TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #279: Avoiding oblivion, the state of Chicago, and bitcoin smart contracts with Chris Stewart

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Chris Stewart, founder of Suredbits, to discuss: - Recording podcasts with our grandmothers - Avoiding oblivion in the Digital Age - Chicago crime - Necessary police reform - DLCs - AJ Towns' Taproot + PTLC proposal - Will there be a fee market? - much more Follow Chris on Twitter Check out Suredbits Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins Compass Mining

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I'm standing outside in a rainstorm in my screen and porch getting these ads out for you freaks. Doing it in the rain. In a storm. The pod never sleeps. Sorry, Adam Carey, for calling the pod. The podcast never sleeps. This rip was brought to you by our friends at the motherfucking Cash App! Cash App is something you stack sats, send sats, receive sats, and sell sats, if you so please. I think you may be able to send sats in a very unique way. Well, not a very unique way, but in a new way on the Cash App at some point in the near future.

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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 that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're paying attention you probably should be probably should be let's do it chris i just ninja launched on you because we're talking about something very important here family lineage history and the ability to record that history in modern day you want to record a podcast for your grandmother yeah um my grandma is 81 years old i have you know one of my four grandparents left

And you get to talking to your grandparents about what it was like when they grew up and the things that they, you know, what was the norms of the time? And my grandma lived in very rural Iowa growing up and in an agriculture community and understanding like, you know, when things like electricity and like running water like got to her household growing up is just one of these like very humbling things to listen to. is like, you know, we're talking, you know, 1950s, early 60s, before this stuff was happening in like the very rural parts of the nation. And that's kind of, you know, for me, anyway, that's just crazy to think that we're talking, you know, 60 years ago, and there's like, my grandma didn't have this stuff. There's an anecdote that she shared with me about, you know, bathing in the family, they would put a cattle tank out in the sun all day, filled up with cold water in the morning. And throughout the day, the sunlight would heat up the water so you could have a warm

bath at the end of the day. And it just goes to show the amount of things we take for granted in the modern age between electricity, hot water, clean drinking water is another big one. And if you don't like kind of capture like this parts of your family history, it can be lost very easily. And, you know, part of the podcasting medium that is so cool is you can really capture that moment in time and capture that information and share it with your kids someday when they come of age

and are interested in that stuff so that they can have an idea of where your family came from. My grandma Janice did X, Y, and Z and understand that part of your family history. I fucking love the idea.

Now I want to record a podcast of my lone remaining grandparent. Love you, Grandma. And you said you're only going to share it with your family, but I think you should put it out there publicly because before we hit record two, we're discussing the concept of oblivion. And you mentioned the phrase, you die three deaths. Yeah. You know, I think it's that you have your like physical death, you have your mental death, and you have the last time anyone ever echoes your name or thinks about you on the face of the earth. And that's like your last death.

And, you know, now that we live in this age of technology, hopefully we can, you know, we're boosting physical and mental deaths, you know, with, I guess, medicine these days. But we can also really capture people's, capture more information about people and kind of fairly represent them with the podcasting medium in an easy, cheap way. So that's, you know, I've been thinking about that a lot lately. And, you know, my grandma's 81. And, you know, it doesn't get any easier when you're 81. You're, you know, you're kind of on a certain trajectory. And it's important to, you know, capture those moments, though, and capture that family history. And that's something I think is really cool. I think it's really cool, too. Is she still in Iowa? She lives in a rural community in Iowa, northeastern Iowa, and she's lived there all of her life. I'm from a very agricultural-based family, both sides, and most of my family has lived in northeast Iowa for all their lives, milking cows, farming, various crops, and that's kind of the history of the Stewart slash Hodfitt family. Yeah.

I love this idea. we should all record podcasts with our grandparents it's funny my grandmother's she's 91 she's in her late 60s approaching 70 um but she's got she's a great storyteller it's like one thing i think she's got great stories from growing up she has a very interesting um life too her mother died when she was very very young um and so it was like her dad and then her stepmother my great-grandmother esther um scottish um had stepped into her family and it's just uh a very interesting upbringing um that she had in the way she met my grandfather and had my dad and my uncle and it's funny she's the northeast philly woman too oh yeah she's she booing at the eagles games yeah well she moved

don't you become a cowboys fan when you move down there that was actually that was one thing i'm really happy i did um she moved to delaware for some reason grandma if you're listening to this i tell you this every time i don't know why you you lived in philadelphia for the first 65 years of your life and you just moved to delaware and uh marty's grandma uh he's going to ask you that on a podcast sir and i think is the correct answer here to get to the bottom of this pressing yes grandma we're gonna get we're gonna get to the bottom of why you moved to delaware now but right before two days before i wound up driving down here to make the final move i took uh my son and my wife we went and visited her she lives with her sister now it's funny my uh my my grandmom

and my aunt bernie just uh and aunt bernie can't hear she's good hon hon what was that she just smiled she's like one of those deaf people just smiles like she's not like deaf uh she she can't hear she's partially deaf but like she just smiles and like yeah yeah yeah um but yeah they're they wear their like sweatsuits and sit in the recliners watching philly sports and oh hell yeah eating hoagies that is steaks do you think uh she knows um like the immigration story from your family of coming to the united states uh yes i do um because my grandfather was very into this is her husband right yes yeah yeah my grandfather was very into our lineage and okay tracing that and actually my uncle um picked up that torch as well and he still

like he has like a very very uh detailed family tree of where where we all came from and yes we're uh we got some german background english um irish um that part of the world gotcha yeah i think my family on my mom's side anyway emigrated from norway in the 1880s um i think there was you know some sort of depression going on over in norway at the time that caused a lot of people to emigrate over to the States. And I believe that would be my grandma's grandparents. But again, going back to the, the podcasting thing with your grandparents is like, these are the kinds of things that you like, you want to get on the record so that you don't have the, uh, what was it again? That, you know, uncle, whatever told me at Christmas five years ago. And, uh, you know,

you're trying to remember that 20 years later when, you know, you really start to think about those things yeah no we actually have my other my mom's side my grandmother and grandfather both passed um but my uncle uh he actually has this one video of my grandmother like gardening and like talking about like how she tends to her plants and it's like it was towards the end of her life and he shares it with everybody like once a year like hey um here's mom doing what she loved loved gardening but like that's one thing we have as a family that we all cherish is that video my uncle tommy took like randomly one day when when he was living with her towards the end of her life and yeah i mean that's why i you know i i bring it up to you because you you obviously know a lot

about podcasting and like you know what's the most effective way to get it done um you know i don't want to start my own podcast and do a reoccurring series but it is something that you know i i care about and would want to be done very well uh because yeah i i would love to keep it around for you know my kids even my grandkids someday and show them grandma janice and uh you know who she was and you can see the actual video of it and i don't have to you know draw the picture uh for you and um you know forget things along the way as we all do as time passes on yeah this is a great wholesome way to start this this episode of tales from the crypt if you're in northeastern iowa uh and you have the capacity to set up audio, video, podcasting gear for Chris,

he's looking for some help. Yeah, that would be awesome. I would really appreciate that. And, you know, yeah, slide into my DMs. I'm very interested in that. Yeah. I look forward to listening to it. I want to listen to your podcast with Grandma Janice.

She's spunky for an 81-year-old. She's more than I can handle, to be honest. i guess uh yeah she's uh she's she's alive and well doing great and uh thriving is probably the way to put it hell yeah hell yeah um i don't want to go from wholesome to too morbid here but we were talking last night about chicago oh jesus yeah it's um it's tough uh you know it's uh you know shy rack is back i guess it's probably the way to put it um you know we're talking you know in the nicest parts of town there's like shootouts in the middle of the day and uh you know in lincoln park uh earlier this week at a shopping center there was a cop that got shot in the cheek

holy in the face so you know that's what it was he got shot in the face um because he was trying to intervene in a domestic violence situation where i think some guy was trying to abduct a woman and you know it spiraled out of control and then you end up having you know a shootout between the cops and this guy at a lincoln park shopping center like and again lincoln park very nice part of chicago we're not talking anglewood here what what shopping center is like diversity in halstead or i i i don't live up in that area so i i don't know the area super well i i couldn't tell you but um you know it's it's uh keep talking i'm fixing your mic i'm seeing something on the podcasting thing yeah it's um you know it's it's crazy how uh violent though it seems to be

traditionally chicago's violence like the last like 20 or 30 years has kind of been isolated in the south side and um you know it's chicago's like a weirdly segregated city i guess you could say very um and you know most things are out of sight out of mind it's really sad and horrible to say that but that is an attitude that you know happens in chicago um as you know this violence kind of permeates into the nicer parts of town hopefully some people in the uh you know that have some sway in the city the politicians stop um stop with the course that they're on and understand that people need uh to have consequences for their actions and uh that is something that seems to be forgotten about. Like, you know, I'm optimistic now that we have Team Blue back in the White

House, we can start like not politicizing this stuff as much as we've done the last four years and understand that, you know, there does need to be consequences for actions, especially physical violence. Like, you know, I was joking with you before this, but it seems like you have more repercussions these days if you say something wrong than if you like literally assault somebody, which is just you know what you know your society's out of whack i don't think it's a joke i think that's actually the reality of the situation that we live in in this country it's pretty crazy pretty pretty crazy and that was we were both at the austin bit devs last night and it was interesting to see uh park mayor parker yeah he always has to make a an austin specific

uh announcement before we get into the thick of bit devs and last night was uh the uh the the proposition uh vote that's up right now uh which is about giving the police sufficient funding so that uh austin and this is the way they describe it doesn't go to the way of san francisco la yeah new york and chicago chicago and other areas and and i thought it was a really powerful message because it was bipartisan it was anti-political it was all about um quality of life and and ensuring that the city of austin provides its citizens with the quality of life and a degree of safety that everybody is comfortable with and it's just like very straightforward and um practical solutions let's fund the police and what i like there let's make

sure that we have bilingual police let's make sure that they have sufficient training we're up the training from 40 hours to 80 hours which is the one thing that i think every police force in this country needs is more training that's why you have all these shitty situations they're just just killing people well because they can't handle the stress and they freak out just to interrupt you a little bit here another crazy thing that's going on in chicago is like i think up to half the police force might walk off the job because they're putting these vaccine mandates on these guys and like you know say what you want about the vaccine or whatever like i'm more worried about catching a bullet in chicago than i am worried about catching covid

um it's if we have half the police force walk off the job we're gonna find out you know what uh the dystopian anarchy looks like pretty quickly in chicago i think uh you know back last year with the george floyd stuff like um that happened in may you know rioting and looting all stores broken into in downtown chicago and then they decided to follow it up with an encore two months later when i don't even know what happened and they went up and robbed michigan avenue on the middle on a sunday night we all woke up monday morning and find all the beautiful stores on michigan have broken into and stolen stuff just looted yeah the nike store right there got got absolutely demolished so i mean again like whatever your opinions on the vaccine are like

half your police force walking off the job over this mandate like you know i i hope somebody backs down i you know whether it's the police or the the mayor but you know as a citizen of chicago like it's just a terrifying proposition to have that happen in um you know a city that that it's that violent in. And to hear this refreshing message down here in Austin, you know, from what Parker says, it's like, you know, police aren't the bad guys. They provide a service to us and they're an integral part of the community. Do they make mistakes? Absolutely. They're human. Everybody makes mistakes. And sometimes they're absolutely awful mistakes, but you know, you can't, uh, you know, demonize the entire community for the actions of, you know, a few bad apples too.

So it's, you know, it's it's tough times in Chicago, I would say, you know, it's they're really getting to the brink of, you know, where they're going to have this city go the next 20 or 30 years. And, you know, whether it goes the way of Detroit or finds a way out and becomes, you know, Chicago reincarnate from years past. Yeah. I mean, as somebody who lived in Chicago for five and a half, six years and truly loves the city, I hope it does find its beautiful city. It really is. And it's a good, great culture, very blue collar culture and incredible amenities, incredible food, incredible sports and the weather in the winter sucks a bit, but it's a character builder. I would argue like the better part of the financial world is in Chicago. I much prefer the CBOT, CME, Chicago School of, not School of Finance, but Implementation of Finance compared to Wall Street.

I think it's much more salt of the earth type people in that financial realm. And then, yeah, going back to the cops issue too, I think what people need to understand too is Chicago specifically, like you said, it's segregated. You have the south side, the west side, and you have the north side, but there's a pocket in the south side too where a lot of these cops come from.

it's like the south side irish and they're like old school they've been there over a century uh a very strong tight-knit community there that's where a lot a lot of the police come from i believe is is that that south side irish pocket um and yeah i mean they don't they they have a very strong culture they don't want to be forced to do anything you have laurie lightfoot coming in and now she's a complete buffoon uh i'll just i'll just say it straight she's a buffoon like she should have never been that's what that's why like the alderman system in chicago like can lead to these yeah these stupid situations like how they have their their city politics set up like and that's another thing i probably said this on the podcast before but it bears

repeating people think chicago is called the windy city because it's very windy which it is off the lake it is very windy but it's called the windy city because its politics are so corrupt like they're so windy and uh it's uh it's really remarkable yeah yeah and there's something needs to be done and again i've i have a lot of friends a couple of which uh grew up in the south side irish part of chicago and they are police and they they do not like the situation at all and they're truly good people just want to protect the city of chicago and they have this tyrant midget mayor who's just like out there trying to yeah i think she's up for re-election and Well, I mean, the really disheartening thing, you know, I, Lori is whatever, I'm kind of indifferent about her. But, you know, the, the problems most of the time are the attorney generals in these various states. So, you know, you got Chesa Boudin out in San Francisco, whose dad is literally a terrorist that got pardoned by Chris Cuomo.

Both his parents. Both his parents are literally terrorists, and they killed two black police officers in the 70s, and now we're walking free. There is also Kim Fox here in Chicago, and she comes from this, I think it's called restorative justice ideology founded in the universities. And this means no consequences for physical actions, it seems. It seems like you talk about your theories or whatever in academia, and I don't really care personally. until it you know comes to the streets and you see this actually practically playing out in cities like san francisco in cities like chicago and like what we as citizens all need to think about is like is this what we want is this the ideology that you know it's manifesting itself on our

streets and again i am more worried about catching bullets than catching covid on like the streets of chicago like it's um it's it's just bad i mean i yeah it's really just sad to see it really is and what's even sadder to see is that there isn't really a an effort to have an honest conversation about all this is all very visceral and that's why i really appreciated i can't believe i can't remember the name of the organization that spoke before bit devs last night but they're they're pushing for for sensible um police funding and then police training on top of that and it just makes sense all right yes let's let's recognize that there are certainly inherent problems and a lot of the police forces across the country that deal or that primarily

are driven by the fact that um there's not enough training like there's not enough stress training there's not enough de-escalation training there's not enough language training you need to line up police officers in certain communities with certain um certain demographics and languages that that allow people to communicate when there is an event that the police need to show up to um it's simple straightforward sensical solutions that are out there and nobody like you have to have them discussed before bit devs like you don't have them discussed on like cnn or well it's refreshing to hear somebody saying that message and i was like god austin really is uh at least there's a pushback and like you know i don't know how successful this

organization is but it's just refreshing to hear the message that uh you know we care about your physical safety when you're walking around and we're going to try and keep you guys safe and we're going to fight for that cause where as in chicago that seems to be one of the lowest priorities right now well they have been successful and they mentioned it um earlier with the the camping ban and they successfully got the tents out of austin and then in our people can't just set up tents and yeah and just like live wherever they're not we're not going to turn into san francisco we're not going to turn into la um hopefully we don't turn into like hopefully philadelphia doesn't get as bad as san francisco and la but they have a similar situation with a

shitty da um a shitty police chief that are trying to push the city that way i won't be back to fight for philadelphia don't worry um but with the and that's the other thing too like everybody viscerally like on cnn and mainstream with the the tenting ban specifically was just like oh you're anti-homeless and they were like actually no like we can prove that the homeless living in these tents is actually worse for them like they're more likely to do drugs they're more likely to be uh unsanitary like there's better solutions to help yeah these people i listened to a really interesting podcast on that recently on joe rogan as he had i think is like schellenberger uh he wrote san francisco i think is the book's name and he talks about how like homeless is such

a misleading term too and like where you know most of the woke crowd here in the united states get their ideology from is europe and things that you know were tried out in the 70s and 80s in europe with, they had a drug problem there at the time and they refused to call it homelessness. They called it an open drug bazaar. And they were very specific with that term because most of these people are choosing to live here so that they can do drugs. Not that they don't have the financial means if they were to get clean to get a house and, you know, live safely. And his argument on the podcast is, you know, we have plenty of resources to help people here in the United States. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, if you guys have ever dealt with an addict in your

life, um, they have to be willing to help themselves before you can give help to them and providing them a home, you know, it's just going to end up getting sold for the thing that they love the most, uh, which is through their drug of choice. And I think that's the right way to look about, look at it personally. I'd encourage other people to go listen to that podcast. It's really interesting yeah i mean i'm sure many of you that are listening now have experienced this yourself whether in your family or friend group with addiction obviously it's a rampant problem in this country specifically i know me personally i've lost a cousin to it and many friends and it's that is exactly true like they need that was one thing when we're trying to save my cousin

particularly we were getting advice or like he needs to hit rock yeah and that's so hard to do yeah it's uh and like you know you it's so easy to portray that as you're not being compassionate you're not what is the word empathizing with the person you're not you know feeling their pain and because of x y and z in their past it's justified for them to do this but uh you know you can't always be looking in the past uh for you know you can't always be looking backwards you got to start looking forwards at some point understand like you know whatever the substance of choices uh you know you need to put it down if you're not willing to put it down um you as i guess a person on the outside you can't like force them to do it it's something they have to come to realize themselves

and it's so heartbreaking that that is the truth in my opinion or anyway yeah i mean i think many medical professionals would advise that as well and again there's there's other ways to attack these problems let's think about like that's why i love focusing on bitcoin um specifically because it gets the first principles and attacks a core of a massive problem in the world which is the corruption of money um with drug addiction what's the core of that maybe it's uh the the accessibility to opiates that is just they're giving out like candy dopamine release of whatever that drug is that they love and well it's just not even that it's just like the the accessibility these drugs shouldn't be as accessible they shouldn't be given out um i mean

And if you've seen the documentary on HBO, the documentary series, I forget what it was called, but it came out like earlier this year that described like how opiates and benzos got prescribed to millions of people. They were basically the pharmaceutical companies create a symptom called pain and you can treat pain and like pain is such a broad subjective term. like what is pain is an emotional pain it's a physical pain is that physical pain actually it's relative it's there's no like absolute pain that you can really accurately measure across person to person it's such a subjective thing that uh you know it's a very subjective

thing yeah and it was all a rationalization to sell a product which is fucking an addictive drug and it's still ravaging the country i mean the nhl is going through right now they lost jimmy hayes he died of a fentanyl overdose really um it was mixed with cocaine um but he he got in his family came out very open about very emotional about it um he was being prescribed opiates by the team doctor like they were like they were pez and he got addicted to opiates and eventually went into other drugs so we're about the same age i'm guessing and like a big thing when i was in high school. So I graduated high school in 2010, you know, rural Iowa, again, class of 69 kids in my graduating class. So super small, you know, everybody. And, you know, there was just some

fiends in my high school for people that were getting their wisdom teeth pulled. And they would just be hunting down these people asking for oxys or whatever painkillers were prescribed to them at the time. And I didn't really understand like, you know, what's going on or why this is such a cool cool thing quote unquote or why these people care about this so much but and you watch you know kind of it unfold over time after you get out of high school and this person i'm thinking of specifically definitely hit rock bottom and got clean as far as i know and has turned his life around which is great but um you know when you're 17 or 16 and you know you get your like something as simple as your wisdom teeth pulled you start popping these things that make you feel

good and you don't understand like this is you know the pharmaceutical version of very strong like opio opio opiates i can't say the word but um in it you know led this individual down this you know terrible path and uh at the time you know 2008 2009 2010 people just didn't know or at least i i didn't know anyway yeah i mean so i graduated 2009 so i guess i'm a year older than you at least uh class-wise schooling-wise and um it never hit like during high school maybe it did and i just unaware of it but like in college philly was like one of the per capitals of the world um maybe might still be i'm not sure um you had like the perk highway from florida all the way up to the northeast and philly was one of the hubs a lot of kids that stayed and went to sju or temple

fell into that yeah that abyss um many made it out i know i know quite a few did fall down and and made it out and clean themselves up but some some didn't make it out uh and yeah like one thing i was proud of my i think my parents learning the lesson from my cousin specifically my brother tore his acl and he got surgery um his junior year in high school and they wouldn't let him take opiates or like no it's not happening yeah i mean it's try it without first if it's the pain's really bad like i understand and like but i think the default should be like let's you know try the ibuprofen the tylenol like you know just if you're if you're still really hurting in a couple days maybe come back or maybe that's what they've done but going to like you know the bitcoin angle of

this is like i think what bitcoin you know does for a lot of people is also kind of gives purpose and uh you know when you're in that age range especially 18 to say 25 you know you've you're you have a lot of freedom thrust upon you, you know, generally you're out of your parents household and it's kind of like, well, what do I do next? And, uh, you know, Bitcoin for me, you know, I got into Bitcoin when I was 21, 22, and it was like this, you know, illuminating thing like, this is so cool. And I can like work on this. I can, you know, build cool things with Bitcoin. There's this awesome community around it of people online that I can go and talk to interact with almost anywhere in any city now. And, you know, have that sense of community and

purpose that you're like working for a cause that's bigger than yourself. And I hope like other people that are younger, you know, say you're in that 18 to 20 age range. And hopefully instead of, you know, kind of tripping up along the common things that a lot of us did, you know, I love the booze back in the day. I still love the booze and not as quite as much anymore. but you know having that thing to work towards and work on and give you that kind of sense of purpose and mission and for me like I think Bitcoin really fulfills that I listened to a really great podcast with Lex Freeman and Alex Gladstein the other day you know Gladstein lays out this like amazing mission for Bitcoin and he does it in such an articulate way that really

motivates it motivated me anyway to keep like really working hard on it and like thinking like how can we solve these problems for the next, you know, three or 4 billion people and give people this freedom that they don't currently have. And that's like something that's, you know, worth spending a lifetime working on, in my opinion. Completely agreed. And I, I mean, the last two years specifically has really driven home the concept of, of deaths of desperation, uh, driven by alcohol abuse, drug abuse, uh, mental illness and it drives people to suicide. And there's, I mean, the quote,

massive men lead lives of quiet desperation. It's really, I think, applicable to our modern age. And there are things out there like Bitcoin that can provide purpose. Another thing, highly recommend, have a child. Oh, yeah. That'll provide some purpose in your life as well. Maybe not when you're 18.

No. Well, yeah. If you've got the right lady. if you got the right lady um and you think you're able to provide yes that's uh my parents are young they were 22 so not 18 but yeah and then we're going back to those generational shifts yeah i think my grandma you know had her first kid when she was 19 or something like that and you know nowadays i'm 29 and i don't have any kids but hopefully that changes in the next couple years i highly recommend it i highly recommend it and yeah i think i think yeah a lot of people are

especially like after lockdowns too like people are at home they're doing they're depressed they're doing this stuff and then they're thinking like oh when the lockdown's up what am i gonna do i'm gonna go back to my my nine to five push and excel spreadsheets like holy shit i don't want to do that at all and they need people need better purpose in this world yeah and i think bitcoin provides that there's a lot to do we got to fix the money we got to lower our time preference we got to fix the sick culture that we have out there this high time preference go go go spend spend spend flaunt flaunt flaunt um there's many lessons to be learned and and shared over the next couple decades i think of how we're going to fix this world and good segue into the

the conversation bitcoin does fix this and you're working to provide uh the world with the tools which make bitcoin more useful provide more utility to it and so for any of you freaks who may not have chris been on the podcast i think it's your fourth appearance third or fourth yeah so yeah it's something like that i've done one with you in austin did one with you right before covet in new york we did one before that right yeah i maybe we did one like remotely it's i i don't we might have done one remotely at some point um i i can't recall at the moment but uh you know the funnest one was definitely the you know march of early march of 2020 when uh yeah me and adav like rolling around new york like at the center of covid like the world's about to

stop two days later and we're sitting down and you know marty's apartment building on a you know a couch in a lobby area doing, uh, doing a TFTC and then, um, you know, speculating about where this COVID stuff was going. Cause at that point it was kind of like the whispers and rumors of like, don't freak out because it may be just totally fake news. And, uh, you know, here we sit, uh, 18 months later and guess it wasn't fake news and the world has definitely changed a little bit. Quite a bit. And it is, uh, I'm happy that we're able to do this in person. It's such a better flow oh yeah we did it in april me you and ben um and now we're here a lot has changed i think people silver lining one of the silver linings and there's a few silver linings to the the last

year and a half uh states rights being reasserted certainly one of them and another is that people are are beginning to question authority and whether or not the central planning of a global economy actually makes sense and whether the people quote unquote in charge are actually competent enough to to steer the ship of this global society if you will uh and uh again i think people are starting to look for alternatives or noticing that the money printer go burr may not be the best solution to all of the problems i mean this i feel like this can all be summed up by the whole uh govern me harder daddy meme like that is like the most epic meme i've seen in the last like you know four or five months is if you guys haven't seen this govern me

harder daddy meme like check that out because it's just an npc with 15 needles in his arm just like keep shooting me up baby like i'm your experiment ah god damn it and then we have prices rising people freaking out about that now and it's really being driven uh to the forefront that holy shit like the money might be messed up uh what the hell is going on obviously we have bitcoin hit an all-time high earlier this week you have uh going mainstream you had tucker carlson talking about uh inflation and qe to his audience millions of people the other week i thought that was maybe i'm over blowing it or you're making it more significant than it was but i think driving that narrative to the forefront of a mainstream audience is actually a pivotal

cultural moment um i don't think that one segment specifically will be looked back upon but i think the the conversation of inflation becoming more prominent and people asking what the hell yeah It's, you know, I was talking to somebody and it's like, it's like this little constant reminder every day you go to the store and buy something and you can just like measure it again. So what did it cost for me to get this bread last week? And then you kind of slowly, it's like, why is my grocery bill, you know, 30% higher than it was like six months ago? Like, what's going on here? Like, this is like the kind of thing that makes people like, you know, it's when you, it affects you personally is when you really start thinking about these things. And, uh, um, you know, it just creeps into your life, uh, you know, silently it's what inflation kind of does. And before you know it, you understand, or you realize like, oh, wow, I do not have as much money as I used to, even though I'm getting, I guess, paid the same amount of money. Well, I can almost guarantee you my wife, uh, as you know, right before we sat down

and record, she put my son in the car, they were going to the grocery store. They should be back any minute. Uh, I don't know if she'll interrupt the podcast, but I can almost guarantee that either when she gets back maybe she will or when we're done i'll go in she'll be like guess how much it was this yeah the last three weeks she's like oh my gosh like look look at i got three bags this cost 275 that's insane like it's like ah yeah she's gonna come back she's been noticing um pretty uh it's been noticeable like she's like oh my gosh it's like it's happening yeah this is like that one of these like orange pill moments i feel like if you've heard the uh if you've heard

about Bitcoin before and you know you hear people like you and me rant on and on about money and like why it's so important and why Bitcoin's different and you're like okay well whatever like maybe Chris and Marty are just crazy guys you know on a podcast somewhere but then you're you know you see it's like oh wait like some of this stuff that they're mentioning is actually kind of becoming true in my daily life and uh maybe I need to start taking those you know the questions that they are kind of hypothesizing or the answers that they're giving more seriously or at least, uh, you know, spend some time actually thinking about that. Cause, uh, you know, it isn't just this theoretical abstract thing. It's affecting my daily life, um, now, and like,

I got to do something about it. Yeah. I'm not able to eat the quality of food that I, that I was only a few months ago. I'm not able to eat as much as I wanted to. I'm not able to fill my tank, uh, as many times as I'd like to, to travel where I'd like to. It's, I saw a tweet today. There's something northern california apparently a gallon of gas is getting up to like 750 yeah i saw that too i was like damn right i think it's like 450 in the middle you know in the chicago area that i live in which is like you know downtown chicago and they typically have like in any inner city typically high gas prices but still like you know we're gonna be pushing five bucks by christmas i think so um that's you know that that you know affects the uh poorest people in society it

doesn't affect you know wealthy people yeah and again going back to the central planners and their incompetence like the policies that they're attempting to pass right now uh are only going to affect poor people even more i mean we saw it in new york earlier this year with the shutdown that very reliable nuclear power plant um and now with the quote-unquote green new deal build back better act whatever they're calling it these days like they're they're trying to force that policy on the rest of the country just to wipe out reliable energy generation replace it not even replace it they're gonna like plan to replace it um and that increase electricity cost and that increase of electricity costs does affect the rich but they can they can stomach it and it affects the poor

yeah the people in harlem people in queens uh people down in englewood in chicago um like going back to a comment you had earlier though about like um you know wall street versus chicago finance like someone you should get on this podcast is uh bill mallers jack mallers dad and i would love to hear him talk about the whole like etf coming out you know fight the fud that's kind of like uh you know 20 you know does does this etf futures products circumvent like the 21 million coin limit and he's such an like experienced operator in the space and has such a like a wealth of knowledge in chicago finance like i think it would be a really fascinating podcast if you know you can swing that to get him on yeah and i think jack might

be in town so i might have to hit him on the shoulder yeah not hit him tap him on the shoulder and say hey i'd like to have your dad on the show yeah um you know bitcoin mom and uh bill are you know one of these like treasures in the bitcoin community from chicago started uh the uh chicago So Bitcoin Open Blockchain Meetup Bob in Chicago, which is kind of the less technical, more social group. And then I run Chicago BitDevs, if anybody's listening in the Chicago area. We just got that started again in person at a bar in Chicago. So, you know, come socialize, talk Bitcoin technical talk like DLCs and Lightning. and uh you know we're going to bring uh that community that is so great down here in austin

to chicago and kind of get that jump started still up by loyola it's uh yes yeah it's not at loyola but is in the area okay yeah up there that's a good spot um i mean you mentioned it to talk about dlc's lightning let's start with dlc's i mean that's why we're we're here we've been dming last week i actually reached out to you because uh obviously the past episodes that we've done we've talked a lot about point time lock contracts aj towns came out with a proposal to do point time lock contracts uh and combine them with taproot in a unique way i'm too dumb to actually understand what what he's trying to do there so i reached out to you i was like what do you think of this yeah it's uh so i mean first off like i wanted to highlight the various like

kind of um lego pieces that uh were in play here to get this done and i think it's um such a great example of all of this research that's gone on in bitcoin over the last three or four years kind of come coming to this culmination and really uh you know enhancing the lightning network um you know cited in aj towns this post on the lightning dev mailing list is uh you have lloyd fournier who came up with this revocable signatures idea he's a developer in Austin. There's Andrew Polstra, who is kind of the pioneer of adapter signatures, which we use in DLCs as well. He's cited in there. There's some other Blockstream guys around Moosig2, which Jonas Nickler, Tim Ruffing, and then I think the last guy is,

I'm going to forget his name. Sorry. I think it's Giannis, but you guys should go check out the paper he's an author on it and uh you know this is you know research has been going on the last like couple years and aj kind of put this all these various pieces together to make this very compelling proposal to enhance the lightning network with ptlcs like his goal with this is to kind of reduce some or sand off some of the rough edges of lightning such as like constantly having to keep around all these like revoked secrets. So you have this ever-growing secret set that you need to keep track of at all times. And then also you can non-interactively forward HTLCs in this proposal as well. So traditionally Lightning's a very interactive protocol. So that means if I want

to make a payment, I got to go query my peer and then they got to send me a message back and then I got to send them a message back and then they got to send me a message back so that's a lot of like kind of round trips and latency that's incurred to make these payments part of AJ's proposal is to make it so that you can just forward it and you don't have to ask me to get permission to forward this thing so we can start making this this payment latency lower so that you know things like on say if you're you know doing things over tor where you can incur a lot of latency going over the Tor network. That starts to make that user experience a little bit easier and more reliable as well. There's some other things that he's touting in the Lightning Dev

mailing list post. I'm still digesting it, frankly. So maybe I'm saying something wrong here, but it's an iterative process to understand these things and also see how it would be deployed into you know the live lightning network that does have a lot of changes so it changes kind of like the transaction structures it adds another layer of transactions i was talking with somebody that knows about mooseg2 last night at austin bit devs and he said like you know we're probably at a coin flip for that actually being included in the libsec p repo by the end of the year which was a pretty good answer to me i was kind of surprised that he was that optimistic about getting Moosig 2 like kind of officially supported uh so that's you know two or three months from

now so we can you know hopefully start having some of the lightning projects try this out and implement it for any of the freaks out there who may be unaware Moosig and Moosig 2 specifically it's uh basically a library that helps you create scripts better correct it combines like public keys so that you can take like uh you know a couple public keys combine them into one public key and then you can also build one signature that corresponds to that aggregate public key so that you get these like nice you know traditionally in bitcoin you it's very easy to tell when you're doing multi-sig schemes and moosig2 makes it more private and it also makes it more space efficient so i i meant to start the conversation with this because i assume you know

since number go up, you probably have a lot of new listeners that are just stepping into the water and learning about Bitcoin. And I'm sorry for, you know, breaking out the technical jargon and confusing you so fast. Hopefully it's not super intimidating. You know, I'm more than happy to help answer questions or help people understand the Bitcoin development community and get you started on your uh you know kind of bitcoin developer journey um but you know yeah just you know try and uh eat this uh eat the what is it the whale like one bite at a time because it takes a long time to understand this stuff and it's okay not to know it and uh think somebody like me is just throwing out uh you know all the buzzwords and jargon and whatever and if you're

confused that's okay um you know the community is very nice and open and ask questions we want to see the bitcoin developer community grow and have you guys come up with the next new idea like all these people i just cited you know lloyd jonas polstra um like these are all you know bitcoin developers that have been around a while but you know we want new developers to come in with their new ideas and perspectives and enhance bitcoin in your own like you know unique way or come up with your you know unique ideas so um you know i i really care about growing that community because Because that's one of kind of the bedrocks of Bitcoin, along with the energy component, I think, is like making sure we have enough, you know, brain power, brain horsepower in the space, along with kind of like the robustness of the network itself. Yeah.

And I completely co-sign that message. I mean, I think it's an especially timely message considering Jonas Schinelli stepping down. Citing a bit of fatigue, I guess you could say, or doing it for quite some time. the concept and the reality of developers working on this it's a very tedious process especially if you're working at the protocol level when things happen extremely slowly you can get burnout pretty quickly yeah and i mean also just uh going to jonas's point on the tweet it was like you know maybe you should maybe consider joining under a pseudonym and uh you know there's multiple reasons for that so i have a friend in australia who's a bitcoin core maintainer that gets to have the joy

of being sued by craig wright the fraud and he has to go through all the legal proceedings pay the legal bills and deal with that when he just wants to write code and uh you know that's you know where bitcoin i guess is these days another you know very prolific uh cto in the space um he got swatted in 2017. And for those that don't know what swatting is, it means somebody finds your home address, says you're like holding a gun against your wife's head or something like that, and tells the police to get there as soon as possible. And does anybody want to go through that? Like, I mean, God, no, that's terrible. That's frightening. You know, it just takes one person to make a, you know, a snap judgment in the wrong direction. And you know, may be physically

harmed here so there is um you know there there is some merit to at least starting under a pseudonym and if you want to you know reveal your identity later you can always do that but it's hard to go the opposite direction of you know having a big identity in the space and then uh going pseudonymous again so yeah take you know think about that if you're joining the community i don't mean to like scare you off from being a bitcoin developer or anything like that But, you know, it's okay to start contributing pseudonymously if you want to. And you also can, frankly, ask really, you know, questions that you think are dumb and not have that, you know, have the dumb reputation associated with you. And, you know, I asked Peter Wola a lot of dumb questions in the 2015-2016 timeframe.

And he was very gracious and answered all of my dumb questions, which is why, you know, I think very highly of Peter. but um there's also that element to it yeah yeah it's no i said this last night the live rabbit hole recap it's just like it's so frustrating that you had the correct rights of the world doing this stuff but then like too like we're working on this this protocol bitcoin that extends natural rights in the digital age it's the the greatest extension of natural rights since the the bill of rights it protects private property and autonomy better than any technology arguably that exists on the planet today and there are developers that are doing the hard work and putting it in um feel afraid for doing that

they feel afraid of being attacked by scammers and attacked by the state and it's like holy crap like what is the state of the world if we're afraid to build out a technology that extends freedom like it's i think that little this sort of theme should highlight that that things have gone a bit awry in in today's day and age where you have to be afraid to fight for freedom. And I'm just realizing this, going back to AJ Towns' blog post, a huge person that I forgot to cite is one of the most prolific pseudonymous developers in Bitcoin. Z-Man. Z-Man, Z-M-N-S-C-P-X-J. Me and Nadav have said that back and forth a lot over the years. And he's a brilliant, brilliant person. Whoever it is, wherever he's at, is one of the most

active contributors on the lightning dev mailing list he contributes to sea lightning and it just really goes to show again for all you all you newcomers out there if you have this like you know technical developer skill set it's okay to contribute pseudonymously nobody blinks an eye at that and maybe there is some upside to uh contributing pseudonymously like z-man and he is you know just a rock star i don't think anybody's gonna yeah he's just a rock star straight up like that man is uh so damn productive it's uh you know you also start working with some of these people in the space and you're like god damn like you've got some freaking mental horsepower under the hood that i was not gifted with thanks grandma janice well uh you feel that

way and then uh i just imagine how i feel sitting behind this mic talking like talking to you i'm like oh fuck i'm dumb it's like yeah and then hearing people like peter woola like and andrew whole shit about this stuff man it's like holy shit like i i can't even imagine yeah what it's like in your brain well and then this just again goes going back to the town's proposal or discrete law contracts themselves as well it's like you know we're standing on the shoulders of giants here there's been a ton of work done over the years um with discrete law contracts for instance you know this is a paper that uh mit researcher named taj dryja came out with in 27 2017 2018 somewhere in that time frame you know we've really taken and run with his idea and his initial paper

and you know are trying to industrialize this and bring it to the mainstream so that you know we can have some of the functionality that we see on other blockchains on top of bitcoin and people don't have to you know result to using altcoins to do some of this functionality that they like seeing on other chains yeah and that's what you dedicated your company to essentially right yeah um dlc's are discrete log contracts are in open uh specification now you guys can find it on github uh github.com slash discrete log contracts uh then slash dlc specs um just like how most things in bitcoin happen you know they community members get together and try and start standardizing an open source specification um lightning had this exact same process in the

2016 timeframe where, you know, various developers from various companies started getting together thinking we got to solve this payments problem and we need some way to scale Bitcoin. And how do we do this in a way that's open to any, you know, wallet provider to integrate in the entire world? And they've now come up with the lightning RFCs, which, you know, we're seeing tremendous growth on these days and seeing a very vibrant developer community. You know, DLCs are, we're trying to model that you know same open source community we have you know contributors uh from australia japan europe you know here in america and uh you know we're really i i'd say we're you know in that 2017 time frame of where lightning's at we're starting to get out of the low level

technical specification stuff and starting to get more user facing and one of the things that we just released is our 1.8 release of our DLC wallet that, you know, bakes in some of these features. So we're trying to get more customer facing and allow users to start tinkering with this stuff so we can understand, you know, what are the use cases that you want solved out of DLCs and really, you know, scratch that itch in the community so that we can, you know, do some of this stuff on bitcoin you know i i'm of the opinion that uh we want to steal all the good ideas that happen on other blockchains and ditch all the bad ones so we want to steal their lunch when it's a good idea and if they do something crazy that's idiotic like well guess what they

get to blow up their own blockchain but we want to be the blockchain that succeeds over the next hundred years and i don't think you know we have a monopoly on good ideas here in bitcoin so i want to make sure that we keep an open mind and fairly um look at things that are happening elsewhere and think, like, is this something that's, first off, not parasitic to Bitcoin? Because if it's parasitic and will cause it to fail over the long term, we don't want it. We want Bitcoin to be money forever. But if it isn't, like, and we can do it in a way that's safe to do on Bitcoin, let's bring it over here and kill these other altcoins.

And, like, say, like, Bitcoin's the one true, you know, cryptocurrency. And, you know, make number go up even more. Yeah. No, I completely agree. You know, you've very much sold me on these ideas over the course of our conversations, over the course of the many years we've been talking about this stuff. And for anybody who's listened to all those conversations, I'm very happy to be speaking now because, as you mentioned, you just released the new wallet. We have Taproot getting activated in the next few weeks here. You have AJ's proposal combining Taproot and PTLCs. And like you said, so you have the open source standard that you're trying to create for DLCs.

DLCs, Lightning has an open source standard, Bitcoin has an open source standard, and the discrete log contract future that you envision combines a little bit of everything. Yeah. Well, so basic 101s of DLCs is it's a way to do bets non-custodially directly on top of the Bitcoin blockchain with an oracle. And what an oracle means here is you are absolutely trusting a third party to attest to what's happening in the real world. The example that I usually give for the new listeners in the community is, say you wanted to bet on the election last year between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and you didn't want to deposit your Bitcoin into some shady gambling site somewhere where you're worried about your coins getting stolen from you. We can do this

with Bitcoin if you are willing to trust an oracle to attest to who won the election. So, you know, the parts of the DLC spec are the oracle component, which is very, very important, and you need to put trust in this person. But then if you are willing to trust that person, we can do a bunch of other stuff in a non-custodial fashion that allows you to represent these bets with Bitcoin transactions, and you get all the nice properties of Bitcoin transactions where you know where your money is all the time you know somebody can't go and steal your money from the exchange's hot wallet or something like that you also get great privacy benefits yeah the oracle for instance doesn't even

know that you're using them so um they they also don't have an incentive to steal from you there uh you know one of the other things about dlcs with the oracle is uh the oracle is a very global thing um you should use an oracle that's used by a lot of people and one of the cryptographic tricks we use with dlcs is that if an oracle does what we call equivocation so like what that just means is like they say joe biden and donald trump won the election they reveal their private keys so if they lie they have to be consistent with their lie so they can't tell you know user a that trump won and user B that Biden won and user C that, you know, I don't know, uh, whoever the libertarian candidate was this year won. And, uh, you know, that, that, that's also a nice property. So it's

like an all or nothing lie is how you should think about it. And again, still there is trust there, but there is, you know, kind of nice properties around that trust where everybody gets screwed or nobody gets screwed. They can't play funny games of like you get screwed, you don't and pick and play you know favorites and i think you can go even further right you don't have to use one oracle which is something i uh very much like because i think that even distributes not distributes risk but mitigates risk a bit more you'd have to have multiple oracles dying at the same time yeah and this is you know we we did a demo with um pierre richard bitfinex and we were one of the oracles too in this demo where we had the oracles attest to the market price of bitcoin

on various exchanges so pierre richard attested to the the kraken bitcoin price bitfinex attested to their own exchanges bitcoin price and then i think we looked at coinbase or something like that and uh it works kind of like a two of three multi-sig where if the you know bitfinex and Kraken both agree that, you know, Bitcoin prices, you know, 20K or whatever, that's the price that gets used for execution of the DLC. However, if, let's say, you know, Kraken said Bitcoin was $0 and Bitfinex told the truth and said it was $20,000 and we lied that, you know, and said it was a hundred thousand dollars in that failure scenario um the dlcs have a refund clause built in and that just means since the oracles couldn't come to consensus about what the bitcoin price is

you get your money back and that's just kind of like a you know what that that's the best you can do in those scenarios if the oracles are um misbehaving yes and there's other aspects to this too right like the oracles don't even know that you're using them right they just provide a hash attesting to a certain event and you just take that hash and put it inside your dlc yeah it's it's not quite a hash um but you can told you i'm dumb you can think of it like it's so what's really cool is like it's kind of some of the same stuff that aj towns is proposing with the ptlc stuff on lightning and we're in the middle of investigating how dlcs can be brought up to lightning with this ptlc proposal aj has and like is there any slight

tweaks we can propose to him to get dlcs working on lightning as well um not not just on the base level blockchain um but yeah so like what what happens is like they they use these things called adapter signatures called you know created by andrew polstra and uh the oracle gives you what's essentially a public key you encrypt your bitcoin transactions with this public key and then they reveal the private key behind that public key at a later date and time which allows you to decrypt one of those bitcoin transactions representing an outcome so it could decrypt the transaction that says joe biden wins or it could decrypt the transaction that says donald trump wins and that's really what the purpose the oracle serves here um the privacy benefits are amazing

It's really private in the sense that, you know, the Oracle doesn't have to know you're using them, and all they have to do is just reveal this secret and go away at the end of the day. Yeah, so they don't even know what the potential honeypot is. That reduces, I guess, the possibility that they would even attempt an attack because it's like how much is this attack going to pay off?

I don't know, right? because they can't tell if people are using DLCs in the correct way, how big the honeypot is. They could be counterparties to people in DLCs, and that's something you've got to worry about. Like, say if they always took the other side of some trade, like they are big believers that Joe Biden's always going to win the election or something, and then they could just have all the people that think

Trump's going to win come take the opposite side of them, and then they can just lie. That is a risk. You need a lot of capital to do that. but it's theoretically possible i guess i don't know if we'll see it in practice but um the other you know kind of honey so you mentioned honey pots there and this is like where we're starting to think about a lot in dlc world is uh so if you think about this you know you you've used this phrase before pemdos right like you know order of operations like how do we how do we build these

the Bitcoin tech stack in a way that, you know, makes sense. And you can have like lower layers of the stack used by multiple layers above it in an efficient way. And the problem that we're kind of solving with DLCs now is kind of like the settlement and clearing and, you know, being able to represent financial terms and conditions, you know, with Bitcoin transactions. So, you know, back to who won the election or, you know, what the Bitcoin price is. What we haven't solved at all yet is market structure. Like where do buyers and sellers of DLCs go to meet? And that's something, you know, in Ethereum land, you have a smart contract on chain that is the market. And then it also does, you know, the printing of, you know, sending money out of the contract,

depending upon, you know, whatever the state of the contract is. We can do that last part with dlcs but there is no market right now where you can go find somebody to trade against and uh that's you know kind of the next big problem to solve in like kind of the bitcoin community is like how can we bring censorship resistant financial markets over to bitcoin as well um ethereum at the end of the day is kind of what they have is censorship resistant financial markets if you um you may not like like what they trade on the censorship resistant financial markets but that is the kind of fundamental premise of it and i think that's a problem worth trying to solve and that's like kind of the you know the the most free market you can get to at the end of the day and

you know whether that means you have to do something for you know maybe deposit your funds into a centralized exchange for a little bit and then they print a bitcoin transaction from their matching engine or you know people gather together on irc to match these dlcs it's still an open question but that's you know a very big problem to solve and one that's worth trying to solve i think at the end of the day yeah like going back to the election example the atomic finance team uh mattsy and tony um they had election bets on their platform and the way you created that market you basically publicized hey who wants to take the other side of this bet with me which isn't very efficient at scale yeah um you know speaking

of the atomic finance team like talk about you know a team that has uh you know deployed an application using dlcs into the wild uh they are you know one thing that they've got as a piece of feedback is the ability to kind of close out of these positions early so uh let's say you have like you know a option that's open till january 1st 2022 so the next two months and then you're like ah well you know bitcoin's number go up like i'm gonna lose money on this and i want to cut my losses early and uh you know use that capital elsewhere like that's one feature that they've been working on very hard is to allow that ability for users to trade out of their dlcs once they're into it and also just having like nice functionality around um like automatically

reinvesting funds into a new dlc like rolling it every uh you know interval of time like maybe you always want to be in the uh the front month forward contract for you know whatever financial product you're interested in so like trying to uh you know make those quality of life improvements above the kind of core dlc protocol into the application layer and make it usable to end users is something they've been working hard on and you know i think they still have their wait list out there on their site and they're you know slowly letting people in as they get more comfortable with uh you know the platform and their you know various software stacks and making sure that you know nothing goes wrong yeah yeah it's uh it's a fascinating space right now

it seems like some kinks are being worked out but this market matching problem or the the market matching really yeah oh yeah where where where do buyers and sellers meet to get into a deal like we have the problem solved of like once they meet and agree they want to trade something like we've got from there on out and solved assuming they're willing to trust whatever the oracle is however uh you know where do what platform do they go to buy and sell uh you know dlcs is there you know regulate regulatory implications um that's what you know i think maybe eth defy has a little bit of a regulatory advantage on bitcoin right now in that sense where no who hosts the ethereum defy markets you can say the front ends are hosted by uni swap servers and

like their legal team thinks that too so they've you know started censoring various things that are traded on uni swap um however the underlying protocol as far as i know um hasn't delisted these markets and i don't even know if that's possible so you can like definitely cut the most of the off the snake i guess because most people just go through the dumb web ui that's easy but you can't like fully stop the market and that's why i call it a censorship resistant financial market and uh i think yeah that that is a problem that you know we as bitcoiners should care about solving um i don't think we should do it in a way that's like parasitic to bitcoin like we kind of see in the eth defy ecosystem but um if we can come up with a

solution that's well thought out like that's a you know that's a that's a big market and that's going to only enhance bitcoin's value over the long term and make it more censorship resistant you know robust and have more people depend on bitcoin too yeah and so completely agree these markets on ethereum are something we probably do want a bitcoin at some point especially the distributed nature of it but they made the trade-off right they have that but the trade-off is it's very data intensive. So full node centralization exists within that particular project.

And so what are the best solutions or ideas to bring this to the Bitcoin stack, these market matching mechanisms? Are there any out there? I don't know if I have good answers here. So something that I haven't tried out yet and then I need to is, I believe it's called Bitmatrix

who does a solution to this on Liquid. Um, that's actually, for some reason, my mind was like, does liquid fix this in some way? Possibly. I, I haven't tried it out yet. So, um, I can't speak intelligently about that. You have, um, models like join market to look at, you know, what they're fundamentally doing is, you know, what they're trading really is privacy. That's what people care about there.

But, you know, fundamentally what's going on is they're building Bitcoin transactions collaboratively just for the, you know, purpose of gaining privacy rather than entering into some sort of financial application they care about same with wasabi right like they just care about building these coin joins to you know enhance users privacy however the kind of core machinery when you think about it is like all they're doing is building bitcoin transactions and we can you know instead of build bitcoin transactions for privacy we just build it using you know for this financial application that people care about and with join market specifically there's been a lot of encouraging developments there like getting uh getting it included in umbral which is becoming a

very popular node absolutely um stuff like that so it does seem like they're like if you can create a stack or an operating system that allows you to easily access these uh these softwares that that you can then go make larger markets between users that all have that download yeah and just like so future plans for us we released crystal bowl on umbrella um what crystal bowl is is just the oracle part of dlcs so you can you know become an oracle for who's winning the election or become an oracle for what the bitcoin price is um you can do that today on umbrella we released that i think last week or two weeks ago the next you know big project for us internally is porting the wallet which is like a desktop wallet from 2005, basically, into Umbrell.

So people can do DLCs from their nice, you know, Umbrell user interface and not have to, you know, go through all this setup process around your full node or syncing or blah, blah, blah. You know, it's an arduous process. And like for people that are new to the space, you definitely should do this stuff. But, you know, a lot of work has been done over the last couple of years to make that easier and make it more accessible to end users.

And Umbrella is a great incarnation of that, which is why we really want to deploy the DLC wallet to Umbrella so that people can get that nice one-click install user experience. It can connect to their Bitcoin D node behind the scenes. And then before you know it, you're off and rolling with DLCs rather than kind of the more involved process that we have at the moment. And if you think about it, that's probably the way in which you want this stuff to be adopted, right? Absolutely.

people to download full nodes and then basically communicate from hosting your own stuff like i mean it's you know it's like the self-sovereign stack um is you know what they're doing i you know i wonder if raspberry pies will you know be have enough computing resources to do it over the long term but um i you know i think their their platform it's kind of like a bitcoin platform can be deployed to various you know a laptop or whatever as well and uh i i think what they're doing is really cool yeah yeah there's there's many others like them you have start nine out there you have uh my node um raspi blitz raspi blitz i mean you have the the ronin dojo samurai which is a bit different more focused on privacy but there's these these i don't know are they

packages are they yeah i i i don't know what the best name is for that um i call it like bitcoin platforms or something i i don't know if anybody i've heard it called known to box i for whatever reason i don't like that as much i i think they are like kind of like these bitcoin platforms that provide these like very core pieces of infrastructure and do it in a very well way which is you know the bitcoin full node and then that allows applications like ourselves to um behind the scenes just work our magic and have the user just you know fly out of the gate ready to go rather than having to have a little bit of delayed gratification to, you know, use the application. That's always like the problem for being a developer for, you know, self-custodial systems

is you got to do the work to make sure you have all this stuff set up. Yeah. It's not easy. It's not easy. It's going to take time. That's why I urge patience here. Do you think we're being too patient? Do you think, what do you, how are you liking the pace of the development right now? Well, I mean, with like, it's good now, like, you know, Taproot is going to be activated. We got some exciting stuff in DLC world going on. You know, I think Bitcoin development is starting to pick back up again. But, you know, we got to get the products in the hand of users at the end of the day and find these killer use cases. Like one thing I was talking with a buddy of mine that works at Unchained last night and, you know, talking about the fee stuff, like it's like Ethereum has high fees. Bitcoin has low fees. We'd really I think both communities want these things inverted. Like I want Bitcoin to have high fees and I think they want low fees. And like, you know, what is going to be the driver for demand for block space over the very long term?

Like maybe we just have number go up and, you know, adoption occurs. but um you know when you start really thinking about this is speculation for what it's worth but um you start really thinking about you know what was taking up a lot of block space in the 2017 time frame like well like people were making bitcoin transactions a lot of uh you know stable coin transactions were happening to our between exchanges as well there was also a spam attack like a dust spam attack yeah as well there was that as well um but you know the stable coin stuff is kind of dead like you know it's moved away to other blockchains so we just have you know, our kind of core Bitcoin transactions at the end of the day. Our scaling solutions seem to be

working great. You know, lightning is really coming along. It's becoming easier to use every day, which is wonderful. We have, you know, these developments in the pipeline, like, you know, signature aggregation to make even less use of block space. And then, you know, we come back to one of our favorite Bitcoin developers, Luke-JR, who may have been right all along about lowering the block size to 300 kilobytes and for the newbies in the space um luke is an interesting guy and a very prolific bitcoin core developer like one of the one of the elite of the elite and uh during the block wars of 2016 2017 he always said we gotta lower the block size gotta lower the block size gotta lower the block size to 300 kilobytes and everybody looked at him like

he had a third eye on his head because like at the time like it's like what the hell are you talking about like he did have it all this shit he was like yeah and like now over the long term it's like god damn it like was he right like he's uh you know sly as a fox if that's the case and i'm not like advocating for that either but that would be just so ironic if that does end up happening um that we need to lower the blocks size uh you know again this is like a decades probably problem frankly but um it would be just like this ultimate irony if he ends up being right today i'm just vilified so much at the time i think it could be i also think it cannot be i'm not as worried about all this as many developers are maybe that's just because i'm an imbecile but

i think again considering where bitcoin adoption is right now and if bitcoin's successful where it will be um obviously you're going to have demand for utxos and therefore transactions and therefore fees and then beyond that again i've always and again this was an idea incepted into my brain by And Pierre Rochard, who we've mentioned previously in this conversation, you can apply Jevons' paradox to Bitcoin UTXOs. And as UTXOs become more efficient and utility gets added to them, the paradox is that you'd think that you'd use less of them, but you're only going to use more. So it's things like Taproot. DLCs, for instance, on-chain. Hopefully we start producing demand for Bitcoin transactions on-chain with DLCs.

It's a new use case, a new thing we can do. and let's see uh you know how much demand we can stir up for them yeah and it's just like again again urge patience it's a multi multi-century project where it's like i feel like especially if you've been in it for a long time you're just like always like why don't why doesn't everybody use bitcoin like it's like yeah we're almost 13 years in we're shit we're what 10 nine days away from the 13th anniversary of the white paper being launched um and it's like i'm very content with the state of bitcoin the state of development community the state of the social acceptance of the network like we're still in the early monetization phase and love it or hate it

people just don't want number one want to use their bitcoin number two know how to use it in the ways in which you're describing and in the products that you're building yeah and yeah we've got a long ways to go for you know normies being able to do dlc stuff and like a nice streamlined ui atomic finance has done a pretty good job uh frankly but uh you know it also just takes education and uh getting people comfortable with the trade-offs and uh you know also making sure I mean, maybe it's something that people don't want to do at the end of the day, too, is like, like you said, maybe they just want to hodl their coins and not like speculate on something or, you know, put their capital to work to gain yield. Like maybe they're like, Bitcoin has enough like kind of upside to it still that I don't want to screw that up by, you know, betting in the midterm or trying to earn yield in the short term, which, you know, I think it's a fair, I think that's a reasonable point of view to have. yeah and going back to the usability of this i do want to talk about the the wild upgrade because

you guys mentioned it last night um at bit devs i feel comfortable saying this because ben was on stage and so i can mention him and uh they said basically have the messaging between users yes much easier now correct yes so um for uh people out there that have done like opening a lightning channel uh beginning a dlc now is a lot like opening a lightning channel instead of uh you know getting a user's like node id you get what's called an offer and uh their tor address and what the the tor address is where you go connect to this person's wallet uh the offer the dlc offer is the piece of information that contains all of the stuff about the oracle that you're using the uh details about the bet that you're doing like you know i get a hundred thousand sats if

biden wins you get a hundred thousand sats if trump wins or you have some sort of you know numeric payout based on some sort of crazy financial engineering that you're doing and then after having that piece you you send it over to your counterparty they review the terms and conditions making sure that like you know the bet's not crazy or i'm cool uh you know with uh this bet and then behind the scenes the wallet will take care of the rest like that's all that needs to be done and uh you're in your dlc and you just need to wait for the oracle to uh reveal their secret uh you know after the event occurs yeah it's uh so again and uh just another thing we've put out uh youtube videos for for both crystal bowl on umbrel like i was mentioning

earlier you get to listen to my voice some more narrating those videos it's very great it's a great very great podcasting voice i will say that thank you um and then we also did one for the wallet as well showing you how to like walk through setting up a dlc with like the wallet in its current state so if you uh you know want to make this a little less abstract without uh you know actually diving in and downloading the wallet and you know putting some sats in yourself like check out those youtube videos because that's a hopefully a you know it's intended to be a way that's to make it more accessible to people that don't want to quite go head in but just want to like learn like this is what the technology looks like and this is kind of um you know what dlc is

in april and beyond that and go check out the youtube videos and go check out the short bits blog i mean it's just a wealth of information pertaining to discrete log contracts uh the difference between hdlcs ptlcs and uh the multi oracle setup that you can have that that scenario which you describe between you and the dove yeah pierre and bitfinex or roman pierre bitfinex and Uh, yeah, I, yeah, I think it was Roman PR and Bitfinex and, uh, um, like it describes the multi Oracle setup very well. Um, and so like, uh, you know, with the multi Oracle stuff, like we want to get as many high quality Oracles out there in the community as possible.

Like somebody that was tweeting about DLCs this past week is Clark Moody, who runs this awesome dashboard service. And he was asking like, well, how do I get like the Oracle DLC Oracles integrated into my dashboard? and he'd be such a great oracle for the community and uh you know trustworthy guy he has reputation built up and uh you know it once we get more oracles out there you can start to you know do these multi-oracle situations where like i want to use clark's oracle i want to use chris's oracle and then i want to use marty's oracle and then if one of them you know either screws up because of

you know technical malfeasance like just like you know incompetence or they just try to be malicious I still can fall back to the other two people to get my contract settled at the end of the day. So you have, you know, the multi-oracle stuff is intended to eliminate this single point of failure that the oracle is. There's still trust. You know, I want to say it again and again. You're trusting the oracles. But, you know, we have built tools to start mitigating some of this trust. So it's not just in a single person, but it can be in multiple entities.

and again i think that trade-off and that the ability to have those multiple oracles is a worth worthy one it's one i'm willing to make as a user um hand up due to my conversations with you i've always realized like you're going to have to trust oracles there's some people out there who who's who tried to paint me as as somebody who was bashing ethereum smart contracts because of uh oracles and i'm happy with it on bitcoin a complete mischaracterization thank god i've been able to have conversations with you throughout the years and you've educated me like the oracle problem is always going to be there it's just like how do you how do you diminish the risk how do you hold oracles accountable for malfeasance is really um i think maybe a more

productive practical uh you know problem to try and solve and like you know another product that we have out there is what we call our oracle explorer so um you can post your oracle to the oracle explorer um we would track oracle identities over the long term if you know you don't have to post it but if you do choose to um we plan on tracking oracles you know identities over the long term following their attestations and making sure like you know building like a rating system at the end of the day because these are the people we need to hold accountable in this space is like this is you know the people we're trusting so for anybody that you're trusting you need to have a mechanism to hold them accountable and the oracle explorer is meant to be a tool to do that and

track these oracle identities over the long term and understand hey this oracle is attested 10,000 times never lied once and always does it on a timely fashion like i could probably reasonably trust that person whereas an oracle that showed up yesterday that doesn't have any identity behind it and uh has no reputation like should probably be a little you know you probably shouldn't put a lot of bitcoin in a dlc that's dependent upon that oracle and uh just you know for everybody else out there like we don't have a monopoly on oracle explorers we want to have as many oracle explorers as possible just like there's many block explorers that tell you you know what the latest bitcoin block is uh you know we we want to have as many as possible have different rating systems built

in whatever the popular platform is but we do need mechanisms to hold these oracles accountable because they are these trusted parties and that's tooling that you know i want to make sure that the community builds yeah and this is bringing to fruition something that has been a cypherpunk dream for for decades is the idea of reputation markets yeah and it's coming and uh one thing you said there is like maybe a newer oracle you don't want to trust right away but maybe that's how like just sent a thought in my idea like if you're going to be a new oracle maybe a way you develop trust is by trying to get into multi-Oracle quorums and just maybe they'll trust more respected Oracles over you first.

But then over time, like in these multi-Oracle setups, you attest the same data that other Oracles are. Is that a way to build trust? Absolutely. And it's just, you know, building a track record over the long term is, you know, something we want to, you know, we want to provide the tooling so that DLC users can see information about this oracle's history and understand, like, you know, maybe they are going for some grand rug pull at the end of the day, and that's always going to be a possibility. But, you know, with the

multi-oracle solutions and, you know, tracking reputation, it does start to mitigate some of that risk. And, you know, you're never going to get rid of it completely. And, you know, go back to your trusting these oracles at the end of the day, it's still true. But we can build tooling to make you feel a little bit more comfortable about it and i would imagine the multi oracle setup would just be the preferred setup and probably the the way in which users always interact with dlc it's like you can like single points of failure like using the oracle in a dlc setup like i like if i were to when i engage in dlcs i think me personally like i would just prefer to use two you're doing like 10 bucks like okay whatever but like yeah if you're if you're doing serious money in a dlc like

you yeah you got to worry about that stuff and i think dlcs can be a tool where you do very large dlcs that you know settle thousands of bitcoin like do you want to put your thousand bitcoin on you know the bitmex of the day or would you rather have partial custody of that and trust you know these this distribution of oracles um let's say you're in el salvador you're you're naibu kele and you know the the international finance community doesn't like you as much as uh you know maybe they should and you want to still hedge risk or do something with your bitcoin like this is a way to do it like you can do it in a non-custodial way where you can get financial exposure to you know whatever the hell the thing is you care about um without you know throwing

your funds into you know the bitmex of the day or whoever you know whatever the platform is that trades the financial product that you're interested in yeah yeah and it's um it's fascinating stuff it feels like it's happening do you have a depressor good we uh 12 though is a hard out okay freaks we uh we were successfully able to convince chris to push his flight back for this recording so we need to thank you for that yeah no no problem it's uh always fun i was wondering if it's if it's too early to have a glass of whiskey with marty maybe that's the case you got a long day ahead of you i'm just sitting on a plane and uh writing but uh i've got another podcast to record i've got a beefsteak i've got a newsletter i'm not ready for whiskey yet

Yeah, I figured you probably had quite the podcast lineup this weekend. I was looking around at BitDevs last night. I'm like, God damn, there is some talent here. There's some hitters. Yeah, there is some hitters here in Austin and the community, man. I was trying to think about this, of how Austin BitDevs got started. And I meant to ask Ben last night if he started it. But I think Justin Moon started it.

i was talking to my friend i believe it was justin yeah and then maybe ben moved like you know ben i think moved in february of 2020 down here to austin maybe he just got on board really quickly and helped uh you know grow it but man like you know this is comparable to the new york city bit devs of old i haven't been uh post covid and i'd love to go see um you know the or i really think highly of the organizer of new york city bet bit devs legend yeah he is a legend um but you know this austin bit devs community is thriving man it is uh you know it's definitely um i'd say you know kind of a cultural center of like the bitcoin movement in some ways and it's just great to see that happening here in texas which of the statewide kind of culture aligns with it very

well no i completely and that's part of the reason i moved down here so i could have in-person interviews again like the one we're doing right now i miss them so much and i think oh god yeah i do think they're much higher quality conversations in person and i mean i love i mean not to not to uh say the conversations i've been having over zoom are terrible conversations you can't replicate yeah in person uh bodily language one thing like with the masks that really bothers me is like, you can't see people's facial expressions. And like that, uh, you know, it's such a valuable piece of information when you're having these, like, you know, if you're having a conversation at the grocery store where, you know, Chicago, we got a mascot pretty much

everywhere. Um, you know, you can't like see what people are thinking. Are they smiling at you? Are they frowning at you? Like their words are muffled coming out of their mouths. Like I can't understand what they're saying. And, uh, you know, it makes me feel a little bit more disconnected from that person when i can't like you know see like the expressions on their face and like react accordingly that was another thing that factored into our decision to move here is my son he's about to be two and that's when i start masking kids at school in the northeast something that's not going to happen um it's it's the shame what's going on with the children right now especially at that very impressionable ages yeah like they need does he under like does he understand any

of that stuff or is it no he's oblivious yeah yeah thank god uh and he's starting i mean he's starting to become more um aware of of the world of surroundings and how things work but i think up to this point and we're lucky where we had been living for the year and a half before we moved to austin was very small island community and um people weren't as you were you an island boy island boy oh god via culture personified i think that's it is catchy and we'll give this very catchy the shit that the internet like the the govern me harder daddy thing and then the island boy is like that is uh you know some of my favorite like internet i don't know if that's just in the bitcoin community or if it's like in the white i always have a tough time telling i have

to ask my my fiance about this of like okay have you like heard this stuff like is this outside the bitcoin community or is this just like my little bitcoin bubble that's like you know just going back and forth with like the the the jerome powell like printer stuff like that i always got to have that like that uh the person to check whether uh you know my cultural references like makes sense to anybody else or if it's just you know our our little community all right well obviously i'm in that little community so i'm picking up what you're putting down but since you mentioned the island boys is actually uh i had a thought earlier that i forgot to ask you about but they were they were on the dave portnoy show okay uh or not like one

of his podcasts at dave portnoy house and obviously barstool uh is getting heavily into the gambling world and that's actually so we didn't mention it directly but eric wall like called me out and called me a fucking moron because i i said i people are sleeping on dlcs he was like all the bitcoiners like have always said ethereum has an oracle problem uh and now they're like pumped on dlcs which has the same problem and i was like fuck have i ever talked about like oracles on dlcs and i had to go like search from that marty bent oracles no there's always been in the context of dlcs i've never once like the derided ethereum for an oracle problem it's always been due to a decentralization and name only like it's it's a larp of decentralization like again due to

conversations that i've had with you i understand the oracle problems is is one that's not gonna go away you're not gonna be able to create decentralized oracles you're not gonna be able to get away from the fact that you do need to have some trust in that but doing that twitter search from at marty bent oracles uh a tweet came up from i believe two years ago where i'm tweeting at dave portney like like you need to get into the oracle game as somebody who's running like who's getting into the sports book game like so do you see that as like a first mover in the oracle i mean like sports betting in general like works really well with dlcs um you know i think uh the conversations that i've had in the past with like you know people in the sports gambling world

is like you know they have the exact same problem it's like do i want to put a million dollars of my money in some shady like operation somewhere or would i rather do something like you know do a these non-custodial dlcs on chain where i retain partial custody and can always see where my funds are at any given time like i understand i gotta trust the oracle to you know attest to the right thing at the end of the day but you know these bucket shops that like just pop up and uh you know in the middle of the night and seemingly vanish just as quick um that is risk and like you got to think about that custodial risk when, um, you know, especially doing large sums of money and DLC is kind of like, you know, solve that problem, especially if you're at the higher

end of the spectrum of being able to represent, uh, you know, a bet with Bitcoin transactions and get all of the nice properties that come along with that, where, you know, where your money is at any given time and you can follow it. So, I mean, again, at the higher end of this spectrum, like dlc start making a lot of sense and then at the lower end of the uh spectrum you know if you're doing small bets that's where we want to go with lightning stuff at the end of the day is have these like you know quick instantaneous bets over the lightning network where you can get that nice feedback real quick and um you know turn around and do another bet if you want to do that yeah yeah it's gonna happen it takes time it's all coming together i mean and then like you know

this is i said a bit devs last night it's like you know bitcoin drives the speed limit when like doing innovation i really like we don't freaking yolo and like you know risk destroying a trillion dollar market now like i i believe the market cap for bitcoin is over a trillion dollars um you know we who are who are we as bitcoin developers to you know just possibly destroy that entire like you know monetary censorship resistant money that gladstein so eloquently talks about, you know, with just, you know, these, you know, some sort of like use case that's popular in today's day and age. Like, I think we should watch what happens on other blockchains and think, okay, that has some legs, like, maybe we should actually think about trying to solve

that problem in Bitcoin. And then also be like, well, that didn't go anywhere. And thank God we didn't like risk a trillion dollar network on, you know, the popular idea of the day. So like, you know, with Bitcoin developers, like, you know, I don't want to be seen as like anti-innovation. and say like we don't you know want to sometimes do things that other blockchains do but we want to make sure that the risk that we're taking by introducing these new things to bitcoin can't you know end in some sort of black swan event where the entire network you know i guess faces harm because you know we we wanted to try the the popular thing of the day yeah completely again patience order of operations do it right or don't do it at all the stakes are extremely high

not only from a monetary perspective but from a freedom perspective we need this to succeed we're going to have freedom in the digital age to be approached with as much caution and and discretion as possible yeah i mean i'm really hopeful that uh you know somebody can get on rogan and make that case that gladstein did because uh you know with maybe gladstein should I mean, hell yeah. I mean, I'm for that. But like, you know, there's like some really harrowing cases of I don't know if you know who Francis Ngannou is. He's the current UFC heavyweight champion. He's a Cameroonian. Yeah, he's a beast. Oh, yeah. Freaking monster. But so his backstory is fleeing Cameroon.

Living on the streets of France. So the more interesting part is how he got there. And, you know, he told this on Rogan of like, you know, you leave Cameroon. I believe you get human trafficked up through Mali up to the – I think it's Morocco. I'm sorry if my geography is wrong here. It probably is Morocco. It's right across the sea. Yeah, and then you eventually try and get on a boat and, like, go over to France. And, you know, if you make it, I think they just throw you in jail or something and let you out on the streets in France.

So, like, that's the goal for a Cameroonian citizen is to, you know, get to France and then you kind of are in Europe. And the relevant parts of the conversation, though, is him talking about trying to get money from Cameroon to France so he doesn't start from square zero in France. And along the way in Mali, I believe it is, there's highway bandits that try and shake these people down for everything that they're carrying with them. Make them strip their clothes, look for any sort of cash that they have, and they're going to rob them. Right. And so what they do or what Francis did anyway, is they end up like putting wax around their money and then swallowing their money and then shitting it out. Like, you know, when they get over to Morocco, I believe this, you know, is one of these just stories that hits really close to home with people. This is people, you know, this is people that, you know, have done this and now are so successful here in the United States. And, you know, relating to those people is a very important thing.

I think we as a country would be much more welcoming of immigrants if they could bring over, you know, whatever resources that they have with them from the country that they came from, Cameroon in Francis's case, rather than, you know, having to worry about, you know, getting robbed on a highway in the middle of Mali in like a 120 degree heat when he's like sitting in the back of a truck bed with like 15 other people. um you know it's just you know the privilege that we have in the United States is like you know orders of magnitude but that's one that people don't appreciate and that's why Gladstein's podcast resonated with me so much because I kind of connected the dots between what Francis said on Rogan and what he's talking about you know with his message out there so it you know it isn't it isn't just a narrative this is something that people are going through yeah I mean and having been on Lex Friedman's podcast is one degree away from Rogan I actually think Rogan might listen to lexus podcast so hopefully yeah i hope it inspires some uh some it's uh you know it's a one of the

best freedom messages i think you can really put out there and one of the best uh you know advertisements for bitcoin and it motivates people like me to keep building these tools so that people like francis from cameroon can uh you know flee the country that he's in make it safely to the united states and just thrive it's happening man i've said it many times gladstein's one of our most high leverage advocate potentially the most high leverage leverage advocate out there how can you how can you tell people fighting for human rights yeah like bitcoin is a bad thing it's like you know generally the left in the united states is very good at framing things like this you know with their uh deceptive namings yes and we have nine minutes left before our hard stop

and i do want to get to one thing i want to ask you about particularly in the transition from hdlcs to ptlcs on the lightning network how do you see that going uh i had a discussion with ryan gentry last week and um i believe his roast beef uh has a framing around this so we have to be careful with this transition because you can run into a second system problem um in some regard so set the stage for the freaks out there right now when you set up a lightning network channel you create what's called a hash time lock contract you can go back and listen to the episode chris nadav and i recorded before covid um in march 2020 but quick refresher you set up a 202 multi-sig and hash time lock contract um it's worked very well obviously lightning is having exponential growth

right now but there is probably a better way to set up these these channels which is ptlc a point time lock contract it adds more efficiency more privacy uh to to programmability more programmability as well to these to these channels and so uh right now again lightning network's seeing much success there's a lot of people creating channels with htlcs now we have taproot and ptlcs are becoming more fleshed out people want to begin transitioning to that um and so how do we handle that transition is a big question that uh that many are trying to think through right now so in the uh aj towns proposal which is what i'm most familiar with uh so he says in the lightning dev mailing list post that in his world uh you would need to close out your channel and open another channel um

with your counterparty. However, in his proposal, it does support both HTLCs and PTLCs. So I think that principle just applies to your local counterparty and not necessarily, you know, if you're routing through Timbuk2 on the network. That person, is my understanding, is they wouldn't have to be upgraded and you could use HTLCs with that person. So it does, it doesn't, my understanding is it doesn't require the entire network to upgrade like in tandem because that's very hard to do with distributed systems um so that that that is another like kind of selling point on this aj towns proposal uh you know i i can't say that i'm super familiar with uh you know what roast beef has proposed and i don't think he's uh i don't think he's proposed anything

publicly i think right right it was just like he okay heard their discussions something he's thinking through yeah how do we avoid like these type of second system prop yeah and you know i i think um that's like part of why aj towns kept htlc support in his proposal because ideally we'd all just go to a world of ptlcs and i think theoretically that is where everybody wants to go but you know the real world's a little bit more messy and it takes time for people to upgrade and you kind of have to have backwards compatibility for some of these, for Lightning as well, because we also don't want to hold a gun to people's head

and say, hey, upgrade or you're off the network. That's kind of against the Bitcoin ethos is like where we try and be inclusive on the network and not kick people off with things like hard forks on the base chain, but also like forcing people to upgrade to maybe a new mechanism like PTLCs could theoretically be construed as like coercive as well.

so yeah i don't did i answer your question there or not yeah well i don't think there is an answer to it right yeah and you know we're very much going through the uh you know proposal stage everybody's reviewing things i think everybody wants to get to this end goal but you know the uh it takes time and you know people miss things and uh new information is introduced and we need to adapt and figure out you know how we can keep people on the network as well yeah no it's just like an interesting particularly problem especially considering like the again the growth of the lightning networks experience in the last six to eight months it's like oh it's hitting the mainstream now it's like all right we're here but we actually need to transition to this thing

because it's better it's like oh fuck yeah i know but hey i mean the silver lining there is that's a very good problem to have yes and like you know it's better than the alternative of like well nobody cares so we can just be a dictator because you know there's like three people that are interested in this thing yeah and uh you know lightning is getting past that stage you know you see you know the like bitfinex for instance who have just been such great advocates for you know bitcoin technology uh i think they have like something like 300 bitcoin in their outgoing uh lightning channels these days and like gosh that's you know that's a chunk of change in today's world is that is that 1.8 million or 18 million dollars or something like that yeah

It's got to be more than $1.8. Let me check right now. Maybe it's $18 million. Obviously, they are a huge exchange. They operate hot wallets all the time. $18.6 million if we're assuming a $62,000 price. Yeah. But, I mean, Lightning is evolving.

We want more programmability on Lightning, and that is kind of one of the fundamental value propositions of PTLCs, along with nice things like better privacy, which we all appreciate as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's happening. People like Chris are making it happen. And I appreciate your work. Well, I mean, I think it's important to highlight again, like the people that AJ cited in his, you know, blog posts on this stuff. Yeah. Jonas Nick, Andrew Polstra, Z-Man, who has been such a great contributor over the years. Lloyd Fournier out of Australia. He is a very prolific contributor to DLCs as well. And, you know, maybe these people don't, you know, get the limelight or, you know, don't get to be on Twitter or CNBC or whatever.

But they're the people that are doing a lot of hard, most of the time, unrewarding research work. And it takes years, if not like decades, for this work to come to fruition. And I just want to make sure we highlight those people and say we're appreciative to your contributions to this space. And it's so cool to see it all kind of come together. Yeah, certainly. Certainly extremely appreciative. Again, as an imbecile podcaster, I would not be able to do this without that word. It goes layers out.

The BitDevs community, I mean, I think that's, you know, how you started attending NYC BitDevs when? Like 2015. I mean, how, like, you know, the OG that leads the New York City BitDevs community is, you know, such a great advocate. If you had more time, I'd go in there and get my notebook with my notes from that meeting. Russ Yanofsky was up, and I remember it vividly, which is maybe weird, but I do for whatever reason.

and he was describing the conversation at the Hong Kong meetup about the discussion around Segwit and how to upgrade and all that stuff. Yeah. We've made a long way since 2015. Isn't that right? I was wearing a blazer. Oh, boy. And I wore blazer slacks and, like, what the fuck?

Did your hair slick back or something? No, my hair is shit. I never slick my hair back, but I had loafers on. I was like, I'm a fucking idiot. It's like, these are developers. Shit, no one told me that. I thought these were money guys. Yeah.

I learned. I learned. I've adapted. And we're here in Austin talking about Bitcoin, DLCs, Lightning, PTLCs, HTLCs. We've come a long way. Lightning wasn't even, yeah, Lightning wasn't even an idea maybe at that point. Early rumblings. Early rumblings.

Yeah. We've come quite a long way since then. And I think we've got an even longer way to go ahead of us. And it's going to be exciting. Like we said in the beginning of the episode, this is a project that can provide a lot of meaning to your life. It has certainly for me. I think Chris would say the same.

Absolute purpose. Purpose. Yes. Better than meaning or better description than meaning for this particular context. And Chris, thank you again for all the work you do. Where can we find out more about short bits about what you're working on?

Anything else you want to point the freaks to? um particular juncture twitter.com slash sherd bits uh my personal twitter is twitter.com slash chris underscore stewart underscore five uh check out those youtube demo videos i mentioned earlier in the podcast for our dlc wallet that we just released and our crystal bowl application which is now on the umbral app store and you know let us know what you guys want to see built on top of dlcs we're starting to get out of the low level weeds and you know we got to find killer applications that users actually want to use dlcs for so we're we're interested in like facilitating those use cases and i would love to talk to anybody that uh has ideas hell yeah reach out to

chris we're going to link to everything he just mentioned in the show notes so if you're interested you can find everything there uh chris as always it's been a fucking incredible pleasure i love how we start these conversations we ease into the bitcoin stuff and then we go full throttle there's a nice progression to these i always love talking to you about this stuff i appreciate the work that you're doing thank you and the perspective that you bring to all this i hope you have a safe flight back to chicago um but i can't wait for you to move to austin it's gonna happen we'll see we'll see i got i got to sell someone else first but uh just get her down here and uh me you uh your fiance parker we'll get a couple other awesome yeah get parker there he's a great

advocate we'll bring my we'll bring my wife as well and uh she'll she'll tell her hey it's actually not that bad i was a little worried when we moved down here we were getting ready to move down here but it's actually been a pleasant surprise that's awesome i think my wife would say that but um all right again safe flight home i know you gotta bounce thank you and we'll do it again soon yeah good talking peace and love freaks