What Bitcoin Did - Is Bitcoin Failing? | Alex Gladstein & Paul Sztorc

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation, Paul Sztorc is Founder and CEO of LayerTwoLabs and the creator or Drivechains. In this episode, we discuss whether Bitcoin is falling behind the innovation curve, if Lightning Network has failed as a project, and if privacy models like eCash are a dangerous compromise or a practical necessity. We also get into whether hard forks should be revived as a path for progress, how censorship resistance is being weighed against usability, and why Paul believes Bitcoin is accumulating “technical scar tissue.” Finally, we explore whether Bitcoin’s culture has become a bottleneck to innovation, and what that means for its long-term future. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/ COINKITE: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/WBD BLOCKWARE: https://mining.blockwaresolutions.com/wbd Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Alex Gladstein: https://x.com/gladstein or https://primal.net/gladstein Paul Sztorc: https://x.com/Truthcoin

The fake custodial lightning that has tricked everyone into being dishonest. If it's just sitting in a multi-sig transaction, then those people can rug you. And there's not enough bites on L1 to onboard everyone. It's network effects versus group think and being in a cult. Why is it the case that you have to be really, really nice to everyone? Can't your idea just be good? Well, why can't we take the middle ground and just say it's emerging? It's not perfect by any stretch.

It has issues. It has bugs, but it's getting better all the time. You can try it today. Like, you can actually use it. The real scaling issue with Bitcoin right now is users and people. It's very important to be thinking 100 years from now about what's going to be key. How can Bitcoin actually be free to money for everybody in the world when Bitcoin's issuance ends is something I think about a lot?

Or will it only be money for freedom of money for very, very wealthy individuals? Paul, Alex, thank you both. So much coming on the show. Paul, you've been being very controversial on Twitter recently, as normal, actually. And you and Alex got into a bit of a debate. So we're going to get into that in detail. But I think probably the best place to start, so the listeners have full context of maybe why you're saying the things you're saying, Paul.

We should start with a bit of an introduction about you and what you are working on. Yes, I would be happy to do. Okay, so back in 2014, I started a blog, TruthcoinInfo. That was basically a Bitcoin maximalist blog, although that term did not even exist back then. And in particular, I wrote this essay, nothing is cheaper than proof of work. So that was back in 2014.

Then in 2015, I created this drive chain idea and I presented the first three scaling Bitcoin conferences. And I'm the author of BIPs 300 and 301. And then now as of late 2022, I am the CEO and founder of Layer 2 Labs, which is like a Bitcoin development company. And so also I have never really worked on or owned any coin other than Bitcoin. So I consider myself to be like a total Bitcoin maximalist usually, although now I think that that is, now that everyone has come around to that point of view, the time has come to jump ship.

And actually, the sun is setting on the Bitcoin maximum. So this will be very weird, but I'll be now taking basically the opposite point of view that I've had for 12 or so years. You've just been the contrarian. Okay, Alex, everyone knows you, You just think this is the third time you've been on the show, but just quickly give a bit of an intro to yourself. Sure. I came into Bitcoin from the human rights world. We saw a lot of activists and dissidents, especially in difficult political climates using it. Starting 10 years ago, it got a lot more voluminous in the last five to six years.

We started getting involved from a support perspective in terms of helping fund tools to become more accessible for activists, become safer, more private. We do a lot of funding of education, and we do a lot of funding of people, bringing people together, bringing the builders together with the activists. And we also do a lot of education about Bitcoin and why it matters for freedom around the world at the Human Rights Foundation. And it's become a pretty big program there. Separately, I've written a lot about Bitcoin, both from a historical perspective, where is it stand versus other? their currency systems, how is it different, as well as why are people around the world adopting it? And I've traveled a lot, met a lot of people, talked to a lot of folks, you know,

in countries with a lot less financial privilege than me, and I've learned, you know, why they're turning to this, you know, magical internet money. Why are they doing it? And yeah, we're very bullish on a world with a lot more Bitcoin users. We think that'll be a very very, very, very large gain for individual freedom globally. So super, super interesting for us. And of course, it's money that dictators can't stop. And that's kind of the most important reason why we, we like it. Absolutely. Okay. So table set. Let's get into the fun stuff. So Paul, I think the best place to start would be if you kind of take it from your original tweet that you and Alex kind of got into the debate about, explain your stance and what you meant in that tweet.

Well, yeah, first was Lynn's tweet, which is fine. Of course, Lynn's not here. So it's on support. But she's basically, there's an older quote from hers about, you know, Bitcoin is the real deal and everything else to knock off. And I think that this idea has a lot of merit, but we have been, Bitcoin has kind of been falling behind the tech cutting edge and it's been stagnant. And so I criticize this tweet of Linz, and then she said something really strange, like she said, that's an old quote, but that she still stands behind it. and that counted as a reply for some reason. But anyway, the point is then Alex jumped in and said something about how I think that people will, that like a shit coin will be adopted by 8 billion people.

What I really mean is that it's not, we can't take it for granted that Bitcoin will be the winning coin until we really have that. So we really see like 4.1 billion people adopt or until we really actually cross this threshold of, and even then we wouldn't necessarily want that because we want to live in a world where everything improves a lot. And so if we have this network effect cage around Bitcoin,

then it will not improve as much as it otherwise. It would be so maybe as Bitcoin investors, we would like that. But we want to live in a world. I mean, just look at why things are so unsatisfying today. You have cases of where the government is tyrannical or when you have some kind of monopoly or just protection from competition. The network effects would just be a different instantiation of that. So the core of my idea is that there's these two forces,

is that there's network effects on one hand where the big get bigger. And so Bitcoin has been doing better and better and better and better and all that's perfectly true. And I 100% acknowledge that. That's absolutely the case. And I'm a huge believer in network effects. But it's network effects versus group think and being in a cult and being in denial about your own problems and lying to yourself and others about imperfections in Bitcoin. to the point where they become systemic and destroy the project. So these are like an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

So that's my, that's like my frame of the situation. And so network effects are very, very strong, but complacency and overconfidence are also very, very strong. And you can look at all kinds of, you know, the fall of Rome or whatever. There's this famous book, The Innovators Dilemma about why is it that companies constantly go bankrupt. Why don't they just react? Many times the company knows exactly what's happening, and they cannot react in time. And it's just because company's too big and has too many moving pieces. Just quickly before Alex responds to this, I just want to jump in and defend Lynn because

she's not here, because this was basically a tweet about the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. And in Lynn's response to you, after she pointed out that was like an old quote that was taken out of context. She said that, sort of empirically, that gap has become bigger. Bitcoin has separated itself more and more from crypto over the years. So is that something that you disagree with, because that is what the market is saying. I accept that it looks very much over the last, especially over the last. So, like, my view is that things have gotten since around 2019, things have gotten under the surface, steadily worse for Bitcoin. And I kind of didn't really complain about it until now, until recently. But I admit that on the surface,

it appears as though everything is going great. But I see this as just more evidence of how perceptive I am or whatever. I'm kind of smiling and winking at the audience here with this. But it's kind of like, you know, you know, whatever. Gandalf shows up and he's trying to warn everyone, you know, there's this huge problem here. And they're always saying like, you know, this guy is bringing trouble. But actually, he's a lot. But actually, he's bringing the warning. He's bringing the warning in time because it's much easier, of course,

to prepare for a problem and then preemptively address it versus kind of reply to it in some kind of emergency. So I admit completely that it mostly things have looked as though the network effect part is just dominating. I attribute this to the fact that it's very difficult to see all the scar tissue that has accumulated.

In Bitcoin, You have to, I think, be involved in these technical debates and these details that a lot of people miss. And also, Bitcoin has grown so much that a very high percentage of the people in the community at any given time are now very new. And that is not great for mass education because these people are brand new and they don't. But it's also not in a people's nature to like really deeply look into. It's kind of minutia. So again, that's kind of a long answer, but I think it's important to get at

what I'm really trying to say. And I would like it to be the case. I think it would be great if Bitcoin is just this runaway train, and it's destined for success no matter what. I think that would be great. You know, that would obviously be fantastic. But I think that we have to, we have to make sure that we aren't

falling into the train. trap of wishful thinking. If we really want to succeed, if we want Bitcoin to be useful for human rights, then we have to make sure that we are looking at it with good eyesight. Alex, do you have anything to say that in response to that? Yeah, I mean, look, I guess we're coming at it from a different point of view. We're not necessarily thinking deeply about, you know, alternative ways of doing Bitcoin at a, you know, changing it so fundamentally and then thinking about what the word like be in that case, we're just using it and we're watching people use it, learn about it. And, you know, from our perspective, what you say couldn't be further from our experience because it's so much easier

to use and so much more successful and so much more widely proliferated and so much more liquid and so much more accepted and so much more understood than it was in 2019. Like, you know, when we started doing activist education in 2019, wallets were very hard to use. The people who designed the wallets did not design them for people who were newbies, you know, essentially as their in mind audience. You had to immediately write down the seed phrase. It's like the first thing you did when you download the wallet. And now today, it's like, oh my God, we have so many awesome wallets. We have so many great wallets that have lightning, that have e-cash, that have so many great additions to them. And then obviously just network effect. Bitcoin is used by so many millions of people around the

world. It's accepted so many places. It's being adopted by so many entities. So from our perspective, things have become much, much easier. So my question to you, Paul, would be, you know, going back to the thread. So you say that Bitcoin's been falling behind. Well, first I would say, number one, what can you be specific? Which protocols or monies or tokens or altcoins is it falling behind? And B, so that's one thing. And then the second thing is, you know, what, you know, which floating, when I say floating token shit coin, what I meant is like, I don't know, Solana, Dogecoin, she, you know, like name one. Which one is going to beat out Bitcoin?

Be specific about it because, you know, let's hear it. I mean, that's what I'm interested. I'm very curious. In fact, I think that it's quite likely that what will happen again is a new hard fork that is very, very similar to Bitcoin and simply just splits the community on some of these dimensions of complacency versus, let's call it, assertiveness or like the Bitcoin Cash fork. Yeah, I think it would be a hard fork similar in that way.

And in fact, one of the reasons why I think that it will succeed is because the Bitcoin Cash hard fork was so poorly done and it was so poorly executed and it was such a bad idea that it has permanently discredited the hard fork. So it is another example of having cast an illusion over the fundamental reality that the hard fork is actually a pretty good institution where every Bitcoiner just gets free money and if you can just ignore it and it goes to zero and it doesn't affect your life at all. So we really should be encouraging more. It does damage the network effect and it does dilute the brand.

But of course, a lot of the things that, for example, Amory and Roger did, like naming it, Bitcoin Cash and Roger using Bitcoin.com the domain to I don't think that those things will be repeated. And I think that the institution of the hard fork needs to be celebrated for how it reintroduces competition. Competition would cure all these hidden issues that I'm talking about. And one reason why I doubt the network effect concept a little bit is that

while it's true that we have grown a lot, It is also true that when I talk to just normal people, lots and lots of normal people who are very smart, they still have never really heard of Bitcoin or they think there's no difference between Bitcoin and crypto and they've never used any of this. And they just kind of think our whole industry is a huge scam, which is unfortunate, of course. But I think it is the case that the network effect, you know,

that hits really strong when you have like lots and lots of people really using it. But when you live in the world where even in the first world, like in America, in educated America, you have tech savvy young adults and they are still a huge percentage of them. Just think the whole thing is that something that they've never used and they don't understand. That is one reason to doubt and say it's also a little bit. So to be to be clear, I mean, because you wrote in your thread that soon in maybe two to five years, it will be possible for anyone with a laptop.

to launch a new coin that has strong privacy, scalability to 8 billion people, and cheaper L1 full node costs than Bitcoin. So are you basically talking about a new L1 blockchain, or are you saying that basically someone's going to come up with a completely different way to envision Bitcoin like increasing the block size limit, you know, at infinitum like Bitcoin Cash and then, and we're going to go in that direction?

Can you just be clear which one do you think is more likely to happen? Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because it's not so much that I think any existing alt coin. I think actually in many ways, the existing alt coins are some of the bottom of the barrel. And also they have just by virtue of existing for so long, they've kind of like, they shoot their shot their shot or whatever. And so now, similarly with Bitcoin Cash,

like it's kind of like that ship is sort of sailed. And it's not worth it to go back and rescue those people. Instead, we will need to, but when I say, because I wrote down this bullet point about Bitcoin falling behind, And you remind me of what I wrote in the tweet. Yeah. There will be an open source tech stack. I mean, it's already taking shape, in my view, where, like, there are things where Bitcoin has fallen behind.

So you wouldn't say, for example, on the dimension of privacy, you wouldn't say that anything we have in Bitcoin is comparable to what exists in the Zcash altcoin or Monaro. problem or, but e-cash is like a kind of a, e-cache is a, what would you mean by that? But e-cache is the federated model, which is the cop-out. That's the cop-out part. No, I, I, what do you mean? Well, I think what Alex means there is that if this ends up happening on some like side chain L2, then that's also going to be in a federated model.

So I guess my point is that like, look, what we want is a, Well, that's what you say. I mean, so in the ideal world, you have people who can self-custody Bitcoin. And then in the ideal world, you also want people to make tradeoffs to be able to sacrifice some of that, you'll be able to get other things. Now, in your mind, you have a particular way of doing that, which I think is fine. Not here to debate that. But today, there exists other ways for Bitcoin users to get that flexibility.

And one of them is through the wonderful Lightning Network to be able to tap into other kinds of payment pools like mince to achieve really good privacy without having to go to some floating token chip coin to do it. So, you know, I think what a lot of what you do is you underrate and underestimate the current options that are out there, which are extremely strong, to promote your own agenda. I mean, there's, there's, this is very clear. I mean, there's no way that you could say seriously that anyone who still shills Lightning Network in 2025 is kind of an idiot.

That's not a credible argument. I'm reading it off your tweet. It says anyone who still shills LN in 2025 is kind of an idiot. I agree. Is this? Yes. That is, okay. Well, I mean, now we've touched on like 500 different things.

I mean, first of all, the Fennerative Mob. So let's wrap it up. But not to escape, so we can go to Lightning in a second. But so where are we going here? So you want to. The federated mile first. Because your whole argument. You're basically, but hold on, hold on, but just to go back, so you're basically saying it's not going to be an L1 blockchain that out-competees Bitcoin.

It's actually going to be a hard fork and like, hard for it would be a new L1 blocking. Yeah, I mean, but it's different than like Cardana. You're basically saying it's not going to be one of the existing alt coins. I finally don't think it'll be Cardano. Yes, right. That's true. Okay, we can agree on that one. So that it's going to be someone who introduces a big rule change to the, to the Bitcoin.

project and that there's a split and that like I guess big in terms of how beneficial it would be, I suppose. But big and being that it's a hard fork, like is by point. Well, I don't think the hard fork part, it's the hard fork will be to split the community. There won't be the hard fork that does the tech enabling. Everything that can be done with a hard fork can be done with the soft fork and everything that can be done with a soft fork can actually be done without changing Bitcoin's code. So actually, this whole hard-verse-soft distinction no longer has any bearing on anything, I think. The hard fork is when you want, if you want to split the community intentionally, you can do it with the hard fork. That is the key, is the members of the community. Because I think if you grow and you accept people into your community who are anti-growth, then actually, then this is, we'll end up.

Just saying, before we move forward to the lightning stuff, can you just, can you? Can you do a description? Well, just walk me through and walk us through a potential scenario in the next five years where the Bitcoin project, as we know it, ends and gets obsoleted by something else. Can you just walk us through quickly how you envision that happening, please? Okay. My view is that all the coins are vulnerable to, like, if one coin actually makes it into something where it has lots of actual users.

This is the best marketing for the coin. This is the best kind of adoption there is. If a coin actually reaches real users, the other coins will be displaced and they will go to zero, basically. That's my point. Because of the network effect argument, basically. So if one coin gets really big,

it will muscle out the others. So that's what I think when I was getting at with my tweet is that, this will become easier and easier over time, and eventually it will become so easy that we'll be forced to reckon with the technical scar tissue of Bitcoin, and then at that point, it may be like an emergency situation. But I still think it'll be the hard fork will win to preserve the UTX O assets.

Everyone's investment will be safe, but that's not really the question that interests me. The question is like, what is the end of the final technical configuration, of the winning coin. That's kind of like the thing that I'm interested in. This episode is brought to you by Blockware. Would you rather have one Bitcoin today or two in a few years from now? Silly question. Well, Bitcoin mining is a tried and true method to accumulate more Bitcoin and over a few years it can even outperform a normal DCA. Blockware's mining as a service enables you to start mining Bitcoin without lifting a finger. Blockware handles everything from securing the miners to sourcing low-cost power and configuring the pool. They do it all. We're

multiple data centers across the US, Blockware is the most reliable mining partner in the industry, and mining is one of the most efficient ways to acquire Bitcoin. So click the link in the description to get started today, and if you tell them what Bitcoin did send you, you'll get one week of free hosting and free electricity for every hosted miner purchased. So click the link in the description or head over to blockwheres solutions.com. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero-fee recurring buys, making stacking stats effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outforms

most high-yield savings accounts. But what really sets River apart is their dedication to security. You have peace of mind knowing that River has monthly proof of reserves and holds all Bitcoin in multi-sig cold storage. And with US-based phone support, you'll always have someone on hand ready to help. To find out more about River and to open an account, head over to river.com forward slash WBD and earn up to $100 in Bitcoin when you buy. That's river.com forward slash WBD. Just quickly on that, Paul. What I don't understand is you've said like in a couple years, anyone can launch a coin with better privacy, better scalability, whatever. Like people have been trying this for a decade at this point. There's tens of thousands of other shit coins. Like what is,

what do you see changing that means one of those will win? Launching a coin, I think a lot of this has been negative innovation. So the coins have been distractions. So these are people who just want money, and they are not as interested. And in fact, this is, this repels the people who have genuine technical curiosity. So the fact that people are launching coins is not necessarily what I'm interested in. But the existence of, for example, the fact that there used to be this zero coin project, and it made it into the Zcash alt coin, and they did a bunch of R&D, and now there's like a rust crate for doing private transactions and having a reusable private address

that hides the sender or the receiver in the amount. The fact that that open source technology now exists, that type of thing is more what I'm talking about. And there are many cases where an academic or someone will put out a new piece of the tech stack that has no coin behind it at all because, of course, launching the coin is so undignified. Could you just try to be specific and detail a little more?

How would this unfold? It's like entrepreneur A does X, then this happens, then this happens. Like, could you paint? You must have thought about this a lot because you're interested in it. So walk us through how this would happen. How does Bitcoin, you know, go to zero? With the gear, like the privacy gear in Bitcoin having fallen behind unnecessarily. So you think that that's going to, like a privacy coin is going to take over Bitcoin.

No, no, no, no, no. Just the option. Yeah, you have the option. L2 or you have the option to use this rust grade that hides the send or the receiver in the amount and that some people will want that. Why would that be any better than what we have now with eCash? I don't understand. Well, I thought I was going to explain that, but you moved on to five or six different things.

The eCash model is federated, and the federated model is just about the worst thing to ever happen in Bitcoin's history, I think. We've had bad ideas before, and we've had dishonest ideas, and we've had a dishonest ideas, and we've had ideas that spread dishonesty like the plague. But rarely do we have them all at once, but the federated model

is just about the worst thing to happen in Bitcoin's history, I think. So it's interesting that you're so blase about what it means. The federated model basically because I'll meet you all of my coins immediately, and I have no recourse

about you ever getting them back and you could take them tomorrow, whereas with lightning and with drive chain and with lots of other things, there's all these complicated time locks and ways of making it difficult to withdraw the coins in an improper way such that you have like an economic guarantee that it's in their financial best interest,

even for anonymous people to participate honestly in the scheme, whereas the federated model is just give all your key coins to someone and just hope that you get them back. And even the federated part is a huge lie because it says, well, instead of giving them to one person, we'll give them to a big group of people. But there is absolutely no way for the layperson to, tell that you really are giving it to 15, you know, if it's nine of 15 or whatever people, and it's not just one person who generated all,

one key, and then 14 clones of themselves. So the whole thing is just shot through with pure dishonesty, and the whole thing is a huge waste of time. And it's a perfect example of the scar tissue that I mentioned before about how this type of thing, this is not someone that you want in your community because they will ruin the community for everyone else. They will move people's attention away from solving the real problems and more towards repeating the lie that the problem has been solved with something with DCASH or any federated idea. I can tell you, obviously, aren't looking at DCASH very carefully because there's not a lot of people using federated decash these days.

Cashew is the dominant protocol. And there's other ways that people have figured out how to avoid what you describe. one of them is like the multi-nut payments and you should look into that. It's really interesting. This idea that you can make payments from any different mince at once. There's all different ways to reduce exposure to rugging. But at the end of the day, no one's doing what you say. Talk about dishonesty.

No one, especially the creators of both Fetamin and Kashi protocols would tell anybody to put all of their coins or even a significant amount of coins into a mint. this is a technology for small spending. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Yeah, but I think they're all like that. Even for in my intended configuration, I think the L2 chains will never have more than like maybe 8, 9, 10, 20,000 coins each, and there may be 10, 15. So that's, um.

Look, we have our potentially coming online. The e-cash that I was, that I looked into is, 100% federated and the people can rug. On L1, it's just a multi-sig output on L1. So that's the only thing that matters. Cacheu is different. Cashew is based on Lightning. Lightning is also multi-sig on L-1.

It's two of two multi-sig. The lightning channels are two of two multi-sig on L-1. So what matters is what the L-1 stack can do. The L-1 stack is not doing these fancy things. Okay. I think all the, one other issue of scar tissue is that the non-mined L-EL-1stack L2s, they don't pay their transaction fees to the L1 miners.

So they have this ticking time bomb problem where if they become successful, there would be conflict between the miners and the L2. The miners will either want to vertically integrate. They'll start like Foundry LSP or Foundry ARC or whatever. ARC is like the final nail in the coffin as to why the Lightning Network is a failed idea. That you could see all these people jump ship to ARC immediately. Well, first of all, Arc is just being

born, so we don't know, but Arc is clearly going to work because of lightning. They work together if you look at how it's going to function. I mean, I totally disagree with that characterization. The creator of Arc is not a characterization. It's how it's going to work. What do you mean? You think you're going to just have on-chain and arc and no lightning? I'll read from the creator of Arc when he made this, this Arc whiteboard video,

and this is kind of like the final nail on the coffin for her. for lightning is that when he's trying to explain ARC. He opens his Arc masterclass video. He opens it with this. He says, well, this is this guy, Barak, who is the creator of Arc. And he's a former Lockstream employee. He crashed the Lightning Network twice for fun.

Yeah. He, I'm just for the audiences. And he says, this is June 2023. I've always been a big critic of Lightning. I had severe objections, right? from inbound liquidity to inbound receiving interactivity, I wanted with ARC to address the inbound liquidity problem, but I really couldn't find a cure for it.

I failed to see lightning scaling. So he's saying when his description of ARC that he has given up on, he wants like something that replaces it. And that is, and then... Well, that's obviously not true, because if you talk to the ARC people today, they view these things as compatible. It's true that ARC does things,

lightning can't do. Absolutely. But these are, these are the way that our pools, I'm not missing the point. My point is that lightning is the central nervous system of the Bitcoin ecosystem and different pools. You can have all kinds of pools you want. You can have side chains. You can have liquid. You can have e-cash mints. You can have exchanges. They all speak lightning to each other. And this is really obvious to us because we actually use Bitcoin. This is all what? This all just cope, I think. They will use whatever else you actually work. Dude, you're demonstrating that you don't actually use these things.

Like, let me read you something from somebody in Nigeria. I asked a couple people I knew. I'm like, how has lightning changed your life? We're going through a lot of different points. Can I just explain? No, no, no, no. You just called what I said, cope. So let me dismiss that.

Sure. Hi, Alex. Off the top of my set, I'd say my favorite lightning use case is overcoming financial restrictions and fast cross-border remittance to solve emergencies. To provide a backstory, my aunt back in the Philippines had a medical emergency and my family was able to use lightning to quickly send money to help out. The other options were too slow. As for helping overcome financial restrictions, it's helped me spend my money in other African

countries without happening to worry about getting foreign currency. That's just one. I have so many stories people sent me about many different countries. None of that has anything to do is what I'm talking about. I mean, I'm very happy for that person. It absolutely has to do with the point that you just made that it's not coke. and that it's actually incredible real world innovation. I would love nothing more than for people to continue

to have access to cheap and effective instant payments, and I think that's great. And I think a problem with lightning is that it's making them much harder for people. But the person who I just talked about couldn't do this without lightning. We can't, I don't know how we could possibly proceed, but I'm going to try to go in reverse chronological order with the most recent thing, and then we'll eventually get back to the federated,

which I don't think we have closed the book on whether or not you have accepted that what those protocols do depends on where the money is on the L1 blockchain, which if it's just sitting in a multi-sig transaction, then those people can rug you immediately. And that is not an acceptable way to argue against whether or not Zcash has better privacy. It's just say if you custody it completely with someone else, well, hey, look, if I just gave it to Coinbase or whatever, they could also keep it private. for me and then they could use SSL or something. No, I'm not, I would agree with you that Federation is not something

where you want to store your Bitcoin. It's a tradeoff that you're going to make to do something else. Yeah, I would rather, well, I mean, so you have a different options right now. One of them is to sell your Bitcoin for a chip coin. The other one is

to use a mint. The other one, there are many different things you can do. You say use a mint, you mean deposit a multi-sick output on L1, where the money is no longer yours? No, because if you're depositing, like, your Bitcoin to the Lightning Network and then going very quickly in and out of Cashew to send a private transaction, like, is that not, you still have unilateral exit through Lightning, so you're only using Cashew while you're actually doing it.

If you deposit the Lightning Network on L1, then your money is in the Lightning Network. But you still have Unilateral exit from the Lightning Network. You could route through someone, yeah, if you routed through someone who discarded the information that would maybe help you with privacy. You'd have to deal with lots of these other problems with the Lightning Network. I mean, I don't think the Lightning Network works at all. No, you don't.

It doesn't even work. You don't think the Lightning Network works at all. When I just told you about someone who was able to, like in numerous countries, have it helped them majorly in their day-to-day let use case. Well, that's not what I mean by work. So can you imagine a second meeting I might have? I'm open to it, I guess.

Yeah, sure. Work. Well, let's say, you know, a, billion people show up to a concert, and it's the way the concert set up, it's too difficult to see the stage. And then some people say, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go to the front and we're going to stand on each other's shoulders or something. You could see how that is a ridiculous thing to say, but that's basically the lightning argument, is that some people, like a few people near the front will be able to get it to work, but their usage of the L1 bytes will crowd

out other people. You will not be able to get a significant critical mass. You won't be, eight billion people won't be able to use it. So the fact that one or two people used it once or twice, that doesn't, I'm not into there. That is such a mischaracterization. Okay, so first of all. What you understand is not a mischaracterization is that you can't get like eight billion people to use the Lightning Network. I've never said that and I would totally agree with you. Of course. No, I also agree. I'm not going to use Lightning. That's what I'm interested in, is if you can get If you can onboard 8 billion happy users to it. Yeah, the way lightning is going to take us to 8 billion is lightning is the central nervous system through which all these different mints and pools are going to talk to each other.

And at the bottom you have on chain, and then they all talk to each other like this. And they're intercompatible and they all speak the language of lightning. That's an actual description of what's happening today. That's what I think is called. Well, but I mean, it's, it's, it's, I'm just describing the architecture of the ecosystem. them. So, for example, when I use like, when I use, when I am transacting and buying things in the real world, they're on the internet, where people actually give me stuff, so it's not just some test net theory thing. I have e-cash, okay, on a wallet. And I, the merchant is receiving Bitcoin, not e-cash. This is how it works, as I'm sure you know. And I can just go around and spend privately. They receive L1 transactions. Not on a, not on cash. No. No, they don't. No, Cash, you does not even understand what I'm just asking about what you meant to say.

You said they received Bitcoin. They don't receive Lightning. So I didn't know what you meant by that. Lightning is Bitcoin. So they received lightning. Well, I don't, you're the one who just didn't you just say a moment ago. Maybe I misheard what you said, but you said they do not get lightning. They get Bitcoin.

So that's why I asked, I have no idea. Yeah, sorry, they don't receive eCash. They don't receive a bearer instrument copy token thing. They receive actual Bitcoin in the form of lightning. But again, I admit that it, I admit that it works. at a small scale, but it does not work at the required scale, which is the whole thing that I'm interested in. I'm not interested in working in the point.

I'm like, you know, you got to meet where the puck is done. Let me read you some, just some things that have happened in Lightning recently. You can react to them. Sure. So as far as Lightning runs on a big scale. Okay. So Block has a routing node, C equals. So they just revealed that they make about 9.7% APR using this.

providing lightning services to people. So we're talking tens of millions of dollars here, and they're earning non-custodial yield through lightning. I think that's really interesting. Bit refill, which is a smaller company, not at the same scale as Block, of course, earns 3.5%. So this technology that you're saying is cope and is silly or whatever is allowing businesses to earn interest on their Bitcoin without giving it up. I think that's one really interesting thing. Another theory is the microeconomy. So Noster has a microeconomy where people send each other zaps using the Lightning Network. There have been five million zaps over the last couple of years

by people on Noster interacting with each other, tipping each other, buying things from each other. A totally permissionless microeconomy, impossible without the Lightning Network, completely impossible. Exchange adoption. You have Binance, the largest exchange in the world, uses Lightning. You have exchanges like Coinbase uses Lightning.

River uses Lightning. You have companies like Steak and Shake, which just today literally reported a massive increase in its sales. I mean, you can trust it or not, based on people coming in and using the Lightning Network. Now, and my favorite one, this is the last one I'll give you just to you can react, is entire countries. So when I went to Costa Rica in Kenya, what happens there is you can use apps like Tando and Bitcoin Jungle. And you can live in Bitcoin through the Lightning Network and you can pay any more. in the country. It's amazing. So what happens is the merchant receives in Pesa or Simpe, the mobile money. They don't have to know what Bitcoin is at all or Lightning. They don't have to

know what that stuff is at all. You download this app and you can actually use your Bitcoin and it goes out in the form of Lightning and the person receives the local Fiat currency. And you can buy anything in the country essentially in Kenya and Costa Rica because of the Lightning Network. This is, these are not small scale innovations is all I'm pushing back on. This is not This is like really amazing. When did you first get into the Lightning Network? Well, I was able to start using it. I found it very hard to use until the summer of 2021 when I went to El Salvador.

And back then, the Moon Wallet, which uses a swap, a submarine swap. So it's not kind of falling off in terms of a Lightning Wallet. I still think it's a great on-chain wallet. But at the time, it worked really well. And I was walking around El Salvador pretty blown away by how, well the Lightning Network worked. Like I was able to just basically fund my whole trip on it. Of course, right.

The Moon Wallet, the submarine swap means that you make an on-chain transaction in order to help the Lightning. So it's a bit of a, you know, it's kind of like every lightning transaction comes with an on-chain transaction. So it's a little bit of a. Well, that's why, that's why, right. So that's why I said, so now today you would use stuff like Phoenix or you would use Zeus or soon while of Satoshi is coming back into the United States with a self-cast.

Dodeo Lightning Wallet, which is pretty amazing news. Yeah. Showing the growth and thriving of the Lightning Network. Yeah. Listen, I can tell you you're very passionate about the Lightning Network, which is great. And I'm just going to tell you my Lightning Story, okay? And this is, I wrote, it's a note. And to prepare for this, I wrote all this down.

And honestly, I cut a lot of it because it goes on and on. I'm going to skip some points. But basically, I first heard about the Lightning Network in 2015. Now I was very excited about it. But even back then, there were one or two things that were a little weird about it, such as on Reddit, which were the huge discussion form of the time. Everyone had a strong opinion. The large blockers all hated it.

Small blockers all loved it. But the only video on YouTube, which was Tadj Drijas' SF BitDev's lecture explaining what the Lightning Network is, that only had 320 views. And at least four or five of those views were mine, because I watched it a few times over and over. And I was like, why is everyone has such a strong opinion about this thing

that only has 300 views? No one's watching the YouTube video. And I was, I don't know, maybe YouTube doesn't count or I don't know what's going on with that. But I really liked it so much that I had this thing, this pure-to-peer Oracle Bitcoin prediction market thing that I'm

still very passionate about. But I rewrote the trading so that you could do trading on the Lightning Network. So I had this completely new type of market scoring rule trade off-chain on the Lightning Network. And I wrote this idea, and that was March 2016, five years before you were using Moon and wherever. And then in April 2018, I wrote this big post about fraud proofs, solved this problem

of L1 fraud-proof blocks, a problem that Eric Lombroso and Luke Dash Jr. thought were kind of like almost impossible to solve, which they're right. it is impossible unless you have a different way of connecting to people to learn about, which is, in this case, the payment channels. So I was originally very, very, very excited about it. I'm just as excited as you are now. But then I started encountering all these huge problems with it, and these weird questions would pop up and people would have no.

So one of the things that happened was I went to an archipalco in 2019, where I saw Waldo, I think it was Blue Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi, at the first time. And everyone was going around, people are giving each other four sets or 10 sets or even one sat using the lighting network. And I was like, oh, that doesn't make any sense because you have to, because I knew how it worked, you had to open channel first and fund the channel and you have to wait for it to confirm. And I thought, oh, so I asked people, oh, is it custodial? Does it really use the Lightning Network? None of the people there, there's this huge group of people who are so excited to use the Lightning Network. It's as excited as you were.

No one there had any idea what that even meant about custodial versus non-custodial. And then year after year after year, you hear about people using Lightning Network and then you ask them, oh, what wallet do you is they say, Walters Satoshi. As you and I know, and probably many people in the audience know, the custodial Lightning does not use the light, doesn't, there's no HDLCs, there's no funding transaction. There is no Bitcoin transaction. It is just a database on their end. So there's no use of Bitcoin.

There's no usage. That's not true at all. the merchant, you use invoices or lighting addresses. So just to be clear for the audience. Okay, so if I'm a monster today. I'm looking good for yourself and you can determine. No, you should use the technology. Like, so if Paul has, if.

It's not possible to sense of enforce that on the lighting network when they have not joined the lighting network yet. I'm not arguing that. What I'm arguing is is the fact that even custodial lighting uses lightning. So, for example, if I'm on primal, or Paul's on Primal at Paul at primal. And that's his lightning address and it's custodial. I can send that, I can send you money from my Albi Hub mobile self-custodial lightning wallet. It works.

The money moves. The money goes to my custodian. It doesn't go to me. You are missing the point. It goes to. I think you have been misled. I'm sorry to say this, but I think you've been misled by other excited. I've not been misled.

I know exactly what's happening. You're literally saying the Lightning Network doesn't actually carry the value to the custodial holder of, I'm the part of that, dude. I understand what the word custodial means. But it goes to, it moves out of my wallet to someone else over the Lightning Network. Not to me, though. Not to the user. Well, if you're using a self-custodial, I'll be primal.

You know, Noster powered account. Of course it does. It goes right to you. Right away. It works perfectly. We're talking about the custodial lightning right now. Were we not? Well, I was making a point.

Like, even custodial lightning uses lightning. It's not like it uses on-chain bitcoiners or arrow or something. If every leg is custodial, then it does not use the Bitcoin network or the lightning network. So it's only the non-custodial parts that use the lighting. Paul, it's coming from me a self-custodial lightning user. This is not true at all, man. existence that, well, I mean, I think the audience will have to take, you know, some time and take a deep breath and take out a pen and a piece of paper and try to work out for themselves if they think. But if, what I'm trying to say is that. One set, one set. Paul. Paul. Paul. I don't, I don't think anyone here is arguing that custodial to custodial is, is somehow ending up in a non-custodial wallet. But like, what Alex's point is, if I'm sending, say I'm using Wall of Stoci, a custodial service and I'm sending to Alex, using who is on Zeus or something, he is receiving Bitcoin at the other end of that.

wallet of Satoshi, but you could use anything. You could be using Visa. You could be using Visa or any other thing. So the lightning part is, but you couldn't be using Visa. How does a Visa pay me get to Alex's Zeus wallet? In order to pay him, you need to know about how he wants to receive the money. So he'll say, I want to receive the money in my lightning wallet. Then you say, you have your own relationship with wallet of Satoshi custodian.

And you can settle up however you like. All right. Here's where I think you can I just, I think that this is where I think using the stuff and interacting with people. I haven't even gotten to any of my critiques of lightning, but we can talk about. That's okay. We'll get there. But like here's the key thing.

You talk about visa. What's so cool, even about custodial lightning is it doesn't require ID. So even if I'm on a new beyond Noster and I met Alex at Primal and you're at Paul at Primal, the fact that we can permissionlessly share information without having to put in information or have a visa card to your point. is quite beautiful. When you use the lighting there. Yes.

But this is, well, I mean, this is an expert condition out of here. I'm getting like run over by 10,000 points and there's hardly enough time

to refute them all. I would just, I have to respond to this idea. All right. No, just to finish the point, like, they're going to journey

and eventually you learn how to self-custody it, and then, and then it works. I agree with that. I agree that we can ramp people up, and it doesn't have to be self-custodial on day one.

I think that's a huge mistake, and that we should ramp people up. I completely agree. What I disagree with is that this is somehow evidence that the lightning network works. It's actually the exact opposite. It's evidence that it does not work and that it's a sham.

And that we're all lying to our community. Okay, so why don't we go back to you responding to all the things I just told you about how lightning's changing the world? I'm trying. Go ahead. I am trying. There's so many things.

My pen is going to run out of ink, I think. But what it interests you, you brought up Noster. I don't know if it would interest you to know that Fiat Jaf, co-creator of Nostar, He was one of the first people to tell me. He's on my little story of timeline of people who said Lightning Network should be burnt to the ground

and it would be better if it had never been invented. He's a huge case. That's a great point. Yeah. Great point. And he cannot stop other people from joining Noster and creating Zaps because that was something that GD-55 did. The point is this is someone that you respect because they like Noster.

You said this is Nostr's this great thing. But I'm just saying, by the way, the creator of Nostr, I'm trying to just paint a little bit of picture here that might be possible that there might be some flaws with so uh one thing is and other thing is taz dry jr came on to what bitcoin did and he gave this very sober account of the light and he started talking about how there's lots of things that can't he said everyone's like lightning's going to be the best thing ever and then he says well actually the lightning network can't do that referring to a long list of things so that was you're quoting the stuff from forever ago just just on that point paul because i got i can't let this

slide. You just said Fiat Jaff said lightning sucks or whatever. Just now, while we were talking, here's Fiat Jop on Noster. I just sent him money over the Lightning Network. Okay. So he hasn't set up and he uses it all the time. I know, but why do you think that that's irrelevant at all? I would like to get into your head from him. You don't think that's notable. You think that it's more notable what he said years ago. What relevant? This is so funny. But you're talking about something that happened in 2019. Yeah, lightning didn't function in 2019. So, of course, people were frustrated. I told you I couldn't even,

it was almost unworkable until 2021. And even that, it only worked kind of in a weird way where it didn't really work properly. It takes a long time for something like this so sophisticated to get up and running. It's not like Fiat Jaff has like an opinion that no one should use Lightning. He has looked into it and he's decided that he's put his reputation

on the fact that it's not going to work. That's why I brought it up. And yet he uses it all the time every day? Oh, man. No, he does not. Well, I mean, why you should let it. You should talk to him and ask him about it. But Paul, yeah, I think we should move on for the Fiat Jaffting because we,

the problem we've got here is like we're talking about, but what we talk about something that Fiat Jeff said a long time ago, we don't have him here to tell us his opinions today. So let's like move on from the Fiat draft thing. Well, I'll tell you this, though, Fiat Jaffe, he runs it like a, or he co-runs a telegram group called the Lightning's Best Moments, where he just has endless screenshots day after day of lightning network not working and in various embarrassing situations, which is part, I have an article where I document lots and lots of quotes from people across time,

which is called the LN Blackpill. So if you go to Truthcoin.Info, you can look it up. It's called the LN Blackpill. The first section is just quotes from lightning developers who say that the Lightning Network is not going to work. Well, it worked just now. Me and a different, who knows where he's out. I understand what I'm saying, sir, you know, about the fact that you have tapped a button.

I mean, you didn't even know that the, because, you know, you. I'm talking about the real lightning network with HDLCs versus custodial lightning network. This isn't custodial, dude. Neither Fiat Jaff or I use custodial Lightning. That was a self-custodial Albi product that I just used to make that payment. I mean, like you said, so you say, I mean, I don't, but let me continue my story here for a second. Okay, good. I was originally very excited and then, you know, Attage did his interview on what Bitcoin did.

and he was like, actually, it's not that great. And then I had some questions back and forth on the Bitcoin Dev mailing list in 2022 in February. And some people asked about, they asked some questions about the PIP 300. And then they said, oh, what about this? And they compared it to Lightning. So I redid the numbers with Lightning,

and the onboarding situation is terrible with Lightning. You cannot onboard. So this led to a long list of problems that had with the Lightning Network, and it led to an earlier post that I wrote called Lightning Limitations. And then ever since writing that post, you get all these people have done, like, you know, a panel or various other. And this is stuff that I've documented on this Ellen Blackbill video.

But another thing that later happened was someone who worked for a lightning company, an engineer, two of them, in fact, they messaged me. One of them was Mike Tidwell. I don't want to say what the other one was. But they messaged me and said, well, you know, I'm like actually an engineer on Lightning, and it wasn't until I read the report that I realized how Lightning actually works.

And I realized that you were right that actually it's probably not going to work. OK. And then I met, I went to present at MIT. I was invited to the MIT Bitcoin Expo. And Renee Picard, the author of the book, Mastering Lightning, he was there. He saw my talk, and he said, oh, this is great.

What a great talk. Then he was giving a talk. So he went to my talk, so I went to his talk. His talk was about problems with the Lightning Network. It was extremely sober talk. And not only was the talk like very dispiriting, but I had the opportunity to talk to him later in the hallway. And he basically said that it's annoying for him because if he wants to talk about

engineering problems with Lightning, he often doesn't get invited to speak or he gets de-emphasized, he thought. And I thought, well, this is terrible. What a terrible situation. And then the final thing would be a, be this thing with Barack, where he's someone who clearly understands, he crashed the lightning network for fun twice. He clearly understands the lightning network. He crashed one implementation of it, but sure, go on. Yeah. And he created Arc, and he said that the motivation for creating

arc was that he was trying to fix problems with lightning, but he couldn't do it without creating a completely separate thing. And then right after he did that, he got a bunch of people to, as if, you know, it's kind of like in 1984 where they said, we've always been at war with East Asia or whatever. A bunch of people who have just been saying before, Lightning is the best thing ever. They just switched to Arc. So you may be right about every single thing that you could say ever.

And I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of people who are fans of Lightning on this show who I am not going to convince. And I just have to say that, you know, God did not put me on this planet to be an incredibly persuasive person, and I understand that, and I accept that, you know? Painful though it is to not always be perclasive.

But I think I have more fun just for me getting my own accurate picture of the world. And I enjoy debate because I think it's fun to bounce ideas off people and stress test the ideas. One of the best things you can do to an idea is throw it out there and say, but I'm just telling you, from my point of view, it looks like this whole thing is just a complete Theranos-style scam that is just a waste of time. So one more thing, Danny, and then we move on. But like, okay, great. So all the things I read you, and I didn't even mention the biggest one of all, which is that this year, imminently, any day or week now,

all the square readers in the United States, which is millions of units will accept lightning payments. Or e-cash payments, which is one of the coolest part about e-cash, is that it speaks lightning. So that means that anybody in the United States this summer will be able to go to their local coffee shop or whatever, assuming your coffee shop has a square reader, and you can use e-cash to buy your coffee,

which helps us fight surveillance capitalism. So all these massive rollouts and upgrades done by finance, coin-based, square, you know, If lightning doesn't work, what explains that to you? Why do you think they're all adopting this thing that you think is just a failure? Can you shed more light on that? Of course, yeah.

Well, this whole thing is a huge group think. It's exactly what I mentioned before. This is a cultural contagious idea. So, like, for example, the exchanges did not, like, adopt lightning because they really wanted to. They dragged their feet because they think, they know that it doesn't really help that much. Now, after a huge amount of, of,

of cultural attention and R&D effort, the Lightning Network has achieved enough of a level of quality that for some people, they may want to deposit or withdraw or move money among exchanges very quickly. But you can see it's because the technology is so bad that they dragged their feet for so long on actually implementing the Lightning Network. And I'm not sure.

We don't know. It's hard for us to figure out with the on-chain transactions, you kind of see the fee. And even then, you don't know what accounts is real. I certainly think the bit refill data, it would be the most reliable because I can't imagine. Just the way their business model works, their data is probably accurate.

So I think that they would know. If you actually look at Sorgia's presentation, he emphasizes that actually there's more light coin payments than Bitcoin Lightning payments. But that's not to say that the reason why Lightning doesn't work is because I've actually investigated the detail. of how it works. And there's not enough bytes on L1 to onboard everyone.

There's a huge risk as to who you open the channel with. They can lock your funds for two weeks or even steal from you, depending on how they surround you in the channel. There's a huge inbound liquidity problem, which is counterintuitive and has terrible user experience and it's expensive. The HCLCs consume so many bytes that they cannot really make. If the L1 fee rate is a certain amount, you saw this with ordinals where they,

So sometimes the payments fail. The routing and the payment rate, that has to be near zero to be viable, but instead it's very high. The fake custodial lightning that has tricked everyone into being dishonest and to just basically misrepresenting what the Lightning Network is and what it does. Basically, the uptake is still pretty low.

The privacy is terrible according to, this is the last time I looked into it. So I looked into it and I saw, oh, yet again, I saw lightning limitations. I saw a panel. And there was Macquariello and he said, you know, that it's actually, it's going to be difficult to get the privacy. So I get my information from what I regard as the top experts. And I know that it takes a long time to filter down to the masses. This episode is also brought to you by Iron, the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin Miner using 100% renewable energy.

Iron are not just pairing the Bitcoin network, they also provide cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with the founders Dan and Will for a long time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially when it comes to their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit iran.com to learn more, which is iri-r-en.com. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. Now, one of the things that keeps us Bitcoiners up at night is an idea of a critical error in your Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where Anchor Watch comes in. With Anchor Watch, you're protected by two things.

You have their time-locked, multi-sig vault, and you have your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London-backed insurance policy. So you get to hold your keys and Anchor Watch holds the risk. So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're fully protected by Anchor Watch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individuals and commercial customers located in the U.S. Speak to Ankerwatch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage over anchorwatch.com. That's anchor watch.com. You're going to cite Matt Carrallo here as an ex-on lightning?

Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I mean to back up what you're saying about lightning being a failure, you're going to cite him on that? Did I just tell you that he said in this talk that, Lightning will has a long way to go to be private or have any decent privacy. That's what he said in this. So I, I think he was an expert. Yeah, I mean, we should all be critical of Lightning, but he also works full time on Lightning as his job.

He gave a talk. Did you attend Tabcom ever? I'm curious. I don't remember seeing you there. No, my colleagues do. And we, well, I'm aware. We sponsor it every year. It's a great conference.

I haven't been able to come. Matt Corallo has given a talk every year called Lightning is broken AF. And sometimes, he changes the title and he says, yeah, he fixes it. His job is to help make it better. He does a great job of it. Well, okay. Exactly. And so Matt, Matt, I think is brilliant. And he

has been very critical of lightning for a long time. I just did a show with him in Vegas a couple weeks ago. And he is the most bullish I've ever heard him on lightning at the moment. But I want to get back to one of readily, I want to get back to one really important key point, which is I think

partially why you guys are talking past each other on this. When you say that lightning's not going to work, Paul. What do you mean by that precisely? Because, like, I don't think many people who are proponents of the Lightning Network are saying this is like the golden bullet to fix Bitcoin scale. Right. That's what I mean. It's going to scale to 8 billion people. But it can still be a very important tool in the stack of Bitcoin and not have failed. Indeed. And I wrote that fraud-proof thing, which would require payment channels. So that would be one use for it that is not, I don't know if anyone will ever care about fraud-proofs. But, yeah, I mean the golden bullet. And I think it's,

It is represented as the L2, and it is represented as having all these desirable qualities that it doesn't have. And I do think it is, it cuts, counters as the culture of truth, which I see as necessary if any enterprise is going to succeed. It has to be willing to be honest. It's true that a lot of people can say, oh, I'm critical of the Lightning Network in a way that will give them, they'll let them collect the salary for another year. But very few people are able to be honest with the Lightning Network and saying, like, we just shouldn't do this at all, which is my guess. One of the reasons why is the Silver Bullet thing is it hits two ideas at once,

which is you scale to 8 billion people. Not only does money have network effects, but any tech stack, a tech stack also has network effects. So if as a certain L2 becomes more popular, it will tend to displace the other L2s. You know, it's just like, we don't live in a world where you use,

like, lots of different versions of Bluetooth or something. It's just like, eventually you standardize on the one that works. Have you, Paul, have you ever used, like, do you have an NPUB, Nostr, have you ever used DeCache? Like, you know, I'm just curious. Have you actually tried these things that you're so critical of? But didn't I actually tell you that I, not only have I tried,

but I wrote new lightning technology into existence in 2016. No, no, no, I'm not talking about, you're stuck in the past here. I'm talking about today. Have you, have you used eCash? Chomeney cache? Have you used Kashi or have you used Noster? And have you explored that at all or not?

Well, I don't use them anymore, but I have used them, you know, through 2020, but I don't, my view is that it's a settled issue and that they don't work. Cashew didn't exist in 2022. But Kashu is federated E-Cash, is it not? I mean, maybe it's not. No. Then what is it? No.

Anyway, here, let's actually get to the something more interesting. No, what is it? Hold on. Okay, so let's say we have this future where we have drive chains. Okay, you get your way, we have it. Okay, how does an on-chain user pay, or I'll make it this way? Let's say I have drive-tane tokens.

Let's say they're Paul tokens. I've made my own, you know, I've got Paul tokens, right? Is this not BTC or is this an L2 Bitcoin or is this something else? I didn't understand. We'll call them BTC-denominated tokens that I've created as a drive-chain. Yeah, when you deposit to the L2, you get, something that over there, it would be BTC, similar to the Lightning Network where it's like, it's, it counts as BTC.

Right. So we'll call it Paul BTC instead of LBTC. Yeah. So how does someone who's just got on-chain Bitcoin interact with you? Like how do you, if they don't have Paul BTC, how does this work? If I want, if you're saying, I want to pay you or who wants, if you want to, if you want to, you've got Paul BTC and you want to pay an on-chain person who doesn't know what your drive chain is. Yeah, how does that work?

The on-chain, the person, the recipient decides how they want to be here. So if they want L1 coins, you have to send them L-1 coins. So you have to cash out to the main chain in them. Well, I think you can use H-DLC to swap them, but you would need to have someone take that bid. But my idea is not that my view is that 8 billion people can't fit on L-1, so it's pointless to try to design for, you know, What you have to do is design so that people are happy being on L2, because that's the only way that it will work anyway.

Okay. I'm just trying to get at this because you seem to be trying to discredit lightning by saying that if you have a scenario where only one half of it works, that it's not working. So I'm just curious, like, okay, in your future, does this mean that, like, everybody has to be using? Like, are the different drive chains interoperable? Like, can Paul BTC work with Danny BTC without having to go on chain?

Yes. And there's, there's, and let's say, let's say Paul BTC is denominated in BTC, and Danny's actually using USD tokens over here. So you're saying these can be. You would want, there would be someone who has an account on both, and you would route through them. They may charge a fee, but how is, fine, but how are those trust assumptions any different from someone who's got, you know, USD e-cash? paying someone in, you know, BTCE cash settling over the Lightning Network. Like, you're still set up, you're still trusting somebody. In my view, the lighting network doesn't work.

And in the federated model is a joke and not real. So that's my view. In the drive chain world, each transaction pays a transaction fee that goes to the L1 minors who are the only people who are the only people who crash the, I'm just reminding the people in the audience. Yeah, yeah, sure. So they're the only people who can crash the system and stop it from working. And so the idea is that they'd be so happy with all these fees they would collect.

And I have estimated in detail what I think those fees would be enormous. And that the number of coins on each chain, as I mentioned before, would be something like 5,000 to 15,000 on each chain, 10 to 15 chains. And the chains would be kind of like geographically distributed, would be my guess. It would be like there'd be like North America and there'd be like Europe. then there'd be like whatever, Southeast Asia or something. And so you would tend to stay on your area, is my guess.

This is a total conjecture on my part. But the idea is they're making so much money from these transaction fees that they are very, very happy to keep the whole thing moving, which if they just do nothing, the whole thing works perfectly. They can intentionally attack and destroy. But my view is that they would not want to do that. And that a key difference between Satoshi's invention of Bitcoin is that the miners are not a federation.

They are not a, there's a dynamically a changing set of people who are anonymous. So you're not like saying, it's not relying on someone's brand or someone's reputation. This is just new people can join or leave at any time. And this is also the configuration that L1 uses, so it's better to reuse that for the L2s. So that is my drive chain vision, so to speak. I don't think that it's guaranteed to work, but I do think it, relative to the intention of lightning gets, it is totally mismatched.

And that is another example of this. I think it's just to be fair. I think it's a really interesting idea. I never, I mean, obviously it doesn't exist, but I mean, I think the idea is interesting. It's kind of cool. We'll see. I think, would you agree that it on www.com.

Slash download? You can try the signet. It's fake. Mixing that coins. Okay. Right. So would you expect your vision if it works out to be to be immediately successful? I mean, or would you expect some sort of time period where it's actually really hard to use

it first and then all of a sudden you get more adoption and then over time it becomes more standardized and it becomes smoother? Which route do you think yours would go? Would it just be like overnight immediately works for everybody or would it take five, 10, 15 years to become, you know, to settle into its role and to function? I do think that there is more, relative to the Lightning Network, it is more where the work is up front loaded.

Okay. And then it would be like teleporting to the finish line. I think that is more likely, whereas with Lightning, one of the problems with Lightning is it just seems to require this ongoing developer investment of time and energy and money. And it's always like different attacks,

flood and loot, whatever, op expire, blah, blah, blah, this stuff is just going on and on and on. Whereas I don't have any of that. Mine, I think. But of course, everything to improve the performance of the chain and to improve the user experience that Rome wasn't built in a day, obviously that would be the key. But I do think there is more of it jumping to utility.

Got it. Particularly, you can onboard people directly to the L2. And so you don't care as much about what the L1 fee rate is. And so I think that was a problem with Lightning, and the Ordinals phenomenon kind of even interferes. interfered with lightning network working, whereas this would not have that issue. Well, people are working on that. I mean, there's like splicing, but I won't go there.

I think what I was going to say is, like, what we could probably definitively agree on is that lightning Bitcoin stack works in practice, not in theory, and that you would say that drive chains work in theory, but not in practice, because they don't exist yet in reality. And I think that that's kind of interesting and it highlights maybe like the spaces we inhabit is that you're in theory and I'm in practice and I'm using it and you're not. And I think that's cool.

Maybe we can work. I think people that are in theory should work with people who work in practice and they can work together to make something that's actually beneficial to someone. But you've made it super clear throughout the conversation that you haven't used a lot of these tools

that you're criticizing, which I just, I don't really feel as fair. One I thought was a cashier I thought was a federated. e-cash. So if it's not that, then I would like to know what it is. But what is it, what happens on L1? You should go check out the documentation. It's not federated e-cash. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, don't chain transactions. I want to, say I have on-chain utx-o and I want it, and it's one, one bitcoin, and I want some e-cash. What do I do? You, you have to deposit, uh, it's, you, you have to

deposit lightning into the cashment to get your cash tokens. First, I open a lightning channel. I joined the Lightning Network. I open a channel with whatever. Let's say I open it with the Mint or whatever, why not make it even easier, right? So I open a Lightning Channel with the Mint and then do I just, I already have, don't I already have the ability to pay people through them as a

lightning routing node? What does the E-Cash part get me? I mean, what's cool is you can go to boardwalk.cash, or one of these E-Cash front-end mint things, and you guys can all try. today, it takes two seconds. If you go to boardwalk. Dot cash, or was it boardwalkcash.com, let's see.

I think it's boardwalk. com, and you can go there, or boardwalkcash.com, and you can instantly generate e-cash, instantly generate e-cash. And you add a mint, and you deposit lightning or Bitcoin. I think you can also send it

because it does a swap thing. You can check it out right now. It's quite cool, and then you can mess around with it and find out, but I would encourage people to check this out. What would you think of me if I made a new project called Lightning,

Lightning, whatever, I don't care, you know, Lightning Desk or something. Okay? And what I actually do is I just take people's money. And then I have like, you know, a little database. And this thing's totally 100% custodial. And then I can offer people a, you know, a fast, instant payment experience.

And then I just tell everyone this is Lightning. But it's fully custodian. Great, but does it talk lightning? Like, will it pay out a, would it pay out Paul at primal.net? Not only do I accept Bitcoin, but I also accept Bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network. But I'm just keeping all the money in a giant pile.

Maybe I pay you up, maybe I don't. But then I say that this is a brand new lightning technology. What would you think of that? And I call it, and I put Lightning right in the name. Lightning Table. What would you think of it offered? You think this is bringing human rights to people in Kenya? If it offered massive privacy improvements over lightning,

I would consider it, I don't know, for small purchases. I promise to keep everything private. I won't tell anyone. No, no, no. Well, luckily, open source code, you don't have to trust anybody. I mean, we can see and verify everything. I mean, e-caches. Well, I would only use it.

Yeah, but I'm telling you, I would only use it if it was open source and I could inspect it and take a look and make sure that it, in fact, was very private. Otherwise, I wouldn't use your mint. Sorry. I'm keeping it. And I'm just promising not to tell everyone. That's not, that would, no, I would not, no, I wouldn't trust that. No way.

So then like, I don't know, that's what all this, that's what Federated E-Cashu. No, Cashew is fully open source. No, it's fully open source. You can inspect the code for yourself. I know, but what happens on L1 to get that? I mean, look, dude, in 100 years, I mean, you really think people are all going to be on L1? No, but I'm just, but when I know it happened when drive chain, when you deposit the L1, you get out two coins, they reside in the B-300 script.

So I know what happens on L1 in that scenario. So I know what security model is. For the custodial model, you just give your coins to someone else. But I mean, hey, I don't know. Maybe it's all, maybe it's all like super, super, super smart. And there's like a lot of ingenious stuff going on. And it's not all a fraud. I would say, well, why can't we take the middle ground and just say it's emerging?

It's not perfect by any stretch. It has issues. It has bugs, but it's getting better all the time. What happens on L1 to me right now? You can't use L1 on Cashew, just to be clear. It doesn't work. You have to use Lightning. Yeah, but how do I get?

Okay, so I have to, I join the Lightning Network, and I'm connected to someone who is using Cashew through the network of channels. If you want to send Cash, you send Cash, you send Lightning to a Cashew Min, and then you can send the eCash tokens either around in that Mint perfectly privately, or you can pay a Lightning invoice with them. Right. Yeah. So the idea is, since it's only a few seconds that you have to trust them in,

it kind of doesn't matter as much. Is that the idea? You can use it like that, or you can keep e-cash. Well, hey, maybe it's the greatest thing. The point is you would never send more than you'd be willing to lose. Like, it's only for small amounts of money. Like, it's for highly private spending. That's what e-cash is for.

Yeah, maybe I'm sure it's great. I'm sure it's the greatest thing ever. Paul, do you think potentially you're, you said before, that you dismissed Lightning essentially in 2022. That's like three years ago. There's been a lot of changes. Do you think you might be dismissing something that you don't fully understand now?

Of course. We all don't understand anything fully. You know, you guys don't. I highly doubt that, you know, how much do you guys understand about a drive chain or whatever? So, yeah, no, 100%. That's fair. So we all have to live in a world where we have a very imperfect

understanding of everything that we do and anyone could be wrong about anything, including something they really feel very confidently about. So we all just have to deal with that. That's our curse as human beings. Some of the stuff is fundamental within that I wrote in the post about you need L1 bytes to join the Lightning Network first. And there's just not enough bytes to anywhere near enough to join. And I do the math, the basic arithmetic in the post.

And again, the fact that people are moving on to Arc, to me, I see it as confirmation that they just want to quietly drop the issue. It's not moving on. I'm just telling you, ARC is very exciting, and it's going to interoperate with lightning. Like, you know, arc pools will be part of a connective tissue

that includes other pool technology, and other side chains and liquid. But it exists. It would be hearing it. You could try it today. Like, you can actually use it. I'm just a little burned out. So, hey,

but that could easily be me making a mistake. But I've heard time and time again about, oh, once we get this and that, then it'll finally work. And even from the very beginning where they said in 2015, they said, I think we'll be ready in three months. It's been three months away from being, well, obviously, that's not true.

So it's a normal thing when you're a software engineer to be very optimistic about. And of course, we all rely on the optimism of entrepreneurs and innovators. One thing that I would say, though, is that I think innovation is not additive. It is ecological. So when something gets a lot of attention, I think it does tend to discourage

the people working on other things. So you have to really decide if you really think lightning is definitely the thing that's going to be the good thing. You have to know that when you support it, you will be cursing everything else to move slower or that maybe people will give up on it and that you may be hurting

I don't agree with that. No, no, because I can use, I can use these other technologies and it doesn't hurt lightning. Like, it's fine. Like, let's use liquids. Liquid's interesting. Fine. Let's check it out.

It interrupt, you know, it interoperates. We can do a swap. I'm just getting my belief that. And again, anyone could be wrong about anything. But I really feel that it is ecological. It's an ecology. So if you, as you support one thing, it discourages all the other things. And even especially financial support, and that could be very distracting to people.

I consider myself to be very lucky. I'm a Bitcoin OG. And so I can work on whatever I want. And I am immune somewhat to the, the needs of, but young, ambitious person will get sucked into lightning. Just they'll show up and they'll see all the cultural attention that it gets.

And so all the people who love it so much and everyone with a little lightning in their Twitter handle and how much attention it gets on stage. And so they'll think, oh, I want it. This is bad. You would say it's bad. I do. Well, good.

So Sabina, so Sabina from, hold on. Hold on. Sabina from Kenya, saw lightning, understood that it had promised built an app. in Kenya and now anybody can go to Kenya and use Lightning to make any payment in the country and live on a Bitcoin standard. I'm sorry, that's just badass. I'm so impressed by her. That's incredible what she's done. But don't you understand why I said that it was bad?

No, obviously not. I don't get it. Why would you say what she's done is bad? I don't understand that. Well, she was misled. She was tragically misled by the people chilling lightning. Because if there was a different thing that will work better in the long run, she wasted her time. doing this dead end. And instead, she would have maybe done the different L2 that actually worked in the long run, and so she'd have a better project now. Whereas, but for the deceptive actions of all the people shilling lightnings.

So that's just my, I'm just saying it is not additive. I guess it's not, if you show up and you say, I'm going to give a million dollars to someone who's working on, you know, Fedement or 100 million people, that's going to, anyone who's working on, you know, then all these people, even if someone working on something close like, liquid or something or something of a completely different design, cashew, they're going to say, well, you know, why didn't I get $100 million? And that's human nature.

So I'm just saying that it is not additive. When you show the technology, you need to, it's more important to have the right knowledge as what is going to work than it is to donate money or attention or enthusiasm. So that's just my point of view. Well, she didn't persist off any donations. I mean, she, she, like, built it herself permissionlessly because she wanted to. You're downstream of the, I'm talking about the people at the initiating where they say, oh, lightning is the future and moving the culture.

So she's downstream. She's a victim, in my view. You say that, Paul, but, like, I, I'm trying to be the moderate in the middle here, but I'm tending to side with Alex, so I apologize if it seems like we're ganging up on you. It's fine. But, like, you say that. But the projects in Bitcoin that are getting amongst the most funding now are things like ZK. Roll-ups and BitVM projects.

So is that actually true? Well, I think that would have been funded earlier if it were not for the distraction of Lightning. But BitVM didn't exist until, I don't know, 2022. I agree. But you know that, okay, so Robin Linus is the creator BitVM. He said that he only did BitVM because there's no BIP 300 and that the BIPVM is a convoluted thing that no one should ever do. he's recorded saying this.

But I still think BitVM is a cool thing that people should try. I did say earlier in this conversation about all the non-mind L2s. This includes roll-ups, BitVM, Arc, and Lightning, and Fetamine. These all will have the issue that if they actually become popular among 8 billion people and they're actually generating a 10 cents transaction fee for trillions of transactions, which would be hundreds of billions of dollars per year, year in revenue. They will have the issue that either the mining, large miners will want to vertically integrate or they have some kind of conflict, excuse me, tug-of-war conflict over who can get

that money, at which point a lot of the security model will go away. And that is one of the reasons why I've always thought the mined L2s, such as merge mind drive chain, why that is going to work. But I completely agree with you that you shouldn't like, you know, everyone has their own ideas about which technology will work. I don't even really want this to be like the, like whatever, the drive chain commercial, like the Paul versus everyone commercial. I do think we should try everything. I don't think that it would be accurate to describe us as saying we try lots of different L2s. I think most people who have been around for the last 10 years know that it has been the lightning show. and lightning has like actually sucked all the air out of the room.

And I, and that's, I, I worry about that personally. I think that was a mistake. Oh, that's my, just my point of view. But then on that, you say that people like Alex and I, who are supporters of the Lightning Network, have this perverse incentive because it's like this group think thing that we need to keep pushing. But to like flip that back on you,

drive chain's never got any real, like, developer adoption. People, it obviously has not made it into Bitcoin. Do you not have as similar, but like, kind of the flipped perverse incentive where you want to attack Lightning Network because you never got Drive Chains? Yes. Although this is like there was no activation client until like a few months ago. So even though I had this idea, it really definitely was theory for many years. And that's why I was kind of, and I of course, I was again, as I said, I was one of the many people who said, oh, the Lightning Network is definitely going to be a great thing. So I kind of just let it just, even though the original idea of drive.

chain is from November 2015, I didn't really, you know. And we had a version that you could run, but this was a fork of Bitcoin 1699, which is from 2017. So this is this fork of this old version of Bitcoin that just has like test coins. There was no active. There was no pull request to Bitcoin Core. And there was no activation client until earlier this year. It's true that, you know, like, so you could look at.

the layer2 labs.com slash friends list. You could see we've got various endorsements from people who think that it is a good idea. I think there are other reasons why there are other weaknesses of drive chain that explain why it is slow. One is that it involves the miners choosing to make more money by supporting the L2s, but this is a role that they have never played. And in fact, the miners have been trained to be very, passive as a result of Segwit, blocks as war, and other things.

So I do agree. There used to be, you know, in the Black Swan, the book, Nassim Taleb, he has a, I think, or maybe it was anti-fragile, I don't remember, but there's a joke about conflict of interests. Like, okay, don't you have a conflict of interest? But then the Wall Street trader joke is that you say, no conflict, no interests.

Which is to say, if the other guy is not in the trade, you know, then I'm not interested in hearing what he said. I only want to hear someone shill something that they believe. So I think it kind of, the whole thing kind of cuts a lot of different ways, right? You know what I mean? You think if someone, it's either hypocrisy or it's a conflict of interest or it's something else. With the current environment now on the blockchain, like where it's just very low fee,

you know, very low fee environment, you know, low demand, relatively speaking, compared to like, you know, last year's having, for example, are you, I mean, why don't you think there's more. urgency from minors to, as you say, vertically integrate. Why do you feel like they're fine, you know, doing their work as is? Why don't why don't you feel like they're not pushing for your BIP or other similar things? Like what explains in your mind their lack of urgency despite a pretty, you know, pretty, you know, environment that may indicate a future where like they're not getting a lot of the action. You know, they may only be getting a very small fee, a fee from a very small.

percentage of transactions like why no urgency from these people if you know in your view what what explains it well i mean i at the um at the las vegas conference the CEO of antpool came up to me and said they had never heard of drive chain before or someone else no asked him about it like so i don't know maybe that's me being doing a terrible job of explaining it or maybe they go through a lot of CEOs i don't actually know what's going on with that story um but i think there was no activation but they know what lightning is they know what lightning is and they're not they're not vertically integrating with lightning. I think this is a case of like this the theory guy versus the practice guy because I am trained in e-gomics and I trained like equilibrium. So I'm trying to think of like the long run.

My example was here's the long run success story where you have eight billion people. And they all are happy users every day. So I'm just saying let's just take that as the extreme case. You know, this is like something they do in physics and stuff too to make a point and say, imagine that everything's a big success. And just take your pick, lightning or arc or whatever. It's a huge success, and everyone's using it all the time.

Well, that thing is going to be making hundreds of billions of dollars a year in fees. And actually, that will be the way I estimated, I did some napkin math, but that it doubles every 11 years or so. So this is a huge amount of money

where you have all the transactions in the world and you just take 10 cents from them. There's more and more people transact all the time. People transact more as, they get wealthier and GDP is growing, et cetera. So I was taking that example where you have a super successful L2 that makes a huge amount of money, and then on L1 they make what they're making now, which is very, very little. I don't know about the miners.

You know, sometimes you do hear about the miners grumbling about, oh, we don't make enough money and we want whatever, a tail admission or something. So I don't actually really know why they would or would not. Well, I met a minor who told me that he feels like Lightning Network is stealing from him. So, I mean, I do appreciate that the sentiment is there. I think I know you're talking about it. Yeah, but it's, I've never heard that before and I've been around for a little while. So it was, you know, it seems like I don't know if all the miners think that way, but it was interesting to hear.

That particular minor is, as you probably know, many of the miners are not really Bitcoiners. some of them are just like very by the numbers guys and they see this is no different than mining cobalt or whatever. Yeah, of course. So many of the miners are very, very, very, very specialized to the point where they're not really even ideologically aligned. No, a lot of them don't even stack Bitcoin. They just sell it immediately.

Right. But that, I think that person you were talking about is an ideological bitcoiner who does look into some of those. Yeah, I think, so you can see how. someone's a specialist, they, they're not going to know about what a soft fork is, what BIPs are. They're not going to know about what L2s are. Many of the miners think that all the L2s steal from them, they don't even know. Many, a lot of people don't even know about what merge mining is.

So I do think there is a lot of education that has to be done. But that is a case where in the long run, eventually all the truths will be revealed to everyone, right? So that's the case for going more into the theory world and thinking, well, what will it be like when everyone figures everything out? Are they still going to, those things still going to be the way they are now,

or are they going to be slightly different? Okay. Well, I mean, look, all I would say is that there's a way to do this where you could be more like, it's less zero sum. Like, if you think about the ARC people, they're pushing for their thing, which in the future would obviously be

more effective with a major change to Bitcoin, right? CTV, yeah. Do it now. Yeah, you could do it now, but it's not quite as good as, as it could be, right? But they've been very, like, they've been very, you know, open-minded to think about how could a world that exists today?

I mean, whether you like lightning, the fact is it's pretty widely adopted and it exists, you know, how could that world help them get to where they want to go? And they've been, like, super complimentary. They've been working with lightning engineers. They've been working on lightning. And arcs doing very well, I would say. I mean, it hasn't really hit yet. But, like, I would say that people are excited about it and it's coming.

And look, if it works, as well as they say it's going to work, I think there's going to be real serious interest in the forks required in Bitcoin to make that happen. So maybe you could just take a different approach where instead of shitting all over lightning all the time, you could be more open-minded and learn from it a little bit and take that into your account.

It may work better for you. If you're right, and we need these things, these drive chains 100 years from now, maybe that can help you get them done. That's all I would say. That's all I would say. Well, I think you're right about that. I was at...

whichever one is in Amsterdam, but it wasn't, I don't think it was, maybe it was building on Bitcoin. I don't remember what year, but there was this whole bar full of people. And everyone there was like, oh, Paul, you should be nicer to people. But you see, I don't. I mean, it works. Tends to work. I don't know.

Yeah. But again, I see it as kind of like something of a integrity. Never too late to change. Dude, you know, drive chains might be valuable, might be critical in 40 years. But like, you know, it seems far off now. I'm just saying if you change the tack and be more, it could work. It could work. I think the arc thing I interpret differently.

I think that there's this huge cultural momentum with lightning, and then the people want to continue that. But I do think we should try all these different things. So I do think we should do BidVM and whatever, all this other stuff. I agree. I am a pluralist, and again, anyone could be mistaken about whatever. So that's part, but this is part of why I am nervous about what originally started this whole conversation,

which is that not a lot of people think this way. We have a huge number of people who think that Bitcoin is perfect the way it is, and it's this pristine thing that's guaranteed to succeed. And then the people working on it up close, they care a lot more about these details, where they think, wow, if we had CTV, which is this tiny op-co that does almost nothing, or BIP-300, which is just like this op-code that counts to 13, over and over again.

We could do all this stuff. It used to be the case that Bitcoin was open source, so people thought, if anyone has a good idea anywhere, we'll just merge it in. And then that changed in 2013 or so to like, well, if it's a soft fork, we'll do it. But if it's anything else, we won't. And then now even the soft forks,

which are these completely opt-in, reversible, ignorable op code, Satoshi put in there for the purpose of being used to upgrades. Now we can't even use those. And so I worry about all this scar tissue. as having accumulated that. This is part of them. Why is it the case that you have to be really,

really nice to everyone? Can't your idea just be good? Look, I sympathize with you that we shouldn't, we shouldn't rest on all laurels and we shouldn't think that Bitcoin's inevitable. But I guess my point to you would be that the real scaling issue with Bitcoin right now is users and people. Like Bitcoin on-chain today without any major edits

could easily add another 100 million occasional on-chain users. but they're not there and people don't get it and they've been fooled into all this crypto bullshit and they've been swindled and scammed by everything from WorldCoin to Solana to Ether or whatever so I'm just saying that's one way to attack the problem is just to work on education and accessibility I at the same time think it's very important

to be thinking 100 years from now about what's going to be key how can Bitcoin actually be free to money for everybody in the world when Bitcoin's issuance ends is something I think about a lot or will it only be money for freedom money for very, very wealthy individuals? I think about that a lot. So, I mean, what you're working on, I think is important. And you've admitted many times that maybe you're just not quite communicating it the right way.

All I'm saying is this is a long game, man. This is a hundred-year thing. And being more collaborative with other people can only help you. It can't hurt you. And maybe you'll see some stuff in Chew me and eCash, and the cash implementation that you're intrigued by. Or maybe you'll see some stuff in Nostur that you're intrigued by. It couldn't hurt.

I mean, if you, you would definitely get more people backing you, if you were on Noster talking about drive chains. You would get zapped all the time. You'd get real Bitcoin in the end, on chain. And you'd be able to, you know, get some freaking zaps for your post instead of living on Elon's, you know, X thing where you can't even get Bitcoin natively. So come to Noster and I'll boost you, man. I'll retweet you and repost you rather. And let's go. We can take it that way.

That's all I would say. Well, thank you. And I'm happy, very happy to hear you say that we, We shouldn't rest on our laurels. That's my main message. No, no. That's what I'm trying to be all about. I do interpret the user thing.

I think it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem where it's like, let me explain. This is something that I've experienced a lot as someone who's been in Bitcoin for a while, because I love Bitcoin. And then, you know, the price of Bitcoin goes up. Then, you know, the friends come out of the woodwork and they're like, oh, Bitcoin, whatever. So then, of course, what you always want to do is you want to try to send them like $10, with a Bitcoin or something. You know, you can't send them too much.

It's kind of weird. But you want to send them, you've got to get the, because if they don't use, because I didn't understand Bitcoin at all until I used the software. I actually read a lot about it. Before downloading the software, which was a complete waste of time.

And that was a huge mistake. Because even after that, I used the software and then I thought the confirmations were kind of like, I don't know, like BitTorrent seeding or something. And I was very confused. I closed the software. And I came back the next day.

and suddenly I had like 200 confirmations, and I was like, why did the confirmations keep going out? I thought you had to collect them, like Super Mario or something. And I was so confused. And only when I used the software did I really understand it. So people come out of the woodwork and you're like, okay, you want to send them some coins, but then oftentimes you can't because either the blocks are full,

those fees are high. You send them, even if there's a $5 fee, you send them $20. They only get $15. then if they send it to someone. And then it just, so I think that, I think that there is a lot of nonlinear, there's a lot of feedback, you know.

So I think that if it, if it could scale to eight billion people in an uninterrupted ramp, then that would help the usage go up. No, I can't do that. It's not going to do that. It can't. You know that it can't do that. Like, it's got to evolve.

And everybody else knows that too, I think. I mean, there's very few lightning entrepreneurs who are going to tell you that everybody's going to use lightning for coffee in 50 years. And that's the mistake I made. I thought that was the case. And then I've changed my mind based on evidence. Like, I think now that lightning is going to be this central nervous system type network that exists between what then users use and the on-chain and businesses and exchanges and everything. And they're all going to speak to each other through this open monetary network that's lightning. But five years ago, I didn't think that.

I wouldn't say I was fooled. I just think that a lot of people didn't know what Lightning could do because we hadn't seen it in action. We were very optimistic about it. And we thought it was just going to be like digital cash for everything. You know, it's possible to use it like that with some serious limitations. Like it works like that on Noster today. But I think most people using Noster understand that it's not going to be like that in 10 years.

We're probably going to use something like eCash. Or maybe it's Arc or maybe it's even drive chains. But like, I think you just got to evolve your opinions as you go. And I think what you're describing, this frustration with lightning that you have, sounds a lot like 2019 to 2021 era. And maybe you can update your priors and check out some of the tech that exists today. It's really much better. I mean, it doesn't work all the time.

But it's pretty good, man. Anyway, Danny. No, I think that's the key point, though. I think it's that like, because I'm with you, Alex, when lightning was first kind of gaining any traction, I thought this was going to be the thing that scale to everyone. But it also, yes, in theory, but it also was hard to use. It was so hard to use. Yeah.

100%. And I think now the people that are actually working on Lightning, they're not making those claims anymore. So I agree with Alex. I think it'd be worth like revisiting this. But we've gone, we've talked about kind of everything there. Do you guys want to just close out with like an ending statement and we'll leave it there for now?

Okay. This has been a lot of fun. I didn't get to a lot of my points about why I think the tech stack will eventually be super, super good. But we did have a great conversation about Lightning. And, you know, I don't want to be mean to any of the people working on lightning, but I do think that at a certain point, you need, like, a cattle prod to, like, get people out of this, like, you know, this weird malaise that they're in.

So that's part of what is going on there. And so, yeah, this is just me sort of being honest about what I have seen. I gave the little lightning story. So I think that people can track that and sort of see, like, where I'm coming from. And so that's kind of what I think. And I think that there is a huge amount of R&D being done, not on the altcoins themselves, which are often distractions and anti-R&D,

but through various people tinkering stuff is being invented all the time. And if Bitcoin is slow to adopt that stuff, there will be an ever-widening gap. And this is the gap of complacency and groupthink and just being in a weird cult, complacency and group think versus the power of the network effects, which mean that the number one guy is going to be further and further in the lead.

So that's basically what I'm all about, and that's what I was trying to say. So that's my point of view, I guess. Yeah, well, look, I think the core part of what you're doing where you recognize that there's this limitation with Bitcoin for a world that needs freedom, money for everybody is extremely valid and it's great that you've been working on that very few other people have been in the same way as you um and i'm not talking about being mean i mean who cares

people have thick skin it's more about like just being um you know less about oh that's all cope and more like okay well there might be some interesting things with that but i don't think it does the job and therefore i'm doing this and the arc people are doing the latter and i think it's doing it's it's going really well for them because they understand that there may even be a moment in time where that things coexist. Like, even if drive chains in the end are the thing that everybody uses, there's going to be some kind of transitional period where there's both lightning and drive chains, like, clearly.

So, you know, maybe think more on that. And I think that your contributions to the space are widely recognized. And, you know, as you pointed out, people like talking to you about them. So, you know, I think talking to some of the people working on the cutting edge lightning and eCash stuff could only benefit. could only benefit them, benefit you. So hopefully we can see more of that. Hopefully you get on Noster.

And we can maybe have one day. Maybe I'm paying you on, you know, drive chains over Nostr. Who knows? I doubt Fiat Jacques cares, as you say. He's good. He's good either way. He's happy with however people pay each other. I'm pretty sure.

But anyway, thanks for us for having us, Danny. It was good to get through some of this practice theory stuff. and great talking to you, Paul. I appreciate your time. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Thank you guys. And Paul, you've got to get on Noster by the time I release this video. And we'll make sure we boost you and get you some followers.

But I really appreciate that. And yeah, thank you for the time, guys. Yeah, you will actually, it's funny, you can shit all over lightning on Noster and people will zap you all day for it. It's perfect. It's ideal. It's ideal. There you go.

Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. Bye.