TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #190: Ben Carman

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Ben Carman from Suredbits to discuss: - Ben's transition from Bernie Bro to Libertarian - Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) - An Oracle's role in DLCs - Are decentralized Oracles possible? - DLCs onchain v. on the Lightning Network - Stock-to-flow thoughts - much more Follow Ben on Twitter Check out Suredbits Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Ben Carman, Ben the Carman from ShortBits to talk about discrete log contracts and how they can be applied and how they're very underappreciated. Underappreciated is the correct word to describe them at the moment. They're hard to be appreciated because there hasn't been many implementations of them but some are coming to market very soon particularly from short bits so i think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode this episode is brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking cash app excuse my son in the background uh cash app you help me stack sats and sats receive sats

and sell sats if you so please we're saying sats sats sats sats because sats is the standard we're no longer stacking fractions of a bitcoin we're stacking sats whole sats you can set sats as a standard son please i'm recording an ad right now uh you can dca in the sets you can send and forget it you can buy daily weekly bi-weekly set it and forget it dollar cost average on top of that you can stack slivers of stocks as well uh you're not only stacking whole whole sets if you're into the stock market if you're buying that dip in the last couple of days you can stack a sliver of a stock you don't have to buy a whole stock if your favorite stock's a little too expensive you can buy as little as one dollar okay we're stacking sats and slivers of stonks because this is all

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down on the cash app and enjoy this episode with ben the car man you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Benn here.

On a hot Friday afternoon. Humidity is very high where I am, Benn. I'm jealous that you're indoors in the air-conditioned. I assume. I don't know if you have your air-conditioner on. Freaks, I'd like to introduce you to Benn the Carman, developer at Shoredbits. bits what's going on how's it going i'm going good how are you doing well man did we first meet last year at bit block boom bit block boom 2019 that's my first like met you in person yeah at uh that's an eye dinner yeah and what were you doing back you weren't at short bits yet then right no at that time um i was still in college and uh just working on wasabi in my free time and then uh yeah and then went back to college you're not in college anymore right no no i

graduated back in december yeah where'd you go if you don't mind me asking uh i went to iowa state uh did abs and computer science isu baby yeah go cyclones yeah even though we suck at every sport it's one of my favorite uh rivalries though iowa versus iowa state oh yeah those are always fun you get way too drunk and then uh iowa state would always lose so that kind of sucked but yeah whatever he got drunk yeah how'd you find your way to bitcoin so um like a lot of people 2017 bull market's going crazy and um i was listening to like a comedy podcast and they're all like know nothing about it but they uh they like brought it up because you know it's popping off and i was like i should look into this thing um i bought like

50 worth and i was like okay i'm set for life if this thing takes off and that next morning i'm like i did the calculation like well is that actually true and i was like turns out it's not 50 or not so you have to be a multi-millionaire at this point in time so um then i started like really looking into it though and watched way too many andreas videos in my free time and uh that took me down the rabbit hole for a long while and then um yeah then finding like this podcast and like pierres and uh stefan laverre like basically all those major ones that like even further took me down the rabbit hole of just like finding like why bitcoin is important and like just learning about it really fascinated me like both from the tech side and the

like economic side because before bitcoin like you know i was like just your average bernie bro that's just you know tax original fix all our problems but after you know after doing some reading and critical thinking realized you can't just solve stuff by taking money from other people so um it helped me out that's interesting i never knew you were a bernie bro what uh what do you think was critical to flipping that particular switch in your mind um safedine's books really like that book blew my mind uh the bitcoin standard i remember like before like i like before and like i understood both sides where i was like you know like one side's like you know we should let people make decisions for themselves and uh you know let's let the market do what it

wants to do but you know i thought like you know sure you can do that but we should go for the best outcome by you know what i thought would be you know taxing the rich and you know giving other people like pre-college through that or whatever but after like never even looking into like you know can that actually work after you know reading like like safety and spoke or just like listening to like countless podcasts you kind of realize like okay no like you can say you can do that but that's not how it actually works out in real life and you know you just get like a couple real good examples and show like this isn't how it actually works out and you're never going to essentially plan something into like what you want you can't micromanage complex systems i think

that's yeah exactly that's how it distilled austrian theory in one short sentence yeah definitely um something that actually uniquely helped me come to that situation was like back then i was like a huge gamer and like followed uh i played legal legends a whole bunch and i would like follow the balance of that game and like it's just like that game where the developers have full control over that system and they could never control it it's like how do you if they can't do that how do you expect someone to control something where they have no full control and i'm not really like like that was something i kind of realized where like people get so mad like no one can fix this game and then even while they have full control and and in the real world these

people have basically they have like some knobs to turn but not every knob to turn and they still can't control it so how do we expect them to do it if i don't know does that make sense oh yeah it does make sense actually tweeted out this morning uh a fresh article from the mises institute refuting that uh that book uh what was it looting the the moral case for looting the author of that book is legitimately stupid like they they quoted her in like the new york times like npr is giving her air as well and she doesn't really understand how things work out or the repercussions of what she's advocating which is the ability to loot stores in low-income neighborhoods

because those people deserve that they should not have to work um yeah i don't like if you take that to its logical conclusion like sure if you say like for the next week you get to loot and you get to solve economic inequality but like you can't just stop doing that like that'll just be permanent part of our society now if looting is okay and we'll just have chaos for the rest of time like you can't build a sound society on like terrible pretenses yeah i mean looting by definition disrespects private property rights and if you want a civilized society private property rights are a pretty important cornerstone and protecting those rights more importantly of a civilized cooperative society things are getting weird ben they're getting weird

2020 man still waiting on aliens they're here they're here they just tried to throw that one in and think it would distract us they actually think they are here i don't know i don't know i wouldn't be surprised are you uh an alien believer are you one of those people that were too far away it's impossible yeah i mean they're definitely out there i don't think they've been here it's just like the amount of time it'd take to get here but i don't think we're too special i think you know where's where's the blue dot going around no one no one really cares about us a pale blue dot a speck of dust and a ray of light exactly one of the uh that's carl sagan right yeah one of the best just oral monologues i've i've ever heard uh give peace a chance for

we're on a pale blue dot flying through space uh but let's get to the topic uh of this episode and why we're here talking which is discrete log contracts uh you've been working on uh basically creating educational material and building out a functional implementation of discrete log contracts at short bits the company that you joined when you joined earlier this year last year uh november last year last year what uh what brought you to short bits particularly and then why are you guys focused on dlcs yeah um i actually first met chris at the chicago bitcoin meetup uh chris being the chris stewart the boss of shirt bits but um and then i was like in college just applying for jobs and then justin moon actually he made like he did like a twitter

thread of like these are all bitcoin companies looking for people so i applied and i already new chris so kind of got me one foot in the door and then you know started working here and i've been really enjoying it what we primarily do is uh at least what i primarily do is work on the bitcoin s library which is like a scala implementation of bitcoin so we have like it's a wallet node all the core functionality that you need for that and um so yeah and then like that was like like right when i joined is like when we started uh getting serious about starting to work on DLCs like all the groundwork for the library has been laid out for that and then um maybe it was in like March or April we got our like first kind of working

implementation of it and yeah I remember writing about that you ran that demo right was that in uh well we've both done demos I think the first one might have been his but yeah yeah if you freaks haven't done so already make sure you go back and listen to the episode with Chris Stewart into dovco and from short bits ben's co-workers we dove pretty pretty heavily into discrete log contracts so i think this conversation to be productive is just to sort of build on that and see what you guys have been up to recently in the state of this interesting technology that could arguably bring scalable smart contracts to bitcoin is that a correct assumption or description yeah yeah so um to slow it down a little like what a dlc is is in like a bitcoin oracle contract

it's basically you're making a transaction contingent on an oracle signature and this oracle signature can be like committing to anything so the example i like to use is like it's the presidential election since it's timely um so like say if you want to like me and barney want to bet on who's going to win the election we would just make transactions with each other that are invalid we have invalid signatures on these but once the oracle signs like say you know oracle signs trump won the election then whoever bet on the trump case would add that signature to their own transaction and use that to make a valid transaction to like take the funds and win and um with that like property since the oracle's not actually signing the transaction they're

signing just like a message saying like this event happened it makes it a lot more private so now like the oracle doesn't see our exact transaction and what's actually happening so that reduces like liability for them as well as like greater privacy for us as well as um and it's just more scalable then since we're not have to putting like their signature actually on the chain or at our contract at all on the chain it's just you know it's just like a multi-stick transaction that like you know could be a lightning channel or coin swap or what have you yeah it's so you guys have a working implementation like how how far away are we from from this this stuff getting some material use um probably within the next month for sure we will have something like for

people to use like uh for real um i can't talk about it too much right now but uh spill the beans ben it's in the works spill the beans we're gonna have something where everyone can bet on the selection if they want um and we have like an anonymous oracle that's gonna do it and it'll be pretty cool hopefully two working clients with it as well so um it'll be like a desktop app that you just download or create transactions with yeah yeah most likely it'll just be like desktop while you download and you'll have to like negotiate the dlc with whoever wants to take the other side of the bet but um yeah it should be out soonish we we tried to get it out this week but um we found some bugs and compatibility issues with other clients but

work in progress so would you argue that this would be a better technology for uh american huddle and peter mccormick to use for their election bet and if so yes if so why is it better than this uh two or three multi-sig with an escrow agent yeah so um what they're doing is like it's uh american huddle peter mccormick and phil geiger they all have a key and a two or three multi-sig and uh they trust phil geiger that's fine but um like what could happen with theirs is like you know like american huddle and phil could be like drunk at bit block boom be like yo let's just take the money from peter ha ha ha and uh they could just spend it without any recourse and um you know you obviously don't want that and and phil also knows the exact transaction

and address that these funds are locked up in and he can uh you know he'll know if that his signature is needed or not versus with the dlc you they would instead of the american huddle and pierre mccormack with just a two of two multi-sig and phil would just be signing the outcome so he just signed you know like biden wins this election and you give them that signature but um like peter and american huddle they could just close the thing if they don't want to use the oracle they you know they agree like we're going to be good guys and just sign it out or you know if like american huddle you know he disappears for the day then peter mccormick can grab the signature from phil and just use that to make the transaction valid so he's like protecting

himself from each other since now no one can take the funds and without a valid signature or eventually it'll time out and they'll use their refund but generally shouldn't need that and you're protecting yourself because you know it's a lot more private they won't know exactly when it happens and which transaction is happening with it yeah so let's hone in on the the oracle aspect of this the oracle just knows that they have to sign a message with a certain event they don't necessarily know the address that we they don't even know how many funds are involved or the addresses that are involved they just know the fact that they need to sign something yeah and like with that too like say like say like the um american huddle and peter mccormick

they're doing their bet and like me and you get inspired we want to do a bet but we also want to use phil geiger now he's going to have to sign for uh if we're doing like the two of three multisig he'll have to sign our transaction plus american huddles but um if he's just doing like a dlc he'll just only have to sign the one message saying you know this event happened like this person won the election now that signature is usable for every single dlc that's contingent on what he's committing to so that makes a lot more scalable as well since oracles can just uh do one event and then just forget about it as well as um you can also combine oracles so say we don't want to just trust phil geiger we want to trust like all the unchained capital guys so i'll say so um

say like parker lewis also is going to sign which uh which who wins the election so then we could do like we add those two together and then if um we get if they both sign this person wins then our transaction will become valid so you can like mitigate or like distribute trust that way yeah so in that scenario would have had to be like an if function if parker and phil provide the same answer then sign um well you would like so what happens if they give different answers that's the question i'm trying to get at here yeah so it depends how you set up your contract so i mean a two two oracles is probably not the best way to do it you want to do like a like like three probably so you do

like a two of three or like three of five but um but it's what we're using to do this is adapter signatures we're not actually putting it in the bitcoin script so um you would just like do this off chain where you just like as part of your signature you would like subtract the signature points you expect from them to actually um get this so once you get the signature from them you calculate the signature point and add that back to your signature to create a valid so um so like i say if we wanted to do like a three or five um we would get so we'd construct like five choose three uh transaction or signatures for these and so then like we have one that's made valid by like like a b and c signatures we have another signature and that's

made valid by like b c and d signatures and uh you just have to like work that off off chain which would give you like more things to store but uh you're still only broadcasting like us to a multi-stake transaction onto the chain once this actually happens yeah let's get into oracle incentives a little bit too you guys have found a way to incentivize oracles to be as truthful as possible because they could potentially make more money via tips and stuff like that correct yeah so um there's two ways to incentivize oracles one um they can so they're like the idea is they should be using like one public key for like most of their uh signatures and with that key um we expect them to take some funds under that so like they'll say like they'll take that

key and put like 50 bitcoin under it so you could go see on the blockchain you know there's 50 bitcoin under you know the shard bits oracle's key that's how much we're safe to bet on because say if um we're signing uh for the election and we sign like trump we do like do two signatures we like signed for ourselves that trump won and then signed for someone else that biden won if anyone finds those two signatures which should be pretty easy to do uh you can just combine them and be able to steal the private key from that public key so that way they're incentivized so um if they lie you can prove they lied by having the signature as well as you can take their money so so let's get into that part you can take their money why wouldn't oracle have to lock up funds

to sign signatures they don't have to but it's just like we expect to become like a standard just because you know if they're like putting funds on the line and staking that like it's their reputation and they're like not only their reputation but as well as we have money up here that so you should trust us up to this amount yeah that makes sense and so this dies into the great debate that's been going on for for years in this space is whether or not you can have decentralized oracles or uh if you can incentivize centralized oracles correctly so that they they act uh in in an honest way and so it seems like short bits is is hitch their wagon to to the ladder which makes sense to me i think like can can you help describe the trade-offs

between centralized and decentralized oracles if decentralized oracles are even possible in the first place yeah i don't even think a decentralized oracle is technically possible like the only way you could really do that is just have like lots and lots of like centralized oracles and you just you know you're doing like a like 500 of a thousand and then just making sure that people agree on that but uh yeah like i think you know like an oracle apparently you're gonna always have to trust them because they could always just sign whatever they want and you know do what they want so that's something you always have to worry about but you can like with like this you can always just do like a combination of multiple oracles and distribute your trust that way and

and since like they also have economic incentives to be honest it's safer to do it that way versus like i don't know whatever ethereum does uh no it's i mean like to me the only decentralized oracle that exists today is the bitcoin network ironically right you you and it's an oracle for what's going on in its ledger for who owns what who owns what and uh an estimate of hash rate and difficulty at any given point in time uh but that's a very energy intensive decentralized oracle and it serves very specific data points i imagine it would be harder to design a similar or just a alternative decentralized oracle uh for more specific data right yeah like i mean bitcoin while we're doing

6.25 bitcoin every 10 minutes so it's like what 70 grand 10 every 10 minutes like that's a lot of money to be paying for an oracle so we we dumped today so maybe a little less well i'm optimistic but yeah i think we're getting a lot we're getting close to the point where you can get uh 10 000 sats per dollar which i saw you were tweeting about the other day or a million sets for a hundred dollars excuse me i like my cheap sats but uh i also like my net worth going up who doesn't exactly your bernie bro days you would have said that wealth needs to be taxed exorbitantly are you are you saying your mind has changed not the inherent bernie bro mentality is it's the other

people you have to tax not yourself that's true take it take it looting is okay kill the rich take all their money it's uh it's time things are getting hairy out there man but we're going to stay on dlcs here because we don't want this to turn into too much of a pessimistic podcast we're focusing on solutions so how big do you think the opportunity of dlcs is do you think it will from a composability perspective do you think it will attract more developers to build more cool applications on top of bitcoin yeah like i think long run like it kind of just kills any smart contracts like shit coin because your oracle could always just be signing whatever your smart contract is going to be so like say you want to have some like fancy like

solidity script on ethereum that's gonna take in all this data and you know if x happens then you get the money like you can have that enforced on chain but like inherently nothing is essentialized as bitcoin and you're always going to be trusting someone like i mean with there you know you might just get hard forked out by italic or you know what have you but with like a bitcoin oracle you could just have them be signing whatever your fancy script is going to do and make your contract contingent on that so it just kind of makes it a lot easier and then you're also just getting inherent privacy benefits from that because you're not putting that fancy script on chain it's just something off chain that your oracle worry is about to do and so you're saving fees by not

putting on chain and saving privacy because people don't know what's going on in that transaction yeah yeah so it's a more scalable more private way of doing smart contracts is this a black swan in the industry how come more people aren't talking about dlcs dude that's what i'm saying And, like, when I first, like, started working at Sherbets, I had never heard about it. And then they, like, basically, like, you know, they informed me about it so I could work on it. And I was just kind of like, whoa, this is great. Like, why is no one talking about this? Like, I felt like you kind of did this with, like, when you started working at GAM.

Like, I could hear it's, like, telling the podcast you're talking about. Like, you start bringing up, like, the free gas mining and stuff. And then you announce you're on GAM. It's like, oh, okay, that's why I've been talking about this for the past three months. Like, I've been doing, like, the same thing with DLC. where it's like guys why is no one talking about this this is something that could like change like a lot of things right it seems that way like it almost seems too good to be true do you think i mean obviously if it is successful it's going to surprise people to the upside due to the lack of

fanfare that's getting now um so these are the type of little projects and and workings that i like to pay attention to the the underscored now i keep saying underscored what i mean underserved underscored means you like underline it and you're like highlighting it it's the complete opposite of what i'm trying to get at i i say it way too much it's complete wrong word to use underappreciated is a better word technologies and i think dl again dlc's is is obviously one of them i mean again scalable private smart contracts on top of bitcoin and so what is the interface of the desktop wallet you guys are gonna like how easy is it gonna be you just deposit bitcoin into a wallet and then you can just pick utxs to put in these uh initially it's gonna be pretty ugly

because um we're like it's part of our specification we're speccing out so like it just be like like you know we're trying to like copy a lot of what lightning's doing and so you just like hit like open and it would like negotiate it all like through the internet but we haven't fully specced any of that uh stuff out yet so right now like what we're doing is just like it'll just i'll put like this big json and you have to like copy paste that over to your friend and uh do that do that like twice and um then your contract set up and then you say like execute once the contract actually happens and then you get your money but uh probably like six months from now then we'll have like the very nice ui where you just you know click execute and

everything happens automatically yeah and so beyond election betting what kind of unique use cases do you see coming out of dlcs um i know like uh i don't know if you've heard of this uh this company but atomic loans they're trying to build a uh like a derivatives like decks about this stuff i do i'm a big fan of matthew black and team they're uh i've met matthew earlier this year we had a we had a zoom call i was really impressed by what they're doing yeah he's really cool um yeah they're trying to work on like a thing where you can like do simple betting like in your browser with dlcs and i think that could be like huge just like like something like like i know there's like the ethereum thing auger where it doesn't get much volume but there's

like some volume where you can uh like bet on just like anything like someone just sets up an oracle for like any event you want to do like you do like an nfl game you do like horse racing you could do you know do aliens come invade us whatever whatever you want but um as long as you have someone signing something you can do that so i think just the composability of it's going to be like just a huge part where it's a lot of this like something like you know it's like the internet where like back in the 80s when they were just sending around like research papers they had no idea like people would be using this to you know stream movies like 30 years from now and i think this is something kind of like that where it's so like it's so infant we can't really know the full

capabilities of having to do like extremely smart like contracts and so would it make sense for me to attempt to become an oracle to create a profitable business on top of this like who yeah who would become oracles like could i just like some joe schmoe become an oracle yeah i mean being an oracle that's like basically zero overhead all you need to do is publish pub keys and signatures so like in total it's like under 100 bytes per event so it's super easy to do like you could run that over torrent absolutely no problem and do it completely privately um but yeah the like the intent of like what we're doing at shared bits is um like we have a exchange api where you can like buy like like previous like price data on different like crypto things

or like nfl or nfl scores or nba scores so with that like we charge like one cent worth of satoshis per uh per like piece of data so that way then like the oracle's incentivized you know to actually like stay in business you know one cent is not much to settle my contract you know i expect you be doing bigger bets than that so um and then like if you have significant volume you should be able to be profitable with that yeah we expect like initially we expect like basically just like major uh bitcoin exchanges to do this because in the ethereum world right now most uh like coin like even like coinbase is like a oracle for i think like uniswap and stuff like that so there's like definitely incentive to be there because like just like getting your name out

there and showing like your order book is important will drive traders to you so if you can do that then it's just a useful function yeah and if you can make money in the process why not right yeah like there's money on the table you should try and take it yeah so my memory is a bit hazy about the the footprint this makes on the blockchain so how much of this is happening on lightning at the moment um and that'll come later i understand or yeah so there's like two things here so you can do them like completely on chain where um what it'll look like it's just like like two people's uh inputs going into a two of two multi-sig and then they get their change back and then they'll spend that

to to multi-sig to like the the winning party or you know they could split the money or whatever so stuff like that but um eventually once we get snore and ptlcs to replace htlcs then we could do these on lightning so then there'd be basically there'd be no on-chain footprint where you're just um having your point be adding the oracle signature instead of adding it to like your on-chain signatures yeah so once we have that there'd be absolutely no uh on-chain footprint and you just like you know you could do those like every second and you know and then you're just constrained by lightning but um there are some problems with uh getting these on uh lightning like um it's kind of like a lot of things with dlc shares problems with other things

so um one thing is like so if you wanted to like if we're betting on the election on lightning our funds will have to be locked up on lightnings till like you know november 5th or so that's like a long time and uh like uh who is it i think shores or someone uh or maybe renee picard they're talking about like hodl invoices and um the problems with that where you know a routing node doesn't want like one bitcoin locked up in their routes for like six months when they could be earning fees on that like providing liquidity so um that's a problem but you know people these are things that aren't dlc specific it's lighting's like entirely a problem so um i think that people are working you know if you pay to keep the funds locked up over time and stuff like that so um

soon tm soon tm uh you guys have also been writing a lot of primers on snore recently what uh what is exciting you about snore how will it help what you guys are doing at short bits and how we're going to activate bit 340 what's your path forward oh boy um so let's start with schnor uh schnor is like i mean we're just changing the signature scheme for bitcoin uh it's it's just inherently better um like one the the security proof is this has less assumptions so um and no new assumptions so that's just better uh straight upgrade and then it gives us like a million new properties and stuff like that so for one um like with dlc's at least we're using ecsa adapter signatures which are fine but schnor adapter signatures are way cleaner

and a lot nicer and with schnor as well um it allows us to do a lot more fancy things like music and batch verification so like with music then um we can make two of two multi-sigs look like you know one of one or you could do a thousand a thousand look like one of one or anything like that so um that one helps dlcs as well because now it just looks like a single spend and then you know with lightning and or any really contract on on bitcoin now becomes just easily one of one and then a batch verification will be sweet because you know now instead of having to verify each individual signature we just add them all together and batch verify them in one go and um that should help the ibd time in the future where uh instead

of having to you know verify each thing individually you're saving a lot of computation time hopefully i'll help out those uh raspberry pies i know mine needs all the help it can get yeah same that's a little cute boy working over there but uh he's trying to star in this uh it's one thing i were not worried about sure but i'm interested like all these improvements Schnorr, Taproot Mucig does it reduce the

the amount of data needed for each transaction to such a level that a fee market is depressed a bit because you're saving so much I know Peter Will has talked about that in the past but when you couple that with

the applications that can be enabled by discrete log contracts and the software that you guys are working on i think again this ropes back to my theory of jevin's paradox like the utility provided by that application alone seems like it could drive a massive amount of usage on bitcoin just from degenerate gamblers who historically have been drawn to bitcoin from one way or another so it just seems like a better iteration on satoshi's dice that's can enable a wider use case yeah i think we'll be fine market like back in 2017 we had like blocks with like over 10 bitcoin and fees and uh i mean bitcoin's more efficient better now but you know we had what probably not even one percent of the

world using bitcoin at that point i think uh once you get more and more people on board it will be there'll be plenty of transactions going through yeah you should you dodge the activation question. Yeah, there's lots of proposals going on right now. You have BitBait in your Twitter handle. Yeah, BitBait or Kai. So, BitBait is like

there's kind of two ways to do it. One is BitBait. So, there's like BitBait false and BitBait true. What BitBait false is basically what we originally did with every previous soft fork where at the end if miners don't activate it,

then we do nothing and it just we don't activate and there's bit bait true where we just say at the end of this if miners don't activate we're saying screw you miners and uas stuffing it into the consensus and um i mean that's cool but it also can be dangerous especially because if we do find like a problem with the you know if there's some find some bug in the taproot code or something like that or in the like inherent properties of it then we're kind of screwed because we've just committed to actually activating this like a year from now or whatever and we have no way to stop it

but I mean generally I think we're going to be fine the thing's getting a ton of review and it's been being talked about probably for almost like five years now or something around there so yeah it's

it's it's like nobody wants to just step forward and start deactivation it's like the weird dilemma we find ourselves in like who's gonna beat the leroy jenkins i think it's just like uh it's a little too early to commit to an activation method i think yeah like like bit 340 the schnor uh spec just got a modification like a week ago and um like well like once we start getting like once the schnor stuff is merged into lipsec p i think it'll start

being a lot more real and then taproot is um that pr into core will get a lot more like buzz and get a lot closer to actually being merged and once that's merged then then after that then we start talking about like activation and stuff like that and even once it is merged we still need to wait for like a bitcoin core release which i mean the current release schedule says the next one is in december so probably have to wait till to even start doing stuff till like january so um we got sometime sometime but uh peter will actually had he he tweeted out about a pr about making libsec snore compatible that was getting axed from greg maxwell this week can you explain what's going on there you did you catch that yeah yeah it's just like the um so bitcoin

core they don't actually implement any of the cryptography there's a separate library on the bitcoin repo called lipsec p256k1 which um just has like all the basic like cryptography stuff like highly optimized to be really fast so um like that currently has like all the like bitcoin signatures like ecdsa signatures and verifying those creating them all that stuff but um now they're trying to add the uh snore part of that so we can add that to bitcoin eventually so the pr for that's been open for a while but um it's just like nearing the end of its review and greg greg maxwell's given an act a couple of times and then there's been like small changes here and there but yeah um last i looked it's like it got like a little bit of review and it's looking like

it's about to be merged so yeah greg maxwell's given an act three hours ago so um another one yeah so we're close it's just uh it just like kind of just needs to happen but once it does then it kind of then it gets the ball rolling even further yeah what do you think about the pace of the activation emerging of this stuff are you content i think it's going a little too slow people being a little too cautiously optimistic or you think it's the right way to go about it and people should just stop being impatient um i mean i'm kind of on both sides like i think taffy discussion sort of started a lot earlier like um like taffy didn't really come into like we're gonna do this thing into like that mindset maybe like a year ago but like it

could have been like we could have started working on it like pretty soon after segway but um it just didn't happen because people are just like battle scarred basically from it and scared to like talk about soft forks again but uh now that we are here i think it's going at a reasonable pace where you know we need to review this thing and make sure it's correct and you know make sure the specification is exactly how we want it because once it's activated we can't change it so um yeah we need to continue and make sure it's correct but i think it's going at a good pace um like i expect like by like probably like june next year it'll be like activated in the network but uh it's just going to take a little bit of time but once we have it we have it forever so that's sooner than

i would have expected you think i think activation will probably start like january or february and then should activate since then really quick like like besides segway every software activation has only taken a couple months so once we actually start activation should be quick unless it for some reason becomes political but i think we've trimmed that fat since yeah i don't think it'll become political and actually a lot of people worry about miners and i'm in a bunch of mining chats right now i think miners are pretty open to this as well i think it's a i think it'll be a pretty pretty big uh not nothing burger but it's not gonna be as contentious as some people expect it maybe yeah i mean like i think like the problem with sega was like

the miners were economically incentivized to not activate it because of covert basic boost and because jihan was being jihan and wanted to make a bitcoin cash so i kind of screwed things over but like there was no covert asic boost and uh we didn't have big blockers i would have i think like segway should have activated fine and now that there's no economic incentive for them to do that should be i don't i don't see a reason why it would become like contentious yeah neither do i uh this is an interesting question for you considering my last guest fabian yar we talked about it review a lot do you hop into core and review prs a lot i try to but uh my c++ skills aren't what they used to be so um and like with reviewing code like you can conceptually review

it but a lot of it you need to fully understand like the entire library they're working with to fully grasp every chain that's going on so um like i'm not too familiar with the entire bitcoin core code base so some of it you just like you know i don't know what this function does and it's gonna take me five minutes to figure out exactly what it does and it's just very time consuming to give a very good review on some stuff so um but i just try to like go through things and give like concept act like you know this makes sense or i'll just like i got a fabian yards uh his uh the get tx out stuff stuff i've been testing some of his stuff like making sure that you know like it does work for me and uh like i'll do like stuff like that like um just

try to test things out make sure it works because that's still useful yeah no it's a very interesting subject that another one that doesn't get enough tick is the the concept of review and how important it is and the whole review reviewed prs to to actual prs that you uh that you produce yourself is an interesting ratio that i don't think a lot of people take into consideration yeah i mean like the review state of core is like it's hard like i have two prs that have been open since like mid 2019 still haven't been merged and uh like it's just like stuff like that like it's it's hard to get stuff in the core because it is such a big project and because like it's such an important project so we need to be careful with everything we put in

what uh what prs do you have open right now what are they oh they're like a couple of small things one of them is just if you have a watch only address to give you the ability to remove it and then um another thing is so like currently you can set like a command to happen if like a blocker transaction comes in and i added one so when you're just like when your nodes finish booting up then it'll execute a command so like my idea was i was trying to make like my lnd election personal server start up every time core started up but um normally you need to like make like a bash script outside of core but i just want to add it like as far as my like as far as my notes so every time i boot up it would always boot those things up and that would be

like a toggle feature yeah yeah just like a command or an option yeah you seem to have a very good grasp of all this stuff for somebody who just graduated college like what have you been working on software for quite a while and what interested you before bitcoin from a software perspective yeah i got it like since i was like five i was like always like the computer guy like my parents called me it as a kid just because i was the only one that could fix stuff even when i was like seven but um yeah like i got into programming in high school like we had a very like super intro to c++ programming i did and after that i like fell in love with it um i would do like basic like coding at home but nothing too serious and in college like that's where it's

kind of like started like doing it all in my free time and stuff there's like a few side projects and then like getting the bitcoin i was like oh like and finding like open source development really like pushed me even further over the ledge where it's like now these are things i'm actually interested that i can work on and um like work and like you know find really smart people to work with like like with um when i worked on wasabi for a while like i was just you know i was a sabi user and i saw they're doing like the bless you covid sneaking up but yeah i was just uh on twitter and i saw they're like the contribution game so i was like all right i'll i don't even know c sharp but i'm gonna try it and like spending like those couple

months working with those guys uh you just like learn so much from the bitcoin community because there's like so many good developers here and it just like sucks you in because there's so much interesting stuff to work on and so many like interesting and smart people that like you just like can't not spend your time talking to these people yeah no i feel very fortunate to be the host of this podcast able to speak to smart individuals like yourself about this stuff because sometimes it goes completely over my head but there are like you said so many smart extremely smart people working on this and the amount of fascinating conversations i've had about subjects that I probably would have never approached

in a prior life. It's a surprise to the upside that I'm very happy and able to experience pretty consistently. Yeah, man, I completely agree. Just being able to talk to Bitcoin, I got BitBlockBoom last weekend. Just being able to talk to those guys,

it's almost surreal how smart these people are and how much different depths that Bitcoin touches. Yeah, what was your favorite conversation from last weekend? i don't know i really enjoyed like uh robert breedlove's talk that was really insightful but um i just like hanging out with uh actually one of my favorite conversations actually talking with um one of the the samurai guys there it was interesting to hear his perspective on some of the things and like different trade-offs they were taking and his perspective on aspects yeah having

worked on wasabi what are your thoughts on the on the current coin joint flame wars um it's warranted and also not like a lot of it's bullshit and like people overhyping because it's process incentive to cause drama but um i think i think they're both good products and it's fine to use either as long as you're you know being smart about it but um it's just it's at the very we're at the very beginning of stages of coin joint stuff like i think wasabi is the first uh like major client and that came out in like 2018 so i think five years on the line this won't matter anymore joint market uh that's probably the first correct yeah yeah but that's never really gotten huge user use yeah our our boy open noms is working on that trying to make it

more user friendly yeah i'm super hyped for that i know um i think grass people it says like implemented now so you could do something with that but i just like that's something that's like excites me because it's like with like that you can actually like quote unquote like generate yield with your bitcoin and you know actually you're providing a service for people by just mixing and and helping yourself i think that's going to be pretty big yeah you help yourself in many ways you get more privacy you're making money and then you're arguably compounding that money you make by making bitcoin more private which makes it more useful and makes it more valuable right it's a nice beautiful feedback loop there and making join market more useful

because there's more liquidity in there and more people come to it then and then compounding there yeah it's a hell of a thing so what's it like working at short bits working you guys are completely distributed correct yeah we worked from home before it was cool um but uh yeah it's nice like we all live in like really far apart but uh we just like do stand-ups every morning and have meetings at the end of the day about what we worked on and it's super chill but also like we all get our stuff done and you know we're all hard workers and doing a lot of good stuff i think so how many people are is you chris nadav and and uh roman tarantchenko he's not on uh twitter or anything but uh yeah he worked on eclair beforehand he's actually the guy that implemented

for functionality in eclair and um yeah he does a lot of good work for us he's a really smart guy so what uh what are you most excited beyond dlc's at short bits like obviously we talked to chris and dad about this in the first episode but i want to get your your opinion on not your opinion your thoughts on why you work there and what you're excited about as you guys build out this company it's a good question i don't know i mean dlc's is like our primary thing i think like eventually we're going to try to do you know like i think just like the dlc is such a deep problem because it's like you know once we get like dlc's like done we still need to figure out like all the external factors for it like building like a a market where you can find other people

to take the other side of your bed and you know building out solutions for like actually for oracles to actually do the correct things or how oracles want to interact with each other and there's just so many problems to solve with that it's like it's like lightning like you can have the initial implementation out but this is a it could be a decade-long problem to work on so i think that's going to be our focus for a while but i don't know i think it's a really cool thing to focus on for a while i do as well and i really another thing i love to highlight in this space is people who have long-term views and are down to commit to doing the the grunt work to build out a a larger vision it's not easy it's not easy what you guys are doing how hard has it been

building this client to make dlcs possible for bitcoiners yeah um it's a lot of work because there's lots of things we need to think about like we've refactored this whole thing like so many times where it's like oh we made start out with this assumption that's not correct so i need to redo a bunch of it but um yeah it hasn't been too bad uh like beforehand we had a whole like actually like bitcoin library we can create all of our transactions and stuff which is very helpful but um yeah i've been mostly on the wallet implementation side of it and uh like how to store all these signatures and transaction data and then how to like communicate that with the user and there's a lot of like things to do like getting the ux for that is you know i mean

the current stage is not pretty at all but just like um i've been in the bitcoin design call um which is like started by square crypto where they're trying to like get designers to help design like things for developers and how to like correctly convey information to them as well as you know make this pretty and look good and there's a lot of smart people there and trying to take uh like their knowledge and apply it to like what we're working on you know like what should be what should what should be extracted from the user and what should they be explicitly setting what um and like you know how what target user are actually going for and stuff like that there's just like so much to think about yeah i'm very happy that slack group has started

because it's one of the things people like to poo-poo Bitcoin for, the poor UI, UX. It's never going to get mass adoption, Ben. It's going to get outrun by these altcoins. Yeah, they have the exact same problems, though. I mean, if we are to give a hat tip to Ethereum, I think while their apps may not be as decentralized as they like to advertise,

I think they are pretty and do have a good UX flow. from what i've observed i haven't used too many of them but i could be wrong yeah i guess like you know metamask is it's kind of pretty but i think it's kind of unfair to say it's better ux if you're lying to your users about the security model that they're taking so yeah how are they lying claiming that uh it's decentralized or that like you know this contract is you know decentralized even though there's an admin key that can just overwrite everything that the users doing so what else are you excited for in the world of Bitcoin what are you looking forward to looking for absolutely looking really forward to tap

route I'm excited for like it once we have that it's gonna add a whole bunch of new things that we can do like one of the big thing I really think is like so since taproot is now it paid a pub key you can use that pub key now for any any other like off-chain stuff so like um i think it might have been nicholas store or no what was it maybe there's no power that came up with this idea where you under that same pub key you host a tor address and then um you could use that for like a secured communication channel and then now use that for like you know if you want to do a pay join instead of just a regular send stuff like that where you're like negotiating all these off-chain protocols by just sending

a bitcoin address and communicating through that i think it's going to be absolutely huge as well as and then you're getting like all these optimizations as well yeah how early are we been way too fucking early are we too early oh there's no such thing as well too early i think like if i try to get my mom to use bitcoin like that's not going to happen she's not going to want to understand private keys right now and you know trying to get her to like mix coins or you know it's even questioned like you know you can't call someone to fix a problem she has like i don't think that's it's not tenable for the average day person i think yet but if you are here now you're gonna get paid for it because um number go up yeah if you're i mean

but then you dirty you dirty dirty capitalist wanting to profit off bitcoin and just number go up is just low level knuckle dragging type uh rationalization for being for being in this asset i'm sorry you can tax me uh no but it's i mean people hate the number go up meme but it is completely necessary like none of this happens without sufficient liquidity yeah i agree i think if bitcoin number doesn't go up i think we just die because the happening is gonna happen and take out miners if we don't go up in price yeah so you have any any thoughts in the stock to flow model um i i honestly i hate it it's uh it just like even if it is true

it just looks so scammy and like uh just like something you'd see like on this like somewhat shit coiners post like no guys look i did a bunch of math and calculated the price for the next 10 years it's like sure if you're right that's cool but like i'd rather talk about like why this thing's valuable not the math behind this algorithm or whatever you made yeah i think it's a nice to have i don't think it's a nice to lead with yeah that's a good way to put it like you shouldn't like be like hey dad look at this this is why the bitcoin price is going to go up because this guy made this chart but if you like you know if you fully understand why bitcoin is valuable you know

like the censorship resistance out money and then you're like look at this chart this kind of proves that i can see you liking it for that reason but i think a lot of people try to push that as their initial like try to get people into it and i think that's just you're gonna get like the the crypto moon boys then and i don't think that's a great place to start what are your thoughts on the moon boys and they're just about to degen's which i mean i was a moon boy when we first started out basically so i don't credit i don't give them too much but hey you were a moon boy you bought 50 and thought you were gonna be a millionaire yeah but yeah i mean i mean moon boys are the foundation of number go up kind of so we kind of have to deal with them but

bitcoin kind of tends to turn them into you know like the hardcore hodlers like we are um if they stay around for a while which is good yeah yeah it seems like a very reproducible hero's journey a journey from moon boy to stoic hodler um maybe we're just full of ourselves here but it seems to have happened many times at least yeah like i mean like most people i've talked they've always been like yeah i heard about it bought a little then i bought a lot then i got into shit coins and now i'm a hardcore bitcoiner yeah like that's like the generic story which you know i mean you end up as a bitcoiner fine with me did you uh do you ever fall into shit coinery oh yeah i was a i was a huge nano shill for a while oh my gosh right what what what

attracted you to nano um i just thought like i thought it was so cool it was like free quote unquote and the fast but um and like you know i was like oh it still has the uh supply limit and uh you know i just like i didn't really think about proof of stake as anything as like well they say it's okay so it must work and yeah and now it's yeah i'm sorry do you think ethereum ever successfully transitions to proof of stake i think um once they do transition or like once 2.0 comes out that's when ethereum dies in my opinion because um if they do launch it now they've kind of admitted like they're gonna totally bifurcate like their community like maker dao is gonna have to now support two things you know every single contract is gonna have to support

two things and all the wallet developers and every basically every developer is gonna have to support two things and that's gonna take forever to do and it's gonna just i think quickly to look at projects yeah we'll see i'm i'm not convinced that they they ever actually fully transitioned i don't know i mean they got a test net kind of but that's completely dependent on cloud flare apparently yeah yeah so that's a that's a sad it's a critical dependency there yeah i still like i don't understand like how do you Convince yourself That it's decentralized

While you're literally Like reliant And pinging on Cloudflare That I don't know Not my problem Cloudflare

Has had some infamous Network issues Recently Right Didn't they have Something last week Where they went down For a while

Yeah they've been Having like a ton Of outages this year It feels like Just like the internet As a whole I don't know 2020 I guess

Yeah do you think They shut down The internet on us At some point Nah We got Jeff Bezos on our side. He's not going to let that happen. This trade's making a lot of money from all the storage.

Hmm. I guess we can end it on... Do you get paid in Bitcoin in short bits, if that's not too forward of a question? No, I try to, but... That'd be bad for our accounting, apparently, so... Yeah. Sorry.

At some point in the future. Yeah, yeah. That's the plan. Well, it's been a very informative hour. Is there anything you want to get off your chest before we wrap up? Anything you want to say about DLCs or what you're working on in short bits that you think the freaks should know about? We have, like, Marty alluded to this earlier,

but we have, like, a million blog posts on everything about Bitcoin, DLCs, Lightning, Taproot, whatever have you. So check that out and, I don't know, follow me on Twitter. Where can we find you on Twitter? I tweet I shitpost a lot but I also try to tweet some good stuff I think you have a good balance of shitpost and

quality stimulating intellectual engagement with other developers and people building stuff on Bitcoin well thank you I try well you're welcome, thank you for trying freaks, DLCs

very underappreciated not yet underscored I think they're going to surprise people a lot to the upside again, heuristically I like things that are underappreciated yet have strong fundamentals which discrete law contracts fall

into that bucket in my opinion yeah, I agree alright, well go follow Ben on Twitter, Ben, thank you for joining us thank you it's been fun that's all we got for this Friday afternoon, freaks peace and love

Ta-da!