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BITCOIN DEFI: DIGITAL GOLD ON STEROIDS? 💉 The Aggregated Ep. 109
Recorded: April 18, 2025 Duration: 1:15:51Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto leaders explored the latest project launches, significant partnerships, and the evolving landscape of Bitcoin and DeFi. Key highlights included the relaunch of Horizon as a privacy layer, the introduction of ZK Verify, and the impressive liquidity bridged by Merlin Chain, showcasing the growth and innovation within the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you you you you you you you you you you
you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you. you
up of the ag layer blood chains unite
rock and aztec leading
together they ignite
polygons of g, scaling a picky game bridging every network, spreading its fame together they ignites pulling on the keys
in a big game
virgin every network
setting its fame
your mobile gardens
we're bringing the cheer
unified liquidity
the vision is clear
together we rise
a seamless stream
rockin' us tech
the dream team supreme.
We are the aggregated where chains come alive.
Polygons power helping us thrive.
Infinite chains under one sky.
Producer Darren and the black hearted bouncer leading us high.
No longer divided. Block chains converge.
Polygons the power.
Innovation search. Quick swag. Getting the flow. Uniting the space. Watch how we grow. chains converge polygons where innovation search quick
swag getting the flow uniting the space watch how we grow
scaling the heights liquidity flows
polygons the heart and everyone knows
together they lead
they plant the seed. We are the aggregated where chains come alive.
Polygons power helping us thrive.
Infinite chains under one sky.
Rock and Aztec, leading us high No longer divided, chains converge polygons the path where innovation surge quick swap
guiding the flow uniting the space watch how we grow.
Scaling the heights liquidity flows polygons the heart and everyone knows rock and Aztec together
they lead in the aggregated they plant the seed we are the aggregated where I'm going to gotec this week.
I guess so.
You do look a bit like Aztec.
Don't I?
A little bit.
I see the resemblance.
Yeah.
It's the cuddly hair.
Yeah.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning from beautiful Puerto Rico.
How's everyone doing today?
I'm great.
I'm doing great here.
I'm in Singapore, actually.
Also usually in Puerto Rico, but just randomly not right now.
Oh, nice.
Live with the dream.
All right, let's do some quick introductions and we'll get to it.
This will be a fun topic.
I'm ready for this one.
And that song got me pumped.
I was dancing.
Was anyone else dancing?
Hello. All right. Why don't we start with Dash? Go ahead. Introduce yourself.
So, hey, everyone. Happy Friday, by the way. This is Joel, also in here. I run BizDev and Marketing for Dash, which is a cryptocurrency focused on being the very best digital cash and payment
system in the world. You make instant, very low fee, secure private transactions and actually
pay for real stuff with it. I've been personally using Dash as my daily money for almost nine years
now. You pay all your bills, all your everything, kind of the original digital cash vision that kind
of got the entire crypto space started. So as always always i'm very happy to be here and very happy to have um some of you find folks
on our spaces which are every thursday at 1 p.m eastern or 5 p.m utc so uh rock is kind of on a
constant invite list of you know if you can make make it, always happy to have anyone there from the quick swap team.
He's in the intro song
too, which is pretty awesome.
Maybe we'll finally be able to
play that next week. We've got to figure
out how to do that.
I'm in the intro song
for the dash.
Your name is. It's pretty funny.
Nice. Let's go.
By the way, Nicole had invited me to
your one this week. I didn't see the message
and I told her, if you
got a space going on, call me or
let me know in advance. Put it on my calendar and I'm
down. I saw your topic for next
week. I got a lot to say on that one
on both sides, so I'm down.
For sure.
We're going to try to elicit
some raised voices on this next one.
Should we give it a quick promo what the topic is here so people go listen to it?
Yeah.
Yes. Next week is going to be on our Lord and Savior or the villain himself, Donald J. Trump and his administration.
Is it good or bad for crypto?
And if anyone knows that Adam Corcoran guy's contact stuff,
let him in on it because I know he hates old teabag.
And so I want to get him in on it.
Ryan Selkis, if we can get him too,
because I know he's the absolute opposite,
it would be very fun.
So yeah, get as many, get as much as many people
all over the spectrum as we can on that one.
It does seem to be working. I just bought a bunch of toys for, um, baby panda and everything
says made in America there. It's, it's been a good couple of weeks. You've got all the
factories built.
Yeah, that's incredible. That's incredible. like at least the label making factories is
switched all out and hoodwink people
okay um here nicole i'll let you take over and uh introduce people actually okay sounds good
all right so we just did dash's intro. Let's move to Rob Viglioni.
Yeah, happy to, guys. Happy to be here. I mean, I would love to continue that macro politics conversation.
But my background, I'm the CEO of Horizon Labs. We're a ZK crypto engineering company, and we were the builders of two projects. So one is an old school ZK project called Horizon with originally Zemcash.
And we're actually relaunching that as a privacy layer on top of base.
So super pumped about that.
And the other is a more modern ZK modular blockchain called ZK Verify.
This looking to become a one-stop shop for ZK proof verification.
So I happen to be here. Personally, I was an early Bitcoiner and I have a PhD
in what my dissertation ended up being, which was in crypto finance.
So I love DeFi, I love finance, and love talking about kind of looping that
back to the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. So this should be a fun talk.
Awesome. Thank you. More PhDs in the house is always looping that back to the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. So this should be a fun talk.
Awesome. Thank you.
More PhDs in the house is always awesome.
I'm a PhD dropout myself.
That's the best kind.
Best kind.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So next up, we've got AIDA or A-I-D-A.
I'm not sure how that's correctly pronounced.
I think you were here last week for our Alien episode, or maybe it was the week before.
I can't keep them all straight please open unmute and introduce yourself
yeah we did a giveaway with you which was a bit of disaster oh that's right that's right okay
uh but uh anyway we got all the rewards and uh all the participants got it uh thank you for
giving us um time and space for that by the way yeah my name is Alex I'm community
manager our CMO Juliana will be joining soon we are a power trading terminal uh we are pre
talking generation event and we now have ambassador program and launch zone program
and happy to be here
thank you for being here okay so next I see Carter Feldman.
Carter, do you want to unmute and introduce yourself?
Okay, not sure. Maybe glitching, maybe unable to at this moment. So if there are other speakers
on the stage right now, I can't see them. So maybe you want to just unmute an intro.
Is there someone? Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Hey, guys.
I'm Vincent Vanho.
Hey.
Super happy to be here.
Web3 content creator, gamer, streamer, Web3 bestie, and just like to kind of bring vibes to spaces.
So thanks for having me.
Thanks for being here, Vanho.
It's a regular.
All right.
Is there anybody else? Next up, we've got Madeline. Oh, there you go., a regular. Alright, is there anybody else?
Next up we've got Merlin.
Oh, there you go. Thanks Darren.
Hi, hi. Hi, this is Jonathan here using the Merlin official account.
I'm Jonathan, Head of Partnership at Merlin Chain.
And for those who don't know, Merlin is a Bitcoin layer 2 network built on Poly cdk based on zk evm so we aim to provide high
performance event compatibility and security in inheritance from the bitcoin main chain for
scalability and then as well the leading bitcoin layer 2 right we also bring along bitcoin liquidity
bitcoin native assets like rules and ordinals into the broader uh bdc55 ecosystem and economy. So till today, we have breached over $28 billion
in Bitcoin and Bitcoin native assets, liquidity,
across different chains and vertically from layer 1 to layer 2.
And we are now laser focused on activating that capital beyond just speculation.
And I guess everyone is here for that. So think of us as a layer
that connects the world's largest domain
except Bitcoin with the most exciting opportunities in DeFi,
including real world yield, DeFi yielding and stuff like that.
So thanks for inviting me here.
Happy to share more.
Awesome.
Plug in Bitcoin and Bitcoin DeFi into ethereum and polygon love it
darren do we have more intros to do or should we kick it off
we do have um richard lda never met that guy before nope don't know who that guy is let's
just skip him what's up everybody yeah i'm Richard. I run business development for Lunar Digital Assets, and I'm excited to be here.
I'll do a little quick intro. Every, like, five or ten episodes, I'll jump in.
I'm Rock Zacharias. I'm the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets, a venture studio, hybrid marketing incubation firm that works in all stages of projects, early stage, mid and past unicorn for a few projects now.
We incubated Polygon, QuickSwap, DogeChain, Persistence, Chromia, My neighbor alice a bunch of others um let's see i am i serve on the
board for the polygon grants program uh which is uh something i really enjoy um it's been uh
it's been a fun road i'm excited we're getting ready for season three and we've been learning
a lot over the last couple seasons the last couple quarters. I also am a mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fi Accelerator
and a city leader for BitAngels, which is an investor and project pitch network where we
try to match projects with investors around the world at various cities.
I think we have like 30 cities around the world.
So the next event coming up is in Dubai at Token 2049.
I think applications...
Actually, Richard, do you know are applications still open for Dubai?
Yes. Yes, they are.
Nice. So if you go to bitangels.network you can and go to pitch you could
choose the city and then apply uh to pitch in dubai and there'll be a lot of really big investors
there uh there'll be the main investors from early days of tether uh some of the investors in ethereum
mastercoin the first ever ICO.
There'll be a celebrity speaker there that we're not,
his team told us we're not allowed to say who it is yet.
But Michael Turpin will be there speaking.
And very likely, either we haven't figured out yet, but Mark, CEO of Polygon, or Sindeep,
will probably be doing a Fireside.
I'll be hosting.
And then Rohit,
who works on a lot of the grant stuff from the Polygon Lab side,
will be there
and some other Polygon members.
So it'll be a really good one.
There'll be some Polygon projects
actually pitching
and grantees pitching.
What was that?
Was that a snort, Richard?
I'm so sorry.
How do you know my mouth was?
That was definitely a growl.
Good sir, doth he scoff at you?
And then, yeah, finally,
we'll also be helping with a CJN DNA event,
which is DNA is the fund that By Brock Pierce that invested in
And they started, well Brock started Tether
And some other big ones
So let's see
Oh I'm also co-founder of Quickswap.
It's like, do you remember in the early days when I had a long list of names and one of them was Mother of Dragons?
I think we need to start that for you.
It's like, I'm Roxagrius, co-founder of Quickswap.
You know when you watched Game of Thrones the first time and her titles keep stacking up and we need to do that for you.
Like practice it so that we've just got it down.
When you sent me that one time, I think maybe it was on Only Space or something. And you sent me a gif about Daenerys.
I was laughing so hard.
Mother, what is it?
What is she?
Mother of Dragons.
Mother of Chains.
Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea.
You know, yeah, a whole bunch of titles.
Something of the Unsullied.
Yeah, yeah.
That was such a damn good show.
I got to go back and rewatch it.
Yeah, I can't believe it took you so long to watch it the first time.
I know.
I don't think I can rewatch that.
There's too much trauma.
Too much trauma?
Yeah.
I can maybe do it up to season three and a half,
and then when I know it's going to be the Red Wedding.
Don't just come off.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I feel that too, Darren.
I got lucky.
No one spoiled the Red Wedding for me.
I didn't really get spoiled.
I didn't get any spoilers.
I really tried not to look online at stuff or anything,
even though I watched it, I don't know,
10 years after it came out so
what you're saying is you didn't keep up with nicole's complete chain of uh jell tales
i think it was just like it was it was so long after it aired that he watched it that it didn't
make sense you know like he probably saw the spoilers but didn't put them together you know like yeah
true true so let's get started all right yeah let's do it all right so first question
start simple what percent of your portfolio is Bitcoin right now.
Dash, you've got your hand up.
Don't raise your hand here.
Just jump in.
Sorry, I thought Elon Musk made it cool.
I thought I'd do it.
So personally, I mean, obviously this being for myself, like the Dash network doesn't own Bitcoin
because it's a network.
But myself, Joelle, network doesn't own Bitcoin because it's a network, but myself,
Joel,
I'm not exactly sure,
but it's a very small minority.
And I have to preface this by saying,
this is not necessarily a smart move.
This is not necessarily a thought out investment kind of strategy.
I'm kind of as this whole,
like living on crypto thing that I've been doing for about
a decade now. It's I basically try to let the portfolio allocate itself, meaning whatever
people will pay me in is that's what I keep. Whatever I need to do things that I actually
use to live on crypto, upload things to Web3, use all that kind of stuff. I kind of do
that too. And so because of that, just about, in fact, most of what I have is in, that is Bitcoin,
is in Web3. Sorry, it's in ThorChain and Maya Protocol liquidity pools, providing liquidity
for those things. And so because obviously people need to get in and out of Bitcoin, that's a great way to go across the chains. So it's kind of, I did have a decent amount more when in the heyday
of Lightning, because there were some things I could pay with Lightning that I couldn't with
other things as easily. But then that kind of fell on his face. Then we had the whole crackdown on
wallets where all the wallets were kind of leaving the US especially. And then that kind of fell on his face. Then we had the whole crackdown on wallets where all the wallets were kind of leaving
the US especially.
And then that kind of like, well, this isn't useful for me.
So yeah, I'm not saying everyone should do that thing.
I do think that there is a good potential for Bitcoin to have a very strong position
in the rest of the crypto markets for, you know, let's say 10, 5, 10 years as a minimum,
possibly much longer. But one thing I will give a random thrash, shout out to the Threshold Project who
were on our space yesterday because they kind of tokenize like a trustless wrap Bitcoin pretty well.
And that does make me much more comfortable in having kind of a Bitcoin that I can move at the drop of a hat, swap for things, do DeFi stuff with it, run it through Railgun or do something else to get massive privacy gains on it, all that kind of stuff.
Those kinds of things would make me want to have more Bitcoin for my personal purpose because the utility then is much, much higher.
These are all really cool points. However, you're being,
you're kind of like receiving the bad end of Gresham's law. You know, Gresham's law is that
good money drives out bad. And so if someone pays you in something, it's because it's the thing they
don't want to hold. They prioritize spending the thing that they don't think will gain value so they they get rid of that
right like when governments started making uh you know debasing coins you know if someone had a real
gold coin and then the you know old romans put you know 10 copper into a coin and people knew that
they would spend those copper ones the the diluted ones
they wouldn't spend their real gold coins um and so those end up naturally though becoming kind of
the day-to-day currency because they are the thing that people don't want to actually hold so the bad
money gets pushed out and that gets into circulation um and by doing that you're kind of holding the
opposite of the stores of value that is a temporary
thing and slight counter to that because um when i got rid of my bank account 2016 and stuff like
that there was some time when for purposes here and there i would need to have a little bit of
cash like a couple hundred dollars on me just in case i couldn't figure things out and that kind of
that was the bad money, obviously. The bad
money that you just want to get rid of first. And at some point, because it became easier to use
crypto for everything, I just stopped. I just kind of got rid of that. Over time, I stopped
replenishing it. So that is a very accurate thing for short-term kind of things. Longer term,
you only don't run out of bad money
if you keep getting it in which case that's either not maybe a little bit nonsensical for the person
or maybe it's not that bad after all but yeah basically my interest is purely in like the
freedom tech side of things the living unbanked the being able to use sound light, to be able to get the fiat scam out of my life.
And so as such, I'm kind of living an experiment. Again, I don't necessarily recommend it. Probably
most people should hold some Bitcoin because it just has done better than a lot of things over
a period of time. To answer the actual question, whether it's not whether one should or not,
but no, I personally
have very little right now. So I really respect, by the way, your experiment. I think it's super
cool. I wish more people would do stuff like that. I don't, to be honest, I don't spend in crypto
hardly ever. Um, because it's, I guess doesn't feel easy, but, and it's like accounting things.
And I mean, I guess, you know, all the
difficulties, but you've also found ways to overcome those. And you, like, from what I've
heard from you from here and other times we've spoken, you found pretty easy ways to spend your
crypto, I suppose, right? Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't always that way. And I did definitely
have an interesting situation in last month when I traveled to Amsterdam and just about everything that all it was just a temporary coincidence that a lot of the tools that I relied on kind of got nuk the 2016 2017 era but mostly uh it's pretty seamless to where i
could get a lot of non-technical people on it right now and it's only going to get better over time i
think do you limit the tokens that you accept as payment or are you just like yeah i'll take far
coin um so this is kind of the old school attitude a lot of people had from a lot of the crypto native people had from back in the day, which was I'll take anything as long as it's on Shapeshift.
That's back when Shapeshift was a centralized swap provider.
Now they're a DEX aggregator that works on Thor chain and some other networks. But basically, I won't take some random, you know,
not to use, I hate
the term shitcoin, but it is kind of
applicable sometimes.
You can definitely say a fartcoin
is a shitcoin.
It's literally
particles.
It's gas rather than solid slash liquid.
But anyway, let's move on to something
better. But basically, I's move on to something better.
But basically, I'll take anything that I could feasibly swap for something else if I can't use it.
But I prefer to take the most liquid kind of the most spendable thing.
So if someone wanted to pay me in Dash, that's the top of the list. If they wanted to pay me in Bitcoin Cash, like I might have a podcast that CoinATM radar sponsors
and they do Bitcoin cash
because I don't know why
they don't want to do that.
But I'll take that.
That's useful.
And then probably something like
I do get paid from X revenue
gets auto swapped into USDC
because they will only do
cash out the stable coins.
And I'm like, OK, well, that's that's fine.
I can use USDC on on arbitrum for most things
and then it kind of goes down the list and then when you get to something like
you know again oh litecoin is pretty high up the list by the way because i could do most things
with it but when you get down to like i'm not even sure what's a good example of that these days but
you know it just if i can't really use it i'm like well if i can't use it is it on some swap system or
decks that i have and you know bitcoin is i would say middle of the pack on there because
it does have a lot of adoption liquidity it's pretty close i wouldn't say it's the top anymore
but it's very close to the top as far as like you know what you can actually do with it and spend
things but because the the uncertainty around you
know fees and stuff like that and time it's not quite at the top but it would probably be top
three four maybe what's your opinion on uh wbtc so w i won't touch it really because it's,
it's not why I won't touch it,
but I'd rather not touch it because of the trust elements involved,
especially since the whole,
you know,
just at something kind of happened now,
something that's a more trustless thing.
Like,
as I mentioned,
TBTC threshold Bitcoin that I don't have to trust a custodian that I can
just kind of
burn those tokens and get real Bitcoin automatically out to me, I would be much more comfortable with
that. In fact, I would love to get them to deploy on Dash too, which we're kind of talking about,
but we'll see if that happens. Bitcoin Dash has a ring to it.
Yeah. I like TBTC and Threshold and what they're doing.
I think they have 150 validators.
It seems, at least from what they tell me on calls I've had and looking into it a little bit, it seems like it's pretty decentralized, or at least the concept is a cool way of wrapping Bitcoin.
cool way of wrapping Bitcoin. But I wonder, like, for me, to be honest, and this is feels like kind
of dirty to say as WBTC is, you know, centralized and by BitGo, but I feel probably safer in WBTC,
probably because I don't know threshold well enough. But even though it's centralized, oddly,
I mean, there are certainly things that are centralized in the world. I think we could all see lots of examples where you would actually trust the centralized thing
more than the decentralized thing. There are decentralized things in the industry that
break, get hacked, exploited, you know, aren't good security. And so for me, I hold, gosh, I don't know, probably seven figures in WBTC.
I hold a lot more regular Bitcoin, but WBTC, I have a lot on Polygon.
So it's just really easy to use it, put in liquidity pools.
And BitGo has survived now.
And again, I feel dirty saying this because it is centralizing, kind of goes
against the whole point of all this stuff, but it has survived some serious ups and downs in the
industry. And BitGo is a pretty successful company that's navigated the hardships of the industry.
So it's got some Lindy effect there. Probably not the safest thing I'm not recommending.
Like if your Bitcoin is just sitting there and you're not using it on a DEX or something,
you should probably just go over to Thorachain and swap it over for some real Bitcoin.
But yeah, any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I agree.
I guess that's much more of a pragmatist point of view than a...
I mean, obviously, I understand pragmatism very well I'm
not a hundred percent with my own life I try to prioritize whatever decentralized thing first but
one thing's for sure is if someone wants to pay me in a stable coin I would absolutely take probably
USDC at the top of the peak of the pack and then tether after that and then after that would be you know who knows what else
but like for example i have held uh busd before and that ended up going away which that's a
centralized kaput but luckily i didn't have any by that time but then also i did have a little bit of
ust now not very much so it's not like i lost anything significant but it did go like i did sell it for
like 23 cents on the dollar on the way down so like the quote decentralized option does go boom
sometimes too it is kind of like a balancing act i think as far as like bitco's not going anywhere
wrapped bitcoin is probably good the risk from that is probably more of a, like a forcible KYC,
or they prevent you from doing certain things or those kinds of things are more risks than
complete explosion. Whereas with the decentralized solutions, depending on what you got,
maybe there's a risk where, you know, it goes kaboom, but they're not going to stop you from
using it before that, you know? Well, that's not quite um i mean yeah generally right but i'll give an
example that i think it didn't even make the news and people didn't even know happened but
there was um i forget which hack it was but there was a hack and the hacker um had received, uh, a bunch or stole a bunch of USDC, I believe, and put it into,
uh, put it into MakerDAO or it could have been DAI, but whatever, either way, you know, um,
or, uh, or it could have been ETH actually. Um, I forget what it was, but anyways,
they put it into MakerDAO and MakerDAO is supposed to be
decentralized. And the UK government, someone sued and through the UK courts, I believe,
and said, hey, you know, the MakerDAO foundation has a multi-sig and has the power to freeze or move these funds. And they, in court, they won this
and the court said, hey, MakerDAO Foundation, you need to like freeze or move these funds or
whatever it was. And some of them, because of legal fears, were scared and said, okay, we'll do it.
There was one holdout. So they didn't have enough multi um, multi-sig votes to, uh, to, to carry this out.
There was one holdout who said, I'm just not doing it. I don't care if it's legal trouble. I won't do
it. It goes against, you know, I don't think legally we should have to do this. And he said,
I won't sign to do this, but what I will do is I will sign. Uh, if you guys, you know,
if we put forth a proposal to remove me and put a new person
on the foundation who can play your game, then I will sign myself off of the foundation,
and you guys can bring someone else in. And they did that, and they moved the money,
and in the end, they actually basically broke MakerDAO's, like, decentralization, in my opinion.
In the end, they actually basically broke MakerDAO's decentralization, in my opinion.
Now, it was to get money from a hacker, which is a noble thing, but similar to the original Ethereum, where they rolled back.
What was that, guys?
The original time.
The DAO.
The DAO. Yeah, yeah, original time paper. The DAO.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not the first DAO. Dash was a much older DAO, in fact,
which I still get salty about that, but whatever.
It was called the DAO.
But, um,
so it's, look, it's been done now.
It happened, you know, on Ethereum.
It happened with MakerDAO
and these are concerns.
Hey, Kurt, I see you in the audience.
We've sent you a speaker request.
I know you've got lots to say on the history of Bitcoin and all this,
so accept, please.
By the way, anybody else who's a speaker,
you can feel free to jump in this conversation.
I know not a lot of people have had the opportunity to speak yet.
We do have an open
forum. Just want to. I'll just jump in and go back to the original question, because I think
the way I look at it, just to frame it, probably obvious for everyone here, but
based on making some bad purchases with Bitcoin back in the day, which I regret these days,
buying watches and things, I just look at Bitcoin as a store of value.
I mean, and that's this core value prop to me.
And I know that, you know, we're talking about much more than that here with adding liquidity
and DeFi and other utilities to it.
But to me, at its core and why I hold it is for store of value.
And, you know, the way I hold it is kind of like a squirrel in lots of different ways.
Right.
So, but anyway,
just wanted to add that perspective because I know we're talking a lot about
spending and surviving and debanking and things like that. Um, but you know,
I think a lot of people just at the core just look at it as a digital gold.
And I'm not gonna say I just look at it that way, but you know,
with respect to holding it long-term, it's just kind of part of my life.
Something that I've had,
I'll always have, just don't plan on touching it. Hey, thanks for the invite, Nicole and others.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry I'm late. I got my calendar mixed up, but I just kind of wanted to
add like a minor two cents. I don't disagree with anything necessarily, which is funny for me because I guess I'm the contrary on these calls often enough.
But yeah, I just wanted to say all that sounds like my recollection of it.
People deciding whether or not to roll back things and what do we use for what
and this and that. I think Bitcoin was always intended to be the underlying base asset. So
if you think about the whole economy and the way that it is set up now, like you essentially have
underlying assets of value. So, you know, traditionally that would be something like gold or other precious metals. And then from that, you would use derivative assets or tokenized assets
like cash, like dollars used to be essentially tokens of gold until the Federal Reserve System
was, you know, created. Fiat currency in general is much older than that, but conceptually you
would have an underlying asset like gold and then then your dollars were weighted. Uh, they were a weight or
measure of gold or silver. They were redeemable at local banks and whatever. And I think Bitcoin
was designed very much to be the same way that the lowest level of Bitcoin, your, your layer one,
uh, asset Bitcoin, um, is a cash system, but that's largely based on it being like the way that it's accounted.
So the way that Bitcoin is accounted for when you make a transaction works like a cash register, right?
So if I have one Bitcoin, but I want to send $50 worth of the Bitcoin to Joel, the network is going to take my whole Bitcoin.
to Joel, the network is going to take my whole Bitcoin. It is going to give Joel the amount of
Bitcoin that he needs. And it's going to give me back the balance in cash as like a separate set
of the transaction. So that output will be my change output. So I think the reason Satoshi
called it cash largely has to do with how it's accounted. And it's accounted for the way that a cash
register, like your merchant at the cash register would do your accounting. And I think that was
largely to help it make sense. But Bitcoin also had the ability to produce tokens and bootstrap
tokens on top of it. And in fact, a lot of people aren't aware that Tether was initially distributed over Bitcoin using what's called the Omni layer.
And then from that,
I think the way that it probably should have been done
is Tether Corporation should have taken
a certain amount of Bitcoin
and held it in some kind of multi-sig wallet
or some kind of smart contract,
both of which were available at the time on Bitcoin.
And then you would release a certain amount of Tether with that.
So you're using Tether recursively in Bitcoin and on Bitcoin, I think would be a much better
way than like, well, you know, here's an audit from Dell Tech Bank.
And yeah, we got the money and don't worry, it's all there.
And so you're taking things off of Bitcoin where they're, you know, exponentially less
auditable and whatever.
But I think...
At the time, we tried that with colored coins and MasterCoin and other things,
and really the technology probably wasn't super ready for that.
It was, yeah.
When they were doing Tether with Omni.
Sure.
I think a lot of it was that the culture wasn't ready.
I mean, the tech, yes, the tech was not robust. But the reason the tech was not robust is because people were just trying the idea. I mean, people didn't really work on tokenization conceptually.
And then it was also right at that sort of big political influx of the block size war, where then you had big influencers debating what Bitcoin was for instead of, you know,
all the other stuff that you could be building on Bitcoin. And so I think there was a big political
shift. And then Ethereum showed up that said, hey, well, Ethereum is for this. So if you want
to do this, do it on ETH. And I think that's a big reason why Tether and most tokens shifted over
to Ethereum in that like 2015 to 2017 2017 era and it's just really never come
back but i think it would be much better well tether did did uh you're right it hasn't come
back but it i mean there's a huge movement for it which is part of what this episode's about
is you know people are building tokens on on bitcoin now and on the various l2s there must
be a hundred bitcoin l2s now and a thousand pretty L2s. There must be 100 Bitcoin L2s now and 1,000 pretty cool companies
that are building stuff there.
And we did just see Tether, actually, on this example,
come back to Bitcoin on Lightning Network recently,
which is cool, in, I think, January.
Also, I don't want to filibuster,
so I'll wrap my opening statement here,
but I just went to the Counterparty conference in Miami about two months ago.
And Counterparty was one of the first serious implementations of tokenization technology on Bitcoin.
Again, 2014, 2015 era.
I think they ultimately went all the way away in about 2017, but the assets, because they're on chain, did not disappear.
And they have sort of rebooted their original uh founder and
and maintainer and stuff like they're back and they want to uh bring back a bunch of the stuff
so a lot of the old memes that you think of as bitcoin memes like pepe the frog for example uh
that was a bitcoin token project a decade ago and they're trying to revive all this stuff clean the
code up re-establish and ultimately i
think it's a really good thing uh because counter parties the counterparty's coming back huh
that's fun they're they're like back back like they they have uh you know solidly it's the
underlying tech on um stamps which is a variation on the ordinals concept. So yeah, it is actually being used today on BTC. So pretty interesting.
So you guys started talking about side chains and Bitcoin layer twos. So let's get into some
questions about that. Yeah. Sound good? Rock? Sure. Do it. Okay. So let's ask, are you more bullish on Bitcoin L2s like Lightning and ARK and Fediment or sidechains like RSK and Liquid?
Can I give a third answer?
Yes.
My third answer is bearish on the first two.
Bearish on the first two.
Bullish on something that manages,
something that's operated by a different cryptocurrency network
that's basically an unsanctioned L2,
like, for example, Wrapped Bitcoin or TBTC or those kinds of things.
It just seems like when people are doing,
I guess, explicitly maxi-friendly, maxi-branded type scaling tech for Bitcoin,
it just ends up being trash
and having no network effect, to be honest.
And we have to see the absolute massive amount
that was poured into the Lightning network.
And it should be everywhere by now.
Everyone should be using Lightning,
but no one's using Lightning.
Usage is apparently declining.
Again, I have to check out some other statistics,
but it's because the tech just is janky
and just doesn't, the user experience isn't good.
Same thing with a lot of these other sort of side chains.
I think that if you want a good user experience,
you got to go with the shit coin world.
And you just, if you have the shit coiners build your Bitcoin layer, that's probably the best, you got to go with the shit coin world. And you just, if you have the shit
coiners build your Bitcoin layer, that's probably the best bet you got. I think, you know, to look
at who does this stuff right. I think we really have to look at Solana and I'm not a fan of
Solana's underlying technology. I think that the way that they come to consensus and the way that they scale is novel.
But I think they're essentially at their scale ceiling now and still very much in the crypto niche.
But if you look at their higher level applications, they are a really good example of why single network,
like in-network effect of your base layer, then your tokens, and then your application layer,
all being essentially in
the same stack makes for the best user experience. And that's just, again, a cultural thing. And I
think a lot of crypto people just by default want to make things complicated. And I'm guilty of this
myself, that we want to be the cool kids. And that's just how lots of things work. This is why like ARPA net and things was like,
it was all hackers and stuff until finally a company like AOL looks at the stack and says,
you know what, we're going to package this up. So every idiot can just put a disc in their
computer and start to use this thing because we think it would be cooler if everybody just
made a pile of compromises in order to teach everybody how to use the internet.
And then that's when that massive hockey stick explosion happened. So I think UX really,
really matters. And I think all of us could learn a lot from like Solana. And there's a couple other
examples, but I think Solana really is best in class over the last year for how to use tools,
you know, how to use tools, how to use DeFi, how to make financial decisions in, you know,
everything from lending and trading and then really just actual financial structure at the
application layer is really, really well done from a user experience standpoint. And I think
if Bitcoin or anybody else wants to bring in banking and finance and things like loans. I think that that needs to be
done really well. The other thing is that people really need to start thinking about contract law
in the same way that you would in any other circumstance. I had Ian Grigg on my show this
week, and he was talking about how essentially a smart contract that doesn't have any legal binding contract is, you know, it's, that's why it's all smoke and mirrors.
That's why it becomes pump and dumps and everybody disappears and it's all anons pumping shit coins.
And that's a major problem.
I think that's probably our largest problem culturally in the blockchain space is that we have to assume 99% of things are lies that they're
pumping nuts. They're designed to scam people. And we really, really have to get away from that by
just being the example, being better and doing things with actual legally binding contracts
in order to bring stuff to the real world. So grandma thinks about, Hey, you know what? I, I could tokenize some of my
assets and take out a loan and receive that loan in USDC or whatever, and then, you know,
live their life banking through a smart contract instead of banking through the local bank. And I
think that would be really cool, but we have to make steps to make that possible.
Or we just build better smart contracts or use the smart contracts that aren't susceptible to pump and dump.
Everybody knows the pump and dump shit that's happening.
They know it's allowed in those smart contracts.
There are smart contracts that don't allow that, that we don't need law to get in the mix of our smart contract law.
I mean, it's kind of interesting because we just talked about an example where a court in the UK actually forced an action on chain, or at least compelled people to perform an action on chain.
I do agree with Kuroko that sort of a holy grail for maybe the mainstream is actually melding the legal system with the on chain world, at least for portions of it.
But I think every time we think that way, we are compromising,
or it runs with the risk of compromising decentralization.
But I wanted to quickly get back to, you know, again, the original question here
on kind of architectures of sidechains or L2s and so forth.
I think that a natural concept was for people to experiment on Bitcoin
with trying to basically do things that worked on Ethereum or elsewhere. But the architecture is just way different. conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual conceptual relaunching Horizon that's been an L1 since 2017 as an L3 on base, which I never would have thought
I would be saying even like a year ago or two years ago. But actually, it works pretty well now.
And we just realized that the network effects that we get by being part of a vibrant ecosystem
mattered more than that kind of where we sit in the architectural stack. But I think that works
well for Ethereum and may not work well for Bitcoin. So when I think about the Bitcoin ecosystem,
I mean, I'm familiar with a variety of the different sidechains and L2s and friends with
the founders and stuff and there's some cool stuff going on. But I get the criticisms. And I have to
say the things that I think are really interesting are taking that Solana example that you guys were
giving, where you don't want to actually segment liquidity, you want to create these silos of I think are really interesting are taking this Solana example that you guys were giving where
you don't want to actually segment liquidity you want to create these silos of liquidity
or other activities and if we can do things like integrating zero knowledge proofs as an example
where you can actually run a virtual machine that actually you know has a snark proof that's
generated or stark proof and verified on chain um so you kind of have this more of an integrated stack at base.
To me, that's pretty compelling.
And I'm really curious where that's going to go,
but it's just still super early days on the tech.
I'm pretty excited for...
I think the coolest thing about Bitcoin is that you have optionality,
and that's kind of this space in general. So for Bitcoin, I am open to all different ways of innovating, mostly away from innovating at the L1 on Bitcoin. That's a whole nother story as an ossophist.
But I'm open to some tinkering on the L1.
But like things like side chains,
things like true L2s using things like roll-ups that people's definition varies there.
But DeFi directly on Bitcoin, I think is interesting.
I think it won't last, you know, more than who knows,
five to 10 years because the fees will likely go up on Bitcoin. So I think the L2s will be
the most interesting. Currently, most of the Bitcoin L2s are really more like side chains.
And they're kind of like, a lot of them are kind of L2 in name only.
But over time, we can build proper trustless bridges,
things like Threshold.
I really like what Bitcoin OS is doing with their rollups.
Hemi is doing some interesting stuff with rollups.
stuff with rollups. BitVM is quite interesting. I like also having things like Merlin and ZKBTC
BitVM is quite interesting.
and Bob, which connect to the Ethereum world and give Bitcoiners a way to access all the Ethereum
liquidity, stablecoins, etc. I like Lightning Network.
I think it's still a project in the making,
and it is making, in my opinion, great positive progress.
It's growing much slower than we expected, but it's still growing,
and the technology is improving over time.
We don't know.
Will Lightning Network be used as the peer-to-peer like sending money system or will it be part of a
larger stack where protocols will interact with lightning as like an intermediary kind of
settlement layer on top of the main settlement layer of Bitcoin? We don't know. It's hard to say.
A lot of people have different theories on how that will play out. But it seems like Lightning Network and that technology will be a part of some kind of the stack long-term.
Liquid is interesting.
I've had the privilege to talk to Adam Back quite a bit about it.
I think that's a cool concept, this kind of federated concept.
Yeah, there's all kinds of different stuff. I think bringing back counterparty, that sounds kind of fun. And ordinals, ruins, these are other
innovations on Bitcoin. I mean, people are hitting this from so many different angles.
I do like what was said earlier about WBTC or TBTC on ETH or EBTC by Badger or all these other, um,
attempts, um, all make Ethereum. To me, I've, I've said this for years. I said it on an interview
with Kitco news. I don't even know, four plus years ago, um, that Ethereum is an L2 or a sidechain of Bitcoin, and Polygon is an L3 because Polygon is an L2 of Ethereum.
So you can transact your Bitcoin through WBTC on Polygon
for less than a penny and in less than a second.
You could use it in DeFi, etc.
You can use it on Merlin, etc.
So there's so many different options. I actually
also include ETFs as another layer of Bitcoin, a centralized layer, obviously. But you could call
it a side chain, a layer to a wrapper, whatever you want to call it. I mean, as mentioned earlier also, you know, dollars were a wrapper of gold.
And now they're not, you know, they detached.
But yeah, there's all these different options.
And I think Bitcoin will have, who knows, hundreds of options in the future of ways to use it.
I'm so sorry before you guys get started again. I've got to
go, but thank you so much for having me. I hope
you guys have a great weekend.
Cheers, Vano.
Good Friday. Happy Easter to those
celebrating also.
Yes, happy. Oh, I keep saying happy Easter,
I don't care at all. All right. Have a
good one, guys.
I just wanted to give a shout out to Rock. I'm really glad to hear you say, you know, that the way that we use the term L2 in Bitcoin really is it's not exactly accurate.
Like most L2s in a Bitcoin paradigm really are a lot more like a side chain.
I've I've argued a lot of them really are just separate networks.
They have their own nodes, their own security policy. They communicate to Bitcoin through a
separate channel, but they're not in, on, or above Bitcoin in any other sense. Now,
I think the exception to that is ordinal technology. Ordinals are a lot more like an L2, the way you would think about it in
basic network theory. So I conceptually really like that idea in that an ordinal indexer
needs to be directly connected to a Bitcoin node in order to be listening and indexing as it
happens. It's essentially a partner to that uh, like partner, um, to, to that system,
but they work, they work in tandem to each other directly. So I think it's a much better, um,
term to use. And I think it's also really important that we get our terminology right
for the sake of attracting, uh, engineers and developers and stuff from outside the blockchain,
uh, you know, our, our, our bubble, you know, so that when they look at it and they say, oh, it's an L2.
And then they're like, wait, that's not an L2. What the heck are you guys up to?
But yeah, no, I think it's really crucial to do that right. And I conceptually like the way
originals works as an L2. And I personally am most bullish on that as a technology for tokenization and DeFi because
you can abstract on top of ordinals and do lots of really, really cool things, especially
if you consider ordinals more broadly, like there are ordinals on Bitcoin forks and things
as well.
And so as those are more scalable based on the way Bitcoin works, you can run,
for example, a BTC node on BSV. And so they're listening to each other. They start to become
this recursive pipe to each other without using some kind of bridge technology. But the node
itself actually runs in the other Bitcoin networks. And so they can start to share data back and forth
and allow you to very trivially do DeFi where it's cheaper
or tokens or cash or whatever else where it's cheaper.
And then if you want to settle it over on BTC,
that starts to become essentially like a fractal level
L2 relationship between the Bitcoin forks.
And I think there's a lot of really cool stuff
that could be done there too we have uh jc uh you want to intro yourself real quick
and guys happy to be here again i think i was here last week maybe no no the two weeks ago
hi guys well i'm jc um from ida da is an AI trading terminal. And yeah, I'm like happy to be here joining the conversation. I came a little bit like late, I think. Maybe, no? But yeah, happy to hear you.
We also have Omni.
before Omni jumps in, I will have to jump off
because I did have a space starting at three minutes.
So I wish I could have not just gone to the space
if I hadn't already agreed to,
but because this one's probably cooler, but that's fine.
Don't let them hear that.
Yeah, we love this.
Unfortunately, I was going to say the same thing.
Yeah, I've got to jump here in a minute.
Thanks, Rob.
But no, I appreciate it.
Thank you, guys.
Cool, cool. Bye.
Take care.
So we'll intro Omni, DuckDow,
and Ordinal'sHive, and then I want to
respond to what Kurt was saying, because that's some
interesting stuff.
Or if anyone else has anything, jump in.
Omni, go ahead.
Hey, guys. Happy to be here again.
To be honest, I'm only joining because
this is like the most
interesting space on Twitter. I don't often stay three hours to listen to anything. I have like a
really short attention span for some things. But yeah, I'm Philip. I'm currently building
I'm Philip. I'm currently building a bridge between Bitcoin and all the other L1, L2, L3s for runes, ordinals, BRC20s and Bitcoin, of course.
And well, I will touch a bit more on the security side because that's the part that we are currently having issues with as a whole.
If you guys saw the latest hacks that happened with some of the rune swaps these last couple of weeks.
But that's for later.
I will let you go.
I want to talk about, I'm going to double click on that in a bit.
Let's quickly intro DuckDao and Ordinal's Hive,
and then I want to go back to what Kurt was talking about.
Hey guys, this is Zoran from DuckDao.
Pleasure to be here.
Pleasure to be speaking with you.
We're actually based on Ethereum,
but we're all very uh very much
in love with bitcoin bitcoin is what brought us to the space it's just you know the the utility
of ethereum and our token and our token gated community and the way it's set up it's more
just easier with ethereum although we all love and hold bitcoin so looking forward to this chat. Thanks. All right.
And Ordnose Hive.
Hey guys, how's it going?
Fonzie here.
Hey, Rod, how's it going?
Great being up here in the space.
Founder of Ordnose Hive.
We're a professional trading protocol
and we deal with Bitcoin assets.
So, you know,
Ordnose is one of the things
that, you know, traders can trade here.
I definitely find the topic
of Bitcoin DeFi quite fascinating.
And I think the very next phase and a lot of the projects are especially geared and building towards this,
is sort of like having a very similar experience, at least training experience,
to what you see on different ecosystems like Solana, Ethereum.
So those are definitely some constraints that are being worked on.
But aside from that, great discussion. I hope you had more.
Good to have you fonzie uh always a pleasure okay um so yeah kurt that's pretty interesting i i love this kind of like more advanced ways of getting blockchains to communicate with each other. We're going to keep building more ways to do this over
time. My biggest bet probably is on ZK rollups. I think most things in the industry will use ZK
rollups eventually. It's a very hard technology, but there's a lot of great people in the space
working on it. There's been billions poured into this technology and it's
still rough around the edges but it is the end game in my opinion i think almost all blockchains
will use some form of ck roll-ups um and i obviously polygon with their ag layer are the
furthest in this um and are trying to unite all the blockchains, which I think is pretty cool. And it's like a neutral agnostic interoperability protocol
that can plug in other interoperability protocols on top of it.
So we're talking to BitcoinOS about doing this for Bitcoin,
and we're talking to, actually we just wrote a grant from the Polygon Grants Board
to a
team that's gonna actually this isn't public so maybe i shouldn't say it but
uh i'm gonna say let's go some alpha from brock
so we just wrote a decent sized grant to a team uh It's one of the Cosmos main developer teams to
build, I'm really leaking something, I probably shouldn't, but
bringing all the Cosmos chains into AgLayer
and connecting them to Ethereum and then all the other chains that
AgLayer connects to. So that's pretty
exciting. And we're talking to other different styles
and programming languages, people to build the...
So like, again, AgLayer is agnostic.
It's like a foundational protocol.
And then other people can build on top of it
to plug in all these various different types of blockchains.
And, you know
you could build you could bring in l2s and l1s uh with like things like their sp1 prover and
pessimistic proofs and a lot of really cool stuff happening there i'm ultra bullish
all right so uh now hopefully i don't get in trouble for leaking stuff that's not out yet. But if we do, we can absolutely blame Timmy and just call him a grass.
Yeah, he told me to do it.
He DMs me.
Yeah, he's on a Polygon handle.
We'll blame him.
Yeah, definitely.
Always blame him.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, love that kind of stuff.
Actually, could you double-click on that just a little bit more, Kurt?
What does that look like when these nodes communicating with each other?
Because I've heard of a few different programs trying to do stuff like this.
So just conceptually, I think a lot of people don't realize that a blockchain is in most ways a just a general purpose private network, right?
I mean, it's distributed, it's public, but if you just think about it like another internet,
like if you were to copy and paste the internet and just run it on 20 nodes too, it would work
the same way as the broader internet that we use. It's just some other variant of it that
for whatever reason, isn't connecting to the other one.
Right.
And so you can keep them segregated like that, or you can simply have the nodes communicate to each other by opening up and saying, okay, now, now we use the exact same method of TCP IP and they can hear each other.
And so if you do the same thing using, for example, like where you do this needs to be very scalable,
right? Like this wouldn't make sense if your average transaction fee is 50 cents, because
then every transaction happening on that other network is writing data to your, your database,
your network at a very high fee. And then, you know, whoever's paying for that is, is getting
fleeced. But, uh, if you have a very scalable network, and I do most of our R&D stuff
is in the BSV space, but we also run BTC, ordinals, tech, and whatever at our mining pool.
But if we were to listen to BTC and essentially run a BTC node that is listened to from the BSV
network, they're very, very similar in most regards.
And so it knows how to understand most of what's going on.
And then anything that needs to be translated
can be translated on that node that is synchronized
in basically in a little parentheses on the network.
And then you can just, you can absorb the entire UTXO set
so that it can listen to it.
Then it can abstract,
or it can listen to all the abstractions of the UTXO set so that it can listen to it. Then it can abstract, or it can listen to all the abstractions of the UTXO set,
like ordinals and then BRC20 and then runes
and whatever else are above BTC.
That's part of why I like ordinals technology as a true L2
is that it's trivial to then provide that service
to anything that is built in BTC ordinals,
as opposed to something like Lightning Network, which is so separate.
It's so like it's not part of the network and therefore you cannot provide extra service to Lightning Network by doing it this way.
But the methodology to do it is not completely defined.
It's more something we're experimenting with.
But it's something that not my pool, but other people in the BSV space have also done with
Ethereum, essentially synchronizing Ethereum node, run it in like a tokenized parenthetical
spot on the network, and then absorb all of the information about Ethereum.
And then every time there is a state change on ETH, that also gets written to BSV.
And then if you wanted to access your Ethereum contract,
you could do it in Bitcoin script and essentially run like a parenthetical operating system over on
BSV where it's very, very cheap. And by cheap, I mean, you know, a 10,000th of a penny is a typical
transaction fee. And then the network is capable of something like a million transactions per second.
And so like, there's a lot of capacity over there.
And then you can resettle it on Ethereum whenever you want to go back that direction.
But you have L1 security across the board because there is no bridge.
There is no other.
There's no spot to hack.
It's literally it is a node on the network, but it's like this little overlap between two networks.
So think of it like the big venn diagram um so yeah it's it's it's a novel way to treat the problem i don't know
if anybody else is is trying to do the same thing but uh it's something that we're pretty um pretty
excited about because we want to provide service to these other networks that all have their own
scaling bottlenecks simply because the network or the bottleneck on our network is way bigger.
It's just another decade or two out
from where most of the other blockchains are today.
So I think it would be a cool way
to have the liquidity of the bigger chains,
but then have the scalability of a chain like BSV.
So that's the thinking.
Go ahead, Omni.
I just wanted to ask, what do you think that the issue with the Bitcoin network at the
moment, the high fees and all that, relates to the amount of nodes that we currently have? Because I think on average, we have about 50K nodes
currently validating all the proof of work on Bitcoin.
So I'm trying to think what would happen
if we managed to reach a higher number?
Will that impact the fees?
Will that make it not faster, but more scalable? Because faster we can't. The minimum
is 10 minutes. So in Bitcoin, Bitcoin nodes are designed to be competitive with each other. So
adding nodes doesn't do anything for the sake of scalability. The scalability is at the protocol
level in Bitcoin. It's essentially decided in the software that there is a specific
bottleneck of between one and four megabytes every 10 minutes.
And adding other things, uh, at the network level doesn't really matter to that.
Like, that's why you have to bring something over to an L2 or some
other separate thing.
If you want to speed that up, it's, it's a, It's a protocol decision in the software. And I would
argue adding nodes after a certain point probably would slow the network down because it becomes
more nodes that need to be communicated to before you can trust consensus. So it's like,
you know, if there were a million nodes, like that's that many more network jumps that have
to happen before you can say, okay, most of the network agrees that
this is a transaction. It actually becomes a more complex spider web, which is not good for
trustworthiness of transactions. But that's sort of a computer science problem. But the scalability
issues in Bitcoin, they're not a surprise.
They're actually designed that way.
They're designed specifically because the people that engineered it said that they want it to be expensive to use the main layer because they want to fund, essentially use that as a funding mechanism for mining to make it more profitable to mine so that it is more secure for that reason.
And then everything speedy can be built
in some other abstraction layer above Bitcoin.
This is actually, this is like the fundamental point
as to why the block size war happened
and why there is a Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV,
and lots of other, even things like Dash and Digibyte,
who I've seen in here really are sort of responses to,
hey, Bitcoin's supposed to be
this expensive settlement layer.
So lots of people spun up altcoins
or lots of people forked
by refusing to upgrade their node
or whatever to play that game.
So does that answer your question?
I hear that Omni has their hand raised.
I don't think, okay,
so just so everybody knows,
you don't, typically here,
we don't raise hands.
We ask people to try their best
not to interrupt each other,
but to just try to jump in the conversation whenever there's an opening but um omni i don't know did
you have your hand raised i didn't see if with that being said yeah we generally just jump in
but with that being said some people aren't so aggressive and uh don't feel comfortable jumping
in if you do want to put your hand up um to get in and sometimes we get into you know
things get pretty uh rambunctious or heated even um so if you do want to raise your hand you can do
that but generally just please feel free to jump in yeah appreciate it yeah i was bringing up that
point about the notes because uh this is something that we should actually expect to happen in the next five to ten years.
Now, there are not a lot of, let's say, we don't really have a lot of people trading on Bitcoin.
We have companies, we have centralized layers that are using Bitcoin bitcoin and that's where the most transactions
happen but the more bitcoin expands the more we can expect people to want to run a node
in their home maybe like it happened in the very early days of 2009 2011 where everyone had just
early days of 2009, 2011, where everyone had just a, they were not joining a pool, they
were just having their own computer mining Bitcoin. And that's something I wish I did,
but I didn't have the knowledge. Well, you're also like using words, just I got to correct
you just a little. So running a node and a miner are different, right? You can run a
node without mining. And that is meant to be very easy it can be done on a raspberry
pi type stuff right yeah just that now it's not uh how to say um it's not worth it like it used to be
well running a node the idea is that it gives you like your own copy of the blockchain so that you know that what you're signing is correct and
there's no one's cheating you or spoofing you. It's, you know, most people don't run nodes,
but there's enough people that run nodes, uh, that just kind of do it because they care about
the network. And I actually imagine in a long enough time horizon, if for example, fees don't
go up enough on Bitcoin or any of these proof of work networks
that you may have people run valid, not validators, sorry, minors, just because they either care about
the network or they have a vested interest in the network and they want to make sure the network
stays healthy and secure. So you may have governments, banks, BlackRock, whoever running
minors, even if it is like slightly unprofitable or you know
whatever i understood thank you because running a node is not profitable and people still do it
right yeah there's always been this kind of like sentiment like if you have been in bitcoin for
you know since a certain date or for a certain amount of time, it was almost like a, you know, obligation to run a node and it wasn't necessarily meant as something that was profitable.
Now, I don't know that I necessarily agree with that, but that's always kind of been the sentiment behind it.
I mean, there is no doubt about it because like in the early, early days, you had to run a node if you wanted to make transactions.
Then people started creating nodes
for other people and this is when the things started to change but before that if you didn't
have a node you simply couldn't participate correct it was a monolithic implementation
but if you read read the white paper and read a lot of
the writings of Satoshi, like the, the project was alpha level when it came out. And he talked
a lot about the necessity for, uh, utilizing light clients and SPV, which frankly has never
been implemented in, in, in the BTC space and stuff. But there are lots of things that were
designed to happen that I think largely because Satoshi left the project in kind of an unceremonious
fashion that people decided to just kind of go the direction that they wanted to go with it.
And it really became like a social community project instead of what I think it was very clearly intended
to be.
Like, you know, I've posted many, many times, lots of quotes from Satoshi very deliberately
saying like that the average person should not run a node.
Like it is designed to be a commercial interest and that, you know, it should be in a data
center.
It should be done, you know, commercially and these things.
And then, you know, the cultural response today is, well,
that's a centralization risk and the government could shut down Amazon.
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