's passed on to the consumer or something. I don't know. But the point is this now sets the stage for an enormous conflict of interest between the L1 miners and the L2 whoever's making all this money. Because we're talking, in my hypothetical example, we're talking $900 billion per year, which is much more than they currently make. I have the math in the whatever, the post, but it's like, you know, maybe whatever, like we're talking like only one one hundredth of that. We're talking like really, really small, including of block subs.

2:45:26So we're saying, I'm saying in the future block subsidies, maybe zero transaction fees are this huge pie. What percent go to the L1 miners versus what percent go to a non-mined L2? And I think for this reason, non-mined L2s are doomed because ultimately, even if they succeed, if they fail, then they fail. If they succeed, then they set the stage for this conflict of interest. The miners are thinking, well, listen, as a miner, I make zero dollars per year. But if I ran the arc super node or if I ran the lightning service provider, then I would make $900 billion a year with a B.

2:46:07And they're like, and it grows and it doubles every, it increases with the transaction volume. So it doubles every 11 years. So do I want to be part of zero and shrinking or $900 billion and doubling every 11 years? Everyone will say, oh, I want that. So then the temptation is for Foundry, you know, hypothetically to create like Foundry LSP, you know, Foundry Lightning Service Provider and do their own. But now they have the temptation to play dirty and they can just censor the transactions which go to the rival L2s, which they can always block from L1.

2:46:47And they can do other things as well. So like the lightning network is actually very vulnerable to having hash. You don't want to have a channel open with someone who has a high hash rate because the whole lightning security model is based on being able to get the so-called justice transaction into the block chain. Fast enough to stop them from stealing your money. But if you actually are against a, you know, a 51% hash rate group or 100% hash rate group, now the lightning network is never secure unless you are partnered with the Lightning LSP, the Foundry LSP.

2:47:30So I don't know, is this making sense so far? I realize now it just, it went from being kind of simple to being a little bit more complicated. But the issue here is that now all the lightning stuff like the HTLCs, the channels, all that is now out the window because it's just, none of that's actually being used. And you just having a channel open with one Foundry LSP. And this is in the good case where lightning is a big success. So all the non-mined L2s, they have like planted within them the seeds of destruction, which is that they do not kick their fees down to the L1 miners, which I think is not only kind of the right thing to do, but also it is sort of inevitable that you either will have a big fight between L1 miners in these non-mined L2s and the non-mined L2s can't really win.

2:48:21I mean, they may have the users, they may have user experience, but the L1 miners have all the bullets. They can block the transactions, they can interfere. All these things, like even BitVM requires that there's like a bond that be pushed on and be slashed on L1. But the L1 miners can block anything, any message they don't like on L1. So the L1 miners can screw up every, the miners can screw up, the L1 miners can screw up any kind of L2 that they don't like. So that was why with Drivechain, I was like, oh, I'm just going to make sure they really like the L2s because they'll be making all this money from the L2s.

2:48:57They'll just be very happy about the L2s. But other people just don't, they just seem to have ignored this whole dimension of, well, what if this L2 is really, really successful? So they kind of want to have it both ways. They want to say this is a small experimental project and it's not going to have any real significance because it's just our tiny little toy, Fedimint or whatever, but then they don't take seriously what would happen if it were a big success. And so this is a, you know, this is just

2:49:25Vlad CosteaLike the marketing for Fedimints was humongous. They're like, oh, we're going to onboard billions of people. They want to get all the community leaders to run their own mints and run on Bitcoin and blah, blah, blah.

2:49:38Paul SztorcYeah, I know. That's what I mean. They want it both ways. So they say our project's great, but then when they don't take seriously what would happen if it was great. Because it wouldn't work. So yeah, I think that's a pretty big, because all of the attention, as you just said. Is heaped onto the non-mined L2s. But I think the whole category is doomed. So, I don't know. I presented this at OP_NEXT and I didn't hear anyone. What people said is that people dragged me into the hallway.

2:50:10Big people, big lightning company and foundry. They were like, oh, this is exactly what we've been talking about in our internal discussions. So yeah, I've never heard any counter argument to this basic idea that if you don't pay L1 miners, then either your thing will be a failure and it won't matter. It'll be a moot point. But if it's a big success, then doesn't that reject Satoshi's plan, which is to have the transaction fees go to the people putting the transaction in the L1 blocks. The answer is yes.

2:50:47And it makes no sense too, because Satoshi was the one who helped invent merge mining, which he did before leaving. And we have been merge mining Namecoin the whole time. So all these L2s could be merge mined. And all of mine are. And I don't know why other people don't just take that. It's free, low-hanging fruit. But instead they deal with this other stuff. They do all this other stuff. And that's why it's a derangement. It's just they're chasing the prestige, they're chasing whatever, the VC money.

2:51:20The whole thing is actually very bleak, I think. Why is so much attention being paid to the worst category of idea? I don't know. But that's that derangement. So there you go.

2:51:35Vlad CosteaYeah, it's something very important. I'm happy that we addressed it. And you have sources for this, like links that people can click to learn more. Very useful. The other significant point that you raise here is purity tests. I think this one, we sort of touched upon it. But at the same time, I'm someone who got excommunicated for interviewing the wrong person almost two years ago. And I know what it's like to be on the receiving side. And it's really not nice, to be honest. Like, it doesn't matter.

2:52:14So I will not make this about myself. Let's make this about Gavin Andresen, OK? He created the multisig, which is like what some people describe as the silver bullet for security. BitGo has built a business on top of it. Casa has built a business on top of the multisig. Like a lot of people argue that it's useful. He also did some other works, which people will disagree that they were useful at all. And he also supported XT and then sort of supported classic and unlimited. And then he said that Bitcoin Cash is the same chain that he started working on in 2010 and stuff like this.

2:52:56But we sort of erased him from history because of the stuff.

2:53:01Paul SztorcHe got off easy, I think.

2:53:04Some people wish they could just be erased. No, I'm just kidding. I know what you mean. He's a super nice guy. He's very smart and very hardworking. And yeah, ultimately the industry is so vicious. You need thick skin, but you don't just need thick skin. You need like really, really like diamond, super thick skin. The industry is horrible. And yeah, I had many people come up to me and say, oh, I was so, people were like, oh, I hated you for years. But then I realized, oh, why?

2:53:36And then I was like, oh, I don't have any reason. And then I was like, wait, actually, you are the only person telling me the truth for years. I've heard like weird stuff. I think you can find, if you go to, there's like a link where I have everything. I think where I did the whale pool interview, it like starts with like two or three people saying that. And then now also in the lightning thing, people are saying, oh yeah, at first people are like, oh, I think I hate you and I think you should die.

2:54:02And then they're like, oh, wait. Oh, now I think you're the best. So, I mean, do you think people think I'm exaggerating?

2:54:10Vlad CosteaI think it has a lot to do and I'm guilty of the same sin to an extent, like the tweeting style.

2:54:18Paul SztorcI think that's it too, but I don't think people, I think it doesn't, this is partially my fault. Like I like to tweet in like a very deadpan kind of like, my tweets are really like, they're all, them are like a joke really. And it's, I can see people reading them and just being like, this guy is like, you know, a rude person or like a kind of, I don't

2:54:40Vlad CosteaThink I'm actually that rude. That's what a lot of people think that you hate Bitcoin. Or that you're bitter. You come across as bitter sometimes.

2:54:48Paul SztorcYeah, I know, that's funny. And I actually, I hate coming across as bitter. I don't like that. And so I think it's my fault because what I'm trying to come off as kind of like, isn't this stupid? Like it's very, a lot of it's very sarcastic, but I think, yeah, I think Robin Linus also said that or something. I don't remember if it was him, maybe I'm misquoting, giving him a fake quote now. But someone told me like, they read, they read all my tweets and they just hated me so much.

2:55:18And then they met me in person and then they were like, oh, I get it now. Like, like all of these tweets are just like, they're just like a joke. Like they're just like Paul, just like, kind of like, but yeah, I don't know if the style can be fixed at this point. It's too late in the game to change it now, but I think that's definitely true. But I'll come out about the purity tests. Like we have all seen examples or at least, you know, in America, I guess it's, I suppose it depends on what generation you are and what age you are and where you live and stuff like that.

2:55:58But we have seen everyone in America has seen like, you know, like a cancel culture go too far where you had like, certain people were definitely like Bill Cosby was like drugging people and like date raping them or something allegedly. I mean, I think proven also, but, and Harvey Weinstein, these are like bad people. But then slowly people started getting accused. And then it was like, oh, this person, we were invited to the same house party in LA and the person hit on me while they were drunk.

2:56:31And that's now like the same thing or cases where the people have texted saying, I'm going to invent, I'm going to fabricate a bunch of fake stuff to ruin this person's life. So we've always, we've all seen situations where the kind of like the standard kind of gets pushed well beyond. And a second example would be like a social justice warrior type thing. This was a phenomenon. I mean, it still is, but it was like what, you know, it's characterized by kicking people out and saying, oh, these people are the worst.

2:57:08But then eventually if you last long enough, you will eventually be kicked out. You will eventually be canceled. So they will come. The mob will come for you. They did that. Three body problem has the scene of the cultural, the communist cultural revolution in China and this mob.

2:57:29Vlad CosteaThat's a popular book nowadays.

2:57:31Paul SztorcThe French revolution also, they say, oh, we give these, we just got to, we have the purges. We just have to kill all these people. But then eventually you get purged. That's the thing. So this is the thing to keep in mind about the purity tests is we've all seen it before. I think most Bitcoiners have even. Because the Bitcoin cohort is like, it's kind of like this libertarian, like they would be like libertarian, like 40 year old. That's like my stereotype, American 40 year old libertarian.

2:58:03I'm talking like the OG Bitcoin cohort. And you know, you have seen like the mob justice and it goes too far. And then you have, it just keeps going until it stops. But that's what we, that's where we are though. We're just kicking people out, you know, for the crime of interviewing the wrong person. And it's like, how can you, and then it's like, yeah, instead what you have to do is go with swan or something, you know, which is like, or, you know, go with whatever, Samson Mao or something.

2:58:39These are the most pure or, you know, Jimmy, Decred Jimmy, who was originally, all these people were like originally like Altcoin people, or they did, they sell a different product that is not Bitcoin. And they, these are like the worst people actually.

2:58:54Vlad CosteaNo, you should go to Max Keiser and El Salvador. The guy who did MaxCoin and StartCOIN and shilling Dash on the Keiser Report.

2:59:01Paul SztorcMax Keiser, I think we've, you and I have discussed this about like his show on Russia Today, in like 2012 was like the only thing that mentioned Bitcoin, like on the whole internet. And it was like, wow, it was so incredible. But yeah, then he did MaxCoin and he was like, it's better because it has SHA-3 instead of SHA-2, that means better. And then he was like, there's no way that Russia is going to invade Ukraine. That's propaganda.

2:59:30Vlad CosteaThat's when I lost my respect for him, because I was at the airport. I was seeing Ukrainians coming into my country and I was like, what's happening? And they had no documents. It was all so dramatic. And then I looked at my phone and I saw this tweet by Max Keiser. Like there's no war in Ukraine. It's all psyop. It's propaganda by the West.

2:59:52Paul SztorcIt's all the West. It's the CIA, you know, they're always up to something. And so then, but you know, they did admit that, you know, I got to hand it to them. It's not easy to deal with something like that, where they had to like, and they did, I think, you know, they cut the RT association and then they deleted the tweets, which is, I think it's okay. I mean, there's two ways to delete a tweet. There's like, oh, I never said that. And then you delete and you lie to everyone.

3:00:23But then they were kind of like, oh, yeah, we were wrong about that. So we just don't want it up there because it wasn't going to happen. Yeah, I think they know they delete, there was someone kept track of like, cause they had made so many tweets saying, oh, this is laughable that, so someone made like even like a, an image or a site where there was like, here are the 146 tweets deleted by, but yeah, it's not really a big deal. I still think they're pretty great, but they are just, you know, they're very amped up.

3:00:51They're very excited. And then, yeah, they're part of this purity thing where they're like, oh yeah, like, see, this is the annoying thing, which is, as you've just brought up, the biggest purity test people are the people who actually themselves, they were altcoiners at a more crucial time. So like it was a bigger betrayal back then to do MaxCoin in like 2013 than now. Now it's not as threatening at all because no one would take it seriously. So, but then those people feel guilty about their own past sins and their own past stupidity and spinelessness, and then they decide, oh, now we're going to be purity tests.

3:01:38And that's what's annoying is there are people who, again, who like then people like me, I was never a supporter of any altcoin and I was not a Bitcoin Cash supporter and I was not a large blocker, an L1 large blocker. But now that, but after being loyal to Bitcoin the whole time, now I want to say, oh, by the way, there are all these derangements, there's all these problems. Then people be like, oh, yeah, it's a Truthcoin, it must be an altcoin or whatever else and stuff.

3:02:03And yeah, you think like whatever. So that's the annoying thing is the purity people are actually the sinners. They are the worst of the worst often. And then there's a lot of well-meaning people get swept up into it. And of course, people think like, well, it's sad because they get swept up into altcoin world. And they think, so they're at first, they're, they're, they're fiat only, and then something opens the door to crypto and they become very open-minded and they think, wow, everything's going to be, you know, tokenize everything and everything will be decentralized.

3:02:42And then William Mougayar and all these funny people, business blockchain, and all this weird stuff will happen, right? And they try all these altcoins, then they don't work and they're down 99%. And then they become very closed-minded. They say, I was open-minded before, it didn't work, Bitcoin is the only thing, Bitcoin is perfect, Bitcoin is sacred. And they're kind of wrong both times.

3:03:05Vlad CosteaSo the same stuff that was being said about Bitcoin when it turned 10 years old can be said about Litecoin today. With the exception of just the mysterious founder, you have the persistence, you have the fact that it's still proof of work, every coin was minted fairly, the launch was fair. It's like honest money, like it's very hard for you to argue with a straight face that Litecoin is horrible. You can say the same about Dogecoin, ironically, like something that started out as a joke, it was abandoned by the founders.

3:03:37It was a literal joke for many years, and then Elon Musk decided to pick it up and sort of troll Bitcoiners with it. That's also pretty legit. It's also hard to argue against Ethereum after it's been around for 10 years and say that it's going to fail. It's just give it more time. Like it's only a matter of time until someone like Saifedean is going to be proven wrong about Ethereum. Also Zcash, that one was supposed to be a soft fork on Bitcoin, which never happened because of the trusted setup, and then they figured out a way to remove the trusted setup, but Bitcoiners stopped caring.

3:04:17Paul SztorcFirst of all, I'd just like to point out that the earlier argument about the printer, that would apply to any of these currencies. But really the reason, yeah, people misdiagnosed why, or second aside is that, okay, this is a perfect example of the Ethereum bashing, which is that I mentioned before about how it was different in 2015 than today, which is what you've also re-mentioned. But yeah, Adam Back used to say, I love Adam Back. He used to say in 2015, he used to be like, oh, it was an 80% pre-mine for Ethereum.

3:04:57And he keeps saying that, but it's like, that does not matter anymore. You know, I remember he was still saying that in at least in end of 2024, we did have spaces together and it was like, you know, 19 million Bitcoin have been mined. Like, you know, like, so someone shows up today, if they were in a coma or they had just been born. Like, it's all pre-mined to them. Like, it's not like, what, like the US dollar is like a 99.999% pre-mine, like what?

3:05:30Vlad CosteaSo no, but the point is that it was issued in a way that they think is not fair. Right. But that's right.

3:05:39Paul SztorcBut the issue is like, that question has been litigated now over 10 years. Like it's over. It is what it is. Like this is, it's like, they, you know, people have had plenty of time to change their mind about that or to accept or reject it. But now the fact that it was fair 10 years ago, I mean, that does give it some legitimacy or illegitimacy, but really like that fades out like very, very quickly. You know what I mean? Like no one would, I don't think anyone would say, like, this is why we have like possession is nine tenths of the law.

3:06:23You know what I mean? It's like really hard to switch and say, Oh, here's this. So it mattered a lot in 2015 when this was a brand new option, you could say, Oh, do I want to invest in Ethereum? Do I want to stick with Bitcoin? Oh, it's an 80% premine. So yeah, the implication is, see the pre-mine, the implication, see whether or not it's fair, you know, life, you know, famously isn't fair, right? So a lot of people, you know, fair this versus fair that, and a lot of people have very different ideas on justice.

3:06:55Oh yeah, this is the way you were going to take this from me. And what about, Oh, and my ancestors took this from blah, blah, blah, whatever. So that's kind of a messy question, which is why we have the possession is nine tenths of the law kind of question and innocent until proven guilty, stuff like that. Some people have argued that that pointlessly enshrines the status quo. Many people have argued this. This was the, it was that guy, Bentham or whatever. I'm kind of mixing up all my names now, but the point is, we go back to Ethereum.

3:07:30The implication of the 80% pre-mine is that this is not a serious project that the founders are doing it only to enrich themselves. And, but yeah, like that, none of that is a core part of the logic of that. And it, but that doesn't apply when you have, when it's 10 years later. And if there have been, it has changed hands, millions and millions and millions of times. So I just don't think that that's, just don't think that that's important. I don't know.

3:08:01There was something else I was going to say, but I forgot what it was.

3:08:05Vlad CosteaIt's fine because I think we have bigger fish to fry here. There's the SegWit discount as one of your medium derangements, but I think it's a very big one because for a long time, people had the wrong conception or opinion of what SegWit does.

3:08:20Paul SztorcMany of them still do. I would go to Bitcoin meetups and I would go to Miami BitDevs. I hate to call out, but actually I think the Miami BitDevs is really good. And the Miami scene is a very good, is very serious. And we had Chris DeRose and Junseth originally from, I mean, you know, from that area and from that Bitcoin meetup and then, a lot of serious people have moved to Miami. So even though I've been to Bit devs and around, you know, New York, San Francisco, Austin, Texas, Chicago even.

3:08:56And, but over the many over the years, but I think the Miami was pretty good, but I would go and I would, people would just say, what? And I would say, yeah, that's not true at all. It's just a flatly a myth. And then people would be like, wow, I had no idea. No, what was the myth?

3:09:13Vlad CosteaBecause we haven't mentioned specifically.

3:09:15Paul SztorcThe idea is that there's this 4x number with SegWit where there's one megabyte here and four megabytes here. The block size is kind of confusing to people. And they think, oh, if I use SegWit transactions, I pay less fees because I get a discount. And they think that must mean that we're like packing the transaction in a more efficient way. And we use fewer bytes because of the magic of SegWit. But that is completely a myth. But instead it happened is that the witness is stored in extension block, a separate place, which is a mandatory hard fork block size increase.

3:09:53It's not really a hard fork, but it's in the sense of being mandatory as a hard fork. It's a kind of mandatory extension block is what I would should have been said. But. You are required in order to use, in order to receive money from anything that's passed through SegWit transaction. This is a mandatory block size increase, defacto.

3:10:16Vlad CosteaI guess this is also why the waters were muddied in terms of what a soft fork means.

3:10:21Paul SztorcYeah, SegWit is extremely unusual soft fork. Very, very, very unusual. And I think it kind of ruined the soft fork for all the little, the innocent little, not the soft fork. So just so quaint and harmless. But this one was a mandatory block size increase from one to four megabytes. So what they did is they gave it the discount. The discount was artificially inserted with the deliberate intent of trying to discourage people from bloating the UTXO set. So I don't know. The details are kind of maybe confusing.

3:10:57But the the like there was some logic to it about like what would it have to take to if we had past patterns prevailed, then maybe there would be a 2.3 block size increase. And this was related to at the block size at the time of the block size debate. People wanted to. People threw around having the two megabyte block size increase. So then this was like a political thing. And it's kind of confusing. So I'm not sure the best way to just repeat the technical thing of what happens.

3:11:32The SegWit transactions do not use fewer bytes in physical space. And in fact, in some cases they use many more. And in most cases, they use like maybe like one more byte. They are actually less efficient. But the old pre-SegWit transactions have to stay in the original one megabyte block, whereas the SegWit transactions are allowed to place the signature, which is a very high percentage of the transaction. If you imagine like a check or something, you're filling out a check in the signature. In the Bitcoin world, the signature takes up like one third of the ink or one third of the page or something.

3:12:12That is an oversimplification because when there's many inputs, it would be even bigger and other stuff would happen. But the signature can be stored in a different part. And that is what they do is they have like it's kind of like when you check your bag in an airport, you check the giant bag. They just stack all those on top of each other in the lower part. And then you sit, you take your carry on and you sit in the upper part of the plane.

3:12:44Vlad CosteaThat's a beautiful way to describe it.

3:12:46Paul SztorcAnd the carry on, it has no, it always has no heat because you can always tell when you go up and when you're 30,000 feet in, it's always like literally the outside air temperature is like negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very similar Celsius. Super, super cold. And then, yeah, when you get like, depending on how quickly you get the bags, but I could get it before my bag would be like freezing cold because it was, they don't heat the lower part where there's no humans.

3:13:15But yeah, that's what they did. And so there's no physics trick making it cheaper. The SegWit discount is a political decision to incentivize cleaning up UTXO bloat. Because when you use the signature, you are spending an old UTXO, whereas when you create one, there's no signature there. The signature will happen in the future when you spend that. So that was seen as, but yeah, but there's the myth is that the transactions themselves, thanks to magic technological progress or innovation or wizardry, except the transactions themselves are actually 20% smaller or something.

3:13:57And that's not true at all. But amazingly, it is. It's basically believed by everyone. And you have to point it out to them that it's not true. And then eventually they, you know, you can show them once I showed someone there's a block explorer called yogh.io, Y-O-G-H dot I-O. I don't know if it still works, but it's a cool block explorer because you can see all the bytes on the block chain, which is great. And I think it's fantastic. And I wish at one point I had like a, we tried to have like a LayerTwo Labs, like version or something, but it was just like never got off the ground.

3:14:35But it's super cool block explorer. But you could like show people like, no, here are all the bytes. You could like count them with your finger and people just wouldn't believe this. So it definitely is a pretty big derangement because it's the thing that just like for whatever reason everyone believes. But, you know, no one ever got around to clarifying that it wasn't true.

3:14:58Vlad CosteaYou actually have some names.

3:15:01Paul SztorcI named some people because now everyone's going to be like, oh, I always believe that or whatever. And I remember years and years going by and I was like, am I going crazy?

3:15:09Like, am I, if I've been drugged or something, like, why is everyone still saying this wrong thing? And they were like, yeah, because SegWit was, you know, created by, you know, the geniuses. And so it must have magic shrinking transactions.

3:15:25Vlad CosteaThis also says a lot about the culture back then, because people would activate this and see it like the revenge against the big blockers, maybe.

3:15:34Paul SztorcThey rushed to activate it. They're like, it's perfect. SegWit is the perfect thing. And look how great it is. But then it doesn't actually do some of the things they think it did.

3:15:45Vlad CosteaYeah, but it was tested on Litecoin. Like there was an actual process to it, but it only took a few months. I do believe that after the ordinal situation, there are some people who are saying we should deactivate SegWit.

3:16:05Paul SztorcYeah, or I think people are very confused about the discount still. And so various people have like caught themselves. There's like a cycle of arguments. And it doesn't really make much of a difference either way. But people were saying stuff like, OK, so Udi and whatever, Eric Wall, they were like, they named themselves the Taproot Wizards. Because they were going to correctly take advantage of everyone's stupidity.

3:16:33Vlad CosteaThis is such a beautiful segue into the next topic that I was going to propose, which is Taproot itself.

3:16:39Paul SztorcAnd they said, we're just going to name ourselves Taproot Wizards, as if this has anything to do with Taproot. It really has nothing to do with Taproot. But they made use of like, OK, so like there's OP_RETURN and then there's this thing of the Taproot Annex. And so it's slightly easier to this is like an extremely in the weeds, nuanced type of a thing. But basically, like I was trying to say before, if you have your thing be a signature, it can live in the discounted world.

3:17:13And this is part of what we were talking about before with OP_RETURN, which is the OP_RETURN stays in the old world. And it's actually more expensive than what some people were doing experimentally with SegWit and Taproot. They were saying, oh, I can I can make a really big signature and it could be four megabytes and it could be a picture of a wizard. And so they decided to name themselves Taproot Wizards. So then when Ordinals happened, everyone blamed Taproot, which I think is like sort of ingenious, at least from like a manipulative point of view.

3:17:48It was very it was a very successful trick. And the reason it worked is because everyone didn't know what they were talking about anyway. So they might as well be tricked one way or the other didn't really make much of a difference. So then they thought, OK, this is Taproot. We've got to deactivate Taproot. And then people were like, wait, this is actually the SegWit discount. So we got, okay, we got to deactivate SegWit. And the whole thing is a circus anyway, because the ordinals are the truth is the ordinals are a good thing.

3:18:19The like I don't know what to say about the SegWit discount. In retrospect, we probably shouldn't have done it because it was so confusing and poorly understood. It's clear that no one really understood it.

3:18:33Vlad CosteaI think Jihan referred to it as unfairly cheap or something like that.

3:18:38Paul SztorcThen he was being made fun of. But actually, he was probably more right than because remember, everyone was thinking, oh, the SegWit transactions are smaller. So they were thinking Jihan's complaining about that. But actually, Jihan was more correct when he said they were unfairly cheap because it's actually the same amount of bytes or more to do the same transaction. And yet it consumes a small percentage of the block by the block weight calculation. So, you know, yeah, like they definitely got a lot of things wrong, but they didn't get everything wrong.

3:19:21And so that's of course, people are so quick to jump on them whenever they said anything. But yeah, I don't think it probably in retrospect, just because no one understood it, we probably shouldn't have done the witness discount.

3:19:38And then in retrospect, we shouldn't have done SegWit or Taproot, which is the next thing you wanted to ask about. Which is that because these are just to serve the Lightning Network.

3:19:48Vlad CosteaYou call it useless in your article.

3:19:51Paul SztorcWell, of course, that's a little hyperbolic. But basically, you could look at graphs of when were other soft forks adopted by real users. So you could look at when was pay-to-script-hash adopted, even though that is very niche. That's not the same as people using it to transact every day. But then you could look at SegWit. I don't remember. It's been now a few years since I first looked it up and a few months since I put the article. But there was something like after the first, I don't remember.

3:20:22I don't remember the exact numbers, but you can look them up and you can see them probably in the article that I wrote in July and many months ago. But it's something like three months after SegWit activated, it had like 38%. And then like a year later, it had like 80% or something like that of all the new transactions were actually using it. And then for Taproot, it's like, you know, like 0.01%, like flatline for much more than a year. And I don't know what it is now.

3:20:57And I don't know, you know, someone could look that up, but that it has as people have. That's the thing that we spent all of the Bitcoin dev mailing lists time on. That's the one soft fork we got in the past, like eight years. It's something that no one is using and it exists to support lightning, which doesn't work. And no one will use lightning in the future. So it's a waste of time. And it is also like it didn't have everyone. Oh, it's going to have Schnorr signature aggregation, which would actually be useful.

3:21:31And that would make it so that a more private transaction actually does consume fewer bytes and is therefore cheaper on its merit. But it didn't even have that feature. That was the big promise feature. It's Schnorr signature aggregation. But that feature is nowhere to be seen. It was never added. And they were like, oh, we'll add it later. But we still don't have it.

3:21:58Vlad CosteaI remember reading a blog post that was trying to explain or rationalize what's happening. They said it's just a partial. So the whole narrative about Taproot before it was called Taproot was that we should switch to the Schnorr signatures because they're more efficient. And Satoshi could not use them because there was some pattern going on. And by the time he launched Bitcoin, the pattern expired. And we should look into that and rewrite the whole Bitcoin code using Schnorr signatures because they're so much better. And there were lots of technical presentations with advantages and percentages.

3:22:38And that was most of 2018 and 2019 in terms of conversations about improving Bitcoin. And then we got the Taproot proposal, which is not the Schnorr signature upgrade that we were promised. It's like a partial upgrade. It was supposed to have the other component, which is cross input signature aggregation or CISA. And that one, I think, is a separate BIP. I'm not sure entirely, but we never got that one. And it was considered to be sort of not good enough or it did not justify the engineering effort because the...

3:23:17Paul SztorcI mean, I thought everyone was saying like, oh, we'll just do this now and then we can just add this later easily. But instead, they just like gave up on it. I'm pretty sure we can look this up. I'm pretty sure that Bitcoin Cash just added, they just switched to Schnorr. They just... Because they have regular hard forks. So this is the benefit of regular. I think the cost is not worth it at all. I hate the hard fork and I think it's very, very, very dangerous and must be used with extreme, like, nuclear bomb level precision or seriousness.

3:23:54But I think that they do the regular hard fork. So they just added Schnorr and I think they just added the signature aggregation also. I think they just like YOLO'd it in like eight months or something and they just did it. So that's an advantage of their... And we still don't have it. And it's a great... The cost is a great... And this is always like billed as the thing. This is like part of the pitch, you know, as I remember it for Taproot was that, oh, we'll get Schnorr, we'll get stuff.

3:24:23It'll be great. Coin join will be cheaper than a regular transaction. You know, there's some nuance to that. But basically that, you know, that's an important idea.

3:24:35Yeah. All to just amount to nothing basically. And then all these people shilling it saying it's the biggest thing ever. I don't know if I linked to... I linked to Pierre. I saw that live. I was like laughing. It's like laughing out loud. But there's like people saying it's the coolest thing ever.

3:25:00Yeah.

3:25:01Vlad CosteaAnd it was Hyped a lot for having extended smart contracting options and also for having better privacy, which is like a very small use case that most people will not even touch. Yeah. Like a multisig where you can put some conditions and then instead of seeing all of the conditions that were part of that contract, you just see the one in which the coins were spent.

3:25:26Paul SztorcAnd that's where you have the privacy. The Cooperative close looks like a normal transaction, but it's like, okay, whatever. Like, you know, and then it's like, well, you know, yeah, this is all nerd sniping. You know, this is just like, we have like smart people having all their attention consumed and meanwhile they didn't neglect normal priorities. Oh, and then don't even get me started. Did I even put in there about like this whole batch 32? Batch 32 M thing. I don't even know if I even put that in.

3:26:04Vlad CosteaNo, I don't think so. Let me search for batch. There is no batch 32.

3:26:10Paul SztorcIt's a taproot. There's this new thing. God, it's, I have to add it then. It's definitely a derangement. Oh my God. It's so funny. Maybe I don't know if it should be in the taproot section or if it should be its own derangement because it's the stupidest thing. But of course, as always with Bitcoin, you know, we can't, we can never have like big privacy. We can't have like ZK snark privacy L2 and we can't have scaling for 8 billion people, but we can always have, what's the one thing we can always have a new address format.

3:26:40So we always have more address formats than we know what to do with. So they were like, well, we'll just have more address formats, Bech32. So of course, you know, cause if you want to be nerd sniped, just come up with a new address format. So they invented this thing where it was like the, what is it? Like BC one Q and the version number you would think. I don't even know where to begin with all this stuff. It's literally like we're being tortured to death by someone, I think, because you would think, Oh, the one clearly the version number has to be the one, the digit one, but it's actually the Q the Q and if the Q becomes whatever an R or an S then they're on version two or three.

3:27:24And you're like, is this real? Like, you know, like, are you kidding me? And then it's like, they're longer and they're all lowercase. This makes them kind of harder to actually read with your eyeball, but this justification is what if you're reading it to someone over the phone, then you have to do somehow capital H lowercase J. Of course, the clever thing would have been to just do like an audio QR code and just have like something where you just click a button. You, you click a microphone on your end and they click a button and it goes like, there's some kind of like cool modem, early '90s internet.

3:27:59It does some kind of like matrix sound effects. You know, beep, boop, whatever. And then that would have been, that would actually been cool, but instead they decided, Oh, the address has to be longer. The other horrible thing about the address is the human eye. Of course, what you're, what you want to do when you're looking at your address is you want to say, is this the right address or not, or did it get like swapped out? Human eye is as the left digit bias, the focus on the significant character first, which is like, Oh, nine 99 in the store.

3:28:30Or 1999. I would say when they're, when they're trying to sell you stuff on TV, they would say, buy the, you know, whatever Billy Mays here with the thing by Billy Mays. I don't remember the, what was it? The slanket and the, you know, you know what I'm talking about is,

3:28:52Vlad CosteaI did not grow up in the U S sorry, but

3:28:54Paul SztorcI thought you watched like, the TV got like re-syndicated over there or something. Yeah, I bet you couldn't, it would be silly for them to advertise to people.

3:29:02I don't know if the shipping and handling worked would have worked in that time, but yeah, there's, you know, the point is they have nine 99. They have the left digit bias. They try to keep it under $20. So they say it's 19 99, you know, the product they're trying to sell. So the most significant digits are always identical. They're always BC one Q and so all the addresses are different. So your eye actually has to like do extra labor. It has to like fight into the interior of the, of the, of the transaction.

3:29:35And then it has to like compare and they kind of have to be lined up. Like what if the font isn't monospace font? Oh my God. Now you have to try to figure out like, this is address, right? You know? Oh, yeah. And you only get

3:29:48Vlad CosteaOne specific use case for using the latest version.

3:29:52Paul SztorcYeah. Then, which is like this reading it over the phone thing. And it's like, ah, why do we even have addresses? You know, cause we we could have had so much stuff, but then the craziest thing is not only did they do all this stuff. And they invented their own thing, like from scratch, but then they ended up screwing it up completely. It has like a flaw. So now we had to do Bech32m. Oh, and then, yeah, like where was any of this documented?

3:30:21Like it's all in, it's always, it's like incomprehensible. They don't just name them like version one, version two, version three. They've got a Bech32 and the Bech32m. I mean, the whole thing's a circus, honestly. So I'll just be like, kind of really rethought, you know, like it's just, it is crazy engineers, like kind of just run amok. So yeah, the Bech32 is just terrible, I think, you know, and again, look, just look at what we had before we had one and then whatever. And then we had three for multisig.

3:30:59And then for some reason, Testnet had two and four. I think this was a mistake. I think the Testnet should have had identical, it's easier to test if all the stuff's the same. Same keys, but for whatever reason, Testnet had the two and then the Testnet multisig was like a four. And then five was the private key. But yeah, why not just say, oh, this starts with a six or why this starts with an eight and just keep the same thing that everyone had gotten used to.

3:31:29Like, I don't know.

3:31:33Vlad CosteaBut yeah, they have to be BC1 for SegWit.

3:31:36Paul SztorcYeah, why is it, why start with BC1? Why not just start with one and cut the queue part also? I don't understand it.

3:31:46Vlad CosteaI don't know, what is it like in Bitcoin Cash? I think they switched to Q addresses or something.

3:31:53Paul SztorcI don't know, but no one, we shouldn't, by now we should have long since adopted. Let me see your wallet. Because as Samourai did and other people have done, you get a PayNym, you get just one code and now you don't need to interact and they call you, oh, send me an address. Okay. And then I send you the address. Meanwhile, they can all be intercepted. The communication can be intercepted. This is like proof that you have interacted before. Whereas instead you can't, with BIP47, all you have to do is post your one code, which is your permanent friend code.

3:32:30And this is what people are used to when you say, oh, give me my address. What they think of when they think of an address is like an email address or like a mailing address where it doesn't change. Oh, if I want to reach Vlad, this is what I do. I use this thing. And what those did with BIP47 is they derive, if I get your code, it establishes like a pipeline between us of where we have an infinite list of, but Luke Dashjr wanted to kill this idea and he had the worst reasons possible, but it was a spam reason.

3:33:05But instead, if everyone had just ignored Luke, which we should certainly have done in that case, then there wouldn't even be any addresses by the time 2017 had rolled around and the time came to do SegWit. There wouldn't be any addresses. There would only be the friend code.

3:33:23Vlad CosteaIt's an interesting thought experiment, but then again, you look at all the altcoins and they still have addresses.

3:33:30Paul SztorcYeah, it doesn't make any sense.

3:33:34Vlad CosteaJust all these nicer interfaces, sometimes where you can have like a PayNym or whatever.

3:33:40Paul SztorcMy guess is that they just prefer to take something off the shelf. They fork BDK or they fork like a fork glue wallet or whatever. So since Bitcoin is doing it, they play follow the leader. But notice that I think Ethereum, you know, for a while they had the whatever at ETH or whatever, the dot ETH thing. Other people are getting away from it slowly, but we should have just killed that. It was always a bad idea, right?

3:34:06Vlad CosteaLike why would you want everyone to be able to look into your transactions?

3:34:10Paul SztorcWell, why do I have to give you an address when you could just calculate it from my friend code? But because Luke didn't like that the first transaction that you have with someone is 20% more bytes. So he just, he said, this is spamming the chain.

3:34:33Vlad CosteaIt's like he is chasing this lifelong obsession and he hasn't moved on.

3:34:38Paul SztorcYes. It's like a Captain Ahab. It's a white whale. Did you read this? That must be like Moby-Dick.

3:34:45Vlad CosteaYeah, I know that one, come on.

3:34:48Paul SztorcProbably a lot of Americans don't these days. No one reads a book anymore, I think, but I was just kind of one. I always, I'm always very impressed whenever I meet anyone who English is not their first language. I always think, do they know any of like our idioms about like, you know, like as different as chalk and cheese and the low hanging fruit and all this other stuff, burning the midnight oil.

3:35:10Do they have any idea what we're talking about when we say these things?

3:35:16Vlad CosteaSo something about chalk and cheese?

3:35:18Paul SztorcAs different as chalk and cheese.

3:35:20That's like when two things are very different. Would they seem similar, but you say, no, no, no. Those things are as different as chalk and cheese. You might think that the SegWit soft fork is the same as the CTV soft fork, but they're as different as chalk and cheese. They're actually completely different because cheese is something delicious that you would eat and you would want to eat chalk. That would be awful. You can't really write with cheese.

3:35:42Yeah. There's lots of good ones.

3:35:43Vlad CosteaSort of sound the same. Chalk, cheese. They both have two syllables, like a rhyme.

3:35:47Paul SztorcThe rhyming is part of it, I think. Yeah.

3:35:52Vlad CosteaInteresting. Is there any derangement that you want to talk about? You want to go through the whole list?

3:35:58Paul SztorcNo, I don't think we should go through the whole list. That's too much. That's just, but I think let's add, if anyone is still the two people who are still watching the stream, if they, if they actually care about anyone in particular, or if they care about anything in particular, we should do.

3:36:14Vlad CosteaOh, someone's in the chat. If you have seen silent payments, which is a feature. Yeah.

3:36:20Paul SztorcYeah, it's very, very similar to 47. They're extremely similar to 47. I don't remember at this point the exact details, but I remember thinking to myself that I didn't think that silent payments actually is that much of an improvement over a bit 47 V3. The guy who did bit 47, he got tired of Luke's nonsense that he just put, he put his V3, like in a different repo, which is not as easy to find, but that's the one that samurai uses. I think pretty sure.

3:36:49Vlad CosteaI think it's also in sparrow, which is still a desktop wallet that's being maintained.

3:36:56Paul SztorcSparrow is an excellent wallet. And so you see, samurai has real users and sparrow has like an actual engineer who cares about things. So they put, they'll notice they put it in because it's a good idea. And because we don't want people to be having to keep track of these lists of addresses that are all just gobbledygook. And we should have long since moved on to, I'll get back to the silent payments thing in a second, but we should have long since moved on to having some kind of name coin sidechain thing where you just have the name, you own a cryptographic name on the blockchain and the name just resolves too.

3:37:31And then you wouldn't need like, that would be so good. And that would help so much because often, you know, like you hear these stories about like people being scammed all the time, but a lot of the scams are like, Oh, send this, send this money to Coinbase and this, and it's okay. Here's the address. This, this entire category of scam would not be possible if it was just like, Oh, everything is just goes to like inbound at coinbase.com or something, or if they have coinbase.bit and every single person knows, no, every single time that I send Bitcoin to Coinbase, I just, I all I have to do is like look up Coinbase in the, like the phone book, the Bitcoin, the blockchain phone book.

3:38:12And also it would authenticate the messages. So when you get a message from Coinbase, you know, the scammer spoofs a message and they say, Oh yeah, this is from Coinbase. We need you to reset your account, click this link. And it links you to like a fake Coinbase, but that wouldn't be possible because you would already know the key, the bit name thing, the name coin thing would already resolve. So every messaging that would, the money, the people, the place you send the money and the place you send messages to and from, and that authenticates the connection in your browser, all of this stuff, this could all be governed SSL, PGP, whatever.

3:38:52This could all be governed by this name coin thing. So we should, we should have been long past even the friend code, but we'd never had any sidechains because, you know, we just didn't for whatever, you know, numerous reasons, but.

3:39:07Vlad CosteaToo pessimistic, Paul. Like I feel like as time passes, you get proven wrong and it's only a matter of time until the miners will get hungry enough to start experimenting.

3:39:20Paul SztorcYeah. But back to silent payments. Now I can't exactly, I'm not sure if I 100% remember the details, but there's a fundamental limitation either way where either you have to consume some bytes. This was Luke's veto of the whole thing. You have to consume some bytes to notify someone like, cause the way it would work is either. So me and you have, we each have a friend code. And if we, once we learn each other's friend code, we're good. But the idea was, well this is kind of inconvenient.

3:39:52If I have to like message you first, then you have to message me. People thought, should it really work that way? How we have to connect each other. So the original idea was we'll use the blockchain to establish the connection. This also makes it easier to back up all the funds and everything. So there's this notification transaction that Luke was talking about, hating. And it was like, you send money here, but one of the things is a bare multi-sig, and it includes this code. It includes my code to you, so if I look up your friend code on the blockchain, I send you the notification.

3:40:25The notification contains my friend code, which you could have looked up. You could have gotten from me, but it establishes this permanent tunnel between us. Okay, so either you have to scan, you have a scanning requirement, or you have a notification requirement. And I think the notification requirement is just, that's better. Much more convenient for the user. I like anything where we're using the bytes in the blockchain for something better. I just think it's much easier, because the scanning requirement is that you have to scan the whole blockchain, searching for people who have tried to notify you.

3:41:04You have to search every transaction in the whole blockchain. And you have to XOR them, so you can't get them from someone else. It's now 800 gigabytes. People are not going to do that, so a lot of people aren't, so I think that's way worse. I'm pretty sure, I may have totally misremembered this, but I think Silent Payments tries to keep Luke happy. But yeah, Silent Payments is another example of this BIP47 class of thing. These are all good ideas that we should do, but we're not doing anything.

3:41:44Vlad CosteaI really like you, Paul. You really think outside the box. You're not taking anything for granted. You're like, why is this here? Why are we still using this? Is it the optimal user experience?

3:41:55Paul SztorcNo, we don't need everyone... We've just gotten used to it. We've had addresses for so long. We've lost touch. But the other thing is people don't use Bitcoin. It's just a picker. It's something they buy on Coinbase, or it's something they buy through the ETF or MSTR. So they aren't real Bitcoin users. If they were, they would be like, where the fuck are these addresses? They'd be like, this is annoying.

3:42:23Vlad CosteaYeah, you're right about this. From a UX perspective, it's so convenient and it can prevent some scams. But on the other hand, doesn't this diminish the privacy? Like when you're posting an address.

3:42:37No, they preserve the association? There's like a deniability?

3:42:40Paul SztorcNo, the cryptography is done very well. Of course, there's all kinds of things are theoretically possible. So for example, in the old v2, it was possible to learn that Paul established a connection to Vlad, but everything else, what he sent to him and how much and when and in which transactions, all of that would remain private. And so you can still, there are many variants on that. In the later variant, it was upgraded to if whichever one of us wants to initiate it, the internet knows that someone like if I wanted to donate money, if you wanted to collect donations for something and you post your code, it was later upgraded to the internet knows every time someone makes a new connection to that.

3:43:42But they don't know, did that person ever donate any money? Was that the last they ever saw of each other? Or did they? So the privacy is pretty good. People always complain about this. These are the things like, you know, compared to what compared to Yeah, just think of, you know, how many people have been scammed as a result of address being tricked into the wrong address substitution or some kind of scam.

3:44:13Vlad CosteaI think that for a while in Ethereum land, I think they were using metamask, which was basically showing only the first four digit and the last four digits. And I think a couple of times those addresses could be spoofed by some malicious attackers that replaced the address with something that they generated and looked similar, except that the stuff in the middle, which was not being shown unless you actually clicked the button to see the whole address. So they had no idea that they were getting scammed, right?

3:44:46Paul SztorcSo then people say compared to what is my is my answer to a lot of these questions, because Luke hated the 20%. But what he meant was, I don't like that someone somewhere is paying with their own money for block space, 20% larger transaction because they want to. He didn't say, Oh, this isn't good. Because what it should instead do is, like, have the user should scan every single transaction in the whole history and XOR or something so that they can, like, you know, it's like, these people are, we made a mistake by policing the contents of the blockchain every time we make every time we police the contents of the blockchain, we make a mistake anyway.

3:45:31So this is why the Ordinals thing is super wrong, is the the hate. And why Luke is completely wrong about all this about about how like, people are also wrong to meet him halfway when they say, Well, I agree with you that spam is bad, but there's nothing we can do about it. They should just say anyone buying L1 bytes with their own money is doing the good thing.

3:45:52But yeah, it's so I know we've gone for a pretty long time. Do you think we should?

3:45:59Vlad CosteaIt's almost four hours. I just want to thank you, Paul, for your time. Also want to say that I'm sorry for being late. And during Christmas and the New Year, I was sick and I was in bed, I got this giga flu, which was some of the worst I've ever had ever. Like I could have like a slow and I don't want to get there. But I could basically die and not feel any pain in that condition. But I was listening to Bitcoin Uncensored the whole time from the LayerTwo Labs Twitter page. And I came across that.

3:46:34Yeah, I was not looking at the graphic that was being shown. I didn't care too much about that. I was just listening in the background to the conversation.

3:46:44Paul SztorcBitcoin Uncensored is so good. It's ahead of its time.

3:46:49Vlad CosteaAnd you realize at the same time that nothing much has changed since then, maybe just the names, but everything else is sort of the same. But what I want to say is that during the episode with Bruce Fenton, and fluffy pony and David Bailey, you basically jumped in towards the end. And you sat down with them in the toilet. I did not watch it because there is no video on it, but I did hear the conversation.

3:47:16Paul SztorcTNABC or this is Satoshi Roundtable two. So she's Round table.

3:47:20Vlad CosteaYeah.

3:47:20Paul SztorcNo, I don't think that one is that because there's one at TNABC, they literally sat, they literally snuck in a table and chairs and a tablecloth into the men's bathroom. And they did the podcast from the men's bathroom. But then, there were other times. I don't think, not sure that I think with Bruce Fenton being there, I think it was probably Satoshi Roundtable two.

3:47:47Vlad CosteaYeah, it was that one. So maybe I'm mixing the information.

3:47:50Paul SztorcI think they follow. Okay. What they did was in that one, they followed Michael Terpin around, I think, but then he went to the bathroom and they're like, we can't follow him. So I think that's what, I think that's where they started to just make a joke about that it was based like on nothing, but you know.

3:48:09Vlad CosteaBut you don't know where this is going, because...

3:48:12Paul SztorcI remember being blackout drunk at that.

3:48:14Vlad CosteaYes, you were. You said you had some Long Island.

3:48:17Paul SztorcIt was a rough, it was a rough event because tensions were high about the block size war and everyone wanted to resolve it. And I just thought, well, this isn't working at all. So I had a great time. I had so much fun.

3:48:39Vlad CosteaYou got the drinks, but anyway, I think it was Junseth who told you that you should take your shirt off and you mentioned that you have a six pack, but you're not going to do it. And I was going to ask you, do you want to take your shirt off during the show towards the end?

3:48:55Paul SztorcNo, I don't know. Do I still have a six pack? I don't know.

3:48:59Vlad CosteaMaybe it's been like 10 years.

3:49:03Paul SztorcI'm jealous of the telegram founder. You know, what's the secret?

3:49:11Oh, yeah. He's like, he's got basically something, right?

3:49:19Vlad CosteaProbably a lot of biohacking or steroids, but he has like a hundred kids. He's living a very unusual life.

3:49:32Anyway, that pitch got declined. Thank you very much, Paul, for being here. I also want to put something on the screen because it was on the telegram channel for drivechain talk. So someone made this, the two of us with those faces. I put this, it's on the live stream screen. You can check it out. I just want to give them credit for doing this because they put some time and effort and it's like fan art. You know, someone actually made this and they were upset when I did not use this for the official graphics when we started.

3:50:07I want to acknowledge the effort nonetheless. It's very cool. And what else? Try the software. Go to layertwolabs.com slash download. It can be a very fun weekend project just to connect with people and see what the future of Bitcoin can look like.

3:50:25Paul SztorcOkay, great. Yes. And thanks as always. Thank you for reading my article and I'm glad that you liked it. I'm curious about this. How did you find the article? Because you must have just like been bored and like just like clicked into the site or something.

3:50:43Vlad CosteaNo, I was on the Drivechain Talk Telegram chat and someone posted this and I just clicked it and I was like, my God, how did I miss this?

3:50:52Paul SztorcYeah, I'm like, how do people find you anyway? Because now you can't find anything good. Everything's terrible now. And the Twitter algorithm is just like ruining everything. But I think it's getting better though. It was hopeless before. It would just give you this political junk. But I think it is getting better. But yeah, like where do you find Bitcoin news? There's like Delving Bitcoin. But even that I don't like.

3:51:18Vlad CosteaI went back to Bitcoin Talk, believe it or not. I'm using Bitcoin Talk again. I gotta try that. I'm just chilling my podcast and I searched through the threads and I realized there's a lot of newbies who ask newbie questions and it's not very interesting. Maybe I should try to listen to what's it called? The Optech podcast.

3:51:41Paul SztorcYeah, but you see, even all that is just like about nothing.

3:51:45Vlad CosteaBecause there is nothing much happening and it's kind of painful. It's also funny with Bitcoin Core. They launched a new version of it. They went from 29 to 30. There are no new features, but there are new bugs, which are going to be new features.

3:52:02Paul SztorcThey refactored. Yeah. They have, you know how many unit tests they have? They added more. No, I'm just kidding. I don't even know if they have or not. Because it's not even worth it to look into. I think it's not a good sign.

3:52:24People have given up on progress, unfortunately. It's funny, on one hand there's a totally delusional optimism, but on the other hand there's actually, beneath the surface, I think the whole thing is paralyzed by pessimism. If you compare it to what it was like in 2014, wherever it was taken for granted, every altcoin feature will be bolted into Bitcoin because it's all open source. Anything open source ever invented, we'll just keep adding all this stuff. The Bitcoin will be this super cool piece of software. Eventually we'll get rid of addresses.

3:52:54Eventually we'll have stuff that will be even easier to scale. There will be total privacy. There will be all these features. There will be smart contracts. There will be whatever. There will be everything. So that was all taken for granted. We're going to get more and more people to adopt Bitcoin. You're going to be able to go to the store. You're going to be able to go to Microsoft or GameStop or whatever. You're going to be able to buy stuff with Bitcoin and you'll have the little QR code.

3:53:17But now there is, paradoxically, more optimism but also less. There's more in the very narrow fake channels of the ETF or nation-state adoption. I don't know.

3:53:36Vlad CosteaThere's a lot of money in that and I still don't get it. What's the point? It defeats the purpose. But people throw money at it. There are so many investors.

3:53:47Paul SztorcYou will own no Bitcoin but your government will. It's like, wait a minute. Okay, well, good luck with that. The government is getting all the sovereignty. Like, wait a minute, that was not the... But I think any adoption is good adoption. Not necessarily because we have adopted some people who say adoption is bad. And now they're setting the whole project back, I think. So we didn't actually want to collect certain people. We want everyone to at least care about the project of adoption. So if we get some people into Bitcoin who sabotaged that, then it was actually bad to have gotten them in the first place.

3:54:36Vlad CosteaThere are lots of bad ideas floating around and somehow they're getting funded. Maybe one day we're going to rationalize the whole thing and just go back to square one and keep building. Until then, I just want to say that I'm working on something which concerns the ideology of Bitcoin post-maximalism and I'm trying to explain how that works. And I know that you wrote an article about it because you're always like a decade ahead of the rest of us. You wrote a pretty good article about it from 2018 and I found it.

3:55:11And I guess your premise was different. You basically assumed that even after Bitcoin wins, there's still going to be a lot of infighting and people will just have this race to the bottom where they still have to escape the dogma.

3:55:27Paul SztorcWell, I think, yeah, at that time, in 2018, I had already noticed that there was a lot of complacency. People would just say, because Bitcoin maximalism was a very good idea, if you compare it to when Litecoin is first created, it's just a copy-paste of Bitcoin. So all this work went into creating Bitcoin, but then copy paste and then a million copy-paste, Feathercoin, whatever. And then you have these bad projects like Auroracoin, whatever, NXT, they weren't very good. So maximalism was like, just ignore all that stuff and focus on Bitcoin.

3:56:05But even as early as 2018, then I noticed that this was just coming around to the idea of just, well, Bitcoin's perfect, so we don't need to do anything anymore. And so it was like, who cares about the users? And it was also, a lot of it was like very mean-spirited, like the way people were dealing with the large blockers. Like you were talking about the denial of service attack that took out like a power grid or something in the Bitcoin cash era or the SegWit, the block size signaling era.

3:56:43And everyone was just like so mean. And you could tell that this was not about doing what's best for Bitcoin. This was just about scoring points and doing virtue signaling, and it had all just become like a high school drama or whatever. So you could tell even that then it would all become political and now we're still paying for it. Eight years later, we have the politics has increased and the meritocracy has decreased.

3:57:18Vlad CosteaThat's a good point. I remember Peter Todd making this argument that it's cheaper to scale computation than to scale human politics. And this was in the context of drivechains. And I think this was back in 2022. We actually watched that whole debate going on in Riga and we commented on it. But the point that I'm trying to present is that Bitcoin is mostly about game theory and you can't really deal with game theory without actually interacting with politics. And we haven't figured out a way to solve the double spending problem without game theory and only with cryptography and computer science. Not a centralized degree.

3:58:05Paul SztorcYes, I would, I would agree. And yeah, that's just related to Peter being very confused about, you know, it's kind of laughable. He's confused about extremely basic things, but he doesn't understand, he thinks that drivechain is an L1 block size increase and he's flatly wrong about that. But he is wrong about all kinds of things. You can look at my reply. He did his piece of writing and I went through and it's like every paragraph has mistakes that are just bizarre. And so, I don't know. I think he just, like... but like, he did... I don't think it's clear that he has never... So, as he said when we talked about that, he never visited the site because he didn't know.

3:58:50He said there's no software for this, even though the software was two and a half years old at that time. And it was right at the top of drivechain.info, like download. So he just like, he doesn't know, like he just heard something about drivechain once and he just like, he wrote down what he thinks it is. And then he's, so yeah, no, it's unfortunate that that is itself like a derangement of like, that this is the kind of criticism that people get. It's something where the critic has never visited the site once and they have no idea what's on like the first three words.

3:59:28And yeah, like, yeah, it's hard to get worse than that. This is as low as it gets.

3:59:34Vlad CosteaOkay, Paul, I selfishly, I can't even talk anymore. I selfishly dragged the conversation to past the four hour mark. All right, thank you very much, everyone listening.

3:59:44Paul SztorcWhat a great time it was. Follow me on Twitter, now called X. Truthcoin, t-r-u-t-h-c-o-i-n, Telegram, t.me slash DC Insiders, layertwolabs.com, drivechain.info, truthcoin.info, bitcoinhivemind.com. I got all kinds of sites. I got all kinds of info. I got all kinds of great stuff. Okay, thanks very much. Until next time, everyone. Bye, Vlad.

4:00:17Vlad CosteaSee you later. Bye, people and Paul. Bye.