Bankless - BitVM: The Holy Grail for Bitcoin? | Creator Robin Linus

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Today on the show, we’re exploring the frontier of ZK Rollups on Bitcoin!  The Bitcoin L2 landscape is standing on the shoulders of this technical implementation called BitVM. We brought Robin Linus, one of the author’s of the BitVM White Paper, to not only dive into how BitVM got started, but more importantly, what it means for the future of Bitcoin. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-robin-linus-interview  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/14?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance    🏠 CASA | SECURE YOUR GENERATIONAL WEALTH https://bankless.cc/Casa   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🌐 TRANSPORTER | CROSS CHAINS WITH CONFIDENCE https://transporter.io/  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:03 Who is Robin Linus? 10:20 Why Bitcoin? 16:19 Bitcoin Needs to Scale 22:15 BitVM Eureka Moment 24:31 The State of BitVM 27:19 BitVM vs Ethereum Rollups 33:45 How Does BitVM Work? 46:07 BitVM Critiques 55:07 The Bitcoin L2 Space 59:33 The BitVM Endgame 1:03:07 The Future of Bitcoin 1:07:09 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Robin Linus https://x.com/robin_linus   Robin Linus Website https://robinlinus.com/   BitVM https://bitvm.org/   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

In general, there is that thing in the crypto industry that when there is a hot topic, there is hype. And when there is hype, then there is easy money. Like, people want to invest. People think there is that opportunity to, like, make a quick 100x or something. And then there are always projects who are exploiting that, who are selling stupid ideas to pre-e investors. Welcome to Bakelis, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance that today on the show, we are exploring the frontier of ZK roll-ups on Bitcoin through the lens of the BitVM. You might be familiar with the Bitcoin layer two landscape.

This has been a thing that has been very hyped in development in the Bitcoin world over the last year or so. All of that technical innovation is standing on the shoulders of this technical implementation called the BitVM, which promises to enable true, uncompromise. trustless Bitcoin layer two's. We are bringing one of the authors of the BitVM white paper, Robin Linus on the show today to talk about how he got into the world of building the bit VM and exactly how it works and what it strictly enables under the hood and how it is the same or also different from the Ethereum roll-ups that you may be familiar with.

This at least to me, I don't know, David, if you agree, is one of the most exciting projects I've ever heard of on Bitcoin because it promises to create a just a ton of innovation and scale on top, including kind of a robust roll-up type ecosystem and all sorts of things can be built on top of BitVM to sort of scale this. So some have described this to us as the holy grail for Bitcoin scalability. So it's very exciting to hear Robin describe that here today. Guys, we'll get right to the episode with Robin Linus about BitVM. but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible,

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a Bitcoin developer and one of the primary authors of the BitVM white paper. BitVM is a proposal that aims to bring Turing complete smart contracts to Bitcoin, similar to those that we would find on a dedicated smart contract chain. Robin, welcome to Bankless. Hi, thanks for having me. So, Robin, I know you primarily as the BitVM guy. So I'd actually like to get to know you a little bit more. What's your background with Bitcoin?

How did you come to become working on the BitVM? Just tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, together with my co-founder Lucas, we founded a nonprofit company called ZeroSync. And the goal of Zero Sync was just broadly to apply zero knowledge proofs to Bitcoin. Because, yeah, obviously zero knowledge proofs the future. And we kind of saw a lack in Bitcoin. Like nobody was really applying them. And yeah, that's why we founded that non-profit company.

And we started out building a chain state proof, which is essentially a way to compress the chain and sync faster so that you essentially can sync on a phone or something. And yeah, while playing with these zero knowledge proofs, it became apparent that it would be awesome to have some kind of ZKP verify on the main layer as well. But back then Bitcoin was like trending towards ossification a lot. Like Jeremy, Jeremy Rubin just tried to activate CTV and while he failed with that. And the sentiment in the entire community was pretty much against any kinds of thoughts back then. And yeah, so then the idea came up if there is some way to hack a ZKP verifier into Bitcoin as it is. Because, yeah, Bitcoin has that scripting language, which is very limited.

But hardly anyone can tell what it can do and what it cannot do. And so it was a very interesting research quest. and what we can do with it. And can we build a ZKP verifier with that? And yeah, for the better part of 2023, me and a couple of friends just bounce off ideas of each other, what could be possible. We research different ZKP schemes.

And yeah, it seemed like nothing really works because there is that script size limit. You can have at most four megabytes of script because the block size is four megabytes. or your script can be at most for megabytes. And that sounds a lot, but it's actually very little because script is so limited. For example, there is no multiplication. Like the most simple thing, multiplying two numbers is not possible natively in Bitcoin script.

What you can do, though, is stuff like addition. And then when you can do addition, you can compose multiplication, but then you need a lot of opcodes. And then the script size blows up very quickly. And yeah, so we figured out that it's not really possible to just, build a ZKP Verify directly in script. And then I thought it's just not possible. But two of my friends, namely Super TestNet, a couple other guys, we formed a group, a Telegram group, and they keep pushing.

They were totally convinced that there must be some way to implement a ZKP verify and Bitcoin script. And I thought actually it's nuts, but I liked reading what they were saying. And then at some point, somebody came into the group who talked about optimistic verification. The MET proposal, maybe a third of that. Probably Ethereum people are not that familiar with it. It's Merkelize all the things it's called. And when I dug more deeply into that, it became apparent that something like that should be possible in Bitcoin script as it is right now.

And then I started playing around. and then I built like a first version that was very limited and didn't really solve the problem. But after a week or two, it just suddenly became obvious how to do it. And then Super TestNet started building prototypes. And he actually started telling everyone about it and everybody got excited.

So I just wrote very quickly a white paper and pumped it out. And yeah, suddenly BitVM was a thing. Where would you say you get your like engineering chops from? Were you a cryptographer by trade before discovering crypto, or did you learn cryptography through Bitcoin? Like, where are some of your technical competency come from? Yeah, I studied computer science. I was always very interested in math as well.

But, like, I started out more like building apps, web apps, and more like on the user interface side of things. I also like design a lot. and when I started to work on Bitcoin, it became obvious that it doesn't really scale. It doesn't really work as money because it's just too expensive and too clunky. And the more I tried to solve that, the more I had to think about cryptography. And then I really learned how much I love it actually. And then I started absorbing everything I could learn about it and started talking to all this great Bitcoin engineers on IRC, like Peter Veller and so on, Andrew Polstra,

and, yeah, I started learning more and more about it. And then at some point, I decided that I really want to make that my career. Robin, there's many different systems. You could be applying your career and your talents to scaling. Most people who are in Bitcoin are passionate about Bitcoin in particular. So we've talked about kind of like how you got here. But we asked the question of why are you here? Why is it even important to scale Bitcoin?

I'm in it for the money. But what I mean by that is I actually care a lot about the design of money. I think it's the most fundamental system of society. And I see in particular Western societies on a decline. I see it here in Germany. I see it in the U.S. as well. just look at the president candidates like both of them are pretty nuts and I think this kind of shows that our societies are not in a very healthy state and on the other hand I see countries like China rising where they don't care about human rights at all they think it's an inefficiency that we should get rid of and that concerns me a lot and I think most of these issues are rooted in the monetary system I think fiat money is a scam I think it's a form of cancer to society. I think most people suffer from it, even though not consciously, even though they don't

notice that it's that. Maybe now they notice more after like this huge inflation in the recent years. But in general, I think most people are getting robbed of their time. I see it also very clearly here in Germany. When I look at the buildings that are like 150 years old, they're very beautiful, very like a lot of love to pay to the details. They are very high quality. They are still sending today. And if I compare to the things that we built today, I see, well, there's a huge difference. It's something changed. And I think the difference is very deeply rooted in hard money.

I think hard money is much more healthy for society because when there is hard money, everybody has an incentive to serve the market as best as possible. Whereas in the field money system, everybody has an incentive to get as close as possible to the money printer. And that's, yeah, essentially destroys all the healthy incentives and creates lots of disincentives that are leading to unhealthy societies. And I think Bitcoin is the best shot to fix that, even though it's a huge dream that is not that realistic maybe. But I think it's worth trying. I love the answer of being in it for the money because of the actual properties of money. But also I think part of your answer, Robin, is that you're in it to scale the money.

Like, that's what you want to do. But you do that via technical matters. So like there also is no meaningful differentiation between being in it for the money, in it for the tech. It's all kind of the same thing. I'm wondering if you kind of can help square something. The idea that hard money is going to fix a lot of society's problems, I think, is a pretty interesting thing about crypto that brings a lot of people into the world of Bitcoin. But you've also just told us a story of the difficulty of actually using Bitcoin technology to scale, which is why you're working on the BitVM. Do you have any perspectives about that particular aspect of Bitcoin? Very technically difficult to work with, but very strong monetary properties. So how do you think about Bitcoin's

technology as its ability to scale itself? Like you're running into roadblocks with the BitVe We'll talk about where the BitVM is in its development. But technically constraining, correct? But yet nonetheless, very strong money. But as a developer on Bitcoin, people generally feel not empowered to be able to do technical scaling. How do you kind of square these two things? Yeah, well, of course you're right. On the other hand, I think it is Bitcoin's most distinguishable feature that it is that hard to

change. Like it's really, there is no centralized control. There is no foundation that runs it or so. It is, I think, in my eyes, it's a good thing that it is that rigid and solid. But on the other hand, yeah, it can be draining when things are going that slow. Of course, like, in particular, in my situation where I was that excited about ZKPs, And then I see, like, in the Alcorn world, essentially everything you want, you have it immediately on the base layer because Vittalik wakes up in the morning, makes a hard fork. So it's kind of like the perspective from the Bitcoin world. And of course, like for research, that is much nicer. And we have seen this like Cambrian explosion of proof systems in the Alcorn world.

We haven't seen that on Bitcoin really. And Bitcoin could not fund it. And the Bitcoin community was not that strong in that regard. On the other hand, I think now that it has been shown without, like, beyond any reasonable doubt that this is the way forward, like that we need proof systems. The Bitcoin community has accepted that. And now we are looking for ways to get them into Bitcoin as well. And, yeah, BitVM is one approach. Of course, it's clunky.

It's a hack. It's not a nice straightforward way as we see it in Ethereum or something, but it's like really quite hacky way. But it already shifted the overtone window a lot. And I think it's just a matter of time. And I think Bitcoin is already so far ahead. Like the brand is already so strong that it doesn't really matter if it takes two years more.

It's totally fine. Robin, I think there might be some in Bitcoin circles that are still. still unconvinced that we actually need to scale in the way that you're talking about. So I remember the Bitcoin standard books, Safedine, Amuse, right? It was talking about it's fine. Like the, you know, the five to ten transactions per second are kind of fine. You'll have like big whales. You have banks kind of like do these things.

But it's sort of the Bitcoin is a settlement network. And like we don't really need that much scale. There could be just like big whales and kind of like super users who actually settle things on chain. And then you have another camp that has said before, like, hey, lightning is a good approach for most scalability. And yet there's this kind of, at least David and I have sort of observed this new tribe of bitcoins who are kind of like the builders who are very excited about these new proof type methods and applying, you know, ZK and layer two's to the, to the scalability challenges here. Not everyone's on board with like the need to scale trustless,

you know, transactions on Bitcoin. What would you say to that crowd? Like, what is like why scale in general? Like why can't we just have your Bitcoin as it is and kind of like scale and just like side chains or lightning network? Like why even need ZK proofs and BitVM Tech? Yeah. I think the camps are more like Bitcoin as an asset and Bitcoin as a currency. And some people think Bitcoin as an asset is fine and it should be an asset and that's it.

And we shouldn't care too much about currency. I think Michael Saylor is actually. the most prominent example of the asset camp. And I totally disagree with that. I think it would be an absolute failure. Like, if it would be clear that Bitcoin is just an asset, I would quit today. I think that's totally not inspiring to work on. I think we need better money.

And that's why I'm in it. And, well, my personal perspective is that I don't want to convince me. them at all. That's why I build BitVM. It's permissionless. Like I can just build on Bitcoin. I don't have to ask anyone for permission. I could say I can like it or he can dislike it, but it doesn't really matter at all. If it catches on, it catches on and he cannot stop it. And I think that's fine. I kind of wonder why people like Safety, like Safety Namu's, the author of the Bitcoin Center, why he's talking about these things. Because his book sounds more like if he would want us to use hard money and not just Bitcoin as an asset.

So it doesn't really make sense to me that he's having this position. But yeah, as I said, like it doesn't really matter at the end because it's a permission to system and we can build on it. And what we are doing with BitVM shows that there are ways to do it without asking others or like without finding consensus among the entire community. It's a good explanation, good way to kind of delineate the camps. There's those that believe that Bitcoin should just be an asset, or that's kind of what they're most interested in, those that believe it should be an asset and a currency. I think you fall into that camp.

There was another camp that felt that way, too, back in 2017, and they forked off and they did the Bitcoin cash type thing. It was departure in terms of how they thought about Bitcoin the asset, but also their philosophy for how to actually scale this. And I'm guessing you're not sort of in the big block philosophy because you've stayed with Bitcoin and you're trying to scale the network as is with these four megabyte blocks and, you know, do it via ZK proofs. But talk about that.

Why, like, why didn't you go fork off and join the Bitcoin cash crew who is also talking about like Bitcoin should be, you know, a currency, a means of payment and not just an asset? Why have you stayed with Bitcoin up until this point in time? Well, I think there is only one Bitcoin. And I'm not that set on the block size as it is right now. I would be open to discuss block size increases. I totally see the counter arguments. I totally think that most people should be able to run full nodes and sink within a reasonable amount of time.

And I think that is a very fundamental property. of Bitcoin and we should not relax that. We should not harm that. But on the other hand, computers are improving a lot. Internet connectivity is improving drastically. And over time, we can definitely increase the block size safely, I think. If we can do it right now, if we should do it in a couple of years, that's open for debate.

But in general, I don't think it's like a bad idea in general. I think it is definitely worth talking about that. And even back then, people like Adam Beck said that it makes sense to like double the block size in, I don't know, five year intervals or something like that. And I don't like, I think there is kind of like a trauma trauma in the Bitcoin community because of that block size was that it became like kind of a stigma to even talk about it and to mention it at all. And I kind of understand where this is coming from, but I feel like the new generation of Bitcoin developers, like me or like the people that I hang out with, they are way more open to these ideas.

And I think it would be fine to increase the block size over time. I'd like to hop back into the BitVM conversation. When you were explaining it in your background and the progress that you've made so far. There was a eureka moment of sorts, I think, with the optimistic proving. Can we walk us through that moment? Like, what was that eureka moment?

Keeping in mind that Ryan and I and our audience aren't that technical, and the places that we are technical are usually in the Ethereum context. So, like, explaining like we're dumb, can you walk us through the eureka moment of the BVM that you had? Yeah, I think the eureka moment was when I realized that,

you can introduce stateful scripts by using Lempot signatures. In Ethereum, statefulness is like totally baked into the system. It's like the most normal thing to have like a contract that sets some variable to some value. And then like the next person who calls the contract has the same value for that variable. That is something very basic that is totally fundamental to any. any advanced smart contracting language. And that is the thing that just was nonexistent in Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, every script is completely stateless.

And the execution of one script is completely independent of the execution of another script that is following. And that was kind of like the fundamental hurdle that we had to overcome. And yeah, the key idea was that we can use Lamport signatures to do that. And Lemport Signatures is a very simple signature scheme that is just based on hash functions. And we do have hash functions in Bitcoin script. And Lamport signatures are so simple that we can express them at Bitcoin Script. And that was known already for quite some time.

But nobody has thought about how to use it for smart contracts. That was my Eureka moment when I discovered that we can use these kinds of signatures to transport state from one script to another. So that the execution of one script depends on the execution of another script. And that was essentially the key mechanism that enabled everything else. And enabling everything else goes to actually allowing the Bitcoin blockchain to verify a proof. And if we can get the Bitcoin blockchain to verify a proof, then we unlock a world of possibilities. Exactly. For what it's worth, in the Ethereum land, there's all.

also on the roadmap, the idea of enshrining a ZK circuit into the functionality of the layer one, so that whatever ZK circuit that we decide fits inside of the actual layer one protocol, it can do its job of securing, proving layer twos amongst other things. And this is the same conversation in the Bitcoin landscape. It's just the technical properties of the layer one is different. And so it's an engineering challenge to be able to get Bitcoin to verify a proof, which unlocks that world of possibility. Where would you say is the BVM in its development?

Are we still in the research phase, still trying to do some solving of some hard problems? Are we in the engineering phase? How would you say, where is the BIVM on its completeness? We are very much in the engineering phase. We did a lot of research. January and February, I was in Stanford, working with a group of David Shea,

and we improved the original design. a lot and made the bridge design much more simple and also the verification permissionless so that everybody can challenge incorrect statements. And I think we have a very solid foundation now. The research is pretty advanced. And we started implementing it already a couple months ago already. and yeah we do have a complete cross-16 verifier so like a snark verifier that we implemented in Bitcoin script yeah now we have to kind of like massage it into the BitVM2 and yeah that is one that's the last

that's the final step to make it work and I think within the next two months like hopefully by the end of August we will have at least a test-end version running of BitVM2. And hopefully by the end of the year, we will have a reckless mainnet. So it's mostly an engineering thing right now. And it's relatively straightforward. So there's no huge unknowns that we don't know how to solve or so. Okay.

So there's no big hurdle to get across. It's really just about, like, putting in the work, typing the code into the system, making sure the system works. maybe there's unknowns unknowns, but as far as like it's known, you feel confident that this is a workable solution and it's just a matter of building it. Yeah. Robin, just some maybe dumb questions really quick. So will BitVM require a hard, like any sort of fork, softwork, I should say, of a Bitcoin

or any additional OP codes? So, you know, like Eric Walls talked about OPECAT, that kind of thing. Will it require those upgrades? No. That's the entire sales point. of BitVM essentially that it works without a soft fork. Of course, there are softforks that make it more efficient, and it can solve a couple things about the clunkiness,

but the system works without any soft fork. Because that's very cool, because listeners may have seen recent news that the Starkware ecosystem is going to support their ZK roll-up type environments in Bitcoin, but in order to do that, they need OPCAT, which is new op code to be deployed to Bitcoin, and there's no ETA for when that would actually be deployed. BivVM, in contrast, does not require that.

Can you go through for maybe some of the people who are familiar with how roll-ups work in Ethereum? And I don't know to what extent you're like, you, I'm sure you know all of this of how it works in kind of Ethereum, but what is the analog? Is this sort of like an optimistic role? up in Ethereum where there's some sort of like, you know, fraud-proof type game and you can, you can kind of launch an entire, say, virtual machine chain on top of BitVM that ultimately gets settled down via this fraud-proof mechanism to the Bitcoin settlement network and establish your kind of like trustless settlement guarantees that way. Like, how similar is this to what we

might think of like optimism or arbitram, which are Ethereum-based optimistic roll-ups. You know, what are the similarities and differences here? In general, what we are trying to mimic is just a regular roll-up, but that is not really possible. So we are doing like a couple workarounds to get there. And one thing that makes it way more efficient is that optimistic approach. So we are essentially combining like an optimistic roll-up with a snark. And that is because that verifying

the snark on chain is very expensive. It costs roughly like the size of a block of script that you have to put on chain. And of course we don't want to do that in practice. So what we do is that we have just like one round of

optimistic, like this optimistic challenge response game where the operator who is like the the party who runs the bridge. They essentially, they make a claim. They claim, hey, I witnessed a valid pegout. And now I am going to take money out of the bridge.

And everybody can see if that claim is correct or if it's incorrect, just from looking at the chain to see, like, if there is the correct data in the chain. And if it's incorrect, then everybody can challenge them. They can just say, hey, okay, I don't believe you. Let's go down the unhappy path. and let's execute the snark and prove to me that you're actually right, which should be impossible if the person is lying, if the operator is lying. Yeah, that makes it way more efficient in practice,

because as long as the operator is not lying, which should be always the case because he's heavily disincentivized, because if he is caught lying, then he will lose a lot of money. So in practice, it will be just he makes a statement, a correct statement, and then that's it. Nobody challenges it and it looks like a regular transaction on the main chain. And only in case there is like an operator going bonkers and totally wants to lose his money, then they make an incorrect claim and then you can punish them for making that incorrect claim.

And then you have to execute all these huge scripts. But that's not that bad because always the lying party will pay for the script. So if the operator is lying, he will essentially pay for his own trial. And yeah, so the hope is that similar to an arbitrum, the incentives are just aligned in a way that in practice, you never have to go down the unhappy path. And who are these operators? Is this like a permission set of operators or can it be permissionless? Yeah, that is probably the biggest drawback in comparison. to like a standard roll-up.

In BitVM, you need these operators. And that is because, yeah, you don't really have like that EVM that just can run contracts. You have to have a party that runs the contract. And that's why we have to have like a set of operators, for example, 100 operators that are determined during setup. and they will be responsible for running the bridge. They are like semi-trusted. They are trusted, like there's the trust assumption that one of them is honest and life.

And as long as one of them is honest in life, everybody will always get their money and the bridge will be safe. Even if they're all dishonest, they cannot steal from the bridge because everybody can challenge them. And there will be somebody who has an incentive to challenge them. like some user or an exchange or whoever has like an incentive that the bridge doesn't break. So even if all the operators are dishonest, they cannot steal, but they can hold the system. Yeah. And that is the main issue. But not even the game theory works out for them to collude to, let's say they could all collude

and then bribe the people or like blackmail the users to essentially saying, we will stop the system until you give us that amount of money. So even that doesn't really work out game theoretic, from a game theoretic perspective, because if one of them defects, then everybody gets their money. So it's quite a safe assumption, but of course, it would be way better if we could get rid of that. Okay. I think people are getting the picture of this, if you're coming from kind of an Ethereum vantage point of, it sounds very similar to an optimistic roll-up with some of those constraints.

Just to be clear, with BitVM, like the project itself, are you launching a chain? Or are you just like kind of developing the protocol and leaving others to kind of like develop various, you know, chains, roll-up chains on top? What's the role of BitVM? Are you guys doing a full chain? Well, in general, BitVM is a generic bridge that will work for all kinds of roll-ups and side chains and all kinds of side systems. And we totally want others to build on top of things. it. We want to build an open system and we think the more people are using our implementation, the easier or the faster we can heart our implementation and make it very solid. But I'm

personally not that interested in roll-ups. I am more interested in another protocol that I'm working on with some people from Blockstream research. The working title is ZKK coins. and the idea behind that is, well, it's a client-side validation protocol that is similar to RGB or taproot assets, maybe a third of that. Lightning Labs is implementing it. And it's essentially taproot assets on steroids because you can improve taproot assets substantially by combining them with snugs. And that, in the end, it breaks down. it can improve the base layer throughput by roughly 10 to 20x and it gives us perfect privacy.

And that's what I'm most excited about. Also, this is compatible with the lightning network. And yeah, that would essentially help us to increase the on-chain throughput a lot. And also what's also interesting is like the, it makes it much cheaper to verify these transactions. So a block full of the K-K coins transaction would be, way easier to verify for full notes than a block full of Bitcoin transactions. So you decrease the burden of verification on the main net. And yeah, that would be another argument for increasing the block size.

And I think like this is the way to scale blockchains in the long run. Because, yeah, it essentially reduces the blockchain to its main function, which is creating an immutable ordering of commitments to prevent. spending. Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about, and I'm working on that with Jonas Nick and Liam Egan from Bloxstream Research. Actually, Liam, he's not at Blockstream anymore. He's now at AltenLeves. ZKKKK coins sounds like a very pure scaling of just the monetary properties of Bitcoin. So it very much aligns with like the in it for the money. That makes the upgrades the tech

of the money. So in the Ethereum perspective, I'm wondering if you can kind of like tell us what a bridge and a layer two is EK layer two using BPM would look like from the perspective of the Bitcoin layer one. If you look at the Ethereum layer one and you want to get your assets onto an Ethereum layer two, you send over your ETH or your stable coins into a deposit contract, into a bridge contract. And then you can look at the state that that bridge contract holds and all of that stuff, all those tokens, NFTs, whatever, are on the layer two, like flying around on that layer two. But you can kind of look at the bridge and see what's actually on that layer two. Is that how it works with a BitVM?

Is there a notion of a bridge contract? Like, what does it look like from the perspective of the layer one? Yeah, it's pretty much the same, just that the bridge contract is just a multisic, like an N-of-N multisic, where all these operators, they co-sign it. Not really the operators. There are these 100 operators, and then there's during the setup, there's a setup ceremony where you have roughly 1,000 people who co-signed the setup. And there's also the assumption that one of them has to be honest and delete their key. And if they are honest and delete their key, then the bridge is safe.

If they would all collude all these thousand people, then they could steal the money. But, yeah, essentially, you are sending your money to a thousand of thousand, Artisic. That's how you pack in. And it looks very simple on the on the chain. Like it's indistinguishable from from a regular transaction. And for the operator set for a particular bit VM layer two, that gets initialized at the genesis of that particular layer two. Can that how does how does someone become an operator?

And can that operator set change over time or is it locked in at Genesis? You can change it over time. You could run this setup roughly like once or twice per year or something. The idea is really that the bridge will be relatively slow and clunky, which is fine because you can just do cross-chain swaps. Like you can just swap from one chain to another and liquidity providers will probably do that because there is a business for doing that. And most people will never use the bridge themselves. It will be just huge liquidity providers who peg in like, I don't know, 10 Bitcoin or something like that. And then it will just stay in the system.

And only if the system really, if nobody wants to use the system anymore, then it becomes relevant to get the money back. But more or less, the bridge is just a guarantee that the wrapped BTC or however you want to call it, that they do have a real value and that you can always get them back if you really wanted to. but most of the time they will be more useful in the side system, and then they will just stay in the side system until the side system dies off. What does the actual exiting process look like, depending on what kind of roll-up is we're talking about on Ethereum. Optimistic roll-ups take seven days, but I don't think we're talking about that. We're talking about a ZK roll-up.

What does it look like to exit the system? How does that work technically? That's a good question. Yeah, first step is that let's call him Bob. Bob packs out, and Bob just burns. his coins by sending them to a particular address that is somehow defined by the system, some unspendable address, which essentially burns the coins. And it has to be such that everybody can witness that.

And then the operator, they have to front that capital for that particular packout. And the operator just sends their own money to Bob. Let's say Bob packed out 10 BTC or so. So the operator now sends their own main chain BTC to Bob. and then Bob has his money. And now the operator, they put their kickoff transaction on Shane. And with their kickoff transaction, they essentially state, hey, all of you saw Bob did a valid pegout. I paid Bob my money.

So now I'm going to take money out of the bridge because of the nature of the workaround that we are doing. And Bitcoin is very hard to define during the compile time of the contract, like a dynamic address. You cannot say this money will go to whoever will be entitled to take the money. You have to be specific who will get the money. And that's why we have to send it to the operator because the operator is known during the compile time. And that's why we do that swap, that the operator gives his own money to Bob. Bob is not known during compile time. Bob is some random user.

So the operator gives his money to Bob. Then the operator is entitled to take money out of the bridge. and the operator's name is essentially in the bridge contract, so we can express that in Bitcoin. So, yeah, and he puts this kickoff transaction on Shane, and that starts a dispute period of two weeks. And within these two weeks, everybody can challenge them. Like if that statement was incorrect,

if something was missing, if Bob didn't do a valid packout, or if the operator didn't send the money to Bob, then anyone can challenge. the operator. If he's not challenged, then after two weeks he can just take the money off the bridge. If he is challenged, then he has to go down the unhappy path, which means he has to make like a commitment to his trace, his trace of the computation of like the verification of his snark. So he essentially runs, like he verifies his own snark and then gives us like a recipe and says those are the intermediate results that I came to.

And if any of these intermediate results is incorrect, then you can challenge that particular step. You can just execute the correct script, which is a huge script. It's like a slice of the computation. And you can just execute it and show what is the correct result and show that the correct result is not the same as what the operator claimed. And that disproves the operator, and then you can just slash them and take the deposit.

They're collateral, sorry. And that's essentially how the bridge works. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle Layer 2

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And so this puts up, this makes the bridge capitally inefficient because some operator has to take up two weeks of lockup cost in order of opportunity costs in order to actually facilitate the exit. We were doing a podcast with Eric Wall and he was talking about some of the potential edge cases that this might create just because there might not just be enough capital to do a mass withdrawal. I'm unsure about how to articulate the scenario that I remember Eric Wall was talking about, but he was alluding to the fact that this might create an edge scenario in which there's a lot of people asking for money and there's not enough money in the bridge. Maybe you can articulate that edge scenario and whatever thoughts you have. Well, I asked him on Twitter and he publicly admitted that his attack, like they wrote this nice

article about BitVM being fundamentally broken or something and asked him and he had to admit that it doesn't actually apply to our model. It applies to a different model that somebody else is building. Yeah.

To be honest, I cannot take Eric very seriously. He's not a builder. I don't know if he has ever built anything. thing. And I think it's always easy to shit on people's things. And there's a lot of politics involved. There's a lot of things with that soft work that he wants to push through. And it's not really related to my work. It's more a thing that is going on there in the background. And Robin, when was this

back and forth? So I think the conversation that David and I had where he articulated this. And it was almost, you know, like how it's just sort of a fatal flaw for BitVM. It was maybe like, I want to think, like six weeks ago or so. Is what you're talking about, the back and forth with Eric, like more recent than that? Yeah, I mean, there is that cat thing going on.

They are pushing really hard for cat. And I'm, yeah, OP cat. I find these guys very suspicious. I, like, hey, I'm here to fix Bitcoin. And I find that not very authentic. Like, usually the people who are pushing for

softforks are people who have been contributing for years and have like a very strong proof of work as like Bitcoin developers and that makes them reasonably trustworthy. And if people who don't have any strong proof of work are suddenly pushing for things in particular, they are related to this, how to phrase it nicely, this alt-coin thing. on Bitcoin. They are indistinguishable from spam attacks, and that's another red flag for me. And yeah, so I just used my influence to just ask questions and to show that it's not really solid what they are proposing.

And he totally disliked that, and that's how it started. That he started to take my work. I was aware that this episode. so it would get a little spicy, but it has. And that's totally great. That's within bounds of bankless. So just to be clear here, so I think what Eric was also saying is, like, he thought that the BitVM designed kind of like almost like collapses down to sort of a like a multi-sig.

You just have to go through this like really messy bankruptcy type process in a mass exit type scenario. And Robin, you're saying that's actually not true. That so we can exit this. It's not all that different from maybe an optimistic roll-up on Ethereum in those ways. Maybe just put a bookend on that critique and why you don't think it applies. He thinks it doesn't apply. I asked him and he admitted that it doesn't apply to our protocol.

And I'm happy if he shows us a flaw in our protocol. I also discussed it with lots of researchers because he created lots of things. lots of waves like in that week everybody asked me about it and yeah but it's it's very hard for me to argue against it because usually when you criticize other people's constructions then you you you state how their constructions work and then you point out particular flaws but he didn't do that he worked on some hypothetical thing that is totally unrelated to what we are building then it's very hard to argue against it when he is confusing terms that much. I think it's just not honest to call it Bitvium what he was criticizing there

because that is not what we are working on. Not at all concerned by that critique. Well, I mean, there is that capital constraint that there is real, but it's not as catastrophic as they made it because they claimed stuff like that all the operators have to front as much capital as the total value locked, which is totally not true. As I just explained, the operator has to front as much capital

as a single party needs for a single unit. Let's say, I don't know, 1,000 BTC is locked and 10 BTC is the unit, then the operator has to front 10 BTC for two weeks. And if all people want to exit at once, which is also a strange assumption in my eyes, because depending on what you want to use it for, If you want to use it for ZK coins, there is no centralized operator or something.

Sorry, no centralized sequencer. It is not a realistic scenario to say that there would be a mass exit or so. Just like in Lightning, nobody is talking about mass exits, because why should everybody exit Lightning at the same time? There is no reason to do that. And that's why nobody's concerned about this scenario. And even in Lightning, where there is no capital question at all in that regard, it would be a huge issue if everybody would exit at once.

Of course, yeah, because the chain space is limited, but that's a totally different discussion. A different critique that I think still holds is the actual incentives to front that capital, the business model of being a bridge operator. Two weeks of holding, you know, X number of bitcoins. Generally, that comes with opportunity cost. What are the incentives being a bridge operator and like what kind of their earnings potential might they get? Do they get to charge a fee for the service? I put the deal here.

You simply pay a fee. Like Bob doesn't get actually 10 BTC. He would get, I don't know, 9.5 BTC or something. Because I'm making up numbers. Yeah, it's just determined by the market. You make an offer to the operator. Also, if actually all people wanted to exit at once, which as I said won't happen.

I don't see a reason for that. Then you can still incentivize the operator to prioritize you by just paying a higher fee. And there's many, many operators, and so they're competing on fees. Yeah, exactly. They're competing on fees. And also, like, the higher, the fees are, like, if actually all people wanted to exit at once, then it would be kind of natural for them to expect to pay higher fees.

And even if there would be a liquidity issue, then the high fees would be quite a convincing arguments for other people who have liquidity to give it to the operators, because the operators would immediately make a profit from it. So it's like a perfect business model. Like you just give me the capital for two weeks and you will get more money back. So these fees are essentially the solution, even if there would be that mass exit case, which I think will not happen. So Robin, what type of entities do you expect these operators to be, say, like these 100 operators? Are these kind of like some market maker types, right?

Are we looking at like a jump capital or something like that? You know, is that the type of entity or, yeah, who will they be? And I don't know if you even have kind of like examples of who you expect to be one of the 100. But yeah, what's just sort of the profile of an operator? I think very similar to the liquidity providers on Lightning. It's essentially the same business. Got it. Okay, cool.

So there are a lot of projects out there that are branded as being a Bitcoin layer. too. That's kind of one of the Bitcoin Renaissance themes that we've seen in the last year or so. And there's a lot of skepticism about some of these projects. There's also a lot of excitement out of these projects, but one common theme is like all the projects say, like, oh, we're going to use the BitVM. All of them. All of them, yeah. Generally, what do you think about this category? I would imagine, like, that's actually kind of the point of what you're trying to build. But also, some of these Bitcoin Layer 2s are not real, is the critique. I'm wondering you're just like high-level thoughts about the whole entire category of Bitcoin Layer 2 these days?

I'm not very proud of having created this kind of layer 2s. If I compare it to Lightning, there are many points of critique of Lightning. I also, I'm not the biggest fan of Lightning. I do think it is a great project, but it's not really solving the issue at hand. But like these other L2s, most of them are very sketchy in my eyes. Like in general, there is that thing in the crypto industry that when there is a hot topic, there is hype. And when there is hype, then there is easy money.

Like people want to invest. People think there is that opportunity to like make a quick 100x or something. And then there are always. projects who are exploiting that, who are selling stupid ideas to greedy investors. And I think that's what we're seeing there mostly. I don't want to talk about all of them. There are a few exceptions who are doing great work and who are contributing a lot to BitVM as well. I don't want to name names because I did that in the past.

and then I heard they're selling tokens with me endorsing them allegedly, which I didn't like, like I don't like tokens in general. I don't like tokens without a clear business model. I think it's totally fine if you sell tokens. If it makes sense, if there is a clear business model behind it, then I might, I will not buy your token, but it's okay to sell it. But if the token is the only business model, then I think it's pretty sketchy. And we are seeing that a lot with BitVML2s, and I don't like them at all.

I think it's bad. I think it's also, it harms the brand. We've seen cycles like this play out before. People love tokens in crypto. They love to play with tokens. They love to speculate on tokens. Optimistically, it's a casino, yeah. It is a casino, right.

And optimistically, that also does create meaningful projects. Like, this is the financing of what hopefully could become meaningful Bitcoin Layer 2s. Is this the path that you see some of these Bitcoin Layer 2 projects on? It's like, once we get past the degenerate gambling phase at the end of that tunnel, we'll end up having some like functioning, like quality Bitcoin Layer 2s. Is it fair to call this like just a deal with the devil? Or like how do you think about this? I don't want to make any deals with the devil myself.

All these investors came to me at first and I told them, go please leave me alone. But yeah, I mean, I see your point in general. Also, like as someone who is active in that ZK scene, I see many of these ZK companies who are doing amazing research. They do have tokens. And I don't think that tokens make any sense at all. But if they would have not that token, then they probably would not be able to pay all these brilliant researchers. And so it is kind of like a double-exam. at SWAT. Like, on the one hand, I'm profiting from these scams. And on the other hand,

I don't want to participate in them myself. But yeah, I think in the long run, there will be Bitcoin L2s and probably some of them will make a lot of money. And maybe that justifies the hype or the extreme interest of these investors. Yeah, it's always interesting. Like we had a Casey from Ordnals and Rooms on the podcast, you know, like a while ago. And he was basically saying, yeah, I think a lot of the, like the tokens, 99% of the tokens support in this thing are just like dog shit. And he's still building it. You know, still kind of a builder in the space. So, you know, I sort of hear that sentiment from Bitcoin builders, like quite a bit. They're not necessarily proud of what is built on top of it, at least in the early stages. But the same time, you guys are,

bit VM is a permissionless protocol. So you don't get to decide. It's like not on you to decide what actually gets deployed there. And so, I mean, that's an interesting, I guess, tension to have. But let me ask this from the other perspective, which is if this went perfectly, and you had kind of your vision of you're in it for the money, scaling the money, let's say that, right? What would you love to see deployed on top of BitVM?

Does it look like a ecosystem of roll-ups, kind of like similar to Ethereum? Is it more along the lines of ZK coins? If you were to just fast forward five years from now in your perfect world, what would you see on top of BitVM? How would Bitcoin look? Yeah, ideally the chain would be full of ZK coins transactions, which are completely private and very compact. And people could use Bitcoin as money again as it used to be before the blocks or

before the scaling was. And yeah, we would have privacy and could use it very well for money, for payments. And I think it would enhance the lightning network a lot if we had 20X more throughput on the base layer. So that's opening and closing channels would be quite cheap, like in the order of sense. And hopefully it would also inspire people or like it would convince people that it's a good idea to increase the block size. and then we would be already quite close to skating Bitcoin as a global currency. Before the block size is increased in a world where BitVM is used quite heavily and quite significantly, are, you know, like, Bitcoin blocks just like are the four megs full of kind of like these proofs?

You know, how much will this affect Mainnet, do you think? And like, what will the Bitcoin fees be on Mainnet as a result of this? It's hard to say. I mean, there will always be married to regular transactions. I think all these institutions were just using Bitcoin as an asset. They will want to do regular transactions just because the technology is much more hardened. The ZK coins would be very novel. It will use all kinds of novel proof systems, which have like,

novel implementations, novel assumptions that are not on the base layer as well. And so I think there will always be a market for regular transactions as well, just because the main system is just more solid, way more solid. And it will take a while until ZK coins will not be considered experimental anymore. Just like lightning. In the beginning, everybody knew lightning was like, they even called it the reckless version of lightning, right? So I guess we will have a reckless version of CK coins first, and maybe there will be hiccups, and maybe people will even lose some money. But that's just the way these protocols evolve, I think.

Well, this has been definitely one of the more interesting eras in Bitcoin history over the last, like, 18 months or so. And it's just very refreshing to see building come back to the space and kick some of the laser-eyed maxis out to the curb and replace them with people actually developing and creating, value in growing the Bitcoin movement that started in 2009. I'm wondering, Robin, is there anything else that's going on in Bitcoin, outside of the BitVM and the Bitcoin Layer 2 space that you're paying attention to and you're excited about? Like, what else should we investigate? Yeah, another thing that I find cool is I was working with David Chea on, like, his group

at Stanford on Bitcoin-backed proof of stake, which is essentially a way to stake bitcoins in the main chain such that you can derive side chain consensus from these state coins. David Jay, that's the founder of Babylon? Yes. Ah, okay. Correct. Okay, cool. Cool. I'm not related to Babylon at all, but I've worked with them on like David and his research group at Stanford on their paper. And actually the thing is very related to some research that I did in 2020. And yeah, I like that. I think once we have the base layer, I think the base layer has just a limited capacity. We cannot scale it indefinitely. So at some point, we will have some kinds of side systems. And I think these proof of stake side chains, like Bitcoin back proof

of stake side chains, they can be very interesting. And I'm very happy to see that they are building it. So if we were to fast forward 20, 30, 50 years. and your ideal version of the universe played out when it comes to Bitcoin. What does Bitcoin the system look like? The optimistic scenario is definitely that Bitcoin will absorb the entire Alcoin market. And that we will have one proof of work chain, and that will be the anchor for all other systems. And then we will have like a couple of side systems around that. And I guess it would make sense that they are all interconnected with something very similar to lightning or just lightning network.

And yeah, I think in the long run, the entire financial system will be run on some Bitcoin backed system. As we as we're seeing currently BlackRock like Larry Fink, he's very eager to create like a new exchange where you can trade like stocks essentially as tokens. And yeah, I think, well, I'm not sure if they really need Bitcoin. Like an exchange is just like a centralized party and they could just have coins, have just keys co-signing some side-gen similar to liquid or something. I guess that would make more sense from a technical perspective. But I think the most optimistic scenario would be definitely that Bitcoin becomes the world-leading currency. will replace the dollar and

people will use Bitcoin as they are using the dollar nowadays. That would be my hope. And hopefully, hopefully, yeah, the biggest hope I have for like the, what I'm dreaming of is that Bitcoin will be able to defeat central bank digital currencies because I think they are really evil.

I think this is the most evil technology that has ever thought of. That clarity of vision is something I've always appreciated from the, the Bitcoin community. and let me say, like, I think bankless is definitely cheering, cheering Bitcoin builders on towards this endeavor because what you just described if we can make it happen is a bankless money system. This is the entire reason why we're here. I think this is one of the central goals, maybe the most important goal of crypto for sure. Robin, just one last question to kind of round this out.

So David asked you earlier about kind of like when main net sort of timelines, can you like concrete with us to the extent that you can on that because a lot of, you know, Bitcoin layer twos are saying, hey, like, you know, Bit VM will be available, you know, now. It's already available even. And I think that there's some work to do. So when do you expect to get BitVM online and deploy it in terms of dates and like what's going to happen next with the project? Yeah.

Hopefully we can complete our implementation by the end of August, such that we will have on CigNet or on TestNet the first version running so that we can actually run or verify the first CKPs on a Bitcoin chain and from there we hope to

complete a reckless main net version by the end of this year that would be the main goal like that is the focus of our team currently that's huge that would be what Bitcoin's 15th birthday around that time? Around that time yeah

very good Robin, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a fantastic discussion. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. Guys, got to remind you, of course, to Dan, none of this has been financial advice. None of us here are shilling tokens. Of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's now the frontier of Bitcoin. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.