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Will Cryptos Without Smart Contracts Survive? π€ Crypto Quorum Ep. 19
Recorded: Aug. 14, 2025 Duration: 3:11:33Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion on the future of crypto, participants explored the significance of partnerships, trends in decentralized finance, and the challenges facing major platforms like Ethereum. Key topics included the importance of programmability, the role of grants in fostering innovation, and the ongoing need for skilled developers in the rapidly evolving blockchain landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello, everyone. hello everyone just trying to get everything set up we will add you guys as speakers feel
free to request um yeah just a second i'm trying to add the song bought up. Not sure if it's working right now,
but that would be a very big shame.
Nicole, if you don't, wouldn't mind
having the theme song on deck
just in case this thing doesn't actually work out.
When outsourcing to a robot for a while,
and yeah.
Let's see.
This is definitely feeling like a ruggy space already.
Well, it is Twitter. So, I mean, we got a 50-50 chance of that.
Yeah, for sure.
I'm ready.
I got the theme song if you want it.
Thank you very much.
It's just...
It's always something to spell to join space on this bot thingy.
But anyway, I can try it again.
But I guess you'd only have to imagine
what the circle of exit liquidity sounds like
because that's kind of the way we roll.
Like everyone up, let's see, Justin,
Justin are you a speaker yet can you say hi I said he said he could always
are you a speaker yet?
Can you say hi?
something everyone if you are here to speak come up and speak, request to speak. I will invite you to speak as well.
And if it's not working, try leaving and coming back.
And if that doesn't work, try leaving and
try using a different device or something.
Unfortunately, where did they go?
Got Justin and Zeno added right now.
Nice.
Hey everyone.
Yeah.
Hello, hello.
Welcome back Zeno.
Good to have you.
you good to be here just as always it's kind of like strange almost to have this
Good to be here.
level of like silence considering the way he usually is with that joyous, goofy music. It is also interesting how,
it is interesting how earlier in the day X was rugging
and I think yesterday it was as well.
So that's unfortunate.
It looks like we only have two speakers up.
I keep inviting everyone up to speak.
If you wouldn't mind,
if you are a speaker here trying to speak,
please wave and also request to
speak and i'll see if i can do that apparently my invites aren't really working super well
also while justin is listening um usually i announce this the thing at the next the next
space at the end but i'll announce it now. The next one of it is, is proof of work insecure?
I know that Justin feels strongly about this one.
So just want to make sure he gets the invite from right here.
If you do have time in your calendar,
we'd love to have you back next week.
Cause I know it's one of your, one of your fun ones.
Oh, he left. He didn't want to hear that.
He's like, get out of here.
Interesting. Also Adriano Feria
did not
he was not able to come today but he did
provide some interesting thoughts
via text
that I
that I'll throw in
there so
yes I can hear you now
today or something.
What did we do to displease them, I wonder?
Yeah.
I expect I'm not the only one having troubles.
I threw it into a new tab.
I was hoping that that worked.
And if nothing else works, you need to sacrifice something valuable to the gods of Elon, or they won't listen.
Yes, that's exactly how this works, unfortunately.
Did you hear me mention next week's subject?
I just missed that because I was just reconnecting as you said that.
Sorry.
Yes.
Next week's subject, we usually announce at the end of the show, but this time because
you're here and I don't know if you'll be there at the very end.
It's is proof of work insecure.
I know you like that subject.
So you're invited to come speak. I will try to get some proof of work maxis I know you like that subject, so you're invited to come speak.
I will try to get some proof of work maxis
to yell at as well.
You keep getting me with these great topics.
Damn it, Joel.
I'm supposed to be doing work here.
5 p.m. UTC.
5 p.m. UTC next Thursday.
Did you see the thread I did
two days ago on security budgets?
It's pretty dramatic.
I think so.
Yeah, because I calculated BTC being third in security
after Ethereum and then Solana.
It's kind of wild considering that BTC is number one in market cap
by a very large margin.
Yeah, that is actually wild but it to me it doesn't
it doesn't actually surprise me because of like the way the what i know about all that but um
anyway certainly yeah not me i understand how these things work um i should probably get some
cast about people too because they're always very energetic um okay so second time the bot failed to
join the space.
This is the last time I'm trying.
If not, we'll just pretend there's not going to be one and use my Nerd Girl bot instead.
Let me see.
Will you just invite some Monero people?
Yeah, well, yes.
You should invite some Monero people.
The problem is I don't know if they would want to come
because there's a lot of like, no, there's no problem.
Also, me personally, I have been not very kind to them
the last couple of days because they've turned,
oh, they, there's no one community there's
a lot of great manera people i know but too many of them have talked about like anti-semitic
conspiracy theories about the attack instead of focusing on their own problems and are going on
the attack mode against zcash and zcash's founder zuko because too much of Zcash's hash rate is from one miner as well,
even though they weren't attacked and they have ASICs. But like, there's all this weird nonsense
and I was a little bit harsh in my criticism, let's just say. And so if I'm like, hey guys,
I want to come in and talk, I'm sure maybe they wouldn't want to, but if anyone knows some Monero people that want to come talk, I am always ready.
I used to know some, but I committed this thing to report some facts on what's going on.
And man, I don't have any friends there anymore, I guess.
I will try to reach some out, especially because if you go to their matrix community with which is where the actual
research happens uh they are actually pretty open to the hybrid approach or at least they are willing
to research it so i think we can have better luck on matrix so i'll try to to reach out or maybe
they're just too anon to to to be reached out to you know i'm joking obviously
yeah absolutely it's it's funny but there are there are definitely some interesting
conversations happening on their side right now yes and i should point out um luke parker kayaba
nerf is kind of spearheading some of these. He's a really smart guy.
And there's a few hybrid models they're looking at.
There's the proof of the... There's some going back to ASICs kind of thing.
There's a few other interesting things on the table.
And he's kind of pretty direct about it.
I did suggest...
Well, I did mention Chainlocks,
which is the thing that Dash uses.
And he did not have at all a researched response.
So maybe he's not looking into everything, unfortunately,
but hybrid model would be nice.
Chain locks are equivalent to checkpointing-ish,
but reaching quorum through consensus on checkpointing.
Is that like a fair summary?
Pretty much.
It's like equivalent to a proof-of equivalent to a proof of stake hybrid. So
Got it. That makes sense.
Yeah. Anyone else? So we have a couple of speaking spots open because some of our fellows,
such as like the Ruggiero folks are going to come a little bit late. So if you want
to jump in and anyone who doesn't, who wasn't signed up to speak, raise your hand and maybe
I'll put you in. I think I said crypto sail up to speak, raise your hand and maybe I'll put you in.
I think I said Crypto Sailor could speak
because he always has some interesting things.
But anyway, we're around 10 minutes in.
I think it's probably a good time to roll the intro
now that Song Jam has failed to join the space, unfortunately.
I'll try again at the end.
Maybe we have a nice outro music.
But Nicole, you got everything ready to go
for the theme song?
I'm ready.
Cool.
And three, two, one, go!
Let's see. oh
your crypto corn's back we're live in the song dash and xano edge wallets set the tone from the block taken to the stars we're here to roast your skin
I'm taking to the stars, we're here to roast your skin.
I'm just a man.
I'm just a man.
I'm just a man.
It's a wild bastard.
Hey, Jason's and it's wallets.
Quick, quick, flippin' chickens.
Markets in a sketch, but some full tragic.
Just yo.
I'm just a man.
He's got dreams, rocks, drop in hearts.
He's got his eyes.
He's got his eyes. is so
well
I'm going to go to the next one. so
This is the big maximalist, a lot more to games like quick swap, take it all to the
strict. There are girls in the booth keeping chaos in check, while Joe Hell's dodging
beat us threats to the neck, from the coast to the bikes, where never we're
left.
All the crypto war runs the place, and let's throw it in some more.
Crypto war on Ring the Night, all those hackers and the blockchain boys, talking loud, throw Oh, I I switched it up on you.
Yes, it was the other version.
Unfortunately, we don't get it all its glory because X is really terrible at the noise cancellation with the music and stuff.
So when we get song jam back on, we'll have play the good ones.
I thought this was the first time no one's ever heard the circle of exit liquidity.
And it's all it's perfect audio glory.
And I was really looking forward to that.
But listen, we can't we have such a great group of people here today that I cannot really complain too much as it turns out.
So, hey, everyone.
Happy Thursday.
Welcome to the Crypto Quorum.
Officially, it's episode 19, which means 19 weeks in a row we've been doing this.
Co-hosted by Zano, who's a fantastic crypto project focused on privacy, etc.
I'm sure they can introduce themselves in a bit.
Consistent co-host, very good people.
And also sponsored by Edge Wallet, who is sometimes a co-host.
They're always invited to be a cohost,
but quick swap is stepping in for them too,
which is again,
a great,
polygon decks.
So check them out too.
edge is a fantastic wallet with true self custody,
no KYC fully encrypted in a private design.
and it's definitely personally,
it's my longest running,-camp multi-coin wallet that
i've used it's kind of my go-to but i'm not using the dash pay wallet to do stuff and they have a
duress mode which i've seen some people use i haven't tested it on myself but it is pretty cool
in the age of now people realize that crypto is real money and they might attack you and try to
steal you from you so make sure to have that on there too. And it's open source, free and transparent. Download EdgeWallet. It's
in the description up here, which is awesome. So let's start going down on the intros now.
So the way we're going to do this is, oh, and by the way, hi, MJ, can you request speaker? I think
that it works better when you request it rather than when I invite.
I'll try it either way.
So if you don't mind really quick saying who you are,
what you do, and let's just get on the board
a binary answer to the question,
will cryptos survive if they don't have
smart contract capability?
Just try to be yes or no. Now,
because Rock isn't here right now, we might actually get all yes or no answers and not
a soliloquy. So let's start with QuickSwap, i.e. Nicole. How's it going?
Hey, how's it going? I'm on both devices. I think I'm speaking from QuickSwap right now.
I'm Nicole, NerdGirl007, also QuickSwap.
Yes.
Interesting.
All right, Zano, what do you have to say on this?
Introduce yourself too.
Hi, guys.
I'm Gonzalo, community manager at Zano. And yes, I believe crypto can survive without smart contracts.
Nice.
All right, Sal.
I see you popped in here.
How's it going?
What do you think?
What's up, guys?
Yeah, whenever you and Justin and Zaino get together,
I have to pop in and listen.
I don't really have a very strong opinion on this.
I suspect that they can survive without smart contracts, but I'm willing to be persuaded.
Interesting.
Well, Justin is the master of persuasion here.
So hi, Justin.
Would you mind introducing everyone, say who you are, what you do, and the binary?
Can they survive this or no?
Sure.
I'm Justin Bonds.
I'm the founder of Cyber Capital. And the answer to this
question, I'll pick it apart a bit later for me is no. Nice. So we already went through Nicole,
and of course, myself, I'm up there too. DB Crypto, would you mind saying who you are what you do and the answer to the question in binary
hey yes db crypto researcher analyst true seeker and quick answer yes
cool interesting um can survive without themny, what do you have to say?
Hey, I'm Vinny. I'm a freelancer in this industry for a while. And my binary answer
to that may surprise some here, but I will say no.
Interesting, especially considering the background and everything. Creon, do you have any opinion on this?
Once you introduce yourself, who you are, what you do,
and then real quick, do you think crypto could survive
without having smart contracts?
Yes or no?
What do you think?
All right.
Awesome.
To be here with you.
Finally, I made it on stage,
and I'm really excited to be here, to be joining
you, Joel and Dash and everybody else. QuickSwap, Xano, and every speaker here. Nice to meet
you all. I don't think it would, because it really relies on smart contract based on my
based on my understanding.
understanding.
All right.
Now, last but absolutely not least for now,
MJ, would you mind introducing yourself,
saying who you are, what you do,
and then your binary?
Can they survive without smart contracts?
Hey, I'm MJ.
I'm just a guy.
And yes, they can.
Interesting.
Well, there we go.
Space is over. Goodbye. I'm i'm just kidding no we have to actually
get into this thing um i would say so first of all let's buy with your answer right
let's define what we mean by smart contracts. Is it, does it mean smart contracts is in,
it has to have like a programmability.
You have to actually be able to like do a compute
or is like a rich token infrastructure
kind of thing enough?
Does anyone have any opinions on this?
As in, okay, maybe it's like, if it just send receive crypto,
that's maybe not good enough. It needs tokens and other things like that. But it does not need full
programmability, like in case there's because there's actually like, it's not a binary, there
might be three. So Justin, of course, you thought of this more than everyone in this dream combined,
probably. What do you have to say yeah um so so technically like
purely semantically when we say smart contract technically like a multi-sig on bitcoin is a smart
contract as well but i but i don't actually think that's what people mean right so i think for me in
the context of this question i would say a smart like smart contract to me means a turing complete programming
language actually that's that's i think a requirement for a total programmability i did
promise i would pick apart the question a little bit because i i i rather dislike the framing
as in survive because blockchains are very good in surviving right like even the some of the worst
blockchains will just continue to survive i'm'm more interested in what thrives. So I somewhat answered
that question more from the perspective of what blockchains will
thrive. Can they thrive without smart contracts?
And that's also how I would define it, actually, which is a more strict definition.
Actually wanting to see Turing completeness because of how that
unleashes innovation without relying on the core team.
I think that's actually the key innovation that Ethereum first brought to the table way back.
Yeah, so I guess thrive is the more accurate way of saying that, but obviously the spicier way is survive.
And so like, for example, if you have like,
I think Aurora coin is still around and kicking,
for example, from way back in the day.
But I wouldn't think anyone could consider it
that it had survived because it's still,
you know, it's not super active.
Not a lot of people use it, et cetera.
It's kind of considered like a dead coin, probably.
No shade to Aurora coin, by the way.
But so Thrive and Turing completely specifically.
So to get that, then you would say
it would need Turing completeness to survive.
So even if it's a token rich ecosystem
with a bunch of other things,
but it's not technically Turing complete,
then it will kind of be left behind. It won't is that your position justin yes yes that's that's exactly
my position throwing complete i usually mean a virtual machine so it'd be a an svm the salana
virtual machine the evm the ethereum virtual machine or something like move like what we see
in sui and uh say and some of these crypto current oh sorry not say sui andos, for example.
So I think that's really key.
And the reason why I think this, I'll expand on this a little bit more and then I'll let
others give their perspective.
I think if we want to create good decentralized money, then we need good decentralized finance
to support it.
Otherwise, it's just not competitive or you end up putting the majority of capital in custodians. And that's, I think very much defeating the point and is also
very uncompetitive, I think, compared to what we can do today with the latest technology.
Interesting. I tend to agree with a lot of that sentiment at the very least,
but what does Vinny have to say? Yeah, I will define the smart contracts
in a simpler way maybe,
as being able to carry arbitrary data.
Like, so I would say that if we could define smart contracts
for crypto, if a network can carry arbitrary data
that can be called by other accounts
or other programs that are the smart contracts.
So if it can carry arbitrary data,
I think it would be enough for the smart contract.
And also, as Justin said,
I'm considering the survive part
as living in a hostile environment.
So I say no, because when I read survive,
I think of a hostile environment.
In a friendly environment, we are not fighting for survival,
but that's another topic.
OK, interesting.
So also, does anyone have a counterpoint and say, no, I don't think so.
I think that we don't need, I don't think we need smart contracts in order to survive.
We don't need DeFi necessarily to thrive.
Who's got the counterpoint?
Well, I definitely think we do need DeFi.
It's just that the way we achieve it,
I think it can be done without relying on custodians
because of the many advancements on BrygG technology.
I think that's the path to go.
But yeah, I can expand later.
But I would like to know what's Justin's opinion on bridging.
On bridging, specifically?
I mean... Yes, so brapping.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I've heard this argument before, actually.
Yeah, I don't really've heard this argument before actually um yeah i don't really
consider it an adequate solution because in most cases bridges come with a lot of trust trade-offs
i know maybe not specifically in the case that you're referring to but from a ux perspective
actually i do recall there are some trust trade-offs there as they usually are now i
actually do remember how it works um and and and there are also ux
hurdles there right like what you're doing is you're breaking up composability and you're adding
extra delays it's it's really i don't find it i mean this is why we want to do on-chain scaling
right so it's all under a single composable state once you start having to bridge over to different
layers and different blockchains it's becomes fragmented and it loses out to a system that scales and that's able to have
a single composable state.
I think that's what we're seeing when we compare Ethereum and Solana today.
Kriya, did you want to chime in on that?
And then Sal?
Oh yeah, forgive my ignorance um because i'm not very technical i'm not even a dev
so i'm i'm really ready to be schooled here but i remembered on one space i went on one space
they were talking about bitcoin um not having smart contracts and you're asking if crypto can survive i think um you know
contradicting my answer earlier i think it can if we're just talking about um survivability
of crypto right but um now there could be like um um limitations because there are so many things now that we cannot do without smart contracts since Ethereum and other L1s introduced smart contracts, right?
Sal, what do you think?
I just wanted to, well, you were asking for people who had arguments
um to the contrary and i think the strongest argument that crypto can survive without smart
contracts is that it already has right i mean bitcoin is what 2008 and ethereum was what 2016
or something like that so it's already we did eight years without smart contracts already.
So, yeah, I mean, the proof is sort of in the pudding.
But if you look at when smart contracts were first invented
and then you see where BTC dominance has gone from there,
you know, I mean, you can project out where that's going.
I mean, BTC might also not be the best example of surviving, right,
when we're facing a major security dilemma in about a decade from now.
True.
But no, I agree.
Actually, you just need two people to run nodes and the blockchain survives.
So I think let's just not focus too much on the word survive here.
I like to replace it with thrive.
I think Vinny had a fun definition as well.
Yeah, for sure.
Now, I know MJ tends to be in the other camp of things
at least, so I definitely invite you to chime in on that,
but I'll wait for you to raise your hand
or something like that.
Oh, there we go.
There's a hand up. Go for it.
Yeah, all I'll say is that I think people drastically underestimate
the long-term goals here and the vision,
which in my opinion is kind of multifaceted.
So I think one of the primary goals and the original goal
is to create a payment system for the world.
And I think people drastically underestimate the complexity
and difficulty of
accomplishing that. We're nowhere close to that today, obviously. We're less than 1% of true
adoption in the world. I think people underestimate the difficulty of doing that, of achieving that,
while also supporting many use cases. And I think we can have a world where we have a currency that
is capable of serving the world truly as basically just a currency, but then also have other systems that are independently responsible for other use cases that can interoperate with that just purely monetary use case.
I think it's, in my opinion, pretty much impossible to truly achieve a global scale of anything with anything other than just one use case.
And that to me means that currency needs to be its own thing. And then, yeah, I think we can have bridging or some kind of like interoperability between chains to provide
an integration with the currency for all these other use cases. But that's my general view of it.
Yeah, Justin, go ahead on that.
I'd like to respond to MJ on that one.
Why the pessimism in terms of scalability?
And I honestly think this is one of the best arguments against programmability and smart contracts, right?
Yeah.
I just don't think it's correct right i think
we can scale systems from sorry the pestilence comes from my career and and back in engineering
um i just know the limitations of scalability and the importance of decoupling of use cases
um there there's i think i think most people in this industry are like spectators in this industry
have no experience working with back-end systems and don't understand the importance of that.
And I've worked with literally hundreds of different backend systems and understand how critical it is to separate responsibilities between systems.
I mean, I would love to dig in with you a little bit more on that.
I mean, I've been a blockchain researcher for over a decade now. So I've been thinking a lot about this problem. I mean, how much TPS do you think
we need if we use TPS as a measure? Yeah. I mean, if we want to, it depends on what the goal is,
right? Like if we're trying to just build a system that can do cool things and do some
decentralized stuff, it doesn't need to be that crazy high, but that's not what I like. I'm not
interested in that really. I'm interested in seeing a payment system that can support the entire world i don't think we're anywhere close
to that with any of our payment system is easy though like into the amount of tps need for a
payment system to me seems like a trivial problem to solve in 2025 the real challenge i think as
you as you correctly point out is actually having a payment system that's also programmable that has
all these flourishing use cases right i think solana is able to keep up with demand today with massive numbers right like that
demand today yes but i am not confident at all that solana could keep up with if we try to put
the entire world on a steel currency but there's a question here like hardware improvements versus
the demand curve do you think demand will go faster than hardware improvements? I do.
Okay.
I do.
I suppose I don't actually.
I think it doesn't even come down to hardware.
It's more about the networking side of things, to be honest.
Okay.
And the capacity of the networking.
That's fair.
Have you looked at multiliter architectures?
Because that gets around some of those networking limitations if you don't have a single leader that's what alpenglow is are you right now solano it's
fascinating that is that basically some form of sharding sort of yeah like i i wouldn't say it's
strictly sharding but you are achieving uh more concurrency right which is very cool yeah i think
the the problem with that is and i i'm not i'm not sure exactly what you mean by multiliter i'll
look into that.
That's a whole rabbit hole.
It's very new as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The problem, in my view, comes in when you have separate components or separate, I guess, shards is the best way to put it, of a single system.
And those shards have to come to agreement on state if there's ever any
interaction between the different shards or different different segmentations yeah and
you're correct and that causes a delay right in the in the consensus yeah i actually and i i'm
actually in the camp like if you don't have sub second block times go home kind of camp right now
i'm like speed speed speed speed and capacity right but the cool thing multi-leader the alpenglow
thing works a little bit differently to that it's you just have multiple block proposers that can asynchronously produce blocks
based on different geographic regions so it's not it's not quite sharding so you don't you don't
have those additional delays and they're able to do this in like under 150 milliseconds and because
because because you overcome the light speed limitation right that
you have to cross the globe if you have validators in multiple locations so it's like wow it's
definitely intriguing i'll look yeah you definitely should um but but yeah my my biggest problem in
general with any leader-based uh consensus is just that you're you're basically centralizing
a component of the of the consensus algorithm and my opinion, there's many leaderless options
that are far superior.
I mean, come on, what's really the difference,
you know, like a leader-based architecture
versus like the random draw of a proof-of-work system,
for example?
Like, it's just, you still have one producer, right?
Like, in the end.
Oh, no, you don't.
Well, in a leaderless architecture, you don't have...
At any one point in time,
like at any point in time when a block is produced,
there's one entity producing the block, right?
Creating the block, but not validating the block, right?
And that's the difference with the leader-based.
But even in leader-based system,
you still got to reach a quorum of validating,
of like verifying the block, right?
Like you need a certain percentage of validators-
Of verifying the block, but not of actually
like upending the block and having the rest of the network follow it, right?
The difference is whether the rest of the network
follows a single person's proposal for block upending
versus whether the entire network basically agrees on the upending of that block.
Right. I think that's a fair distinction.
I don't see why it really matters, I suppose, what I'm saying.
I see it as just an extra point of centralization. No, of like it's not a big deal you know but but but the multi-leader thing gets around that that's part of why it's also so cool now
you have multiple leaders instead of just and that's arguably even better than the kind of
randomized nature of a proof-of-work system right i also think that that implies the need for a
process to select a leader
right and i know there are some some quite impressive processes for this today but it's to me
that seems like an unnecessary like step in the process um i mean i suppose it's kind of very
solvable though i don't like i i'm not gonna die on that hill yeah and i agree with that i wouldn't
either but i i definitely am interested in the multiliter protocols that you're speaking to.
And I'll look at that.
Yeah, Alpenglow is kind of on the cutting edge of that.
Say did something recently, had an announcement around it.
But Alpenglow has a testnet.
So that's really cool.
Actually, and I'll just quickly share because we just went so deep in the weeds.
I'm not sure the audience is even still, but let me just quickly, one of the reasons I'm so excited about Alpenglow is that, I'm just going to give a real quick little riff on this, is that today, if you think about stock markets, stock markets in the world are fragmented, right?
I'm not sure if the audience is even still.
But let me just quickly.
You have the New York stock market, you have the US stock market, New York stock market, Tokyo stock market, whatever. Right. And there's multiple reasons for that.
One reason is like political.
So you have like power relationships and regulations and whatever.
Right.
And crypto solves some of that.
And then the other reason why is because of latency and like co-location.
So that's why like if you're a trading firm, then you have all your servers and your bots
located like right next to the server where the actual
exchange is, right?
So the problem with a blockchain, if at any one point you have a single leader and that
leader is just like, well, now it's in Europe, now it's in Africa, now it's in Asia, now
it's in the United States.
If the leader is jumping like that and you need to send it to the leader, then you don't know if the latency is going to be like 300, like 200 milliseconds or
400 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds. Right. However, if you have a multi-leader architecture,
then effectively you can just send it to the leader that's geographically close to you.
So that actually like solves the, um, some really key barriers and
allows us to have a truly, truly global market. That's no longer fragmented by, by latency. It's
phenomenal. I know the, the vision of it really, really gets me, but now I really need to, um,
we, we went really deep in the weeds here, Joel. Oh my. I really, I really enjoy that MJ. Thank you for that.
Yeah.
So on that,
it just seems like the big thing is like a trade-off as far as like,
that's kind of where the deep rabbit hole he went
is the trade-off in, for example,
scalability, latency, et cetera,
decentralization maybe
that you'd have to do
in order to scale to receive tile world
really quick like nap kid math i did of and and you if i have a zero off or something again this
is not a research paper i kind of just said what if every say there's seven billion people
transacting and they do say a hundred transactions a day at most which probably people aren't going
to pay for 100 things but
maybe they're going to send money to like top up their game they're playing they're going to buy
some this they're going to tip someone that they're going to do a sports betting it averages
out to 100 per person per day i think the tps for that was something like 8 million 8.1 million tps
so yeah i don't think i don't think that number is accurate, actually.
I'm sorry.
I need to...
Sure.
Let me have to do some quick math as well.
And real fast, I think you're only referring to payments, right?
Yes.
In this case, yes.
Yeah.
So that doesn't even include, you know, if you were looking at a system that does
generalize, turn complete smart contracts, doesn't include all the other potential applications
that are causing demand on the network.
Yeah.
So that was just like a, anyway, just in the math I did,
it was 100 times 7 billion.
And then I divided that number by,
so that would be, yeah, or by hours and then minutes and then seconds.
And then that's what I came up with.
But I could have missed a step.
But feel free to do that.
I did a similar calculation earlier today.
I'll just use that and come up.
So I'll have it for you in a moment.
Yeah, no worries.
But yeah, that's just for payments.
Obviously, everything else would be astronomically more.
Xander, do you have something to say on this and then Crypto Sailor?
Crypto Sailor was first, actually.
Oh, right. Sorry about that. Crypto Sailor. Hey, how's it going?
First off, you just added you, so you mind introducing yourself real quick and then who you are, what you do, and then just keep going?
Yeah. Hey, guys. Who am i i'm crypto sailor i've been working in the
blockchain space for about 14 15 years i'm a full stack web 3 dev and systems architect um so i just
wanted to i'm not going to get into too much it was just an interesting point i wanted to bring
about some assumptions that were kind of brushed over, which was that your assumptions on the necessity for throughput and stuff like this was on some idea of everybody transacting in one token.
This is, I don't think, a necessary circumstance to consider.
Or one chain.
There's just no way that you can say that that would necessarily even need to be the case.
I mean, horizontal interchain interoperability is already here.
It's rough still, but it's working.
You have horizontal scaling all over the place, layer zero, IBC.
So I don't see, and interoperability also means assets on different chains right
even the most rudimentary form of that is let's say wrapped BTC everybody can critique the heck
out of it but there is some representation of a foreign asset on the Ethereum blockchain so
interoperability interchain I don't see why you would need to try and consider the even like the exercise of trying to design a complete total
global payments chain especially given like you're having to do and make advancements and
you're having to create innovation in actual new technology performance rather rather than just
using tons of existing technology which you can get a few thousand transactions per second
out of a number of blockchains.
And altogether, you have easily the throughput.
So that was just the point that I was making is,
is this even like a real exercise,
a valid exercise to consider?
And tie it into the topic of the conversation.
You're trying to make the argument
maybe that
cryptocurrencies can survive without smart contracts in this instance,
but maybe this instance isn't at least probable.
I also want to add to what the crypto sector said,
that we're considering all the trade-offs here like
as MJ said if you are trying to achieve the highest cps then you might have to leave
programmability out and if there's a system that achieves all of this at once and can scale like
sure that would win but until then i think operability is something we have to live with.
Especially if you add another factor, I think it's pretty important and pretty overlooked, which is privacy.
You also need to have privacy on top of this and doing a system that is programmable scales to billions.
And it's also private, private by default.
I think, I mean, if someone achieves that then um sure i'll jump in but
until then i think we need to keep the interoperability approach i mean i think we've
achieved all of those things except for combining all of those things with privacy right that's
where xenos is um you know has has its has its own niche there you could say i just want to
quickly respond to crypto sailor because they just you said our interoperability we can just you know have have these chains communicate with each
other but the examples you gave i would all consider to be failures right there's like the
question is why did ibc not get widely adopted is widely adopted it's the ibc is used by every single
yes chain link uses ibc bit um finance has used ibc ripple recently abandoned their own ripple
had their own ib interchain protocol that they were pushing for years you know ripple they hang
around forever
promoting their stuff they finally capitulated on using their their interchange protocol to adopt ids there's some fair some fair fair points there so in terms of interchange protocols there isn't
a more widely adopted i mean i agree it is the most popular one right but my point is that there's
a social coordination problem where you're going to have competing interoperability protocols it's it's and if i were to borrow from
political theory it's similar to the anarchy that exists between states right like how are you
supposed to coordinate that like um so for me that's a very fundamental problem and if you look
at that btc well it's it is anarcho-capitalism right it's no different than the web right
interoperability between websites is completely open.
Anybody can link any website on any website they want.
There's no reason to bring anarcho-capitalism into it.
I mean, what I'm suggesting is still anarcho-capitalist too, right?
Just to scale the L1.
Well, you're just saying the same thing,
which is that the markets will decide as per normal,
even with the web. Tons of websites are very small. just saying the same thing which is that the markets will decide as per normal right and even
with the web tons of websites are very small yeah no that's fair well i mean they were all like
this is it's not this isn't like a political democracy right this is like this is a much
more merit-based system and that's more appropriate for business which is that people with expertise
and what it is that it would take to actually, you know, make appropriate designs and then implement those designs in core
protocols. These are, you know, like not as anybody can do that. So necessarily those with
the greatest expertise will be the ones making the biggest contributions or the most, the most
effort to make contributions. But I mean, there are dynamics that
are different amongst people who work in fields of specialty than there is amongst those who are
just looking to profit in the market. Right? I mean, you know my position on this, it should
be the stakeholders that make the decisions. Nice to chat with you on the stream, Crypto Sailor. We
interact a lot. Well, i'm a big fan of
liquid democracy right i mean there are tools that can be built to enhance that that's actually
what i'm working on i'm literally working on building a tool to help that so yeah i would
like to see more granularity and on-chain governments and more engagement 100 yeah very
cool yeah i love it is that like democracy, like state type projects or cryptocurrencies? Like do you have an identity system then I assume of some sort?
Yeah, well, it's a token based system. So it's like plutocratic, you could argue as like in a public company was what we're starting with. But obviously, yes.
Not really democracy.
That's just because.
More like liquid plutocracy. No, no, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, the thing is,
I'm actually launching the startup that I'm doing as that, right?
So because if I'm going to arrange agreements
between participants in the project
and we're doing it distributed,
we may as well do it all on a chain
since it's a crypto project anyway.
So I've modeled that, let let's say governance after a typical startup
company where there will be like boards of directors and stuff like this but that's just
one governance model right you could add identity and then do democracy in whatever level if you
wanted to but it's all about you know i'm very interested in enhancing all that because that's
like you're right like you even we do devolve into technocracies.
This is what you could argue actually kind of led to the demise of Bitcoin because there was a core group of priests amongst the priesthood in 2014 that, you know, put the kibosh on really expanding the protocol.
So you don't want to have theocracies emerge uh even when it comes to let's say plutocratic
systems like you know just the pure network itself i mean i i just i don't even think that
was a was a technocracy it was more of a uh i guess a full capture external capture situation
and perversion but yeah no i think we're mostly in agreement on that well i mean there were
there were people like there were people in the core group who were with it, right?
Right, but I'm saying it wasn't β
I don't see it as a hijacking.
I suppose I'm saying it wasn't merit-based.
I think we can agree on that at least.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Yeah, I mean, like, culture amongst engineers and specialists,
you know this if you've worked in science.
I mean, it's not primarily β it's more like ego or, you know know uh uh reputation based nobody's trying to make the most money as possible right so there's
different dynamics amongst like technicians if you're going to say that in a merit-based system
the lead technical people are going to be the ones writing the law they're the ones writing the code
that's why stakeholders should decide. Right, right, right.
So that's what I mean.
I do support that.
I want to do that.
I want to get engagement.
We need to create β at this stage of the game, we have to create better products and better apps that are just using blockchain in the back end so that we're bringing real value to the market and attaching it to blockchain rather than just more DeFi pump and dump churning.
Everybody knows this.
Yeah, preach, man.
Yeah, so first of all, Sal's had his hand patiently up for a while.
Do you want to chime in?
I don't know if it's still fresh or if it's got a rotten.
No, no, it's not fresh.
I wanted to contribute something to that TPS discussion from earlier.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with Peter Risen at Bitcoin Unlimited,
but he's done some fantastic work on, like, using hardware to scale.
And I had a chance to sit down with him a couple months ago at a conference that we were both at.
And he is ready to launch some like it's over my head but
he's like got some hardware chip that and according to him will be able to uh scale to the world
immediately so um i know there was somebody who uh was going back and forth with justin i forget who
it was who was skeptical about that point but peter rising is ready to launch a product that does
exactly that so i just wanted to throw that in there i don't know if you guys are familiar with
that i'm sort of familiar with it basically uh the bottleneck and scaling utxo systems which is
specifically what he's talking about is a signature validation according to them and this base it's
basically like a node ASIC
so to speak like a very inexpensive chip that would allow you to parallelize
signature validation and get massive throughput through that I'm sure that's
just one of those pieces of like the mass scaling thing but yeah it does sound
very interesting as far as yeah it's really wild UTXO models well there's
multiple ways to to scale systems in crypto today.
We have DAGs, we have shadowed systems, we have purely paralyzed systems, we have scaling
through hardware, as Peter Reisen put it.
By the way, I looked up that math on that number, and you were correct, Joel.
It intuitively didn't feel right to me, but it was actually correct.
Napkin math yeah what's about the the what are what's the tps of like let's just
say a reasonable um system today right are we into the millions yet is anything on main net
comfortably so so actually for any single shouted system we're sitting between between 10 to 20 000
tps that's that's where we're maxing out right now. So that's far from the 8 million,
9 million figure for every person in the world to do 100 transactions per day. So yeah, that is
quite something. Some sharded systems can theoretically do a million TPS today, but
that means they're very slow with three second block times which might not sound very
slow to some of the old school uh ogs here but but it really is very slow for us today
but yeah but you're right that is a challenge obviously you know like like solana claims to
reach a morion tps for fire dancer blah blah blah but i don't actually believe that myself
yeah it's gonna take going to take such a system
to reach that. A couple of questions before switching gears on that a little bit. First
of all, with the three second block time, how many blocks are considered final in that case?
As far as like, do you have at what point you dump like a hundred grand on Binance or whatever?
How many comp is it like in three seconds,
it's just considered done or they want to wait for,
you know, a dozen or so confirmations,
just out of curiosity.
There's Binance choice, right?
And I suppose it also depends on the economic security
behind the blockchain,
because the bigger it is,
the less confirmations you would wait for.
But I'm going to be brave
and I'm just going to say one confirmation.
Let's go. Yes. And the other thing would be, do you just on the looking over the
horizon right now, what do you see about scalability, I guess, like improvements kind
of leveling off, like kind of like diminishing returns? Do you see you're starting to tap a lot
of things? And even though we are getting scal Do you see you're starting to tap a lot of things?
And even though we are getting scalability improvements,
it's starting to minimize just how amazing they can be?
Or is it just still just every day is a new wonder
and it's like 10,000 times
or 10 times the scalability we thought before?
I think we're gonna go 10 times a few more times
over the next five to 10 years, let's say. So we're still civil orders
of magnitude of scale that I think we can do. I think the next big thing is achieving greater
concurrency and doing it in a way that doesn't sacrifice finality or variance in the block speed.
That's, I think, one of the big challenges.
And for me, there's a kind of inevitability to these things because I'm quite optimistic about hardware improvements,
and maybe I'm a little bit more pessimistic on the demand curve.
So that means, I mean, as long as the demand curve stays below
what our hardware can do, then the problem kind of solves itself, right,
if you project it out a few decades.
So that's another reason to be optimistic by itself.
But I would expect several more magnitudes of improvements
from where we are now.
Yeah.
I mean, not including a shouted system
that's already at a million, right?
Like something like that,
the challenge is bringing the latency down.
Whereas a purely paralyzed system like Solana,
the challenge is bringing the latency down. Whereas a purely paralyzed system like Solana, the challenge is bringing the capacity up.
So it really depends on
what your starting architecture is.
Or in the case of Zeno,
achieving a high, fast block speed,
you know, and capacity
while also still having privacy, for example, right?
So each blockchain,
depending on their starting architecture,
will have a different challenge to solve.
Because I think ultimately, I'm a big believer in
let's just solve all of these problems
and put it all into a single design,
because I think we can.
And that's ultimately the most competitive thing,
which to bring it back to this question,
which is why I think smart contracts are so damn important
to be a competitive and a complete blockchain
with a full feature set.
Yeah, DB, do you want to chime in? important to be a competitive and a complete blockchain with a full feature set. Yeah.
DB, do you want to chime in?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great conversation so far.
And especially this last part, I know Justin and I have talked a lot about the adoption
curve versus the hardware scalability, how it's going to improve.
And that's something that I find very interesting,
fascinating. To bring it to the adoption, I fully believe when we were talking about transactions
per second earlier, that we are going to need millions, a million, like more than 10 million,
maybe 50 million, 100 million TPS at some point. And part of the reason for that is for one,
100 million TPS at some point.
And part of the reason for that is, for one, you have to account for peaks and spikes.
So your mention was, what, 100 transactions a day by 7 billion people.
Maybe that is a consistent number.
But there's going to be times when that's going to be three, four, five times that at any given point.
And then it's going to trail off for a while.
And I was actually talking to Grigor Rosu. He was on our space, I think a couple of days ago.
Brilliant guy. If anyone is aware of him, he created the K framework, which is what is used
by Ethereum, Algorand, Cardano, and dozens of blockchains, runtime verification. And he also just released Pi Squared and Facet. And we were
talking about adoption and where it's going to go. He believes, and I fully agree with him,
that we're going to see a billion agents using this Web3 blockchain space before we see a billion
users. And these agents are going to likely be doing just stuff all the time behind
the scenes that we may not even be aware of and i think this is what's going to potentially lead to
10 million 50 million 100 million tps needs at some point down the road and oh my god i can't
i can't i can't resist db crypto Are you saying bots are good?
Agents.
Not exactly bots.
They're bots.
They're just bots, man.
Well, I'm glad you pointed that out, actually.
Yeah.
Bots.
Okay. I guess we should probably differentiate them from your standard trading bot that is just
your standard trading bot that is just buying, selling a thousand times a minute.
buying, selling a thousand times a minute.
I'm talking about bots agents that are handling our email,
that are doing our social posts for us,
that are scheduling flights, booking hotels.
Why are you discriminating between the bots DB crypto?
If they pay a fee, they're there.
Sounds like a bot bigot.
Well, yeah.
The reason why Justin's being in this on is because I've always been a huge critic of bots on, trading bots on networks for spamming and manipulating transactions.
And Solana, well, let's just go there.
At one point, over 80%, I i believe of non-consensus message
transactions were done by bots and well yeah it's it was a fair play i i give them credit
it's brilliant i mean they were able to pump their numbers to just insane tps volume revenue all that
because of the way it was designed and hell it was a it
was a smart move i'll give him credit for that i don't agree with it but it worked for him
so so for what is it two legs good four legs bad i've got it it's the other way around right but
yeah you know what i mean oh yeah well hopefully at some point we're going to move past these meaningless metrics too.
That's the important thing.
I think the fact that we're even arguing over 2 TPS versus 100 TPS versus 1,000 TPS shows us how early we are in the space and how meaningless it truly is.
Because 10 years from nowβ¦
We need the it's early gong.
Because anytime anyone says we're still early, goosh, hit the gong. Because anytime anyone says, we're still early, get the gong.
Well, if you ever join our space, as you know, I say it at least three, four, maybe five times.
It's just a given.
Because hopefully five to 10 years from now, we're not going to be talking about TPS.
We're not going to be talking about volume.
These are going to be meaningless.
You don't talk about how many Google searches there are a day for a specific topic.
Unless you're in Web3 and you want to see if crypto interest is growing but these are just a lot of the things we pay attention to today
and rate a network success off of is completely meaningless in the big picture
yeah started chat um something interesting to say so we kind of like round trip this
entire crazy discussion um just went like super deep like right away um and i kind of feel like
everyone's here's the thing we're talking about like tps and um i guess scaling is the big thing
as far as like what can we scale the world to do?
It seems like today, for example, the node network is able to handle the payments of,
of the entire world today.
And then that's a very small percentage of all crypto actions.
And of course the optimism is, oh, we're going to be able to do this someday.
Optimism is, oh, we're going to be able to do this someday.
So now I guess the question is,
or right now it does seem like it makes sense
to have multiple systems
because one can't necessarily handle everything.
Of course, the hope is that one will be able
to handle everything at some point.
And we mentioned like bridging and stuff like that
and some of the drawbacks being like latency and trust.
So I guess the question is, or the subject,
and then just when you chime in,
see if that, you know, see if it applies,
but also say whatever else you were going to say.
If you're bridging, like, let's just say we're doing data,
you know, data transfer type stuff or DeFi stuff.
And it's, there's no latency
because it's all on one system.
But by the time you go to withdraw to your money wallet,
your money system, bridge to the money chain,
the bridge or whatever is only like a couple minutes
and you don't really care for the latency
because you're not experiencing that latency,
but like once a week or once a month
or something like that.
And is that really like a problem then
if that's
the way things have to be? So that's just a general idea, but also whatever else you're
going to say, Justin. Yeah, I just want to push back on the idea that we need. I mean,
there always will be multiple chains because it's a free market, right? But I will push back on the
need that we currently need multiple chains because we can't handle all the capacity.
Again, as long as we keep up with demand, that's what matters.
And we're serving demand, we're serving the market, and we're being competitive.
That's, I think, important.
To quickly answer your question, yeah, I think it does matter, I think,
especially for more sophisticated actors.
And also, I'm not fond of the idea of pushing people into less safe and less secure
and what I think are worse systems when we have better alternatives, when we don't even need to
make those compromises in the first place, from my perspective, at least.
Yeah, interesting. So I guess there's also sort of seem argument around what is the absolute 100
optimal use kit you set up if we were to design it ourselves versus can a crypto survive and thrive
without smart contracts necessarily which doesn't mean is it the 100 most ideal outcome
so i guess maybe the hair split there is like,
okay, well, maybe it's more efficient to have it like that.
But what if you can get relatively few drawbacks
from having two different systems, for example,
one a purely payments-based chain, purely money,
and then the other that does all these other kind of stuff.
And it's in the both
systems the actual yet yes but they're both maybe let's just say and i'm devil's advocating a lot
here of course uh what if but there might be both good enough that the user does not notice enough
to where they would be like yes screw this two system thing i'm going to go look for a new one system thing right but if you if you hypothetically
made that two system one systems considering you know assuming you could do it preserving
decentralization etc then that one system now has double the security probably double the
scarcity improved economic aspects is more decentralized right like if we just fragment this whole space into smaller
blockchains we become easier to attack and if and I mean do it when we have a reason to but in this
case I don't think we have a reason to I think a blockchain can a single blockchain can do it all
and if you're not doing it all you're actually limiting yourself too much i think privacy i think privacy is that reason it's a
good point i think the two blockchain approach could work if there is one turing complete
actually that's that's the one example that's actually the one example in which i would agree
with zano and joel on actually because solano's privacy is pretty terrible so bridging over to
zano to get that privacy there makes sense but actually solano's privacy is pretty terrible. So bridging over to Zono to get that privacy there makes sense.
But actually Solano's privacy is really good because no one can read their
explorers.
That's a funny jab before we get it.
Cause I know I'm rocket Aztec jumped up high guys before we get them
involved.
One you mentioned about the privacy.
I actually did some basic research again,
check my numbers because this is not like science. I'm not some basic research again, check my numbers,
because this is not like science. I'm not an actual pro like Justin, right? I do. I do amateur,
like I literally opened up the computer calculator to do the head math I did earlier. So
that's the level I'm working at. But transaction sizes are significantly different,
depending on what privacy protocol is being used. So from my understanding, like a Bitcoin transaction
or like a Dash one or just whatever the typical,
those kinds of transactions would be around
two to 300 bytes usually.
Again, tons of variables.
If you hide amounts using confidential transactions,
typically that gets around a kilobyte per transaction.
When you get to what Monero does currently,
it's like two to two and a half kilobytes from my understanding,
probably similar to Xano,
although I'm sure you guys have a better idea.
Monero with full chain membership proofs,
when they activate that would be around four kilobytes.
Zcash is a orchard shielded transactions.
As far as I know,
around nine kilobytes.
So that's, what is it like
30 times the size of a regular bitcoin style transaction so when you start to do complex
um calculations like like like a complex smart contracts on a zero knowledge type system like
the orchard pool in in zash, then the data size per transaction
goes like astronomically higher at that point.
And then that does kind of impact scaling,
which is one of those reasons
why I do like the ability to do transparent transactions
if possible.
So you don't throw that extra data on chain
if you don't want to specifically,
but you can always have privacy if you need it.
Although that's an entirely separate discussion.
So where were we?
Let's go.
Rock, do you want to introduce yourself?
Say who you are?
Well, actually let's go Aztec first
because I know once Rock gets going,
there's going to be a little bit of a verbal filibuster
going on between him and Justin.
So let's just start with Aztec.
Who are you?
What do you do?
And what's your binary kind of,
or what's your take?
I guess we're past the binary.
What's your take?
Do you,
cryptos need smart contracts to thrive,
which means survive,
but not just like technically still be alive,
like actually succeed.
Do you,
do cryptos needs,
every crypto needs smart contracts?
So who you are,
what do you do?
And then answer that question.
Sure. Thank you, Joel. and thank you for uh inviting me i'm aztec i'm the cso at lunar digital assets
full stack blockchain venture studio i think baited polygon quick swap and many other projects
around the industry and i'm also the co-founder now of LitVM.
It's the first Litecoin layer two,
fully endorsed by Charlie Lee and the Litecoin Foundation.
So we're building a hard, many, a hard, much web three.
And right when I said that,
I thought about how you guys ambushed me
at the Litecoin summit.
Yeah. Oh my my god that was that
was funny um but to answer your question i think cryptos do need smart contracts um technically
they they can a lot of these cryptos can be as is. They're a final product. They're running. They have massive user bases and they you've ever seen that site, all the money in the world where all the money is represented
by a bunch of cubes,
you realize that the inflows
that have entered blockchain,
it's just the beginning.
The institutions and all the derivatives
and all that,
they barely just tip their toes in the water.
And so I say,
well, you might not necessarily need smart contracts,
but why not? Why not bring these cryptocurrencies into Web3 and enable them or enhance them like we're doing at LitVM with Litecoin to have smart contract capabilities to interact fully with web3
and the future where this industry is going
okay nice um tb do you have something quick in before we we jump to rock no no it was back on
our previous topic so we can go ahead and move on.
Okay. Rock, who are you? What do you do? And do you think every crypto needs smart contracts in order to survive slash thrive? Hey, guys. Rock Zacharias, CEO of Lunar Digital Assets,
mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fi Accelerator, head of global leadership council for Michael Turpin's BitAngels, serve on the
board for Polygon Grants, co-founder of QuickSwap, and after six years putting my co-founder hat back
on to be a co-founder of LitVM that Aztec just mentioned, this Litecoin layer too, that the
whole point of it is to bring programmability and smart contracts on top of Litecoin, or that's a big part of it. So, I mean, as a general answer, I think in some form or another, yes, I don't really
like messing with the layer ones on some of these. I think like Bitcoin, Litecoin and others,
we probably should not mess with the layer one to do smart contracts. They're good as is. We just
need to use technology to do programmability on other
layers. But a more caveated answer is I don't think we need necessarily smart contracts, but
programmability. And there's ways to do a lot of this stuff without smart contracts per se.
smart contracts per se um one of my co-founders from quick swap is building um basically a dex
that uses roll-ups uh to ethereum um but does not require smart contracts so you could basically
take like you know a binance style code and um and write that all onto a blockchain without like
traditional smart contracts uh you could
use different programming languages and things and still have all the benefits of you know
decentralization self-custody um you know transparency where needed privacy where not
etc but um so i i don't know that we need like specifically the the concept of smart contracts
we'll see that's gonna i think change a lot just over the years. We're just going to invent new technologies. But the general concept,
I think, of programmability, yeah, I think we should, like everybody, all the blockchains,
you know, I think Bitcoin is fine without it, for example. But if you can have programmability
through subsequent layers or other technologies, I think that adds a whole lot of special stuff that you could do. Like you could put your will on chain. You could program it so when you die, or if your wallet
is inactive for call it like three years or whatever you program it to be, that it'll
distribute all of your funds to some set wallets, which are your family members or whatever.
That stuff you can't really do without some kind of programmability so
i think it just adds it adds flavor to all of these things that last example if i'm not mistaken
it's possible on bitcoin today no if the will well but that would be using some kind of like
htlcs or something right which I think, a type of smart contract
or some of the parts would be
like some kind of programmability, right?
You could just make it a time lock, right?
And then have like...
Well, isn't these like HTLCs, time locks?
I mean, I think some people,
are those considered a smart contract
or at least programmability?
I would say so.
Actually, this is something I said.
Just limited.
Yeah, this is what I said at the beginning of the space is that technically speaking, that is a smart contract or at least programmability? I would say so. Actually, this is something I said. Just limited. Yeah, this is what I said at the beginning of the space is that technically speaking, that is a smart contract.
It's just that's not really what we mean colloquially in crypto.
Yeah, I think having more programmability is probably better for us in general.
That's my take, yeah.
Cool.
What do you think?
I'm curious, Justin, what your take is because i i
just joined so i don't know what everyone's been talking about for the last hour but yeah what do
you think oh no i i i do think like full tour and complete uh contacts are necessary for uh to to
really be competitive because i think my thesis is also very much i'm just very much summarizing
i made these points earlier but my thesis is like well i think we can do it all on a single blockchain and if we can like on the l1 you mean yeah on the
l1 and i think if we can do that while preserving decentralization then that way you gain more
revenue and i think ultimately revenue is what what i think is will determine what is the most
decentralized scarce and secure blockchain as well so this is all part of my big meta thesis you
could say that's that's informing me on this opinion.
So yes, smart contracts, specifically in a virtual machine form, I think are required to really be competitive.
Obviously, Bitcoin sits over in its own niche, but as you know, I don't really believe in that niche.
But we can respectfully disagree on that one for now.
So would you say, so you're like talking about like, for example, Solana, you know, that, you know, the idea there is that they could scale and have programmability
on the L1s who don't need the other layers. Now, what about like Bitcoin as it stands now,
would you, if you, if you cared about that thing or wanted to see if you were, you know,
the benevolent dictator of Bitcoin, would you change the L1 to be more like Solana? Or do you think because of
the direction that it's taken, that maybe it makes sense for Bitcoin to do it in subsequent layers?
No, I mean, if I was benevolent dictator of Bitcoin, I think the first thing I'd do would
be stakeholder governance. And then I would advocate for, yeah, first the capacity increase,
and then thinking about that type of upgrade.
Yeah, that is the direction I would go into.
Cool.
Respectfully disagree, but yeah, it's a fair take, yeah.
Man, I respect this.
It's been actually a very nice
on-the-level discussion between two of us.
between two of us.
I think Joe was expecting a bit more fire.
I think Joe was expecting a bit more fire.
Call each other some names, please.
Call each other some names, please.
Physical appearance is especially on the table.
But no, so it is kind of interesting
where I used to be a tech,
I would say a tech maximalist as it were,
as in like the best tech will win, period, kind of thing.
And I think that definitely the best tech has its own like the best tech will win out at being the best tech for sure but i've sort
of evolved a little bit in terms of like predicting which system will end up having the widest
adoption and it might not necessarily be the actual technical best one even though that does
definitely give a a leg up and an advantage.
So I guess the question is,
what happens if we have,
this is now that we have like some a little bit more,
some more Bitcoin-y, L2-y people here.
What if there's a dumb chain,
like let's just say,
let's just call Bitcoin a dumb chain for a second, right?
That just ends up being used for what it's used and all the DeFi type stuff
that and all the other things that are done are done with a bridged version of Bitcoin on a
different chain that the other chain has like 98% of all the transactions for crypto transactions
because it's kind of doing all that. But it, it's all built with the, the main chain, not doing things themselves that, or in another thing, let's just say there's something
like nano, a hyper scalable, but hyper, a very scalable, but hyper purposed payment system.
And all the kind of everything that's done is sort of wrapped on another chain that's like,
in terms of like the very financialized versions of that
and then bridging it out would just be like a couple seconds and then that's kind of how it
works is that is that a situation where those dumb chains let's call them don't survive or
would they could they just survive long term and thrive in that kind of setting anyone gets a
vinny chime in yeah i i i have a say to that especially because
of my background with nano uh in high interest in in this area i've i guess as i said in the
beginning like uh if we are talking about a a friendly environment for for crypto key hints like low regulation or not as heavy as a regulatory hand operating
in the environment and censoring transactions
and censoring services and having like huge requirements
for people to serve as a provider,
like a payment provider or an exchange provider and so on.
Like in this beautiful world,
I think like dump chains can survive, can go on pretty well.
Like Nano is a great example of that.
Like it's a very low market cap,
and it still has a very passionate community.
People continue to use, I take my payments,
a lot of a large share of my payments in Nano is too,
despite not talking about that that much.
So it's super useful for me and super useful
for the community that's backing it.
So yeah, it works, it can work and so on,
but it puts ourselves like in this situation where we are always dependent on centralized providers.
For example, Nano itself, like I take my payments in Nano, but it brings me some sort of anxiety because Nano is currently super dependent on Binance. So if Binance decides to delist Nano
for whatever reason Binance may have,
Nano will go through a very hard time.
Like I might see my purchase power drop a lot,
this is a hypothetical situation,
but this can happen, right?
Because Nano depends on the goodwill of a
centralized provider to continue providing its service. So my
point on the beginning was that serve of our serve, sorry,
survivability exists, the discussion about survivability
only exists in a hostile environment. So if we understand that some forces may try to act against some chains, I think that the dump chains will likely not survive.
Monero is a very curious case about that because it has faced some relevant opposition while still being very
limited in its capacities.
But there is some level of arbitrary data that you can carry on Monero, which allows
for some level of more decentralization and trustlessness while exchanging it.
So there are a few decentralized options
to exchange Monero,
but it's still not a great situation to be at.
There are liquidity challenges, right?
There is a higher spread and so on.
So in a hostile environment,
I think dump chains like the ones you mentioned
would have a very, very hard time
and being able to carry arbitrary data or being able to process and run smart contracts
would be inevitable and crucial for survival, you know, because this is the only way we
can continue doing operations and continue having liquidity and continue having the certainty
that our money is liquid, like that we can extend it for something else without relying
in a centralized provider. So this is where I think they will have a very hard time.
If I could piggyback off that directly real quick, I don't, I actually think that we've gone to a place
in this industry with the advancements in ZK technology
that to use your phrase, Joel, these dumb chains,
they will be able to survive because you can now
in a trustless manner uh use
things like bitcoin likewise we're literally building this for litecoin
you can bring it over to the evm so that you can build at the application level
that you can build at the application level,
smart contracts and, for instance,
like Litecoin syncs or Bitcoin syncs
or build Litecoin or Bitcoin-backed real-world assets,
whatever you have in mind for these,
as you say, like dumb assets.
And so we're like, no matter how
bad of a environment that we're in,
where there's these really hard competitors,
these chains will now be able to join the programmability,
smart contract, Web3 revolution.
So we're already past the part
where we have to worry about these projects.
So I've specifically looked into Bitcoin
and the ability to run rollups and things like that
for things like BitVM trustlessly.
And I just don't think it's actually possible to do that.
In Bitcoin's case, I have no idea about Litecoin.
You're the expert on that, so I'll get you into it, but it's not.
I mean, can you be like, let's be more specific though with words.
So like, do you think it's completely impossible ever for like,
let's say we gave it a thousand years and humanity
has developed laser code
or something. Are you saying you think it's completely
impossible or it's just not
there yet? As of today,
we don't know how to do it.
But if
what's the name of the thing
that we need? There's a particular piece of code. Help me
out. OpCat? Yeah, it's OpCat.
If OpCat is passed,
then it is possible actually to do it as far as I understand,
but then we can have bid VM two.
Under bid VM one,
there's certain key limitations where it's still a very trusted solution on BTC.
I can't speak to like,
if I could jump in here,
this for,
for Bitcoin,
just to answer your question specifically, this has already been done.
So Bitcoin OS, which is one of our development teams, they're pioneers on Bitcoin ZK technology.
They already proved at the Cardano conference last year that they could trustlessly.
I've specifically challenged this claim.
I've debated Yago on the matter as well.
You can look up the debate.
I've written an article on it.
Also, you know Yago.
Yeah, of course you have.
But I don't believe the claim.
And we've debated back and forth.
So, yeah.
So then it just comes down to not believing it.
But, I mean, there's definitely...
I don't have a lot of depth on the subject.
But, yeah.
I mean, look, look.
Is it that you don't think it's...
I mean, clearly people are using BitVM.
They're using Bitcoin OS.
Is your argument that it's not decentralized enough
or that there's some flaw or something?
Because it is working.
They're able to steal user funds and sensor.
I would not consider that decentralized.
And they're claiming they're decentralized.
Like there's a reason why-
Okay, so would you consider optimism decentralized
so we can set the bar here?
No, because in optimism,
they can steal user funds and sensor.
So I would say, no, that's not decentralized actually.
Well, so the idea there is like,
it's not as decentralized as call it,
you know, bitcoin layer one transactions
sure but i mean we can try to figure out is it is it 99 is it 30 is it 99.9 the the question is like
so like you said optimism hypothetically someone uh can steal funds but there's this seven day
contestation period and as long as you have one person watching
then they can't steal funds right if one good actor no no i'm talking about the admin key
so there's the admin key they can change the smart contract and then they can empty out the
contract with that right and there's also a single sequencer as well so the single sequencer can
absolutely censor transactions as well and all of these things are not possible. They can temporarily, from my understanding,
and maybe there's caveats and secret backdoors
that I'm too stupid to understand,
but the general idea is they can temporarily stop producing blocks,
basically, or proofs,
and then they would slow the transactions from happening.
If it's a single sequencer, they could stop them from happening.
And then users can go, hey, what the hell?
Now there's a unilateral exit function where you can pull your money out.
You're confusing two things.
You're confusing the sequencer with the admin key.
So in theory, these Ethereum L2s can be decentralized.
Well, you talked about two things.
You talked about the admin key first that you're saying can steal funds.
And then you said the single sequencer can censor.
Yeah, the sequencer can censor and the admin key.
So I think there is probably a timer on that.
So the users have some time to move their funds,
but if they don't move them in time,
then they lose them, right?
Which I don't particularly think is a good solution.
And look, I mean, that's less decentralized
than some crappy old coin at number 500 in market cap, right?
Like a normal cryptocurrency won't allow you to steal funds
and do that, right?
It's crazy.
So back to the point of though,
like, and I agree with you, by the way,
I've made these exact same points about optimism
and optimistic rollups and BitVM,
is that it is not an end game it is a temporary
solution this is what vitalik has also said that this is a temporary solution until zk rollups
solve this so that instead of having trusted validators sequencers whatever that can you know
that can cheat that's why it's an optimistic rollup is because you are optimistic that they
are not going to cheat you but if they do you can you can get there you's why it's an optimistic rollup is because you are optimistic that they are not
going to cheat you. But if they do, you can get there. You can pause it. You could freeze it.
You could pull your funds unilaterally. There's always some exit mechanism. So I agree. It's not
a great system optimistic rollup. The end game is ZK rollups or other like based rollups. There's
other kinds of technologies. And my point is just, yeah, I agree. we're not there yet and and even in the systems
that are there now there are flaws and they're not at pure you know they're not as pure decentralized
as i would like to see or you would like to see but that i think humans are really good at solving
things and we'll figure this out and i think we're pretty damn close on the zk roll-up side the only
problem with zk roll-ups like we have solved this on the zk roll-up side on eth and i think on bitcoin i would argue and and work it's solved the cord but the problem is
it's a little expensive because zk roll-ups to generate the proofs they're expensive in these
things but but they're already they're already solving this too i mean we just we've had
conversations with like caldera and gateway and and they already, like in the last six months. The costs have come down massively.
Technologically, it's totally solvable.
Like today, like we know how to do it.
The problem is, is the core developers won't implement the changes that need to be made to make it viable on BTC.
That's the issue.
Like it's totally cool.
Justin, have you read over the Charms white paper also?
I vaguely, but there was a Bitcoin OS.
Not specifically, no, but i'll just speak
to bitcoin s real quickly and i know i'm saying horrible things about them but i do think there's
a reason why we have like 20 plus l2s and none of them like bitcoin l2s and none of them claim to be
as trustless and decentralized as bitcoin os and and i really i just think their claims are not
accurate and i think a lot of other...
You should check out Charms then,
because this is something else that they're building.
And with Charms, basically the asset,
let's say it's Bitcoin, it never leaves.
It's not like Bitcoin is actually moving
into a vault or some type of centralized thing. it's not like Bitcoin is actually moving onto,
you know,
into a vault or some type of centralized thing.
It stays on the L1 and you're just proving that you have the Bitcoin and that you can use it in whatever stack, you know, for instance, they,
they are one of the stacks that they, they're moving
this Bitcoin with charm technology is on Cardano, another UTXO smart contract chain.
Um, so it, it, it basically creates this trustless, uh, more safe environment to, to move and use your UTXO currency, you know, whether that's like
Bitcoin, Litecoin, the white paper is really, I would recommend reading that white paper.
It's a good one.
We'll check it out.
Thanks.
I guess, I guess my like thinking here is just for me, I would rather see bitcoin stay a dumb rock you know dino coin than see us tinker
with the l1 too much now should we enable opcat i'm just not smart enough or involved enough or
keeping up with that these days to know like i was very involved in the block size wars and i was
very involved you know i was one of the first Lightning Network nodes and I liked SegWit and I was even
semi-open to SegWit2x, but whatever. Anyways, I just don't keep up enough with it. But I would
say probably if there was enough consensus, if 95% of the community, the miners, the nodes,
and the core devs, if 95% of them all agreed it was a good thing, I would probably be okay with the
tinkering. But I would like to see over time, I would like to see, you know, the L1s, you know,
ossify and stop, you know, basically code freeze. I think that's more important, not for all chains.
I think for some chains, it just makes sense to keep like being technologically like innovative,
like Ethereum has decided this is how they're going to do things is they're going to keep like being technologically like innovative like ethereum has decided this is how
they're going to do things is they're going to keep updating and they're going to keep trying to
like a little more like a tech you know company or project but i want bitcoin for example to be
a commodity i don't want it to be a pro like something that keeps getting changed and the
code keeps getting changed i want something that will just stay like it is forever and i do believe we
can solve these things on l2 side chains metal layers fucking laser beams i don't fucking know
i just think someday and i think we're we're making great progress on it now but i think
someday these things will be trivial actually i think having privacy what's that that's what's
funny you're serious about the laser beams when you were talking about on other space with uh was like quantum and uh i've heard quantum entanglement
so like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah no i i mean i'm more joking here but yeah sure yeah i mean you
can do a lot of stuff with laser beams people don't know you know but anyways it was more of a joke but
But anyways, it was more of a joke, but I just think humans are good at solving stuff.
And I think Bitcoin has, we had, like, it is possible to solve.
I don't know that we're there yet.
I think even where we are there, there are, we are making compromises in most cases, um,
or, and those compromises might be to decentralization.
They might be to privacy.
They might be to decentralization, they might be to privacy, they might be to security, they might be to user experience, they might be to costs.
There's all these compromises.
But over time, those compromises are shrinking and we're getting better and better at this stuff to the point where I actually think in the future, it'll be just much better to use some kind of ZK Rollup or something else.
much better to use some kind of ZK Rollup or something else, it'll be cheaper, it'll be
equally secure, or like 99.99% of the same security, but it'll be cheaper, faster, better
programmability and all this stuff over time. But I think it's great that we have some blockchains
that are trying to, we should have thousands and millions of different styles of, we tried lots of
things. I always say like
in evolution, you know, this Cambrian explosion, if, if in evolution, you had like someone saying,
no, no, you have to have four legs. You have to run on four legs. That's the best way.
I think, you know, that wouldn't be a good thing, you know, cause then you wouldn't have fish.
You wouldn't have humans, right? Like it's good that we try lots of different things.
Try to scale at the L1, Try to scale at the L2.
Try to scale with ZK rollups.
Try to scale with optimistic rollups.
Try whole new things,
like just get rid of smart contracts completely.
I mean, look at Ethereum is now going to shed EVM,
you know, essentially,
with RISC-V or other, you know, programming languages.
And I'm talking to actually the ETH Foundation
about this kind of stuff now.
So I just think we'll solve it at some point.
And I think we're actually making pretty good progress on it now.
Rock, I'm interested in your take on this.
So let's assume we get there.
Let's assume we get to this endgame where most of Bitcoin is wrapped up in some trustless layer that has actually the programmability.
So we really agree that most of transactions will happen on the programmability side,
especially because of bots slash agents.
So, you know, what happens with the security model?
So if 99% of Bitcoin related transactions happen off-chain,
what happens to the layer one
itself which is supposed to be secured by transaction fees yeah i mean this is a whole
another can of worms i'll just give a quick summary go ahead aztec well yeah just real quick on that
if you using zk like a roll up you're still rolling up to the main chain so the main chain is still
you're still rolling up to the main chain.
So the main chain is still receiving transactions.
It's just scaling where you're only rolling up, you know, so much of the transactions.
Well, I mean, you're only not the full amount of transactions happening at the L2
two are necessarily like, uh, hitting the L one.
are necessarily like hitting the L1.
So basically the L one still benefits in the ZK model from the L two.
And if it's like, uh, an L one where there's mining and has a robust network,
it, it, uh, you know, those, my revenue, rock what we're yeah i mean and the the argument against
that would be that it's not enough and that these l2s become parasitic and you know there's good
arguments for that like we see on eth uh you know a small percent of the l2s go to the l1 and you
know the l1's not doing a lot of transactions and maybe this is why ethereum hasn't been as
deflationary
recently. But I actually think like there's lots of case studies for why what you're saying makes
sense Aztec. And that's that the number actually of, and I think we discussed this maybe with
Justin previously, but, you know, I had looked at the numbers at that time and there was like some some period where, you know, a very small amount of the transactions were going to Ethereum and it seems parasitic.
But that it is now averaged out to like I think the average is like 17 percent or something of the fees go to Ethereum and like, you know, a three percent goes to base, for example, or something like that.
Right. Whatever it is. So look at Amazon.
Amazon could just sell everything themselves. Would Amazon be what it is today if it did that?
I don't think so. Instead, they literally use that same number, 17%. I think it's different depending on if you do fulfillment in their warehouses and blah, blah, blah. But basically,
call it 17% of the revenue or profit, whatever it is. I don't know what it is with Amazon,
17% of the revenue or profit, whatever it is,
I don't know what it is with Amazon,
but basically goes to Amazon.
And then, but look at Amazon, you could say,
well, Amazon, why are you letting people,
you know, do these, you know, L2 shops on top of Amazon?
They're parasitic because, you know,
they just, they bring tons of value to Amazon.
Amazon's the biggest seller in the world.
You want mass adoption.
Yeah.
Like we're all shooting for mass adoption when you when you actually have that many people using
your solution then you do need the layer yeah and robin hood is now coming to ethereum right um
through arbitrum stack and uh you have a lot i think visas uh i don't even know if it's public yet, but Visa's doing an L2 on Ethereum. And so, like, I think that this model will work.
And if it doesn't, and now going back to the original question, well, what happens if,
like, you know, all the transactions are happening on L2s or on ETFs, right?
ETFs are taking our volume two from Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy is, in ways, taking away volume. That's volume that
would have happened on Bitcoin, but it's happening instead on these treasury companies and these ETFs
and these L2s. Totally fair. It's something we all have to think about. And so my argument is
that a lot of these will bring value to the L1. I think the L1, what we originally kind of
hypothesized was it would become this settlement layer for L2s, bigger app, you know, app chains, governments, banks, you know, countries and
sovereign wealth, et cetera. Maybe, maybe it's, you know, you're, they're paying a thousand dollars
per transaction, but it's like, you know, an entire l2 with millions of transactions settling just you know whatever
once every 10 minutes but it's you know a thousand dollars every 10 minutes or something
or maybe it's a bank settling once a day all those all those treasury companies all those
uh etfs all of that stuff that happens in the stock market can actually transact on the Litecoin layer to the Ethereum layer two.
And so then basically then rolls up to the main chain.
So there's a way in the future where even the things that seem parasitic in some way
or are taking away from the network, they in the future can build it out with smart
contracts like we're discussing. That's why at the beginning of the show, I said, you know, all the money in the future can build it out with smart contracts like we're discussing that's why at
the beginning of the show i said you know all the money in the world and we have to think how all of
that's going to transact on the uh you know most likely on the layer two so it scales and rolls up
to the main my other my other thing is that if that just i'll try to wrap this up just quickly
of my okay so we don't know right we don't know how it'll look i think it's a pretty good plan
in place but maybe i'm wrong and maybe like so many transactions go off chain that the l1 just
has like no transactions and now we're fully relying on block subsidy and the block subsidy
dies in 120 years and we're fucked with that being said i think i
don't think that's going to happen i know two major projects including one by david chom the godfather
of cryptography which are literally the things they're building they're going to try to not only
pay miners but pay full nodes uh to help validate their their data um and one is doing like a meta
layer on l1 where everything's on SACs,
it's all programmable, it's on the L1 basically, and they want to get the miners and the nodes
involved. But anyway, so more of these things will come out, right? Ordinals came, maybe it hasn't
been as popular as it once was, but for a long time, that was a massive amount of fees for the
miners. My point is we don't know what's going to happen and more things will develop and there'll be more L2s on Bitcoin. I wanted to do something where we have like a Bitcoin alliance where we
try to get all of the different L2s and builders to agree or to like we pressure them maybe with
peer pressure and maybe they don't have to do it, but we just peer pressure people into, hey,
you should be contributing to Bitcoin more than just being parasitic. So if everybody gives like
1% of their revenue to a fund or to the miners or to the nodes or
whatever the hell it is, there's ways we can solve this is my point. And I think if it gets bad,
then we will have an immune response. And we did this with, like, there's been lots of ways people
said Bitcoin would die. Everybody said the pools would get too centralized. And at one point,
there was a pool that got to like 50% or 51% of the hash rate. And what happened? Everybody cried
about it and said this was a problem. And so everybody pulled their hash rate away from that
pool. That pool is no longer in existence. It's dead now. And so same thing, we said, oh, China's
going to be too much hash rate. China's going to be too much hash rate. Well, that solved itself.
They banned mining. And there's still a lot of hash rate there, but it's become much more spread out
over all the countries over time. So I just think if this does happen and all of a sudden the miners,
like if hash rate starts dropping, which is not happening anywhere near that right now,
it's growing massively. But if that does happen over time, people will step up. Protocols will
start saying, hey, we're giving 10% to the
miners. So we're just going to give 10% of our revenue to the miners to keep the network alive.
You'll have Michael Saylor will start running a note at a loss because he has too much money at
stake. You'll have countries that will run big mining farms at a loss. And by the way, I'm in
talks with a government right now that is willing to run this
stuff at a loss because they want to get caught up in bitcoin this country is literally tell giving
us up to you know 10 to 60 megawatts of electricity for free and a 10 to 20 year land lease to mine
bitcoin and if it goes very well then they could do up to like 2000 megawatts. And this is a whole country, right? And so most of
the people that, that run mine Bitcoin, they have some special deal and you can run this stuff
basically at what for anyone else would be a loss, but it's not a loss because they either are
getting, I just talked to a company and I was given permission. They have not announced this
publicly, but I was given permission to talk about this publicly. But this
company is found a way that it's there, I think, patenting it, but they take, or it's patented or
something, but I was given permission to say it just so I was safe. But they are taking old oil
wells. And these oil wells apparently have a lot of heat under them from whatever, because they're so deep in the earth. And so they are
making, they are pumping steam, water, steam, whatever, into these old oil wells. There's like
16,000 of these abandoned in the United States. And it costs the oil companies a good amount of
money to cap these off. So they're not releasing gases or something. I don't know, but normally
they have to pay to cap these off. But now this company comes in and says, we will put a turbine and power steam from the heat that is infinite, like this infinite source of energy from our Earth's, you know, whatever, or core.
And it'll power these steam turbines and they can produce electricity at one to three cents a kilowatt hour.
And it's super green and it can power miners or data centers.
And so we just keep finding these cheaper ways to run
or even in some cases run at a loss.
Rock, you're giving me way too much to respond to here.
Sure, okay.
Bill Buster effect.
Justin, do you have anything to respond
before we introduce Koinomi, Hi, Konomi,
and then have them?
Yes, I do. Rock, you started off great, actually. anything to respond before we introduce koinomi hi konomi and then have them yes i i do rock
you started off great actually i was like man rock you're making all my points for me you're
you're fantastic and then and then we went off uh in some points i can finally disagree with you on
so um i i did have a chance maybe start with the agreements or then we can go to disagreements
oh well well you're you're very good at disclaiming the arguments of parasitical L2s and etc.
And how that might not work out.
And I think that's great of you to acknowledge.
I did have a chance to do a bit of prompting.
And the base revenue does vary a lot.
But I would say maybe 5% on average goes back to Ethereum.
I would say if you look at something like that, because look, I'm comparing it to a system where all of the fees go back to the L1.
I just don't see a system that quote-unquote outsources all of its execution so to speak which is like where
the money's at um but amazon does it and it's one of the most profitable companies in the world
about amazon what kind of a crazy analogy is that i'm talking about i don't think it is it's
brokering it's brokering out either beer block space or they're brokering out uh you know a
sales platform or whatever uh you know i don't think it's that crazy but it's it's a similar concept no no it's it's it's it's not
quite right because like base just gets to keep all of those fees that amazon that sorry that
that ethereum otherwise would have had like that's why today solana on like many days has like more
fee revenue than eth, significantly more.
Right.
And it's clearly because of this model.
Right.
And also like I would add to that,
that I think that fee revenue in the long run,
and as you correctly pointed out that this includes Bitcoin,
fee revenue in the long run is actually what will determine the security,
decentralization and scarcity of the system.
Right.
And,
and,
and you're okay.
In 120 years.
So we have 120 years to solve.
No, no, no.
I really, and that's another point I wanted to respond to.
That's a misnomer.
Right?
I actually think Bitcoin is going to start running into trouble in around a decade from
now.
Right?
Like, this is an exponential function.
Like, this is, like, it's almost, it's worth, the block reward is almost worth nothing in
a few more cycles.
Right? So, like, this whole idea that this is almost worth nothing in a few more cycles, right?
So like this whole idea that this is a problem to solve in 120 years from now is completely false.
I actually, according to my- That's a fair point.
It'll be like 99% reduced, you know, or from the beginning within whatever.
And the ratio is already very low.
Like the security budget is only like 0.4% of Bitcoin right now, right?
This is going to just keep falling off a cliff.
But that's just one way to look at it, Justin, because another way to look at it more positively is that if Ethereum didn't have those layer twos, all these users, all these transactions would have already moved to faster.
There's a false assumption right there because i was an advocate for scaling ethereum
and the moment ethereum decided not to scale the l1 and pivot towards l2 scaling i became a critic
right so i'm quite consistent here that's why i shifted my support over to scalable block i mean
i like your consistency bro but we we were we've been around with ethereum and you know we incubated polygon we saw that uh
guys like bsc finance when they started building you know faster ethereum tron building a you know
saying to be we're a faster ethereum all these ethereum killers if it wasn't for the l2s or the
people like polygon back in the day that were saying we are an l2 but it was really a side
chain you know can uh keeping that ethereum mind share in the ethereum world and the dApps building within the evm
economy i'm an advocate of l1 scaling if we just scaled the l1 we wouldn't need l2s if
ethereum scaled today all of these l2s would go out of business that's part of why this is
because there's an incentive the l1 still can't always scale though
what's that yes you know like they can't you know they can't scale as fast like for instance you
look at like bitcoin spaghetti code it's harder like like sh like sharding like ethereum originally
promised to do sharding right in the time before before they they even gave up on sharding other
blockchains had fully implemented sharding that fully
implemented ethereum's original vision right like yes the technology is possible and solana right
now is running laps around it doing like why do you think why do you think ethereum why do you
think so bitcoin and ethereum the two biggest blockchains in the world both made this same
decision bitcoin more extremely i love that yeah i love that ethereum ethereum
decided to scale like partially on the l1 and partially on the l2 but yeah why do you think
are they all just retarded no no no there's a really good question there's a really good question
i love love love love this question because i have a very specific answer to this question
so both bitcoin and ethereum were originally going to scale on the L1. And at some point during their history, they pivoted towards L2 scaling, right?
So for me, that this happened twice in this way, and more times actually that we can identify
in other blockchains.
For me, this is all a massive systemic flaw in the governance mechanism.
That's what I'm seeing, because I think it's a case of perverse incentives creating
corruption and also like the way the governance works now in ethereum and bitcoin it's trivial to
capture if you think about if you're like an intelligent agency or some sort of organized
crime group how easy it is to attack the system it's insane like even the cia commissioned a paper
i believe it was 2019 where they talked about about, oh, how would we attack Bitcoin?
And they're like, yeah, the cheapest way is just to bribe the developers because they are effectively gatekeepers to the entire system.
And more so, like these developers, they get paid more by sub-
Are you saying it's forced?
You're saying it's like bribed self-sabotage?
Like the people that are making these decisions are trying to destroy Bitcoin and Ethereum?
But there's clearly a conflict of interest.
The conflict of interest can't be denied.
That these developers are living out of their car as a free open source developer.
Or they get like, you know, Blockstream gets funded with like $400 million, right?
Big freaking difference, right?
That's a crazy...
So what's the reason for me being here?
Okay, so they're a bride.
I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the...
Well, I'm just saying, because it's not just the people who kind of made the decisions.
I was there for the Block Size Wars. Why did I... Was I captured or my incentives perverse?
I'm not going to accuse you of that. You were convinced by those arguments and I was not convinced by those arguments and you supported Bitcoin pivoting
away from its original vision and goals and design. So that is... I supported Bitcoin staying
the way it was. I didn't support pivoting. I guess, yes, there's an argument for... The original roadmap
was to scale Bitcoin. We ended up with a very different system with some very severe consequences
in regards to security now because of that, right?
Like that to me is a change.
There's interesting that both of us are arguing
for not pivoting Bitcoin.
It's just to me, not pivoting Bitcoin means
don't touch the code.
To you, pivoting means touch the code.
I understand your argument.
It's a fair argument.
They did touch the code.
They did secret. code. They did.
But isn't it interesting that we're both arguing for the same thing and taking a different approach?
Yeah, no, no, you're right.
You're right in pointing that out.
But I think from β like I have a politics background, a political philosophy background.
And for me, it's always drilled down.
Like, look, if the status quo happens to align with whatever you want, that's still a change.
To change the roadmap, to change the goal, to change the social contract, that's a change.
And you could say the same thing about the Constitution, for example.
My argument would be, as a constitutionalist, I would argue we should try not to fuck with the Constitution because i think we risk messing things up but there's a bunch of but you could argue right like like you could argue that they wouldn't have it's good you could
argue that they wouldn't have put a system in place for having amendments to the constitution
if it wasn't meant to be changed right there's both arguments you know like that it was meant
to follow a roadmap of change with the times i would argue that the
best way to preserve the thing the more conservative if conservatism is like keeping something the same
and you know progressivism is and is you know changing it with the times i think and in the
case of like yeah yeah but i think satoshi never really explored these governance ideas when we
look back at his writing like yes he had a roadmap in terms of what Bitcoin should do,
but he never kind of left us with a formula
of how we should decide this as a community.
Well, maybe that's part of the beauty of it.
He decided that he didn't want to make a roadmap
or tell people how to do it.
He wanted it to get a mind of its own.
He understood the game theory.
He was thinking about game theory understood the game theory you understand
right he was thinking about game theory right but you understand that from my perspective
the consequence is that is massive centralized control of the bc blockchain and decision making
right like that is the content and that to me that that like a small group of uh developers that they
have the final say over the code and like they can make radical changes and get away with it.
That to me is not in the
spirit of a decentralized
network at all.
But the irony is that they're doing the opposite.
They're not changing it, which is why you're upset.
Yeah, but that to me is a change because they're diverging
from the roadmap. And then we go to the weird semantic
thing you pointed out before.
But yes, we understand each other.
They're fair points.
Understand and respect is good.
Fair point.
I just wanted to make a point where I think
Justin is making a major misunderstanding
if I could.
I think
you're trying to imply
the roadmap with some kind of
social contract or some promise.
But the roadmap doesn't guarantee what's
in the roadmap is possible like the roadmap the roadmap is just like a heading to go towards
but i mean 10 years ago of course we can increase the block size of course yes there was
there's there was many better ways to improve upon bitcoin, but I think you're trying to project political aims
where it's just more like we're even having a conversation
on this call about how you would do a scalable payments network.
Like 15 years after Bitcoin,
the way to scale Bitcoin isn't even really figured out yet.
We can scale Bitcoin easily.
You can support Visa-level volumes on a decade-old laptop
with the right optimizations.
I reject this idea that we don't know how to scale Bitcoin.
We do. We just don't.
To what level?
That's what I'm saying.
Today on this call, people were talking about
what is it that you would need to get to
in terms of transaction throughput to handle global payments.
Like millions.
Yeah, but hold on.
So there's always a limit to your ability to scale.
Millions of TPS is a hypothetical.
There's always a limit.
There's always a limit to how much you can scale.
You can't have infinite scaling and infinite decentralization.
Demand is also not infinite. That's my counterpoint, right? how much you can scale you can't have infinite scaling and infinite decentralization demand is
also not infinite that's my counterpoint right well for sure but i mean ultimately you can't
like you can't necessarily say like there's there was some systemic or cultural issue when it's in
a lot of ways it's it's just par for the course, right? Like Bitcoin was a hobby hacker project. One dude built it in
his spare time in his basement. The code was known to not be of top professional quality.
There hadn't really been like a ton of testing done on it. So it was like live launched into
the wild as basically an alpha. And they had to work for years and years and years to get it to
where it was beta at best. So, I mean, what are you going to do? Sit there and years and years to get it to where it was beta at best so i mean what are you
going to do sit there and try and build upon i mean look at the difficulty that ethereum has
again you're making with updating its protocol because of it you're making a technical argument
that bitcoin couldn't have scale and that's just not actual right like it could have was actually
trivial scale to what level scale scale to what level there is a level right now just scale as much
like as it can and women like these are not these are not binary notions decentralization
and scaling is not binary like like like we can but you have to define what you consider
decentralized and you have to define what you consider scale sure we can do that you can't just
there's just no there's just no arbitrary binary switch that it's a spectrum everybody knows this
so maybe decentralization is a spectrum yeah so my only like i'll just like the only point that i
wanted to make is to try and project there's some kind of wicked nefarious agenda here it's more
like this was like kind of shitty tech to start off with there was an idea to scale it but it was
just like it was so far away and so difficult that it was the concept of it was pivoted like
that's just what happened so i would maybe i could jump in and defend justin in a way here and say
i think maybe you're right, Justin.
And maybe with hindsight, with people doing testing.
Huh?
No, no.
I mean, we have a lot of agreements in philosophy and stuff.
But so, like, maybe you're right.
And maybe in hindsight, I actually don't.
I don't think it's that clear.
But let's just go with that.
There's a possibility that you're right, that we could have just scaled it by increasing block size and that everything would have been hunky-dory and we would have had like,
you know, Moore's law would have kept up with things and that it wouldn't have resulted
in and that, you know, maybe it was a good compromise and that, you know, yes, you can't
run a node on a, you know, Raspberry Pi, but maybe that's not needed or whatever.
Okay, so let's say that was the case and we tinkered with the block size.
My big argument is not even that it couldn't have worked.
It's that the repercussions of where that could lead is what I'm scared of.
I'm scared that when we start to tinker, look at Ethereum.
They tinker and they tinker to hell, right?
They tinker a lot.
We know the repercussions of not scaling the system.
The repercussion of not scaling the system is the security budget failing right like how how is
not but that's not we don't know because that's not an issue yet and it is something that can be
solved over time right so it's not an issue yet it hasn't it hasn't created any problems bitcoin
is the most powerful computer network in the world times a thousand. Hold on. If you combine every...
It's the third most secure network by economic security.
I recently calculated this actually, right?
And it's falling.
It has been falling for the last five years, right?
So what are the number one and two?
Ethereum has got $52 billion worth of economic security.
Solana has $24 billion worth of economic security.ana has 24 billion dollars worth of economic security and
bitcoin has nine billion calculated according yeah there's so many there's tons of reasons why
that you want to go take a look at my timeline see how i calculated it if you want i mean but
you can make an argument that like the difference is asics are hard to create and once you you know
build up enough of them and you destroy the network the
game theory is that you wouldn't do it because it would cost too much money and then the asics
are worthless and yada yada there's all this like nuance to this there's a conversation but and
there's i kind of i i accounted for in the case of pooper work i can quickly real quickly look
it up for you um sorry continue while i quickly look it up sorry i actually i'm getting
that i have to go to a lawyer call but but i just want to say i have to go to another call too
it's at the top of the hour here justin just a quick question is it possible though that if we
start tinkering that's my biggest worry that's why i'm an of all things i probably consider myself
an osophist i'm scared that someday we could change the 21 million.
We could change other things that matter or the protocol can be taken over.
And to me, the best way to prevent the protocol from being taken over is to just socially tell everyone, don't fucking touch the L1.
We don't care if you're a good guy, a bad guy, good intentions, bad intentions.
Someday, if you tinker enough, someone's going to come in and use that tinkering to their advantage.
I have a perfect real quick response.
I love this.
Sorry, real quick.
I just have to go, Justin.
I have to go, bro.
I just want to say thank you to Joel and Nicole and to the show.
It was a great conversation.
I followed everyone back.
I really appreciate everyone's thoughts.
And I love this discourse.
I go to for another call, but thank you so much guys.
I hope you all have a great weekend.
If I may just rock really quickly respond to that.
And the thing is, because you mentioned this earlier in your talk,
and then I do have to leave in like, like one or two minutes max.
They're waiting for me.
I'll be on the 30 seconds.
So, so, so, so basically you, you're saying that like the,
that there will be an immune response when the security budget runs out.
And I know that one of the immune responses is going to be an inflation increase.
That's going to be the only option to keep Bitcoin secure in a decade or so from now.
So that's one of the reasons I think it's so important.
That's a pretty bold thing to say it's the only option.
I mean, that's like saying that we know everything that's going to happen before it happens.
None of us know.
I think there'll be multiple forks, but I think that's one of the options that some of the key core developers are preparing for as well.
Possible.
Yeah.
Possible.
Ethereum has already talked about like almost mandatory, like, you know, that's just a discussion.
Hasn't happened.
But like almost like mandatory somehow programming in that the L2s have to pay more.
You could do that through like increases to blob prices or whatever.
I think that's a terrible idea actually, but yeah.
I think so too, probably.
I think we're both through market capitalists.
So I think that's why we probably do that.
Yeah, exactly.
But there are other ways to solve it.
There's lots of ways to solve it.
We don't know what they are yet.
We're all too early in this to really say.
For now, we seem to be okay. And the hash rate is growing rapidly. Um, and I think I just, I'm just a
believer in humans abilities to solve things. And I, I actually, and because I think we can solve
things, I think we could solve them without messing with the L one so much. And I hope,
and I'm not totally against op cat as an option. Um, I wasn't so against taproot i just don't know enough about
to be honest but i mean i think it's an interesting concept i just am i just am scared that the more
we tinker the more we create um risks that we don't know like you know taproot created the risk
for ordinals and i actually think ordinals are a good thing but a lot of people would argue they
were spam or whatever but anyways we don't know what we don't know.
And I just think we'll solve it at some point.
But if we don't, if we don't.
What?
Upcode was in the original code base for years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a bunch of the different stuff.
Yeah, but I guess if I'm wrong,
then it's a great thing that we have all these other experiments happening.
And if Bitcoin somehow dies, which I don't think it will,
thank God we have a million other blockchains
that are trying all kinds of cool stuff.
But anyways, okay, cheers, guys.
See you all.
Thank you, man.
That was awesome.
Thank you so much, Rock.
You're the man.
See you, Justin.
See you, guys.
You too, man.
I love that you understand this stuff so well.
And we could have, like, I learn every time I talk to you,
I do learn something.
So, okay, cheers, guys.
See you, guys.
Thanks, Joel. Thanks, Nicole. Thanks, everyone. So, okay. Cheers, guys. See you guys.
Thanks, Joel. Thanks, Nicole. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Goodbye, Rock. And I pinned on the top of the meme of these spaces, which is, you know, good, engaged speakers. Next,
stay over an hour. Third, and you're at this stage, miss meetings. At the fourth stage,
miss meetings, leave, and come back.
That's how you know it's a good space.
So if ROK is back in here, we know this will be one of the very top spaces.
But again, we'll see.
DBCrypto, you had your hand up for a while.
Is what you're saying still kind of relevant to that?
Kind of, yeah.
I'm not going to touch the block size wars in the BTC debate.
Let me just say on that part real quick, because
this probably, we're probably not going to talk about that too much more. Let's hope. It's definitely
shared generational crypto trauma where it's just like an ugly family argument. And it's just like,
well, that's why you're adopted. Oh, it's the equivalent of that in crypto. It's just,
That's why you're adopted.
Oh, it's the equivalent of that in crypto.
It's just everyone's got this shared drama to fight over with that thing.
So it always makes me laugh when that comes up.
But anyway, go ahead with your point.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So I wanted to kind of fast forward a little bit to, I think, some of the points Justin was making earlier in regards to Ethereum and why Ethereum chose a different path. Unfortunately,
why they abandoned sharding. And it's for a couple of reasons. And why they're not going
to go back that way right now, which Justin pointed out, is because of different incentives
and different directions, the ecosystem. If Ethereum went back to full sharding and actually
scaled the chain, it would kill, what, 50 to $ billion dollars worth of L2s. That's just not going to happen at this point.
It's not even an option. But why they originally veered off from it was due to difficulties.
And Vitalik posted this. And it's difficulties due to their asset structure and composability.
The chain wasn't designed from
the get-go to be sharded. And sharding is not something you can just add to a chain after the
fact. And they ditched it. And they also started ditching it when they started seeing competition.
And it was kind of out of necessity. I'll say it was out of just laziness. Ethereum needed to stay relevant.
So what did they do? They took the easy path. They took the quick roll up. Let's slap some L2s
on this chain and allow it to process faster and cheaper transactions because we got Solana on our
heels and we got other blockchains on our heels we can't spend five to ten years trying to build out sharding to stay relevant we need to do something now and that's a shame because that's
i think it's wrong to say it's lazy i mean you're in a competitive market like if you're going to
say why did ethereum take five years like so what the last they're just going to sit there and be
obsolete for five years while the market leaves them behind. This is a tech revolution.
You know, the reason why Bitcoin isn't being used is because it didn't keep up.
They're in a place where they cannot go back and they cannot win because they can't go back to sharding.
You have all these L2s that are fine for attention.
There is a product market fit, right?
Like attempting to build the one blockchain that's going to be perfect for everything is going to be end up being mediocre and everything this is these are known principles so you mean you you ethereum
has a product market fit what is the product market fit it is the most trusted blockchain
right now in terms of anything that offers composability 10 years of uninterrupted
service 100 uptime that matters to big money so you know ethereum has a product
market fit and it needs to wreck respect that product market fit if it wants to have success
in the market right just because they're not building the idealistic platform that you wanted
it to be doesn't mean what they're doing is like lying or cheating or being lazy that like you
this is a competitive industry the tech industry
is beyond the most competitive space you're ever going to do anything in and crypto even more so
so you like you better keep up with the joneses because it's still going to be another 10 years
of innovation before you know like things start to stabilize oh Oh yeah, I completely agree with that for sure. They are the most
trusted. That's why some institutions are looking into it. I think a lot of that's overblown.
But 10 years from now, if we continue on a pace and we get actual real adoption at some point,
which we have no adoption right now, I'll actually push back on the product market fit
because there is no adoption in the Web3 space. If you really look into the true numbers behind users, transactions, volume, everything,
it's not even at 0.1% of what we will likely have in the next five to 10 years.
So I'll push back on the adoption and product market fit part. And if you understand what is
the underlying tech and the way the ecosystem is completely split, you'll see
that they've got a lot of challenges ahead of them, a lot of challenges, because it's a giant
mess. The direction that they put themselves into by taking these shortcuts, and it is without a
doubt a shortcut the way they took by just tossing roll-ups and L2s on top of it.
What do you sacrifice by being a Puritan?
Let's say adoption isn't really scaled at all in terms of end usage,
but let's say DeFi is usage of Ethereum right now.
Should they abandon generating as much revenue for the protocol?
Which, by the way
like you're essentially saying if you're going to sacrifice you know engagement with the market
to like build the proper thing then okay you think ethereum is going to do as well as a token
and price so you know you could you could sacrifice like all these networks are businesses they have
costs the people who are providing infrastructure have to pay for that infrastructure. They need to generate their revenue sufficient to justify their running nodes. This is all based on business. So you got to make money and you got to have success in the market or else like Solana will happily eat Ethereum's lunch.
as they're currently doing and they probably will continue to do
because they they took a path that is a little bit more sustainable now i don't completely agree
with solana's path and their future capabilities but that's a completely different uh topic anyways
yeah it's a bit of a strange argument to me crypto sailor because it's like oh you got to
do the business thing.
You've got to stick with the Joneses.
But the choice that they made has led to less revenue, like losing market share.
But not if you're going to β what other market share should they have gone after?
Like the market share, like what's actually going on in crypto right now is DeFi.
The only thing happening is DeFi, right?
If Ethereum had scaled, right, I don't think Solana would be successful today.
I think Solana has more protocol revenue and far more application revenue today than Ethereum has, or at least protocol revenue on most days.
And like that would have all have gone to Ethereum if it had just scaled, in my opinion.
That's what you're leaving out on the table.
Or at least most of it, exactly.
Thank you, Joel.
Yeah, because before the scaling problems were a thing,
there were quite a few ETH killers out there,
if we remember like NEO and of course,
Binance Smart Chain and stuff.
And they took a
little bit of market share but yeah it wasn't until the scaling uh really limitations hit eth
that we saw like a big spike in competitors yeah you you wouldn't have a solana you wouldn't have
solana with like 72 times more tps than ethereum today right it's crazy
that's not competitive that's that's that's anti-competitive behavior that's shooting than Ethereum today, right? It's crazy.
That's not competitive.
That's anti-competitive behavior.
That's shooting yourself in the foot.
And that's where I point out. It's also the possibility, though, Justin.
Developers are doing what's best for their own pockets
or best for their own ego, not what's best for the L1, right?
That's where I see it as a perversion.
I don't see how in the near term, like, first of all,
it's like you make a lot of assumptions about it would have just been
easy to do sharding, as was mentioned.
Because I'm saying that because in that same time period,
other systems did achieve sharding.
Yes, but you're not starting from scratch, man.
Do you know how much easier it is to build the right shit when you're starting from scratch?
Well, they should have been brave and just forked the ledger there.
My God, man.
The biggest thing you need to realize, Josh, is you need to stop thinking you know what it takes to implement any of your ideas.
These are excuses.
You know what?
The developers that were in charge of Ethereum at the time, you know what they should have done they should have stepped down
they should have stepped down you're assuming that other people could have done it that's put in the
way no there is possibilities i guarantee the satisfying of the ego of the developers of ethereum
would have been to build the most awesome sharding system hold on hold on i literally talked to the core developers during this time period right and and and and they told me i was
like hey look these guys did it here's the code just fucking copy it and they're like you know
what we can't do this and therefore we're not going to do it right it's like but what the fuck
like but could you understand the code that you were telling them to copy what do you talk what kind
of a question is that so this is where i actually know whether or not it would have been feasible
unless you can understand the implementation you understand just like it's such a different thing
man you could yeah this is where i agree with it always because it's not something that they could
have easily done due to the the, the way the chain was designed.
Just like Solana can't add sharding or Algorand can't add sharding.
It's not something you could just tack on at the end.
And this was part of the complexity and part of the reason why they went their direction versus maybe spending the five to ten years that it would have taken in order to make it work.
I think they could have pulled it off it would have been a massive rehaul though and probably would have
required a complete different asset structure too to pull it off certainly is easier to do it from
scratch like for sure but it's doable right and if and and just because something's hard is not a
good reason to do it because if you don't do it then the competitors will do it and you lose
and that's exactly what's happening that That's a good point. And before I do it to Zano real quick.
The kind of gentleman just said.
You can't just talk over everyone as soon as anyone else starts talking.
Okay.
As I was saying.
It's like the, you know.
Jesus Christ.
It's insulting to me that Justin says these things. He's saying some very negative things.
He's saying devs are only motivated by what's in their pocket and their ego. He's saying some very negative things. He's saying devs are only motivated
by what's in their pocket and their ego.
He's saying that they were lazy.
They took shortcuts. He's saying there's a
systemic perversion of incentives.
He's saying some very
negative things about the people
who built this
shit that you're using and without which
them building it would have maybe
never existed. I'm not saying bend down and kiss the knee.
I'm sorry that the truth offends you,
but it is the truth, right?
I'm saying it's not the truth.
Okay.
Well, I'm sure we could argue on the personal merits.
He's being like really insulting, guys.
Okay.
I don't want to have to start actually handing out mute.
So let's be, let's be nice to each other here.
As I was saying about pivoting systems, like we do have to also remember Ethereum did pivot
to proof of stake when it did not start that way.
And that was a, a large task that took kind of a lot of doing and uh it's doesn't it's obviously didn't start that
way so it was more difficult but yeah it could be achieved eventually and there's a lot of work put
into that probably sharding could be done too but again i'm not a technical expert on that so i'm
not going to even comment beyond my gut feeling uh xana what were you going to start saying
uh yeah i just said you know whether ethereum could have done it or not, it doesn't matter.
What matters is it's the end game.
And the end game is that there are other alternatives that have done it, and they will scale, and they are taking over.
So, yeah, just want to pivot to that.
people to death.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
So, you know, it'd be an interesting discussion for another time, by the way.
I was just thinking about, can crypto survive without having like built in privacy rather
than programmability?
That would be an interesting one.
But anyway, MJ, you're back.
Do you want to jump back in and say something i know we've been kind of you know talking on that stuff for a while uh
where should we go from here by the way it kind of just just put puttered out into the like me
and crypto sailor have a fist fight right right crypto sailor yeah Yeah. I love your passion, man. I just want to say that.
No, Justin and I agree on so much that I'm not afraid to disagree with him on what I disagree with him on.
Because I know he and I are vibing on tons of stuff.
I know that.
I love you, man.
You're awesome.
Yes.
Well, you should come to CryptoDamn or whatever it's going to actually be called because we do have actual knife fights there.
So every year that I've been, there's been a knife fight.
It's Amin Solmani's thing.
He takes a plastic knife and goes and fights people in the parking lot.
And Justin, how was that experience like?
I love it.
And it's actually really surprising how many people
have really good martial arts training in crypto.
It's my people.
I love it.
Yes.
So while we're in the pivot space here, I want to share this Unstoppable post that we post earlier.
Partnered with Unstoppable recently, which is a fantastic wallet.
But they want us to get a hundred thousand impressions
on that post. And then they say that they're going to integrate the Maya protocol decks into
the background, which we support. So just as a, as a little shell, if you, if you're feeling
charitable, you can go share it, share that post around, help them me just ask, what is the biggest thing that programmability,
that be a Torian complete VM, I suppose, is required for that we kind of can't deal without,
like the biggest single use case? I not just like everything but like what's the
very one thing that we we absolutely could not survive that a crypto could not survive and be
sovereign and thrive without if you make me choose one thing i would say dicks
yeah so yeah now i guess my question on that is obviously Dex, because you want to be able to acquire and trade the asset and all the other assets.
But first of all, you can you do right now, the biggest swap route that you'd want is fiat.
Isn't how do you get from fiat to crypto? Because that's what people have.
And briefcases of cash.
Yes, which is not a programmability thing in that case.
So is it possible that the biggest censorship vector of onboarding into crypto is something that programmability can't even solve?
Correct.
Well, you do have solutions.
I'm not sure how centralized they are, but you do have, for example, escrow contracts.
So there are ways.
At least you have more tools to come close to the solution
than just not having probability at all.
Now, you can improve things on the edges, but fundamentally,
like the on and off ramps, I mean, they're the fiat system.
So yeah, that's not something crypto can really solve. fundamentally like the on and off ramps I mean they're the fiat system so yeah they they can
for those that's not something crypto can really solve yeah I'm sort of fond of saying that the
worst thing about crypto is fiat I like that actually I mean what what you really need is
I mean this is just from inception you need a reason um you know upside speculation outside earning more fiat to use
crypto and you know if you give people the motivation they will find a way even if it means
directly trading their work for crypto and avoid fiat altogether you still need the main motivation
and um DeFi can maybe achieve that so I'm not convinced yet because I'm very interested in decentralized lending,
but the current ecosystem of that is just more speculation.
So I'm not entirely convinced.
That's spot on that you said that, by the way,
because that would be my second answer.
My first answer would be DEXs and my second answer would be decentralized lending.
I think one way I think to truly compete with, say, the banking system, with the fiat system is you want to have your
crypto in your wallet, right? But a bank gives you interest on your capital, right? So we need
to be able to do that too. And I think that's where DeFi comes in and earning a small amount
of yield over your crypto because of DeFi i think yeah that that that's key that
makes it yeah yeah but that makes it a more competitive product yeah i'm not talking about
freaking degenerate 30 yield or something no like free free 50 and they could be even 20 on an
algorithmic stable where is it coming from run run where's it coming from um it's it's it's actually
it's it's cool how it works.
So it's like when you're lending the money,
you're actually lending it to traders who are primarily using it
to go short and these sort of things.
So, yeah, pretty sweet.
It works.
I know.
I guess my frustration with lending and crypto,
as it applies to hard assets, is that it can encourage leverage, and leverage historically sort of catches up, right? 2008 and you wouldn't have like a pump and dump in the late 80s if you didn't have over leveraged
positions that effectively were distorting the perception of the marketplace from being
a comparative of a free market right so i'm i want to be clear here i'm not anti-profit i'm not
anti-capitalism i'm not anti-interest actually but on on a sort of currency scale wherever the
interest is coming from it's going to come from somewhere. So as long as it's coming from new adoption or inflows as opposed to imaginary, you know,
crypto casino stuff, then that's fine.
But I mean, I can answer to that.
Go ahead, Vinny.
I can answer because there is a huge difference between doing leverage with fake money that you can get from credit emission from banks
and fiat emission from central banks
to leverage that you are using
from a scarce pool of tokens
that will end at some point
and will have supply and dynamics play playing there to increase
the interest rate and attract more suppliers or to decrease the interest rate and encourage
borrowing, you know, like on lending, on crypto lending, you have a liquidity pool and you can only use what is in this pool within the protocol's limitations.
It's not like the banking system that we saw in 2008 and nothing like that.
So there's a huge difference between this leverage from our leverage here in DeFi.
true but the use case is still speculation no one is buying a house on a crypto mortgage
True, but the use case is still speculation.
unless they are also speculating on their collateral I mean you can I mean that that's
finance right like finance is just people moving money around with each other and it has some sort
of external benefit to people right like that's that's that's just finance in general, not just DeFi.
That seems quite abstract to normal people.
Yes, but still the concept that you need to lock up a collateral
bigger than the credit you're taking, it just makes it not really useful for regular people.
You also need a collateral within the bank.
It's just a social collateral like yeah exactly if you don't if don't repay your your your debts they can go for your other assets that are
worth more than the house itself yes exactly great point if we could have that on chain i think that
would be you know let me give a very small rant on this because I really love that subject.
There's an economist, Hernando De Soto,
who did a book called The Mystery of Capital
where he analyzed why the free market worked
in the developed world,
but not so much in a lot of the developing world.
And a lot of what he was able to see
is there was difficulty in getting,
having titled ownership of people's assets like property so that they could then use ownership in a way that is held up legally, for example, then you could use your collateral to then lend it a DeFi protocol. It's not like money. You could actually tokenize your house and other things like that and then use that as collateral to get a loan for business or something like that.
loan for business or something like that. Or at some point you could, there might be a reputation
token system at some point where you could literally collateralize your reputation, which
is what a credit score is kind of doing. There's a huge can of worms about that, about social credit
scores and all that stuff that I don't know if we have time to go into now, but the point is
this can all be achieved and that could be really really fun to have like an actual
competitive lending system on in dvam that is cool i really like that i have to run um but this
means so much fun thank you for this thanks very much justin don't forget next week again
if you can't make both weeks no guarantee but i'm but i'm glad i made it this time around just put
it on your calendar even if you can't be there, just so you remember.
So I don't have to attack your posts.
You know me too well, Joel, man.
I love you.
And I love you too, CryptoSailor and Vinny and DB.
Yeah, I'm going to say something just so there's no hard feelings.
Come on now.
See you later.
We're good, man. And you know me.
I love the passion and I love a good difference of opinion.
That's where we learn.
You know, that's what really gets me going.
I love it.
All right, everyone have a great day.
Till next time, everyone.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye, Justin.
So we're talking about the DeFi stuff, right?
About DeFi or DEXs are some of the biggest thing.
So one thing, I definitely agree with that
because access to these assets is very important being
off custodial exchanges is important one thing i've gotten very into as i'm sure crypto sailor
knows as well is the cross-chain dex ecosystem i.e the thor chains of the world the maya protocols
the chain flips the near intense and i'm sure there's a few others that are pretty big that
i'm missing i guess the question at that point anden, I guess you can go first if you want to, if
you're on the subject, right?
Does that make it so that you don't necessarily need programmability?
So for example, if I have Litecoin and I want Bitcoin for some reason, neither of them have
to have programmability for me to drop them on ThorChain, swap one for the other,
and still get what I want
in a relatively trust-minimized way.
It's obviously not as fast
as if it was all native on the same thing,
like Solana to some random shit coin,
but it still should work, right?
Does anyone agree or disagree with that kind of position?
I mean, that's the same context
that's the same concept as bridging and wrapping and i know that torching you know they don't claim
to be that but one can argue that torching is also trustless wrapping so yeah sort of like
wrapping unwrapping the exact same transaction so it's not there's never really a
wrapped version but it is yeah it's it's a hair split but i mean do you think that's a problem
do you think that no i don't think so i i think that's really the way to go that you have
multiple blockchains as they're interpret interoperate and there will be friction there
will always be friction but what you need to make sure is that the incentive to actually bridge so
the value that the quote unquote dump chains provide is greater than this friction and also
you know greater so that um there is significant value
still on that chain that's still
secured.
If it's only a little bit better
than smart chains, then smart
chains are just going to take it over.
Okay, interesting.
Yeah, I think...
Sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say, because you said I mentioned like I definitely follow this space very, very closely.
I'm a contributor to the ThorChain project or at least one of the applications that they have.
So I think like this is a case that could be made about why cryptocurrencies could survive without smart contracts. This is actually a point that I was thinking about
way long time ago in this conversation,
which was that, you know, having, like,
you can make the argument that any chain can be valuable
as long as you have a distribution to users, right?
UX can solve a lot of distribution problems.
If Dashpay just had the greatest payments app ever
and whatever features were in there,
like, people would just use Dashpay just had the greatest payments app ever. And whatever features were in there, people would just use Dashpay for payments.
And then what Interchain allows for is just resolution to other assets with people's desire so that you don't get caught in the walled garden.
Because everybody has a favorite token and a favorite chain.
They want to be able to use it.
They want to be able to use it.
So interchain would allow for Dash Pay
to kind of be a payment settlement layer
for multiple different chains and ecosystems.
It's technically all feasible at the moment.
So maybe we don't need programmability.
Interesting.
Well, at least not for that.
Actually, that's okay.
I will make a good case as to why not.
And it actually has to do with a lot of the drama that was going around with,
that's gone down with ThorChain, right?
Speaking of InChain as well.
ThorChain added a lot of features,
and they've gone ahead and actually now added smart contracts.
And in an effort to, let's say,
attract more engagement with the protocol. That's not necessarily borne out to be true.
And the other thing is bolting on smart contracts,
you're just competing in kind of an already saturated market. How many smart contract chains are there? So yeah, that's actually a very interesting point,
which I, you know, again,
I wish Justin was around for that,
but I'm sure I'll argue with him a different day on that.
But is the market saturation kind of thing.
And this is one of those things I literally think
every single crypto is dealing with right now,
when we finally don't have as speculative of a space anymore.
We're coming towards the end of that, I think at least,
where now chains are having to compete with each other.
And there's a definite, you know,
there's each one had a strong narrative behind it
and that was enough.
Now it seems like you need more than a narrative,
you need to actually be useful.
And everyone is sort of moving
to some sort of programmability for example or or some kind of access to that and i think at some
point it's just going to be saturated where every chain has like kind of the same um the same feature
sets more or less and there's no reason to use one other than the other. It's kind of interesting.
And that was kind of, again, I barely dipped my toes in. I know
very surface level about MultiverseX. It seems like a very interesting, very advanced programmatic
chain. It seems great, but also has just not captured attention or traction nearly as much.
And I was sort of trying to ask myself that question of like,
why is it sort of, you know, not been there?
And I sort of looked at...
Oh, I can give you some like inside info on this.
Well, please do it in just a second.
Let me get my speculation at first.
And I want to see if I can get along to what other people think people think but it also just it looks like there's no differentiating factor as far as like
you say oh the the sharding is super great and it's super advanced and like okay but then if you
look at like what can you do on it they have like a basic deck so wallet some tokens you can do this
oh you could top up this card some other things it didn't seem like there's
any compelling reason to use it over solana in fact the opposite it seems like solana has a
so much more advanced ecosystem and obviously capitalization and things so it's just like that
struggle to differentiate despite being a an equal or maybe superior competitor this seems to be
what i would think.
But can I just, sorry,
can I just let Ruben chime in on that first and then Crypto Sailor,
keep that in your pocket, the inside info.
So, I mean, there's a lot to catch up on here.
So I'll try to be brief.
Sorry, we'll talk a lot.
No, no, you're good.
So I think first things first,
you know, we're good. So I think first things first, we're going to overlays, with conditionalities, possibly over minutes, possibly over years.
I did a lot of context. And by the way, there's 190 jurisdictions. We're not even getting into local states.
Right. And so like the language that we use here for consensus is contextual based on whatever the expectations of those parties might be.
And what might feel like a contract to one person may not feel like a contract to another, right?
I think the Australians had a song about this. A kiss is not a contract.
Anyways, but I do think that there are paths to consistency and interoperability.
And I'm not sure we need to wrap it up with money, man.
As long as we have the capability access layer from an identity standpoint,
so that I can have sufficiently rigorous controls as a person over my technology stack, which has whatever off keys to access my money and my access to my other decision making tools.
Maybe they sit under the same roof technologically or maybe they sit on different ones.
But does it really matter as long as I can get what I want done?
as I can get what I want done, right? And I think this is a thing that's like a lot of the format
wars happened in the early 2000s, late 90s, even like Betamax versus VHS or, you know, the whole PDF
debacle, like all of the format wars. They're very similar here to the extent that smart contracts
or contracts in general are
useful for the purposes of multi-party consensus which means that standards emerge over time
which is why we have things like wheat futures contracts or oil futures contracts they're
standard you can put a box around them you know i can give you a thousand of them and then i can
give you ten thousand and you can understand that they're probably going to be very similar to each other if not legally defined as such.
And so in terms of having those kinds of structures to be able to interact with one another and with institutions and governments and so on and so forth, are smart contracts useful for that?
Sure.
Are they the only and exclusively the best way to coordinate on those layers? Probably not. Would it be useful to put it closer to the underlying rails of the transaction network so that we can put things on a ledger? Absolutely. Is everything going to crumble if you can't do that tomorrow? Probably not. Right? I guess, I don't know. Does it resonate with anyone?
Yeah.
Am I right here?
I think so.
Crypto City,
do you remember the inside info
on what happened with Multi-Fact?
Oh, yeah.
I was just going to give you a perspective
on this whole competing amongst
smart contract platforms.
Like,
the thing that a lot of people
don't seem to be grasping
across the whole entire space is who is the target market of the smart contract platform.
It's actually smart contract developers.
And what a lot of these platforms do is they don't really seem to be trying to attract developers as much as they just trying to be attract gamblers in their crypto casinos that a handful of degenerate developers are willing to build.
And so as an example, I was at a crypto conference and I was talking to representatives of some major chains and I was representing my project, which actually also represents a handful of developers.
So we're a development group and we're a smart contract Web3 full stack development group.
group and we can we're a smart contract web three full stack you know development group we can build
tons of dApps on a blockchain and literally none of these representatives for any of these blockchains
was in any way proactive about even trying to convince me to launch on their blockchain
so they're you know so ethereum just becomes like ethereum is the default because there's just so
much code and libraries and testing and open zeppelin contracts have been beaten to hell and
back and so you know if you're going to develop d5 what are you going to do probably solidity
and then where are you going to go probably eth Ethereum or a clone, obviously. But yeah, that's why I think there's a really big problem. I mean,
there was a really great chain called Evmos. Evmos was the first EVM chain in the Cosmos
ecosystem. They actually did some pretty brilliant things in implementing the EVM into an interchain protocol so that you can go from the EVM to other chains.
And they built a lot of good things in it, but their project died because they just couldn't, they didn't attract enough serious development projects on it.
All it was on there was like, you know, yet another iteration of CryptoKitties, an NFT marketplace and all that BS.
Interesting.
I think I saw Vinny.
And I'll give you like one tidbit, last tidbit insight.
I actually was in discussions with the Evmos group.
I'll just talk about this so people get like,
like see the inside of this.
I was talking about our development group launching on Evmos before
or while it was kind of dying or right before when the token price was doing well still.
And they had people in charge of grants and business development who had no background
or experience on it. They were mostly just fanboys from the Discord who had been there
from the beginning and they didn't know how to properly evaluate anything and they didn't they actually pushed me away from launching on their
project because i wasn't doing what they liked me to be doing so that's kind of what goes on
there's a lot of these blockchain projects are like some weird kind of a leavis attitude
where they think you know because they built and they're somehow slightly better or cooler
that everybody's going to run to their platform, but developers aren't.
They're not really even doing a good job of outreach.
So there you go.
Interesting.
Vinny, do you have anything to say?
Yeah, very interesting perspective from from crypto sailor uh i i think that there are
arguments that maybe it wasn't just a good day i i wouldn't like summarize all the why is multiverse
where where it is right now in market cap and network effect uh and not the position like Ethereum or Solana have.
I think there is a lot of nuances to that.
I don't think like one anecdotal case just fine, but yeah, definitely a great perspective.
And one that we don't usually have because there actually aren't that many active builders
sharing their perspective.
So thank you for that, CryptoSailor.
But one thing that I will disagree is like, and not disagree,
like it's agreeing and disagreeing, like the solidity thing and this stuff like.
For a developer, there is a much higher friction if you need to learn a new language
so you can write smart contracts, right?
So I think that there are a lot of things that make Ethereum a success.
That is not like Solidity itself.
The Ethereum ecosystem is more mature, so you have more open source tools available for anyone that want to use Solidity to develop but if you
have the same maturity of an ecosystem and you have like a particular language that you need to
learn in order to write smart contracts for a chain and you have something like multiversex
or even near that use wasm. And you can write
smart contracts with popular languages, like Rust, Java,
and Python, etc. I think if you think from a developer
perspective, of course, that if you don't need to learn a new
language, you will opt to to this chain. So there are a lot
of factors, I think that the most contribute the most
contributing factor to market cap and current state of adoption, etc. is a much simpler answer.
That is stablecoins, Tether and Circle. They are picking winners, whether we like it or not.
it or not most of the usage for these smart contract chains are at the stable coin level
and if you don't have usdc and usdt native to your chain you are already losing by miles so i think
that the this the easiest explanation for multiversex would be that the lack of native stablecoins there.
They are already in a great disadvantage with other chains that do have these stablecoins
implemented.
That's a terrible state to be at and that adds a lot of centralization.
But I think that that's the reality right now.
But yeah, I also wanted to give my two cents on the language thing because you mentioned Solidity. I also said this is just due to the maturity of an ecosystem and if the other ecosystems have enough good chance to onboard more developers because you remove the friction of having to learn a language just right there.
You know, it's a broader market you can tackle as a developer.
Yeah, I would definitely agree with a lot of that. that and before I jump to DB on this uh the the point of the USDC and USDT kind of thing is very
interesting because it's again not at all technical it's entirely like a business decision
like who shook the right hands and caused the thing the the deal to happen for deployment
and then there you go the the the chain doesn matter at that point. And that's something that I guess I should at some point, like Justin is a technologist
primarily.
And I used to try to think entirely that way about like, oh, the best tech will win.
And it's I kind of think that the tech is like almost like a third of it.
It's crazy.
Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, but it's, it's almost all like
selling. And a lot of times when you build tech, that is not the best tech at all. Sometimes you
build the tech that will generate maxis in your community, sort of like literally the tech could
suck, but it makes people happy. And I have a feeling, for example, this is, this will be the
argument for next week,
but proof of work is a lot of that.
People, the hardcore Saverpunk type people
love proof of work for whatever reason.
And if you don't have it,
even if whatever you got is better,
they will, like, you just won't have
as much energy behind your project.
I've noticed that happen.
But anyway, DB, why don't I switch to
you real quick? Yeah, yeah. So actually, I'll tell you exactly why you're right there about the tech
kind of being a boon in just a second. But I do also want to say, Sailor brought up some great
points. It's sad, the developer kind of mindset in the space right now, how it's not growing.
of mindset in the space right now, how it's not growing. And looking at the electric capital
report, there's 27,000 full-time devs in the space, which I'm big on the analytics and numbers.
Facebook has more engineers and developers alone than all of Web3. And EVM, for example,
has just over 4,000. They're down 7% in the past year.
They're losing mindshare to move SVM and others.
I see this continuing to trend just because EVM has some serious limitations.
And Vinny was kind of pointing to it that people are going to naturally gravitate once we get to that point to languages that they know. And WASM is going to be a big one for sure because they're going to be able to use the languages that they know and they love already when they come into the space.
The 25 plus million developers in Web2 that have yet to step foot here.
But also there was another point I was going to make.
Oh, MultiverseX you brought up.
And I can answer this question.
Obviously, it's not something you can answer definitively.
But I can tell you very confidently part of the reason why they're not succeeding, and it's because of their tech.
And they solve some things that seriously limit them. Think of what makes top blockchains top
right now. What are some of the metrics that people really follow, that they love, that help push an ecosystem?
I can tell you, it's TPS, volume,
yeah, transaction volume, revenue, stuff like that.
One of the biggest issues with MultiverseX
is they, for the most part, solved MEV.
And that is a double-edged sword.
That absolutely kills them.
Because they do randomized transactions
in a block. So you do not
have big whales and
money coming to the chain to do MEV.
Solana, most
of their revenue comes from MEV
and bot transactions.
And it was designed to be that way.
I noticed you wait until Justin left to say that.
Just kidding. I know. He would have pushed until Justin left to say that. Just kidding.
Yeah, I know.
He would have pushed back a little bit on that.
But it's true.
Look at the chains that are...
Sorry, I don't know if I got cut out there for a second.
But they allow for this.
MEV, Ethereum, Solana.
They have tons of MEV, which drives in massive whales, massive liquidity, tons of stable coins, and lots of transactions, lots of volume.
And MultiverseX can't do that because of a way they design their chain, which is a great thing, but no one gives a shit.
Especially when their transactions and their volume and everything is low because of it.
Second is capital.
I think we could probably all agree that capital on this base is king.
If you don't have money to spend, you're just going to kind of fade away.
Look at the, again, the largest chains and what they're doing.
Sui is absolutely crushing it because they have a $350 plus million treasury.
Ethereum has how much money just insane amounts
what do they spend i think over 100 million a year and solana fuck they they print 10 million
in solana a day uh with their inflation so if you don't have money that's that's another thing
that's gonna severely limit you so those are two of the reasons
why i think multiverse x is seriously lagging because of they do i can make a strong case that
they have some of the best tech in the entire space but that tech also limits them unfortunately
yeah that's a very interesting this is where things get very weird and we i think we all have we all but at least i did maybe i'm
speaking for myself i had a lot of very um of ideas about what was valuable and what wasn't i
just thought that i was right as far as like peer-to-peer like electronic cash system this
decentralized permissionless everyone understands that has value. And then everyone understands a lot of things. And then eventually, sometimes the market says you're
wrong, right? That like things you think are super valuable might not be. And apparently,
like at this stage in crypto, maybe things are just too or were too early. We're so early,
right? You hit the gong. We're so early at this stage that a lot of times you kind of need to play the meme coin, ICO, hype bubble, et cetera, game in order to get money because the money for righteous purposes, as it were, is just like not there. And so maybe that's because it is a cynical point, but maybe it's accurate that the
market for MEV is greater than the actual DeFi market or it's more profitable. And it does kind
of go back to like, I think that proof of work points again, spoiling some points for next week,
but I'll be there. You guys can be there too. Of course. Um, I think a proof
of work has a significant market advantage over proof of stake in some ways, because first of all,
people can get, they can mine and get the coin and people get really excited about that. Now it
might not be efficient from the protocol thing, but people love to just boot up miners. Almost
all the coolest, best cypherpunks I know
were all like, oh yeah, I got into this by mining.
I just decided to mine
and then I became a passionate person about the tech.
It's like you started mining first and then,
sorry, Zana, you're gonna say something?
No, no, just I did.
That's the exact way I got into Monero.
Well, there you go.
See, proof in the pudding.
It's like maybe not an efficient consensus mechanism, but it's an efficient way of onboarding people. And then now you build an economy around it. Now you need exchanges because miners need to sell their coins to pay for your electricity. And then someone needs to build a six. And now it's like, okay, well, they probably take the coin to you build this inbuilt economy by virtue of having an inefficient system, maybe. Right. And it's,
it's not necessarily wrong. It's just the way the market is. And so I think a lot of cases to just
speak specifically on the multiverse X kind of thing. Although again, I have to do a lot more
research. I don't know enough, um, is maybe solving problems that people didn't really have,
maybe solving problems that the market didn't have a demand for and just saying,
well, everyone complains about MEV. Everyone complains about scalability.
Everyone complains about this.
We'll solve all those problems and we'll be rewarded. Right. But in, you know,
in the end of the day,
there were some other problems that need to be actually solved. And, um,
it's kind of where we're
kind of at. I think that there was a lot of the same thing in the Dash world where it's like,
we'll solve all the problems like instant transactions. And then people like don't care
at some point. And, you know, people who use it for money love it. But then there's there's always
kind of that. And I sort of switch my mindset to try to build use cases and build what people do.
And then when people say, why doesn't Dash have this?
I wanted that before I can,
then I go back to the developers and say,
hey guys, we have customers that want this.
And then when you build like customer in that direction,
then you have that.
And there are also a lot of customers that are asking for VM support.
And that's kind of why we're looking to have that on the roadmap as well.
So, so there's that, but yeah.
So any other points real quick?
Shit.
I got to build a casino on Xano now.
Well, what happened to sailor?
I was still waiting to hear his kind of insider info we never
got that i think he he rage quit or something but i don't know i hear a lot of i hear a lot of people
talking about that as well for um uh the cosmos ecosystem like i hear a lot of criticisms of
cosmos oh cosmos is dead it's's all, all this stuff.
And anytime they say that every reason for saying that seems to be, um, every, like every
reason seems to be completely like, oh, the foundation or whoever's involved spent all
the money on nepotism.
It's all everyone's, it's all, it has nothing to do with the tech.
It's all like how people spent the money and built ecosystems so that is kind of maybe a valuable
lesson on that that like uh smart contracts are only necessary as much as people have a value
for it um it it's interesting because i definitely think uh a, it's just harder to establish a use case outside of them.
Like if you say, Hey, you know, we got a meme coin casino,
but also you can spend it as real money.
It's like you kind of,
you come for the meme coins and then spend on real things,
or you come for the real spending and then spend some extra time on meme
coins, or they kind of have like network effects together maybe.
But it's really hard.
It's really hard.
Like, I guess my final idea on this is,
yes, I think a crypto,
which I didn't give my opinion.
Yes, a crypto can survive and thrive
without smart contracts
if it establishes a strong and dominant enough
use case with enough real usage that people will
use that for that. And they will do multiple chains. Like they will say,
I only want to use Monero for private transactions, for example. And then that's what I buy my drugs
and children with is what was that. And then I could just swap into Solana for everything else,
for example. And even though it's more efficient to just,
even after Solana gets on-chain privacy,
that's rivals or exceeds Monero's even,
as long as it's enough privacy and they're in that use case enough
and there's enough of a market.
And as long as like Solana devs don't worry about going to jail
because they're not involved with that.
And the Monero people are hidden enough or have a different risk tolerance as long as the economics of the situations
figure out even though technically it would be better to just have it all in one chain
i think it can survive that's my opinion anyone else i absolutely agree
yeah especially privacy i think privacy will be the killer feature that will make people go through the pain
of bridging and wrapping, which is also getting better over time.
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, so any, anyone disagree with my take, by the way, I know we've kind of gone back
and forth on that for awhile, but everyone seemed to say, yes, you need programmability.
And I'm kind of at the spot of no, not every chain that thrives needs it.
But as long as you have programmability somewhere else, and as long as you have cross chain dexes.
Yeah.
So you do need some probability to at least achieve these dexes, because I know that Monero, for example, is struggling with this.
But yeah, no, you don't need Turing full Turing completeness.
And I will actually, I will say, I think nano had the same issue too, as far as like Thorchain not able to send enough data in the transactions to do the
swaps.
Although, I know Thorchain is working on memo-less swaps.
I don't know.
There's...
The thing is, these questions change all the time.
But I would say I might have an actual post on this at some point now that you've inspired
A fun fact about Nano, but go on, I can give you. A fun fact about Nano is that Luke Parker, Kayaba,
has developed some time ago a proof of concept
allowing doing atomic swaps between Monero and Nano.
Very cool.
It was a proof of concept.
He developed it together with Plasma.
It didn't get the community support he was expecting, which is a shame.
I was really looking for it.
I follow the entire development at that time.
It's something that happened years ago.
He put that to rest now.
But actually, even with nano super limited capacity, it actually can do atomic swaps uh if well implemented i don't know
if they killed that function later uh with uh protocol upgrades to to to fight the spam thing
and etc but uh i i can tell for sure that like four years ago five years ago something like that
it was possible with not many people know.
Interesting. Yeah, I definitely did not know that. But yeah, I would say there's two things,
MVP is a thing, which obviously stands for most valuable player. But in this case, I would call it minimum viable privacy. That's something that I think that everyone's
going to need to have. Not everything will need to have the top, even though I believe
in the highest level privacy. I do think that something similar to pure confidential transactions,
without any transaction graph hiding, is probably the minimum that people will accept in the
future. Where if
you, if a normal person who doesn't care if the government or big companies are spying on them,
wants to buy a coffee, they at least don't want the barista to be able to look and see what their
balance is. And so there's like a minimum for everything. And of course, more privacy is better,
obviously, but I think there's going to be a minimum viable privacy. And I also think there's a minimum viable programmability where you have a minimum
amount of data and data options that your chain can do, which just allows it to participate
and interact with, for example, cross-chain DEXs and bridging protocols and things to other
chains. So then you get to just move back and forth
and you're not kind of cut off in a silo any disagreements on that point
i think we synced Thank you. Did I get wrong?
Oh, wow.
No, I am just a moron.
I had the mute button on as I was talking.
insane.
So as I was saying,
I put the bit angel space up there.
A rock's going to be in there as well. Um,
every Thursday they have it at like three hours after.
So I always try to at least push the space three hours so we can just roll
right into their space.
And so I promoted there.
feel free to jump over and listen to there.
I'll probably join and maybe say a couple of words.
We'll see.
Interesting subjects today, that's for sure.
But let's start to do like the wrap up and shilla clock kind of thing.
So I checked my clock and it is indeed shilla clock.
And no, I didn't mean to rhyme that.
So let's see, Nicole, if you're around, you can do the quick swap
one. But in the meantime, I'll go from bottom up. Vinny, how's it going? You want to say,
shill your quick thing?
I don't have much to show because I have just so much work right now that I don't
want an extra work. But yeah i i i have been dedicating
myself to to do some freelance content creation i can do editing writing and uh and and many other
related things uh so if if you need a writer or a consultant or just an editorial opinion or some
sort i i can maybe help i'm not taking any work right now, but yeah, have me in mind
and maybe we can talk.
I only take my payments in crypto.
I don't take fiat, so don't even insist.
But yeah, nothing else to show, just great space.
Joel, thanks for having me here.
Also Nicole and I forgot your name, the XenoGuy name,
but all of you were great and thank you
for this very good discussion.
Also all the speakers, the ones that are here yet
and the ones that are already left.
Absolutely, and thanks very much.
And I like your content before I remember when seeing you write for some other
publications before you went kind of more freelance like that. And so yeah, definitely
recommend working with you if you can, but also I will not send you any extra work for now.
All right, DB, you want to jump in? Sure. Yeah. She'll, I I'm not a shiller um i'll mention that i host a space as well
where we talk big topics like this and come join us on xbase every tuesday thursday
it's in my bio if anyone's interesting oh no oh yeah you got song jam working. Look at that. Yeah, just in time for the outro song.
So, yeah.
Sorry, keep on going.
No, no, that's it.
Yeah, I love doing these bases.
Great chat today.
Good, good guest.
Good topic for sure.
So, and next sounds like next Thursday is going to be another good one.
So looking forward to it.
Yeah, absolutely. I almost talked on mute again. Yeah, absolutely.
I almost talked on mute again.
What an idiot.
It looks like Nicole left,
but for quick,
she runs the quick swap handle as well
and also produces the show with me,
which is very nice.
But quick swap is a cross chain
or not cross chain.
It's a polygon based decks
that is incubated by,
I believe the,
the lunar digital assets team,
which like rock is part of.
So it's all kind of part of the big happy family.
I haven't used them yet because I don't really use Polygon anymore after I
made my first NFTs with them.
But anyway,
check them out for that.
All right,
Zano,
you got the final,
final show of the night before you hit the song.
Yeah. So, so we already talked about this a bit, but if you wonder what's the actual use of Zeno,
it's to be able to upgrade your assets and tokenize your Bitcoin or Ethereum or what else into private versions of itself. So yeah, this whole topic kind of applies and you can do it without custodian and in
a fully trustless manner.
So yeah, go check it out and yeah, really looking forward to the next one.
I think it will be really interesting.
And I'll try to bring the big guns, but we'll see.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's going to be a good one
and see if you can bring any
proof of work maxis,
especially people from the Monero community
that you already said
you don't really know them that much,
but for reasons,
but it is what it is.
Or is that someone else?
I don't remember.
But anyway,
I think it was someone else.
Yes.
Well, if you have any Monero friends
who are,
see if they want to come in and talk about it, it's very topical to them.
Anyway. So thanks everyone for listening.
I'm going to play my favorite song in the whole world if this works correctly.
And then we'll see you next week for the proof of work versus not proof of
work versus proof of stake, but is proof of work secure. All right.
Bye bye everyone. Listen to the song before you leave. Bye-bye. Crypto na na, Exit Liquidity From the day we arrive on the blockchain and blinking step into the trade, there's more
to lose than can never be won, more to dump than can never be won More to dump than can never be saved
Influencers tweets and the noobs all follow Buying high selling low what a gain
But the boomers know and sailor he knows That the dump is coming it's all the same it's the circle of exit liquidity
and it moves us all through despair and hope through faith and full mode till we find our place
Faith and FOMO till we find our place on the path unwinding in the circle
The circle of exit
Liquidity Some of us fall by the wayside and some of us soar to the stars.
But the influencers always win with the Lambos and their cars.
So beware of the pump and the inevitable dump for the cycle continues and the new Crypto na na, Exit Liquidity, Hot oh na na, Dump it all The circle of exit liquidity
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and FOMO
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding in the circle
The circle of exit
Liquidity Beautiful to hear it in awesome quality.
The best song in the entire world. everyone have a great week bye-bye
bye-bye Thank you.
