Drivechain is a proposed soft fork that has faced a lot of criticism in the community, and Shinobi (Technical Editor of Bitcoin Magazine) joins me to discuss his critiques of the idea. We discuss:

• What is Drivechain
• How it works
• Miner centralisation
• Re orgs on sidechains
• T-shirt sales argument
• Stratum v2
• “Miners can steal”
• Other soft fork ideas (e.g. APO, CTV)
• Multi Party Channels
• “First Develop with what we’ve got”

Links:

• Twitter: brian_trollz on X
• Drivechains Introduce New Incentive Dynamics to Bitcoin
• Achim Warner – Thoughts on Drivechain I  

Sponsors:

• Pacific Bitcoin Festival (code LIVERA)
• CoinKite.com (code LIVERA)
• Mempool.space

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on Twitter @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast

Podcast Transcripts:

Stephan (00:01.669)
Welcome back to the show. It’s been a while. And of course, congratulations on your new role as technical editor of Bitcoin magazine.

Shinobi (00:09.218)
Well thanks a lot, Stephan, it’s good to be here. Obviously apologies for being the uncatchable rascal for the last month or two.

Stephan (00:20.332)
It’s all good. It’s all good. I think I’ve been meeting to chat with you for a while. Obviously, there has been a lot of arguments going back and forth about drive chains. I know you are one of the prominent critiquers of that idea, particularly around the MEV centralization angle. And of course, you have a lot of interesting ideas around the future of Bitcoin and some of these other ideas. So, you know, let’s get into some of these ideas. Do you have any kind of

Opening I guess context setting that you want to do around this whole drive chain argument I mean, it’s you know drive chains the idea was from maybe 2015 or 2016 And in fact in our first episode maybe four or five years ago. We spoke about it even then But it seems to have come up recently and perhaps the reason for that is the recent VC round or raising By the company behind it layer two labs But yeah, do you have any context setting that you want to do around drive chain?

Shinobi (01:17.418)
I mean, just like these, you know, criticisms of the proposal are not something new. You know, like, like you said, this is a proposal from 2015. And a lot of us went through all of this back as early as 2016, 2017. And just, I wouldn’t say this is framing just more.

like my feelings and attitude about dealing with this are kind of at this point just like Jesus Christ guys like are we seriously gonna do this again for the third or the fourth or the fifth time you know I get why side chains are something a lot of people want and support it’s literally one of the oldest proposals for scaling or adding new features to bitcoin

besides let’s just make blocks bigger. But there’s a reason that hasn’t come to fruition outside of things like liquid or RSK which are just federated systems. And it’s the complexity of how do you make a pegging mechanism that lets you move between these blockchains that’s safe, that doesn’t add risks to

And despite the claims by drive chain proponents, that has not been accomplished yet.

Stephan (02:52.397)
Yeah, okay. So can we just start with expelling or just, sorry, explaining what drive chain is just in very simple terms for people who are, let’s say, new to the space or maybe just are only learning about what this is now. So just a very high level, what is drive chain?

Shinobi (03:08.33)
Well, there’s two pieces to it. There’s the BIP 300, which is the hash rate escrow or the pegging mechanism. So how you actually lock coins on the main chain and transfer them back and forth between other blockchains. That’s essentially just giving control of coins to miners. And when it comes to getting them back out, it’s essentially a vote.

wants to pull their coins out of a side chain, they propose the transaction that does that, and it gets put up to a vote on the main chain by miners for roughly three months. And within that three month period, 75% of the hash rate on the network has to essentially vote yes before that withdrawal transaction can actually finally confirm on chain.

part one like how you actually lock the coins up and unlock them to transfer them to these other side chains and

Stephan (04:15.986)
Yep. One clarification there. What we’re talking about here is mining pools at this point, not just individual miners. Yeah.

Shinobi (04:22.782)
Well, technically pools are going to be the ones coordinating that at the end of the day, but you still need the actual miners to provide work and get the blocks that pools put together mined that vote yes or no on these withdrawal transactions. So there is a heavy involvement from pools, but they still absolutely cannot do this without the actual miners.

Stephan (04:51.22)
Gotcha, correct. Okay, and if you could just go on then to the 301 component, the BIP 301 component.

Shinobi (04:59.082)
That’s the blind merge mining proposal. So how blocks would actually be You know kind of minted and confirmed for these side chains and the proposal there is Essentially to try to create a bidding market where any person who is not a miner can kind of put a side chain block together and What they do is then

take the hash of that block in the header and then put that into a main chain Bitcoin transaction and attach fees to the miners for it. And so the idea is that anybody, even if they don’t mine, can kind of come along, put a block together for the side chain and then bid to pay actual miners to confirm those blocks in a kind of open bidding market. And the idea is that person takes their coins

they pay the miners and if the miners pick their block then they lose those main chain coins the miners collect them but they’re able to claim rewards on the side chain to make up for what they paid to miners. That’s kind of the very basic high level and the important thing there though is that the way the BIP is constructed requires in the same block that a miner claims

that fee from somebody that there be a matching output in their coinbase transaction that corresponds to that transaction that the other user bid with. So there is no way for a miner to collect a fee from somebody who made a sidechain block without actually approving that sidechain block atomically in their coinbase. So they cannot get that money unless they actually approve

vlog.

Stephan (07:00.02)
Okay, and as I understand, so just very high level, the idea with sidechains is that you can peg in and then peg back out. That’s sort of the generalized idea with sidechains. But in this case, because it’s a hash rate is screw, it’s almost like the miners are the ones you need to peg out, right? And that’s distinguished from, let’s say, liquid federation where, you know, 11 of 15 functionaries have to let you peg out, right?

Shinobi (07:25.898)
Yeah, but you know, semantically though.

I would say the only difference between the two things there would be who is the federation. I mean like conceptually I would still call drive chain a federated system. It’s just instead of explicitly defined members holding keys, it’s anybody who comes along that has hashrate. So it’s more open in terms of membership.

Shinobi (08:00.152)
might see positives there, there’s also negatives. So while honest members can join this federation, air quotes, without permission from anybody, so can dishonest members. Whereas with a traditional federation, new honest members need existing participants permission to join, but so do malicious members. So I still

Shinobi (08:29.872)
federated custodial thing so to say it’s just the nature of that federation is different and that’s kind of the argument from Proponents about why this is superior

Stephan (08:40.988)
Okay, gotcha. And so just to, I guess, spell out what drive chain proponents see as the positives. Now, I guess separately for listeners, I have also agreed to host a debate. Peter Todd and Paul Storz, when the time is right, they’re going to come on and have a debate on the show as well. But in terms of if I had to try to summarize, at least to Steelman, the drive chain proponents see it like, okay, there’s going to be 256 drive coins or drive chain side chains. And the idea is that

theoretically Bitcoin can replicate the functionality of altcoins or add in other features that are not yet on Bitcoin’s main chain and they view this like using this drive chain proposal People can test out other functionality there now I don’t really agree but their argument is oh it’s going to end or reduce some of the politics in terms of soft fork politics because People can just spin things up on a drive chain side coin whether that’s they want some kind of Z coin or Z cash

functionality or a Monero functionality or Ethereum functionality or some other thing, or even Bitcoin soft forks. That’s how I’m understanding, at least the steel man of what they want. Do you see it differently or how are you seeing that before we then get into criticisms?

Shinobi (09:54.912)
I’d say that’s an accurate way to frame their perception of things.

Stephan (09:59.708)
Yep. Okay. So let’s go into some criticisms then. So in your mind, what are the top, you know, few criticisms of drive chains that you would have?

Shinobi (10:11.37)
Well, I’d say the most important ones.

have to do with mining incentives and mining centralization. To put as succinctly as possible, the design goal of blind merge mining was to ensure that miners can collect fees from all these side chains without having to actually care about them. I think the incentives for that are broken and that they will naturally kind of domino and cascade to the point

miners will in fact wind up doing all of this themselves and that over time it will even become economically necessary for miners to do these things themselves and once you get to that point you know the claim about what blind merge mining accomplishes it just falls apart like the entire point is that miners can collect this revenue without actually doing this work and I

not think that the proposal will actually accomplish that. So it will create centralization pressures, incentive issues that are something that main chain users who do not use any of these side chains will have to deal with and consider.

Stephan (11:18.763)
I see.

Stephan (11:32.712)
I see. So let me summarize that then as part of the whole reason we care so much about bitcoins being decentralized is that it’s easy to validate. So then what we got into, I guess what we’re sort of going into here is with drive chain, the idea is that the miners, but the individual miners and the mining pools, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to run.

all of the sidechain full nodes or do all the validation required, right? Of doing Ethereum validation of Monero, of Zcash, of whatever other sidecoins. And so the way the drive chain people are trying to get around this is they’re trying to say, well, we’ve got this blind merge mining idea where if the sidechain miners don’t want to validate, they don’t have to, they can just take the highest transaction fee. And so…

I guess what you’re saying is the argument counter to that is, and I believe Alex B, Alex Burge has also made similar kind of arguments, which is that in a very cutthroat competitive market, these miners, and particularly mining pools, will have an incentive to vertically integrate and they will then actually take on that role of validation because in some instances, so for example, in Ethereum, this is literally a thing, it’s called MEV, Miner Extracted Value.

and it relates to specific opportunities that are available to people who are doing that extra validation. And so that’s part of this argument here that miners will get, there’ll be a centralization vector here because you’ll need to do it to be competitive. Would you say that’s a fair summary or how do you wanna expand that?

Shinobi (13:13.758)
Yeah, you know, I think just the first level of what’s wrong with the thinking here is just the basic economics, you know, like to put some numbers to this.

The whole idea is that non miners working on these sidechain nodes to construct blocks, you know, pay the miners and their argument is that this will get so competitive that 99% of all the money being earned on these sidechains will just get paid to main chain miners without them having to do anything and the other people will just keep 1%. But let’s put some numbers to that.

Say that every side chain block on one side chain generates 0.1 Bitcoin. Well, with the withdrawal time taking three months, that means for that three month period, collectively between everybody constructing these blocks, you need to lock up 1200 Bitcoin.

in these side chains. Like you effectively have to take 1200 Bitcoin that you already have, give it to miners in exchange for that amount plus the 1% on the side chain, for a chance at collecting 12 Bitcoin in reward.

So, you know, let’s say there’s 10 people doing that. Each one of those people have to put 120 Bitcoin at risk for the chance to earn 1.2 Bitcoin.

Shinobi (14:58.402)
Do you think an economically rational person is going to take that much in Bitcoin capital that they already have and risk it for that small of a return? I don’t think they will. I think the reality is that people doing that will try to keep much more than just that one percent. And when you start looking at that in percentage terms, that’s extra revenue that these

mining pools could capture for themselves and miners who mine with them by just cutting all of these people out and running these nodes themselves. Because unlike these other people, I don’t have to pay myself to put my own sidechain block commitment in the blocks that I’m mining. I don’t have to have that 120 Bitcoin to do that. I just put the hash in my block.

on the sidechain. So I don’t have as a miner that capital requirement to be able to compete over these rewards. I already have that in the form of the pool, the hash rate. I don’t have to reinvest that again in order to claim these rewards. And so just at the basic level, without looking at MEV or other issues, I think the reality is that there is going to be enough of a margin that these other

are trying to keep to themselves, that alone is enough of an incentive for miners and mining pools to just do this all themselves. And then over time…

Stephan (16:33.63)
Interesting.

Stephan (16:37.884)
Okay, interesting. So let me just walk that through. So just as you’re saying, it’s without even going into the MEV, you’re actually saying there’s a mining centralization vector just at the pool level because people will have an incentive to sort of cut other people out and try to take the reward for themselves. Is that what you’re saying?

Shinobi (16:57.312)
Yeah.

Stephan (16:58.74)
Gotcha. And so in terms of those numbers, could you just walk us through that example? I didn’t quite follow everything you were saying. Point one BTC in the side chain and you were saying 1200 BTC. Is that just because of that? How many blocks for three months or what?

Shinobi (17:12.842)
Yeah. Like if you look at 0.1 BTC every single block in a side chain and it’s going to be the same block interval as the main chain, then for three months that adds up to a little more than 1200 Bitcoin. And so 1% of that would be 12 Bitcoin, you know, just, just to put like concrete numbers in people’s heads to think about instead of abstract percentages.

Stephan (17:34.985)
I see.

Stephan (17:40.74)
I see. And so this is just like at the first level, and then you can take it even further, right? Like with the MEV angle and with other angles, right? So what would you say is the next, I guess, biggest critique you’d have?

Shinobi (17:52.054)
Well, the next issue is kind of how reorgs work on a side chain. Let’s say you are.

the person who’s not a miner, you’re just competing for these sidechain rewards. Well, let’s say you are the miner, Stephan. Well, I pay you 0.1 Bitcoin to be able to claim a little more than that on this sidechain. Well, reorgs happen independent of the main chain on a sidechain. So we can have main chain block 100 commit to sidechain block 100.

101 can commit to an alternative version of sidechain block 100 and then main chain block 102 you know whatever like sidechain block that one builds on whichever version of sidechain 101 will decide which one is like confirmed in terms of the longest tip on the sidechain well you can take my money for

Stephan (18:38.524)
I see.

Shinobi (19:01.14)
of sidechain block 100 and then your next main chain block you can just reorg my sidechain block out so you are in a position where you can not only take my 0.1 bitcoin on the main chain but then you can reorg my sidechain block and take that from me as well and you get double rewarded and there’s nothing i can do about it except sink more money into things and hope some other miner

side chain block instead of yours. But the thing is there, bigger pools are going to have a bigger percentage chance at also mining the block after that where they can lock their side chain block in and you know guarantee that I wind up losing not only what I paid but what I could have earned as well. So there is a big asymmetry here in terms of risk. When a miner mines their own side chain

They’re also open to the side chain block being reorged while the main chain keeps going forward, but they only lose revenue they could have earned. They don’t lose money they already had like I would as a non-miner. And so there’s that asymmetry.

Stephan (20:18.372)
I see, because they’re still getting the BMM revenue, right?

Shinobi (20:22.314)
Well, I mean, they would get nothing if their sidechain block was reorg. So they would lose the potential revenue they could have claimed, but they didn’t have to pay for the chance at that. So while they do lose out on the opportunity cost of that, I not only lose out on the opportunity cost, I lose out on the money I already had that I paid and relinquished control out of. So I lose way more than a miner would.

of an asymmetry where the risk for me as a non-minor is higher than for somebody who is actually a main chain minor. So that’s just a second disincentive for outside participants to take a role in this because I have more at risk than somebody who’s already a minor in terms of moving the side chain forward.

Stephan (21:18.348)
And so the corollary, the lesson here in this sense is it would raise the bar to be a profitable miner or mining pool is probably the most centralization would be happening, correct?

Shinobi (21:34.686)
Yeah. And you know, the incentive there is also kind of mining pools who capture more of this value are also going to attract more actual miners to that pool, because it’s going to be more profitable than other pools. And so that the

Stephan (21:50.7)
to point your hash rate to the big pool, yeah. Yeah. And so now one of the arguments, I guess the counter argument that I have seen from the drive chain proponent camp, because I don’t agree with this, but this is their argument I’ve heard, is they say that it’s sort of like an ancillary services, as an example, if Brain’s pool has a merchandise shop that sells Brain’s t-shirts, that they make this argument, another similar kind of related.

argument is they say, well, miners have to go and do all kinds of things to get better power or, you know, to get hash rate basically where they, you know, might go and you know, need to negotiate power deals or other things, you know, in terms of innovating on the ASIC machine. Another argument I’ve heard is this argument that, well, it’s similar to if, you know, the Texas, some Texas miners are doing curtailment and they’re receiving sort of

reward in a way or getting paid for turning off. And that’s like an incentive outside the system. And so this is no different to that. Why should you care about, why are you so kicking off such a stink about drive chains when there’s all these other factors that miners have to do today? What would you say to that?

Shinobi (23:06.962)
Well, to address the t-shirt merchandise example, because that’s not the same industry.

Like when it comes to mining side chains, you are reusing your existing capital investment. I don’t have to go out and buy more miners to mine a side chain. I already bought those miners. I can reuse my existing capital investment. Like for mining pools to spin these nodes up, they don’t have to go buy new data centers and new server equipment. They already have that. They are reusing.

existing capital investment. Whereas something like the t-shirt shop, you can’t just use your data center to make t-shirts. Like you actually have to go out and make new capital investments and new infrastructure, new production capacity and a whole new industry to compete and even footing there. So that’s very different in terms of the economics of that.

Like yes, anybody can go start any business, but you can’t go start any other business with your existing capital, like you can integrating side chains like this. And you know, that very important distinction aside, I still think like, okay, so there are outside influences or incentives to the mining ecosystem that may present some damaging risk.

an argument for why we should add more of those things. That’s an argument for why we should do the exact opposite and not add more of those outside incentives because we need to see how the existing ones actually play out and how much damage or negative externalities the existing ones create before we even consider rushing to add more outside influences like that.

Stephan (25:16.763)
Okay, so I guess summarizing some of the key arguments so far, it’s that there is generally a mining centralization vector because the sidechain miners may integrate and take some of the raw for themselves. We’ve mentioned also an impact around reorgs on the sidechain, which could also create issues. We’ve mentioned, let’s say, the t-shirt example, I think…

I presume your counter argument in terms of the curtailment sort of example is like you were saying, that maybe that is a bad thing and that we should not encourage that or exacerbate that further, that the incentives of the Bitcoin mining system should be kind of self-contained in terms of Bitcoin block reward, as opposed to having rewards that can kind of come from the fiat system or from outside of Bitcoin.

Shinobi (26:06.74)
Yeah.

You know, like if you live in a shitty neighborhood in the city, you know, where gangbangers are hanging out outside all day, and that presents a risk to you every time you go outside. Are you, is your attitude going to be, well, fuck it, there’s already gangbangers outside, let’s just invite a whole bunch more to the block. Like you, you have a risk to you, so fuck it, let’s just make that risk work. Like that is completely irrational.

argument for why to do something.

Stephan (26:41.568)
I see. And so, do you have any other kind of key arguments that you really wanna hit in terms of the drive chain? Because I’ve got a few other points, but I’m curious to hear your views first.

Shinobi (26:53.55)
Well, just say like the MEV issues. This is a massive similarity or comparison with what’s going on in the Ethereum ecosystem right now. And it’s kind of a similar thing to the T-shirt shop arguments. Ethereum has been trying.

to separate these roles of who is actually on a consensus level confirming and finalizing blocks and who is actually filling the contents of those blocks and putting them together exactly to try to deal with the issue of MEV on Ethereum to make that MEV risk something competitive and decentralized but the reality is that even though they have tried to

separate those roles, they are still vertically integrating. You still have the stakers and the staking pools, instead of leaving the MEV extraction outsourced, they are vertically integrating those operations into their own staking operations. And so this entire argument that you can just make this an open competitive thing to try to mitigate the damage, this is not just a hypothetical,

like we can literally see this play out in Ethereum right now and it’s not working. Like everything they are trying to do to mitigate these issues and stop them from being centralization pressures, it is failing and those dynamics are causing centralization anyway. So that is something and you know just to be clear drive chains are not at all the only way

that MEV can come to Bitcoin but that issue specifically is something we should be extremely cautious about with everything that we activate in Bitcoin because we can see the other ecosystem in Ethereum where they were not cautious about introducing those things from day one in terms of how the engineering and the architecture of the system was designed and they’re becoming very

Shinobi (29:17.664)
problems in that ecosystem. So like that is not something we should just dismiss or hand wave away as we’ll figure it out because they’re trying to and they’re not figuring it out.

Stephan (29:19.88)
Yeah. And

Stephan (29:26.879)
Yeah.

Stephan (29:30.388)
Okay, and so just to make sure everyone can follow along, do you mind just giving like a very simple explanation of what MEV is and why it has certain centralizing pressures or why it’s an issue?

Shinobi (29:43.926)
Well, in abstract, it’s any type of value that can be extracted from the activity on a blockchain where the consensus makers, so the miners or the stakers or whoever is actually moving your blockchain forward are in a unique position where they can extract that value, whereas others can’t. You know, the simplest way to think about it in the vast majority of cases is just they are in a position where they can front run you.

So let’s say there is a decentralized exchange on some blockchain with lots of profitable trades and people just interact with whatever contract is operating that DEX to trade and make profit. Every time you do that and it goes into a mempool, a miner can look at that and go, oh, that guy made money and drop someone else’s transaction and just recreate a version of themselves doing that.

they can take that profit themselves. And, you know, it’s, in practice, can get a lot more nuanced than that, but just at the basic abstract level, it’s the miners, because they control what goes into the block, are in a special position to front run any type of transaction that is open for people to participate in that can generate profit. And so that’s…

You know, that’s a very closed type of revenue stream that not everybody can take advantage of. Like miners or stakers or whoever is working your blockchain are like the unique decider of whether or not things like that happen. And they’re in control of it.

Stephan (31:36.048)
And my understanding of why that’s a bad thing also is that it is a very highly specialized industry, if you will. There’s very few people who really deeply understand these nuances. And so then it’s hard to get the talent who can actually exploit that MEV. And so there’s very, I guess, it sort of privileges the people who really those pools or those stakers in the Ethereum world who have access to that kind of talent. So then I guess the…

bringing that to Bitcoin, that would be an issue then because it would be the same kind of centralizing pressure towards the big pools who can afford this kind of MEV exploiting talent, right?

Shinobi (32:17.994)
Yeah, and you know, even if that talent is elsewhere and doesn’t want to come to those pools, there is still a huge incentive for those pools to develop that talent in house. And you can see this objectively in what’s happening in Ethereum. You can even see like that objectively starting to happen in Bitcoin, you know, just searching for external or new sources of revenue, Luxor, bot ordinals hub.

and they are actually as a mining pool exploring the ordinals ecosystem as a new stream of revenue. F2 pool is actually front running stacks miners, like a kind of parachain on top of bitcoin and they are just ignoring the open competition from other people trying to progress the stacks chain forward and just doing it themselves to capture that value.

Shinobi (33:19.729)
see that mining pools are investing time, capital, and resources into looking at new streams of revenue. So if you see other forms of MEV start appearing on Bitcoin, miners will explore that. That is a new stream of revenue for them, and their incentive is to maximize profit.

Stephan (33:47.976)
Right, and similarly, kind of similar to the gangbanger example earlier, there is this argument, oh, MEV will exist on Bitcoin anyway, so therefore, you know, drive chains and just accept it sort of argument. But I presume it would be the same kind of gangbanger example where you would say, well, the fact that this bad thing exists is not a reason why we should encourage it or exacerbate that issue. Is that how you would comment that issue?

Shinobi (34:14.782)
Yeah, I mean like MEV is not just a black and white thing. It’s a very nuanced thing more along the lines of a spectrum. Like if you want to get like autistically technical, like just picking fee or transactions with the highest fees is a form of MEV. It is a value that only miners are in a unique position to extract and they want to maximize that.

And so you the more complex that the route for extracting value becomes the more centralizing it’s going to be because the more specialization it will take the more resource intensive it is. So we should absolutely be trying to keep the complexity of any type of MEV like that appears on Bitcoin as low as possible. Because when you have low complexity,

for everybody to participate in. That’s where you’re not going to have like a massive disproportionate benefit for the really large miners or the really large pools. And we should not just be looking at some very basic, not complex form of MEV and use that as an argument to go fuck it, like just let everything happen.

Stephan (35:38.1)
Gotcha. And so another point to add here is that there is currently a project in Bitcoin circles known as stratum V2. Obviously, I’m sure you’re aware of this. But for listeners, the idea is that there are a range of benefits that it can take away man in the middle attacks by adding encryption. But crucially, one important factor is that it could make it so that miners can create their own block template, i.e. individual miners can select which transactions go into their blocks and instead of taking that away from the at the pool level.

Now there is progress on this, there’s stratum reference implementation which should be coming out soonish, soon to year, maybe a few months. In your view Shinobi, do you view drive chains as cutting against any progress being made there in terms of advancing Bitcoin mining pool decentralization?

Shinobi (36:26.358)
Yes, I do. I think it adds a lot of cost because you have no idea what the validation cost of any drive chain is going to be. Like once you allow people to start activating drive chains, it is impossible to constrain them. Like you cannot dictate how complex the validation cost is going to be, what the

Shinobi (36:56.192)
making the potential cost of running all of these to maximize all of the revenue you’re generating infinite like at the most extreme case and that completely undermines like the entire goal of something like stratum v2 or like to take it like all the way something like braid pool which is accomplishing the same thing as stratum v2 but also making the payout to the individual miners

custodial and trustless and it undermines you know the goal of moving in that direction because no matter what you do it’s more complex like it’s either more expensive for an individual miner to construct all these block templates themselves or sorry or it’s way more complex for uh you know all of these drive chains to have to interact in some way with miners who

are running stratum for the base layer. It’s adding cost, it’s adding complexity if you try to mitigate that cost. It’s just fundamentally throwing a wrench in the possibility of improving that aspect of mining.

Stephan (38:13.128)
Right, and I think another example I’ve heard of is P2 pool. Is it P2 pool? Where the idea is that kind of a similar sort of idea where maybe the pool has less control over what’s going into the block, but in a drive chain context, it’s cutting against that as well, right?

Shinobi (38:19.149)
Yeah.

Shinobi (38:29.654)
Yeah, P2 pool is kind of like the ancestor of something like Braid pool. It’s a decentralized mining pool protocol.

Stephan (38:36.652)
See you next time.

Shinobi (38:41.198)
miners participating in it kind of have their own blockchain in between the actual blocks in the real blockchain With lower difficulty just to keep track of who’s doing how much work but the problem with P2 pool is that every individual miner has to have a specific output paying them their cuts in the coinbase transaction which makes those coin bases huge and it

all of the miners income into tiny UTXOs and it just hit massive scaling problems. Braidpool is kind of an improvement on that design looking at a lightning hub or hub and spoke design to kind of cache all of those individual payments off chain atomically like you have the coinbase go to a hub that hub atomically

block through payment channels to the individual hasher. And then periodically, miners can close those channels, have them reopened, and sign over complete control to the hub of the actual Coinbase output, and just massively improve the on-chain footprint of doing this in a decentralized way.

Stephan (40:02.668)
I see. And my understanding with Braidpool is that one would actually require a soft fork, whereas Stratov2 does not, right?

Shinobi (40:09.102)
No, there’s no software needed for Braidpool. You would just need kind of customized lightning software because the script structure used to connect the lightning payout to the Coinbase is kind of non-standard in how it’s constructed a little bit. So you would just need like some custom lightning software for the hub operator and miners. And other than that,

Stephan (40:12.764)
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. Okay.

Shinobi (40:39.209)
No fork is necessary.

Stephan (40:40.832)
Okay, great. One other big argument that is here with drive chains is this concept of miners can steal, right? So that’s kind of another big criticism that people are leveling against drive chains. So I guess there’s a few different ins and outs here. One argument here is that there would be politics even on which particular side chains get activated. And another argument is also that it may raise a lot of main chain politics

UASF arguments if miners were to try and steal. So do you want to just give a bit of an overview of this particular argument and maybe spell out your views on that also?

Shinobi (41:22.73)
Well, so the whole risk of, you know, the custody aspect there is like I said earlier, when you put coins into a drive chain, you are effectively giving full custody of those coins on the main chain to Bitcoin miners. And whatever 75% of miners want to do with those coins, they can do. So they can just in theory, just take every coin locked into every side chain.

and the consensus rules explicitly allow them to do that as long as 75% of the miners agree. And an important thing to remember here is in practice if miners were really set on doing this it doesn’t take 75% it just takes 51% because any miner who does not you know up vote theft

to approve them, at the end of the day if you have a 51 plus majority they can just orphan those blocks. I do want to kind of couch this with though that is

Stephan (42:30.944)
I see.

Shinobi (42:38.298)
If we’re at a point where miners are doing that, then we likely have bigger problems than these side chains are getting looted. Now, I will also say, most of Bitcoiners’ concerns with 51% attacks like that are around an explicit cartel of miners deciding we are going to organize together and do malicious things.

see situations where miners could form a majority to mess with drive chains like that without an explicit like malicious cartel like that. Like there could be situations where it’s just the incentives are aligned for a majority of miners to do something regarding a drive chain and it’s not like some explicit conspiracy. Like these miners have not sat down and gone we are

everything like there is just an incentive alignment for them to cooperate to do this one thing but that’s still

pretty bad situation we would be in. Personally, I’m not so concerned about those risks in the short to medium term if drive chains were activated. I’m more concerned about those types of risks like 20, 30, 40 years down the road. Like if drive chains were activated and we do wind up in a world

Shinobi (44:16.516)
types of minor dynamics are now geopolitics. It’s not just us sitting here discussing businesses in a niche ecosystem anymore. You are talking blocks of nations, superpowers, that level of thing. And I think in that type of environment, if drive chains are widely adopted, then the issue of theft could become kind of serious. Like imagine, say, you’re

some pariah state like North Korea has a drive chain and all of the other countries and nations come together and go well we’re just gonna take all of their money like that’s where that’s the level where I think the issue of theft starts becoming a plausible risk and something to worry about but you know if we’re just talking like right now Bitcoin is still a relatively niche

Shinobi (45:16.758)
at that scale.

Stephan (45:19.18)
I see. And just sharing something I’ve seen now shout out to a Chim Warner, I’ll put the link in the show notes, but he has a blog post where he talks about a few examples of some of these, you know, where there could be politics brought in to this. And so just as an example, I mean, hypothetically, there could be like some kind of assassination market chain or something like this, or, you know, something where, you know, people would just be making all kinds of crazy side chains. And then there may be others, other miners who are trying to

shut that down or stop that chain. So there could be sort of fights in that way. And that could be another angle for which there could be politics between and even between nations, right? So if it’s kind of like something focused on the leader of one nation hates the leader of another nation, you know, there’s another angle for more politics there, don’t you think?

Shinobi (46:09.394)
Yeah, you know that’s, it’s kind of the thing. It’s if Bitcoin really does become a global currency, like do we really want those types of incentive dynamics where it is possible for coins to just outright be stolen by miners? Like we have no idea how this is going to play out in the longterm if we get to that type of scale. You know.

I know Bitcoiners don’t like to hear shit like this, but hello, I’m Shinobi and this is Planet Earth. And when things become critical to the global economy, to diplomatic relationships, nation states generally get together and they make treaties about things. So like we really should not be looking at introducing new dynamics like this, just assume

we know what the mining landscape is going to look like. That we know what the politics, what the regulations of the mining ecosystem is going to look like 20-30 years from now because we don’t. Like that is just something we are going to watch evolve and have to deal with problems as they pop up as it evolves. And…

something like drive chains opening the door to theft, to miners explicitly custodying these coins is introducing a completely new variable into that situation in terms of how things could evolve over the next few decades.

Stephan (47:51.04)
Right. And so I think another point that you were touching on earlier, it’s this idea that a lot of miners have very low profit margins. And so if there are miners with an incentive outside the traditional ones, they may be able to push out the traditional miners. And so in that context, or say 20 or 30 years down the line, it could be that some nation state is sort of having an incentive external to earning Bitcoin, where they want to try to influence

what happens in the chain. So I think that’s maybe an example of what you’re getting out there.

Shinobi (48:25.49)
Mm-hmm.

Stephan (48:28.107)
All right.

Shinobi (48:28.566)
But yeah, it’s just that it’s adding a whole lot of variables when we’re not even sure how things are going to play out with the existing variables. And I think it’s just it’s incredibly impatient, short sighted. And the general rationalization for it is the air quotes security budget, which is again, something people just keep making bold assumptions on.

We really have no idea how that’s going to play out. None of us are clairvoyant. We don’t see the future. We don’t even know whether that is or is not actually going to be a problem for this system. People are just assuming it will. We should not be trying to fix problems before we’re even sure that is a problem.

Stephan (49:24.416)
Okay, and so one other angle that I see, and I’m curious to get your views on this, there is this argument that, well, if the miners try to steal in drive chains, there could be a main chain UASF to block that theft. Now, I see that as a potential to create just a lot of soft fork politics and cacophony, because there’ll be 256 slots, and if users on any one of those slots are getting

that they will try to have a UASF to say, hey, main chain Bitcoin users save us from getting rugged. What do you think of that risk?

Shinobi (50:05.026)
I think I feel similar to the risk of theft in general. I think in the short to medium term, that wouldn’t really be much. It would be a small group of people crying to change bitcoin because the consequences of their actions are coming home to bite them in the ass and everyone else would just laugh and say I told you so. But if you’re talking nation states looting from other nation states, that’s a big

very different scenario. That could potentially do something like cause a permanent chain split that will never resolve and every time that happens that could just further and further fragment Bitcoin’s network effect. If some nation had a drive chain that was being used to facilitate commerce, let’s say that’s 10-20% of a country’s GDP in there and it gets stolen, well they’re forking.

And they don’t care whether everyone comes along with them or not, or whether they wind up on their own fork chain because, hey, it’s that or we have nothing. And…

You know, again, it’s like once you start looking at a truly global scale, like some of those problems with drive chains that wouldn’t be problems right now could present very serious problems.

Stephan (51:34.124)
Yeah, so I think we’ve covered a lot of different angles in terms of your critiques of drive chains. So let me just summarize a few of them. Mainly you’ve made the case that there would be minor centralization because they can just take some of those rewards for themselves. There may be reorgs on the side chain. We’ve spoken about the t-shirt example and why the t-shirt analogy perhaps is not relevant. The MEV issues as well as miners can steal and soft fork politics. So

With all of that said, do you have any other thoughts that you want to summarize in terms of your thoughts on drive chains?

Shinobi (52:10.966)
I mean, personally, I am kind of at the opinion today that any type of sidechain that tries to involve minors is just something that introduces very bad incentives. I’m kind of at the point where I don’t think it’s possible to involve minors without doing that.

But that said…

Shinobi (52:43.291)
I don’t understand the obsession with drive chains and hash rate escrows given all of the progress being made in the last couple years with efficiency gains and security proofs regarding zero knowledge proof systems. If people really want side chains, if they are dead set on that is a valuable solution for them.

I really don’t get why they’re so obsessed with this convoluted, complicated design that’s almost a decade old at this point, when so much progress is being made with zero-knowledge proofs. Something that gives you a basis to actually have a trustless peg instead of just trusting the miners to be honest.

Shinobi (53:40.904)
I own these coins on this sidechain, I can withdraw them right now, and that proof is actually validated on the main chain. I’m not just trusting miners to be honest, I can put a proof in the main chain that is succinct and cheap for everybody to verify without unduly burdening main chain users to prove that I am honestly withdrawing my coins. I really do not understand

instead of looking forward and trying to improve upon the sidechain concept.

Stephan (54:18.316)
I see. So just to get some of your thoughts about broader ideas and soft forks that people are talking about, I think I see a lot of discussion, a lot of debate about various ideas, check template verify, any prev out, APO, Tx hash plus check sig from stack, op vault. There are various ideas and then things that these things enable, whether that’s arc, payment pools.

you know, things like non-interactive channels and things like that. But I also see a camp of people who are saying, it’s not compelling enough, right? It needs to be more than just interesting. It needs to really be like, it needs to really meet a very high bar before people are in favor of that. Um, so looking at some of those soft forks that people are talking about now, where do you, do you have any broad comments about some of those ideas?

Shinobi (55:08.391)
Well, personally, I would like to see…

more discussion and consideration specifically around CTV, APO, and OpVault. They are incredibly simple proposals, the most basic covenants that you could make, and there is a litany of new second layers that can be built using those or improvements to existing ones. You know, Arc obviously is probably one of the best known ones.

I have a few ideas myself. Moonsettler, if anybody’s familiar with him, has proposed a few layers of his own. Polyud has published two papers now, I think, on his concept called the Enigma Network, which is a way to vastly improve the on-chain efficiency and security of second

Shinobi (56:11.636)
They’re very simple, safe primitives that open up a lot of new design space for second layers that actually anchor and are enforced. Like enforced, you’re not just trusting miners by the base layer. And I think that is the direction we should be looking in terms of scaling solutions. Like, we don’t need permission to build custodial things. We don’t need new features to build

just do that. Like you don’t need permission, you don’t need to change Bitcoin to do that. We need new features, we need changes for new or improved non-custodial solutions. And you know, to be clear, drive chains are custodial. The miners are the custodians and miners are a dynamic group, but it is still custodial.

I really think that priorities, especially regarding consideration, discussion, like learning about things, should focus on non-custodial things. And in terms of people…

kind of not even on board with that. There are a good amount of people out there who are just very cautious. They don’t fully understand the implications of those proposals and what they mean and that’s a completely rational place to be or view to take. That’s why I think it’s so important to continue having these conversations so that people can better understand these proposals,

Shinobi (57:51.536)
downsides are or trade-offs. But on the other side, there are quite a lot of people who have just obstinately decided no change period, who not only don’t understand these proposals being put forward, but are actively arguing that there are downsides or risks that just factually do not exist. There

Shinobi (58:21.296)
harm could be done or negative consequences created that just are not. And frankly, me personally, I am starting to get to a point where we should just ignore those people. And this kind of comes to the very core of how development on Bitcoin has worked and should continue to work. The idea of rough consensus. Like everything here is not a vote. We don’t need

unanimous consensus to soft-fork things. We just need a very high level of support and the entire notion of rough consensus is this is not voting. This is give me your criticism. I will address your criticism. If your criticism has been addressed, if problems you have or concerns you have been dealt with, if a proposal has been changed to mitigate them, if it has been shown that

that concern is not valid, then that concern is done. Like you cannot just keep coming back with the same concern that’s been addressed over and over and over and use that as an argument to say there is no consensus. Because the consensus is have the concerns been addressed? Not does everybody support this, but have problems actually been addressed? Have they been fixed? Have they been shown not to be problems? And yeah.

If there is going to be a group of Bitcoiners who is going who they’re just gonna be that guy who keeps bringing up the same False concern or the same concern that’s been addressed over and over and over and I’m just gonna ignore you Because you are not participating in this conversation. You are not having a dialogue. You are not informing yourself You are just obstinately trying to be a brick in the road for zero logical reason

and I wish it.

Stephan (01:00:20.904)
Okay. So do you have any examples of this in terms of like some of those proposals we were talking about?

Shinobi (01:00:28.014)
Um, well, the concern that say check template verify, um, can enable government white listing, um, so that you can only spend your coins where the government says, um, one, you can do that.

Stephan (01:00:35.488)
Gotcha. Yeah.

Stephan (01:00:40.048)
Yeah, obviously that’s been, I think that’s been fairly addressed, yeah.

Shinobi (01:00:43.35)
Yeah, but you know, you can do that now with multi-sig and that’s not how a check template verify works. It lets you commit to ahead of time a predefined path to spend coins, but it has to end eventually and just relinquish control of those coins. You cannot pre-define something into infinity forever because you don’t…

know where things are going to go forever in the future. Like eventually there has to be a defined point where this restriction ends and these coins can now be spent wherever whoever has them wants to spend them.

and that type of criticism, I’m ignoring you because it’s just factually wrong and we should not have to just deal with that type of shit to try to build consensus amongst people who actually are having that dialogue, who actually are trying to inform themselves. It’s a denial of service attack, it’s a waste of time, and it accomplishes nothing.

Stephan (01:01:50.368)
So what would you say your view is longer term, if not everybody can self custody, right? I think most people accept this idea or at least understand this idea that today with technology we have today, it’s not possible for all, you know, eight billion people on earth to self custody. You know, maybe today, and I’m curious to get your view, maybe that number today is something like, we could have millions, maybe tens of millions of, you know, kind of Bitcoin banks, like being your own bank or lightning banks.

But beyond that maybe there’s further improvements in technology that’s required. So what do you think about that idea?

Shinobi (01:02:27.602)
I think that is the most important problem to address regarding Bitcoin period. If we wind up in a world where 99% of people are all just using custodians, are like literally incapable of self-custodying their own coins, Bitcoin may be extremely valuable in that world.

You know, it might make us rich, it might help us financially, but what use is censorship resistance in a neutral platform if 99% of the people in the world can’t actually use that or benefit from it? Like that’s not…

what I want out of this. That’s not why I’ve spent the last eight years in this space as a public figure. Like having these discussions, trying to like address these issues and just help people understand them. Like if that’s the end goal then you know bye. I’m not selling my coins. We’ll see how that goes but if that’s what everybody wants for the future then I’m just

wasting my time here and I’m gonna go do something more enjoyable or productive with my life.

Stephan (01:03:49.568)
Gotcha. And so I think, you know, that’s where maybe some people will disagree. There’ll be some who say, well, if you could have tens of millions of lightning banks, maybe that’s, you know, enough, but I think that’s definitely where people will probably disagree. And I think there’ll be others who are saying, well, we could actually get more for less. And maybe some of these ideas like Anyprevout or CheckTemplateVerify might…

be a part of actually achieving that. So do you wanna just spell out in your view how some of these ideas might help more people be non-custodial?

Shinobi (01:04:29.726)
Well, not APO specifically because you could do this with CTV and Chexig from stack or some other combinations of things that work like CTV and Chexig from stack, but L2, the proposal to change how lightning channel states are managed.

That is absolutely necessary if you want to have a proper coin pool or channel factory with more than two people in it. Because without L2…

There is no real workable way to trustlessly enforce the current state of things off chain with more than two people. Unless you are going to involve federations or escrow type functionality that means this is not completely trustless. Because there’s no way to work the current penalty mechanism for more than two people. Because it’s as simple as this key.

allows you to confiscate 100% of the money if somebody pushes an old state to chain. There is no way to work that with more than two people. Who cheated? Like how do you guarantee that when the money from a cheater is taken in an old state, that it’s assigned properly amongst everyone else? Like that they all get the appropriate amount of money back and then divvy up the thief’s money

them. There is no real way to do that. Like that’s just not possible in an informational theoretical sense. And that’s a big part of why L2 was proposed because instead of the penalty mechanism you just replace the old thing with the most recent thing and that’s what confirms. So you correct instead of punish. That is absolutely necessary.

Stephan (01:06:32.488)
Yeah. Now one argument, right. And one argument I have heard now, I think from what I’ve read and from when I’ve spoken to people, I think APO and LN symmetry would be good. I think I’m in favor of them. But one argument I have heard against it is this idea that some people who like the idea of LN penalty or having some kind of penalty mechanism, or they see it like maybe in a multi-party channel world, there may be a lot of griefing because people can try to…

try to grief you by shutting down that channel and let’s say it’s a 10 person channel or a 20 person channel now you know the other 19 people in that channel in that group channel have to go or be offline in the sense that the channels offline do you have any thoughts on that idea

Shinobi (01:07:18.474)
Well, as far as just LN symmetry in terms of improving two-person channels, you can do penalties with L2. There is a proposal for that called Derek that actually builds off of another proposal called Symmetric Lightning Channels. So you can do that.

there is no need to throw penalties away if we move lightning as it exists now to L2. But in terms of multi-party channels and griefing, that’s its own issue to solve, I would say. It definitely is an issue, but when somebody does something like that, like the one guy in a 20-party

Shinobi (01:08:10.544)
channel from working. That stops you from updating the base level on the main chain, that real UTXO. It stops you from updating that. But all the other things built on top, the different tree paths that lead to other channels between subsets of members of that channel, all of those can continue functioning, can continue updating while that one person is being unresponsive.

Stephan (01:08:39.926)
Don’t show.

Shinobi (01:08:41.064)
That’s still something I think very important to explore. You know, like lightning itself has griefing issues that exist that do have to be addressed. I don’t think, you know, griefing issues getting worse with multi-party channels means we just give up. I still think that is a very important area to explore. And there’s also a lot of nuance in terms of trust models that you could interject into those systems.

to attempt to address that. You can even go so far as to look at new primitives to address that at the base layer. Things like OP evict or TAPleaf update verify actually are OP codes at the base layer that would enable those 19 people to just as efficiently as possible on chain effectively kick out the one guy who’s not cooperating.

from the channel factory and then just yeah so like that’s you know that is a problem but there are many ways that we could go about addressing that.

Stephan (01:09:41.079)
So that’s a way to deal with griefing.

Stephan (01:09:50.216)
Yeah, and in fairness, as you said, channel jamming is currently a risk, but there are, of course, lightning researchers who are working on solutions to channel jamming today. So, you know, I’m confident on that. I’m also curious your view on the idea that, you know, if there’s a rush to the exits kind of problem, right, because if a lot of people try to all hit the chain at once, you know, today that’s quite difficult. Are there any ideas that exist today or are?

hypothesized that would help with that kind of thing. If, if you know, lots of these channels were to be shutting down at once.

Shinobi (01:10:24.702)
Well, things like CTV or other basic covenants could to some degree mitigate or help that just by allowing a single thing to confirm, guaranteeing that all of these other things can kind of take their time and settle out as block space becomes available. But also, that is an issue that exists with lightning as it is now.

Stephan (01:10:52.96)
Correct.

Shinobi (01:10:54.776)
super mega hub that everybody has channels open to and something goes wrong with that hub, all of those users are likely going to stampede to the main chain. And so, you know, the issue there, the mitigation there is simply don’t do things like that. Like do not have or use the giant mega hubs. Like use smaller ones, like try to incentivize more hubs like that to exist.

goes wrong with one, it’s not big enough to cause such a huge stampede that it just mucks up the whole network.

Stephan (01:11:33.212)
Yeah. One other view I’ve seen, and I’m curious to get your take on this. There’s a view that before soft forking, talking about all these soft forks, why don’t we first get as much, why don’t we squeeze as much as we can out of Taproot? Because we’re seeing, for example, BitGo recently implemented Music2, you know, there’s people working on Frost. There’s all these things that are still out there that we haven’t even fully exploited yet. What’s your view on that idea that, you know, we should try to first get as much out of Taproot before even exploring soft forks.

Shinobi (01:12:03.642)
Well, I can definitely understand that point of view, but I think that’s a dangerous way to think about this. Like, a lot of people throw the word ossification around like it’s some intentional thing or a choice.

That’s not how I see that. That’s not how I’ve ever seen that. Ossification to me has always been when we grow to such a large point that it’s just not socially possible to coordinate consensus on activating a new feature. So the way I look at things is we don’t have infinite time. Like I kind of think that Bitcoiners who sit around, like we can just take 10 years

to get to the next thing, like they’re incredibly naive. I think if we wait 10 years for the next thing, that next thing is probably never going to happen. After we’ve seen 10 years of growth, 10 years of businesses starting, users coming on board who do not have the level of understanding we have here now, and it’s just not going to happen. So I think like we should be moving faster,

Shinobi (01:13:22.084)
add all the things or not care about the consequences. Like we should be very cautious, we should scrutinize changes, but there are changes that we know we need now. Like things to enable multi-party channels. We know what the scaling limitations of a blockchain are. We know the limitations of trying to put everybody in two-person channels. We know we’re going to hit

Shinobi (01:13:51.824)
It’s not an imaginary problem. We know that here are a bunch of potential solutions to that problem. So even if people are going to take a while to build things out, we should be looking at adding features necessary to solve those problems because we do not have all the time in the world to just sit around. We are eventually going to get to the point where it’s just, this is never going to happen because there are too many people to convince.

to educate, to get involved with things, and it’s just intractable.

Stephan (01:14:27.752)
Okay. And so I guess the other angle that we’re starting to see some people discuss, maybe they’re not necessarily pushing for this now. And I guess it’s controversial as well. I know it’s controversial, not just I guess, given what happened with 2016, 2017, etc. with the block size wars. But people, some people are having this view of, oh, well, would a block size increase be another way of scaling? You know, but maybe not today, but maybe they would argue that should be like telegraphed, you know, five or 10 years out in advance.

Do you think that would be a feasible thing if other advancements come, such as U3XO? Or are you more focused on the idea of CTV and things in that camp, let’s say?

Shinobi (01:15:10.306)
No, I will personally never support another block size increase ever. I think the instant we start doing that, it becomes a slippery slope. It removes the incentives to actually make script more flexible to enable more efficient off-chain systems. And it just inevitably keeps raising the cost to actually validate the system and like directly be a peer on this network that you are going to be using

layers or systems built on top of. Like to me personally that is a non-starter I will never support that. We need to be looking at making second layers more efficient, more secure. Like the ship sailed with the block size increase five years ago.

Stephan (01:16:01.512)
Yeah, and I mean, to be clear, I’m probably closer to you in that camp. I would not support a block size increase. I am more personally in favor of looking at things like CTV and APO, or things that do that function. But just wanted to get your views anyway. Okay. So I guess let’s wrap up here. Do you have any, I guess, closing thoughts for us here on where you think the future of Bitcoin is going? I mean, you’ve been mentioning some of this, but…

What do you think are the next steps that the ecosystem and listeners should be thinking about?

Shinobi (01:16:38.866)
I think everybody should be looking at the Covenant proposals out there and really trying to understand them. Understand what they do, what they enable people to build on second layers, and what risks or externalities, if any, they create. Because looking at the path forward of anchoring second layers to the main chain in a way that

Shinobi (01:17:09.421)
we need covenants. Like we need some forms of very basic covenants to accomplish that.

at least me discussing a lot of this stuff the last year or so. I see a lot of people who kind of understand the general direction all of that is going, but they feel very uncertain about how things actually work or their ability to themselves weigh the pros and cons in making a decision. So I think it is very important that we continue having those conversations.

in an actually impartial way. Like to use drive chains as an example, I have had issues with this proposal for seven or eight years now. I have spoken about them for seven or eight years. I’ve been very vocal in that, but my criticisms are the proposals itself.

Yeah, I think it’s very silly and counterproductive some of the conspiracy theories I’ve been seeing around why Paul is pushing for drive chains. Like oh, secret big block money or he’s a spook or…

whatever the hell, like that’s, that’s ridiculous. Like I think Paul is completely wrong. And I think that this proposal is dangerous and broken, but Paul obviously doesn’t like that’s why Paul is pushing for this proposal because he thinks it does work. He thinks it is a good idea. And he thinks it will help Bitcoin. I completely disagree with him on that, but that’s why he’s doing this. It’s not some conspiracy or the fact that he’s a

Shinobi (01:18:58.224)
government agent or something. And you know, those types of accusations right off the bat, immediate reaction to things like that doesn’t help. That does not move things towards a productive discussion or dialogue. It just, you know, exacerbates things.

Stephan (01:19:15.968)
Okay, well, I think let’s finish up there. I think there’s a lot to take in from this episode. So hopefully listeners enjoyed it. Lastly, where can people find you online? We’ll put all the links in the show notes. I guess you’re going to be technical editor at Bitcoin magazine so people can check that out. And of course, follow you on social media. What’s the you know, what’s the main place for people to find you online?

Shinobi (01:19:38.506)
Brian underscore trolls with a Z at Twitter and I guess one last comment. Anybody who does have questions or opinions on technical topics you know that you would like to push into the discussion feel free to reach out. I will publish them at Bitcoin Magazine. My entire goal here at that role is to try to push a lot of the conversation around these issues

in a more productive direction because things are just kind of getting a little silly and ridiculous these days.

Stephan (01:20:16.448)
Okay, well I think that’s a great spot to finish up. Thank you for joining me, Shinobi.

Shinobi (01:20:21.471)
Thanks for having me, Stephan.