Are Bitcoin L2s Real? with David Seroy (Bitcoin Dave)

On today’s episode we have Bitcoin wizard, David Seroy on the show! He’s an armchair researcher in the Bitcoin rollup ecosystem. He really likes Bitcoin, and he really likes projects that are building on Bitcoin. We’ve got a lot of questions on Bitcoin today, especially those that revolve around Bitcoin L2s. Are they real? David’s got answers. ------ 📣SUI | Register for Sui Basecamp https://bankless.cc/sui-basecamp ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/Arbitrum 💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 9:18 Bitcoin L2 Rollup Support? https://twitter.com/david_seroy/status/1749508724274946514 12:56 Bitcoin Renaissance? 19:07 ETH vs. Bitcoin Scalability 21:18 Why The Bitcoin Community 25:34 The Bitcoin Rollup Pitch 30:14 Explaining Bitcoin Rollups 38:39 BitVM 47:03 Are L2s on Bitcoin’s Blockchain? 56:13 Exciting Bitcoin Projects 59:32 Are There More Bitcoin Daves? 1:02:53 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES David Seroy (Bitcoin Dave) https://twitter.com/david_seroy BitVM whitepaper https://bitvm.org/bitvm.pdf ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  That's kind of how I feel about this whole broader like L2 Renaissance and what's possible in the Bitcoin world. I don't care if it sinks or swims. I'm pretty sure it's going to be very successful. But even if it's not like this is ideas worth pursuing, you know, like we are fricking missionaries, not mercenaries. And if people disagree with it, it's like, bring it on.

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bank List, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more.

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Bitcoiners.

• 0:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, is that what we're doing, David?

• 0:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a Bitcoin episode.

• 0:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a really simple premise for today's episode. We brought on somebody who could answer the question for us, for me. I had more of the questions actually than you, David, coming into this episode. Are Bitcoin layer twos real?

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  What do you mean by, what do you mean by that question? What does that mean?

• 0:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's kind of what I was going to ask our guests and did ask our guests. But what I, what I sort of mean is I was under the impression that Bitcoin did not have the expressivity, did not have the virtual machine, was more like a calculator and not a computer at its base layer. And therefore had a very difficult, if impossible, probably impossible time launching what Ethereum calls a roll up, which is, you know, some sort of chain that is secured by the base chain. And this next guest says, actually, layer twos are possible on Bitcoin.

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  With an asterisk.

• 1:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  With an asterisk and he explains why. So I thought it was a brilliant like episode. And it doesn't answer all of my questions, but opens the door to possibility that I didn't know fully existed. And so I have still some research to do on this. This is probably the first episode of several in the future. We explore this topic in more depth, but I don't know, this, this guest has some legitimacy on this topic. And actually you know, this person, right? And so he came in my Twitter DMs or my tweets. And I was just like, David, who is this? This is a good answer. You had already met him in person.

• 1:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, this is basically how your, my relationship is, is like you, who are, who is this person? Yeah. Oh yeah. I met, I met this person that one time. Yeah. Uh, I, I, we'll talk about a little bit. The intro, how we met David in the show. Shout out Steven from Alfalfa. One thing I want to say before we go into this episode is that when we talk about like the differences between layer ones, usually there are things that get lost in translation. Especially when I do like some of these Solana episodes, like I have to like stop and just like translate for the listeners who I know are like thinking in Ethereum terms. But across smart contract platforms, that's actually pretty easy to do and not all that complicated. It's just like usually swap out one word, replace it with a different word, right?

• 2:42David Hoffman?

  And then there's like the conversation of like learning about Bitcoin versus Ethereum. And if like learning about Solana to Ethereum is like English to Spanish or something. Learning about like Ethereum to Bitcoin is like English to Chinese. Like you can translate, it does work, but it's entirely different. And so when we talk about layer twos on Bitcoin and we talk about fraud proofs and we talk about different things, like yes, we are close, but like we need to actually, some things don't always carry over. And so I think that's important context for listeners to go in is like you don't just swap one thing out with a one word and place it with a Bitcoin word. That's not how it works. And so like layer twos and fraud proofs and ZK rollups and like expressivity on Bitcoin will look different. It's like same saying, but different. And so you can't perfectly translate

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  these things and you'll, you'll listen to me and Ryan like stumble our way into that realization. Once again, as we have this conversation with Bitcoin Dave.

• 3:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there were, there were some stumbling in this episode, but it's a, it's a pretty like, we didn't have an agenda going in. We just wanted to pick David Se Roy, who's our guest. We call him Bitcoin David because we have two Davids in this episode. Pick his brain. I think hopefully the result is something that can further your knowledge on what Bitcoin is building because there's kind of a renaissance going on a little bit, like some glimmers of it.

• 3:57David Hoffman?

  It's a Dave Bitcoin Dave to Bitcoin David presents a zero to one moment in Bitcoin building. That is potentially ahead to us.

• 4:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Super exciting. So guys, stay tuned for that. But before we get into this episode, we want to thank the sponsors that made it possible, including our recommended exchange, a place where you can buy Bitcoin if you're a Bitcoiner.

• 4:15David Hoffman?

  There, yeah.

• 4:16Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 4:17David Hoffman?

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• 5:02David Hoffman?

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• 5:46David Hoffman?

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• 6:30David Hoffman?

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• 7:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to David Se Roy. Yes, we have a second David on the podcast today. This is the Bitcoin David.

• 7:09David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin Dave.

• 7:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess my co-host, maybe David Hoffman. I should refer to you as Ethereum David. So we've got Bitcoin David here, and he is a Bitcoin wizard, I would say. What does that mean? He is definitely an armchair researcher in the Bitcoin rollup ecosystem. He loves Bitcoin and loves projects that are building on Bitcoin. He actually had probably the best answer I received to a question about the Bitcoin rollup community, an L2 community I put out, and is part of the reason for this podcast. Bitcoin David, welcome to Bankless.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited. I can't believe you guys let a Bitcoiner on here.

• 7:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, we do that from time to time.

• 7:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we bring Bitcoiners on.

• 7:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  We just had.

• 7:50David Hoffman?

  Nick Carter is our number one most recurring guest.

• 7:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Who else? Who else?

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  After Vitalik, after Vitalik Buterin, then Nick Carter.

• 7:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, who am I forgetting? Being in the spot?

• 8:00David Hoffman?

  We've got Eric Wall, Eric Wall, like on four or five times.

• 8:06David Hoffman?

  We had Lynn Alden on like four or five times. We just had Robert Breedlove on for his first time.

• 8:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Robert Breedlove, of course, of course.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:13David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin represents at least 2% to 3% of all Bankless podcasts.

• 8:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  That, when you put it like that, that's very small.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  We gotta pump those numbers up.

• 8:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's undersized as far as market. Well, that's what we're doing today. So Bitcoin David, I understand, actually, you guys have met in person.

• 8:30David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 8:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this isn't your first meeting.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  We were introduced by Steven Cesaro of the Alfalfa Podcast fame. And David was introduced to me as Bitcoin Dave, and that's how his name is stuck in my brain. And once again, entering this recording room, I was like, wait, David, are you called Bitcoin Dave? Or is that just how Steven introduced you? And apparently, that's just what Steven introduces him as.

• 8:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Now, we actually, we actually played pickleball the next day.

• 8:55David Hoffman?

  Yes, then we played pickleball.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  David, David told me about a really cool idea. He said he wants to put pickleballs on the blockchain.

• 9:02David Hoffman?

  I want to put the points.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  The supply chain is under duress.

• 9:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it needs Ethereum.

• 9:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but which? We're track, track points, so no one can cheat with points.

• 9:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, but isn't that the broader question? Like, which blockchain? Because now Bitcoin can support some tokens. I'm, I'm hopeful Bitcoin Dave, you'll, you'll tell us a little bit about this because maybe I'll start the conversation. We're going to talk about the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. But my base question in that tweet that you helped answer for me was, was this. Okay, a question for the unbiased big brains, that's how I couch this. Can Bitcoin have an L2 rollup that satisfies the five slices of the decentralization, decentralization pie? I was referring to the L2 beat pie, where there's like kind of five slices that demarcate decentralization. I mean, is there an exit window? Do you have some sort of decentralized sequence or a few other things? Or does it lack expressivity?

• 9:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so, David, I want to throw that, that question to you, basically. So can Bitcoin now support L2 rollups? And like, what does, what does that even mean in, in the context of Bitcoin?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm going to give a really clear answer here and say, yes, but it depends. And really, it kind of depends on, I'd say, three general things. First is like, what flavor of rollup are we talking about? Are we talking about like a fully validating ZK rollup? A sovereign rollup that has no approving system or an optimistic rollup? The second question is, you know, are we saying with a soft fork or without a soft fork? And then the third question is like, what level of trust is, is acceptable? And if we jump all the way to the answer that people probably care about is like, no, we want no soft forks. We want fully trustless, and it needs to be a fully validating ZK or validity rollup. If that's the exact criteria we need, then technically, no, Bitcoin cannot do that. And that is because Bitcoin does not have the ability to natively verify zero knowledge

• 10:50Speaker 00

  or validity proofs on the base layer. Where this gets a little bit interesting is BitVM. And BitVM potentially allows us to hack in a ZKP verifier into the Bitcoin L1 without a soft fork. And so BitVM was this white paper that Robin Linus, a developer and amazing researcher in the Bitcoin community, wrote back in mid-December, and that was about six weeks ago. And so the claim with BitVM is that we can now compute anything on Bitcoin, and we can express Turing-complete smart contracts on Bitcoin. And so if this is true, which it appears to be, then this is kind of the fundamental breakthrough that really changes the paradigm for what is possible on Bitcoin.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  The caveat with BitVM is that it's a little bit clunky, and it has a trust assumption of one event, meaning that you can perform this computation where we could have a ZKP verifier on the Bitcoin L1, but the people that are performing that computation could be a group of, you know, 10, 100, 1,000 people. You only need one of them to be honest in order to kind of, you know, get the crypto-economic security there. And, you know, some people would say, "Well, that's not good enough." But if we can, you know, essentially optimistically create a validity prover, then maybe that's good enough to build the bridge. And I mean that technically building a bridge,

• 12:20Speaker 00

  but also metaphorically building a bridge to cross that chasm that Bitcoin typically can't cross. And if you can cross that chasm, then you get into the whole world that Ethereum is in. You get into this idea of like shared sequencers and cross-composability and preconfirmations and tons of different execution environments, like some really, truly amazing stuff. So BitVM is the real innovation, that this could possibly happen without a soft fork in a little bit of a hacky way, and that may be good enough to kind of build out the rest of this. And maybe down the line, we say, "Okay, like, we want the fully trustless version. We're going to soft work in, you know, a dedicated ZKP verifier."

• 12:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I want to get back to like BitVM as kind of maybe part of the final destination here. But could we zoom out for just a minute before we get into some of these more technical details? So where is this innovation coming from in Bitcoin? Like, why has Bitcoin just discovered that, oh, wow, we can launch rollups and layer twos on top of Bitcoin? Like, is this some kind of a builder renaissance? Has this always been possible? It's just there wasn't the funding or the projects? Or is this just kind of new, novel experimentation? Are they seeing the success of Ethereum? They're just like, hey, we could just do that here. Where's this renaissance coming from?

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of moving puzzle pieces here. Like, to be clear, like, a lot of this stuff was kind of discussed, like, early on in Bitcoin Talk forums. Like, there is a post from Greg McQuill, who's like, kind of this, like, OG, just like amazing Bitcoin developer, where he talks about bringing, you know, ZKP's to Bitcoin. And he specifically references Elie Bensassan, who is now like, you know, who was the founder and is now the CEO of, like, Starkware. So this has always kind of been on Bitcoin's radar. And there's even quotes from Satoshi, where he talks about, you know, like, if the technology has caught up, like, this would be, you know, the best way to improve and kind of like scale Bitcoin. Like, all the evidence is there. Where this really kind of starts, in my opinion, is like back in 20, or not starts, but like, you know,

• 14:15Speaker 00

  is back in 2014, where Blockstream released their white paper for sidechains. And this was like this scaling vision for Bitcoin, where it's like, you're gonna have the Bitcoin base layer, and then you're gonna have all these sidechains. You know, maybe you have a big block sidechain, maybe you have a privacy sidechain. You know, maybe you have like whatever other specialties. And everybody loved this vision, but it was, the one problem is, the Blockstream white paper said, oh, by the way, like, we haven't solved this trustless two-way peg. Like, so for now, you're just gonna have this federated model, where you bridge your Bitcoin into these other ecosystems. You'll trust us with a multi-sig, we'll solve the trustless two-way peg later. That never happened. And in the interim, Bitcoin went down the path of like Lightning Network. You know, they got SegWit in, you know, it fixed the transaction malleability, which was an issue that prevented Lightning from occurring.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  All that happened with the block size wars in 2017. And then we said, we're gonna go all in on essentially Lightning. While that was happening, as you guys know, like the Ethereum community went down this other path where you said, you know, we're going to pursue, you know, plasma and then state channels, and then you eventually settled on rollups. What we're now seeing in the Bitcoin community, in my opinion, is that Lightning is massively hindered. And I think people drastically overestimate essentially what it can do. And don't get me wrong, I love the Lightning community, I support the builders, but there are some systemic issues, which in my opinion are probably going to be insurmountable for it to truly scale Bitcoin. And Ben Carmen, he goes by Ben the Carmen on Twitter, really wrote like this, this very

• 15:43Speaker 00

  nice like post where he kind of said, like, he's like, I'm a Lightning lover. He's like, I am one of the developers. He goes, but sometimes I look around and be like, what are we doing? Like, is this really the right path for Bitcoin to scale? And he labeled that, he laid out like all these reasons why Lightning like, it has some issues, you know? And, you know, I think a lot of those issues are going to be tough to get past. And even if we do get past them, it's just like, you know, it doesn't have a global state, you're going to have the inbound liquidity issues, it doesn't have very good privacy. You know, like, it requires massive footprints on the L1 is an issue, you know?

• 16:24Speaker 00

  So like, if, if Ryan and I want to open up a channel, like, that requires an on-chain transaction, you know? If you want to add more liquidity in this channel, that requires an on-chain transaction.

• 16:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So David, just to kind of get up to this point, and it sounds like there's been some eras of Bitcoin development, right? So Bitcoin had kind of its sidechain era, let's say, and that never manifested into kind of like a true trustless bridge and something that like Ethereum would call more like a rollup, and that was one area. And then Lightning was kind of the thing. I mean, Ethereum, you rightly pointed out, very much had its kind of state channel era, where we thought that would be like the holy grail for Ethereum. And we tried a lot in that era. I mean, like, I remember Amin Soleimani, you know, built his entire company Spank Chain on like, on top of that. And we had Raiden, and that was sort of like this, and it never achieved product market fit.

• 17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never got the traction. I think for the same reasons that the Bitcoin community is seeing, like, you know, its endeavor inside of state channels through Lightning, like some of the same things still applied, right? And then we entered kind of this this roll up era of Ethereum and then so much so that Ethereum essentially pivoted entire its entire roadmap to be like, you know, Vitalik called it the roll up centric roadmap, right? So you're saying this the similar trajectory, the similar path is happening just like slower and a little delayed, but like it's still it's happening in the same way in the Bitcoin community? Or is that, you know, is there something I'm missing here?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  No, I mean, that's that's exactly right. I think one of the things that that was kind of the breaking point was like a lot of the ordinals and inscription stuff, because, you know, inscriptions, they post arbitrary data on chain and some people will call that spam and it's not monetary use cases and all of that. But bottom line, like, like, they are fee paying customers. And so they are kind of pushing up fees on the Bitcoin L1 chain. And the same way that like Ethereum kind of had like their fee crisis and and fees were booming, like fees on Bitcoin, they're not like absurd, but like they're they're creeping up. And what people are finding is that like the Lightning network really suffers in a high fee environment. And people are sitting there and looking and saying like, wait, like, this security budget that Bitcoin has, like, we're

• 18:35Speaker 00

  relying on fees to be higher long term, but our long term scaling solution Lightning doesn't really work in a high fee environment? And I think that was the catalyst that kind of was making people question like, okay, like, is this a long term solution? And we have other things like like Arc, which is very cool. You know, people are working on things kind of like, like, you know, RGB as well and, you know,

• 18:59Speaker 00

  space chains and all this stuff. But like, at the end of the day, nothing has solved like the trustless two way peg, but rollups potentially do.

• 19:07David Hoffman?

  I want to present actually a slightly a different characterization of the progress of Ethereum scalability as it compares to the Bitcoin story. Because we had the Ethereum Layer 1, we knew it was always needing to scale beyond that. And so that we started with state channels, which then grew into like generalized state channels, which then grew into like plasma for hyperscale. And we were doing like these plasma thing for a really long time. We had these plasma implementers calls. And then there was like this aha eureka moment, which morphed into optimistic rollups. And we had like the uni pig demo, and then that's how we got to like optimistic rollups. And then also, we knew that ZK rollups would ultimately manifest as a result of that. And it was a very logical progression of thought, of like research and development

• 19:52David Hoffman?

  and direction and iteration, until like it actually landed on where we are today.

• 19:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you say, David, it's kind of like an idea maze, like kind of quest? Like we hit some dead ends, we're like, oh, like backup.

• 20:02David Hoffman?

  But smaller dead ends, right? And like, and then we kept on progressing, each one built on the history of the other. And what I'm seeing in Bitcoin is actually people going down the Lightning idea maze, realizing that it's a pretty strong, pretty far, like tons of investment into Lightning Network, and realizing it's a pretty strong dead end. And now we're actually going very far back and picking an entirely new strategy for Bitcoin expressivity and Bitcoin scalability. David, would you, how would you, that's kind of my, how I would kind of change that characterization. Would you agree?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  I do want to somewhat defend the Lightning community. Like, I don't think it's, it's, it's a dead end, but I think that it has like significant limitations that can't be overcome by just like, just give it enough dev time. People are like, oh, the builders are building. It's like, no, like, and Vitalik pointed this out, it's like, like, the Layer 2, like Lightning, is essentially bound by essentially what the L1 is capable of. And so there's just systemic limitations that Lightning is going to have. Like, could it be something that kind of like connects all these different layers? Like, if you have a bunch of rollups, or, you know, like something like Fedimint, and can it connect these Fediments? Like, yes, but isn't it going to be this grand vision that everybody hoped for? Like, no. That doesn't mean we abandoned it. It just means like, let's let a thousand flowers bloom.

• 21:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, Bitcoin David, I should say. So I'm wondering if the Bitcoin community has kind of felt this because I'm not sure if you would represent yourself as sort of a minority of folks. I know there's been kind of like the Nick Carter, Udi sort of wizards is sort of side of things and there's almost been this like this forking in the social layer of Bitcoin of kind of builders and those who just want the just the pure gold store value use case. But it also seems to me like some of the people who were embracing of like some sort of scaling of trustless transactions per second and they were formerly Bitcoiners,

• 21:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  like I count myself among those, already moved to the Ethereum community. I'm wondering if you think that effect is in play too. So like I consider myself a Bitcoiner. I love Bitcoin. I still own Bitcoin. I don't know if some Bitcoiners in kind of like the Bitcoin tribe would acknowledge me as a Bitcoiner, but I consider myself a Bitcoiner. That said, I moved over to Ethereum because they had a roadmap that was actually trying to scale this whole trustless compute piece of it. And yes, in the early days, the monetary properties weren't quite as pristine. It doesn't have kind of the anonymous faceless founder, but I saw this potential to build kind of a bankless money system. And that's why I

• 22:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  moved over into the Ethereum community because they were pursuing that most aggressively. But you're saying, I think what you're saying is there are still some Bitcoiners out there who are trying to build this vision on top of Bitcoin. And one of my basic questions is like, but why? Why not just why not do it on Ethereum? Or like, why have you stayed? You seem like you're very much the builder mindset. Why have you stayed like inside of the Bitcoin community? And why do you still have hopes and aspirations there?

• 23:09Speaker 00

  You know, when I talk to a lot of Bitcoiners, like, and it kind of gets into this like implicit discussion of like Bitcoin versus Ethereum, they're like, they're like, well, you know, this is a monetary revolution, like not a technology revolution. And that used to bother me so much because I'm like, yes, it's a monetary revolution, but damn it, like the tech matters, you know? And there were many times where I would listen to bankless episodes and I'm like, man, this stuff is fricking exciting and it's cool. But I always had this, this, this spot in my heart for Bitcoin because like, Like that, that is the use case, like, like it is all about the money. And, and if we can kind of merge these, these two worlds, like that is the best case scenario. And now that we see some of this technical stuff that Ethereum has pioneered and we could potentially bring it to Bitcoin, like, that is the vision that I want.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  I do not think that Ethereum is as good of money as Bitcoin. You know, I could sit here and kind of stay silent and be like, but damn, like Ethereum has legit scaling solutions. I can honestly say that I do not think is as good of money. And I think what you guys are starting to realize right now is that like, like, like scaling block space, composability, all that stuff's gonna be solved, but where are the apps? Where are the frickin' apps? Like, what is gonna be the use? The use, it, it, it's been the same since day one. It's money, it's payments, it's payments to each other, it's payments in privates, it payments to, you know, uh, like a, a loan contract, it's payments against, you know, collateral, it's, it's, you know, payments if you wanna send it, you know, using Face ID on, on, on Apple Pay. Like, like it's always been payments and it's always been money. And like Bitcoin maximus, for, for all of their flaws,

• 24:38Speaker 00

  and, and for all the frankly, like dumb things they say, what they got right is, is the monetary revolution. And even after this episode, I think so many of them, like, I hope will listen to this, and they'll probably still be blind to rollups and the power of them. But them holding their ground and, and having that anchor and understanding that, that the tech, in my opinion, is kind of irrelevant unless you have the money, like, that part, they got right. And that's why I'm sympathetic to, to the Bitcoin camp. Like, that, in my opinion, is the true revolution. But ultimately, if you want that revolution, you, you, you need to have the technical side. Like Bitcoin in its current condition, you know, you really can only scale to like, you know, less than 1% of the world in self custody. Like, that is not viable.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  You know, we, we, we need to like increase the, the, the scaling of self custody. We need to bring some form of expressivity so people can borrow against their Bitcoin. They don't have to sell it so that people can have private transactions. We need it.

• 25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, uh, David, I'm gonna ask you, cause you know, we've certainly made the case for, uh, bankless, uh, money systems on, built on top of Bitcoin. And it seemed to be a roadblock in the past. I'm wondering if you could kind of like, what would you say to the Bitcoin community? I mean, you sell them, sell them, pitch them on rollups. Why should the Bitcoin community get excited about rollups?

• 25:56Speaker 00

  This whole vision that we have about like 21 million, 21 million is thrown out the window if anybody can't have the optionality to self custody. Like, right now, there is only a certain allotment of block space every single 10 minutes. If Bitcoin gets any modicum of scale, you know, those blocks are essentially going to be full, and it's going to price out every single other person from having self custody. If everyone is using these custodial solutions, they don't have the option to go into Layer 1, then that in and of itself leads to massive attack surface for fractional reserve lending, for rehypothecation, to kind of like... Basically, the block phi's and Celsius's of the world?

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, just anything, even putting your funds in into a custodial Lightning node. Like, it gives this attack vector to implicitly break the 21 million, and that's what essentially people care about. And, you know, seeing kind of like the decentralized finance movement, like the DeFi movement, and Ethereum, I think Bitcoin is like massively underestimate this. Like, even if you think, you know, finance is the scum of the earth, and you're this kind of like Rothbardian, you know, Austrian economist, like, finance is the anchor that money must carry, you know, if we want this perfect world. Like, you need the ability to audit these kind of contracts. Like, people are going to borrow, they're going to lend, there's going to be all this stuff. Like, if you can audit all of that, and you can, you know,

• 27:19Speaker 00

  cryptographically like enforce this set of rules, like, all of that contributes to this, you know, trustless, you know, hard money world.

• 27:28David Hoffman?

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• 28:13David Hoffman?

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• 30:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so in the beginning of this episode, I started with kind of like a question that brought us into the weeds really quick, and you started talking about BitVM, right? Which is the question of like, can Bitcoin really, you know, launch rollups, completely decentralized Ethereum-style rollups? And you threw out a kind of a few categories and definitions there. But before the BitVM thing that you're talking about, which we can still get into a little bit more, what has traditionally been possible on top of Bitcoin? Because where I sort of last left things, it seemed to me that Bitcoin did not have the expressivity to sort of do much more than some sort of a sidechain, multi-sig sidechain, right?

• 30:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it was kind of like the early days where things maybe left off. But you mentioned sovereign rollups. To me, that's kind of like, I think that's sort of a sidechain type of thing. So what sort of thing has been possible when Bitcoin talks about layer twos, or the community talks about rollups? What are they describing, I guess, outside of BitVM, which is maybe a special case that we'll get into in a minute?

• 31:18Speaker 00

  I mean, the main problem with Bitcoin is that it has no concept of the outside world, right? Like, if you are on a sidechain, like, the sidechain can run a Bitcoin node, it can interpret essentially what's happening on Bitcoin. But Bitcoin cannot interpret what's happening on these other sidechains. So you can bridge Bitcoin out of the ecosystem, because those other chains, those other ecosystems can read Bitcoin. But if you're trying to bring Bitcoin back into the ecosystem, Bitcoin has no idea what happens in that outside world. And so that's the main problem. It's essentially just a trustless two-way peg. Like, if you want to peg your Bitcoin, you know, outside into a sidechain, you can't do it because of that. And zero-knowledge proofs could potentially solve that.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  So what I could do is kind of give like, an overview of, you know, how Bitcoin rollups would work from a Bitcoin perspective, but I can start using some like Ethereum vernacular and vocabulary.

• 32:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  That'd be very helpful. That'd be very helpful. And as far as I understand, so like, an optimistic rollup would not be possible on Bitcoin, right? Because we don't have a smart contract that can kind of enforce the sort of the fraud-proof type of game. But maybe there's hope for some sort of a ZK rollup? Is that what you're saying?

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Well... BitVM potentially could enable both of those in like a kind of like, you know, quasi-trust minimized way. And I'll get to that, but let me describe the roles first, that we're all on the same page. So in the Ethereum world, you guys have talked a lot about this modular thesis, right? How you have like the data, the computation and the settlement. And Bitcoin is really no different. When a user submits a Bitcoin transaction, like Alice sends one Bitcoin to Bob, that is data. That goes up into the mempool, which is like the waiting room, right? The miners mine the block and then they go up into the waiting room, up into the mempool, they pull it down, they collect the transaction fee and then they create the block. They package all of those transactions, that data into the block.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  That block then gets propagated out to the rest of the network. It's sent to all the nodes. And if you're being a good little Bitcoiner, you're running your node, you receive that block and you're going through and you're essentially performing the computation. You're validating all those transactions, saying, does Alice actually have one Bitcoin? You know, is this a valid signature? Okay, yes. And then they append that block to the rest of the prior blocks in the blockchain. And then now you've essentially audited, you know, everything up into that date. And then you settle the transaction, you say, all right, Alice no longer has one Bitcoin. You know, Bob has it. With a rollup in a Bitcoin world, similar to Ethereum, you're abstracting that computation part, that kind of incrementing and decrementing of the balances

• 33:55Speaker 00

  is no longer being done by your nodes, it's being done in this off-chain environment, right? And, you know, I think an astute Bitcoiner at this point will say, well, hold on a second. Actually, let me back up really quick. Because you're not doing the computation on Bitcoin anymore, you're doing this off-chain environment, you can use any custom execution environment you want. You're no longer bound by what is called Bitcoin script, which is kind of like the EVM equivalent in the Bitcoin world. You can now use EVM in this off-chain computation world. You could use Kyro, you could use Rust, you could use Clarity, you could use whatever language you want. At this point, you know, a Bitcoiner would say, well, hold on a second. If this computation, this kind of incrementing of decrementing of these balances is happening

• 34:38Speaker 00

  off-chain and my node is not validating all of that, then doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of Bitcoin? And this is where, as you guys know, like the zero knowledge proof comes in, where all of that computation, which it could have been smart contracts and DeFi and NFTs or, you know, fast transactions, small transactions, all of that, is essentially compressed into a singular zero knowledge proof, which is like an unforgeable digital receipt. That unforgeable digital receipt is pushed back to Bitcoin L1, along with the updated state saying, hey, you know, Alice no longer has that one Bitcoin. Now Bob has it. Here's the unforgeable digital proof that this actually occurred. And from Bitcoin's perspective, it's essentially saying, well, I have no idea what happened

• 35:23Speaker 00

  off-chain, but just prove to me, mathematically prove to me that you followed the rules of my consensus, that no more than 21 million coins were created, that Alice actually did have the funds, that all of the signatures were valid. And if you can mathematically prove that to me, then I will allow you to update the state on the L1, meaning I will allow the kind of now, you know, Bob has the one Bitcoin and Alice no longer does. Functionally, the way this kind of works on Bitcoin is on the L1, you would have what's called like a shared UTXO. This is essentially like the roll-up contract in Ethereum world, where users can pool their funds into the shared UTXO, and then those funds are represented in the L2, where all

• 36:05Speaker 00

  this computation and the zero knowledge proof and everything is essentially completed. It was typically assumed that in order to create some sort of shared UTXO structure, you would need a software called recursive covenants. However, there are proposals to potentially create something like this if you had a ZKP verifier. With BitVM, we now potentially have the ZKP verifier. So hopefully that's making sense where we could potentially create these shared UTXOs on the L1. We can perform all the computation in the ZK proof and submit it back to the L1. And then you can use BitVM to verify that ZK proof. If you have that, then you can build a rollup.

• 36:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So before we get to BitVM, could you just like, so I'm not as familiar with the kind of the Bitcoin, I'll call it generally layer two community, but like, I don't know if these are legit layer twos or not, right? And what you would say? And I'll say first, like, we run across the same problem, of course, in all of crypto and Ethereum, where everybody wants to be a layer two, but oftentimes they're just sidechains with multi-sigs. And so it's hard to like, get past the marketing speak and get to actually the technical details of, is this really a layer two? And then that's even more obscured by the fact that some legitimate layer two projects are still not fully layer two, if that makes sense. Like, they still have some training wheels on, some guardrails on, and they're working to decentralize over time.

• 37:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  But the technology is such that they can become kind of fully decentralized, or much more decentralized, layer twos in the future. So I'm just trying to find out what's real in the Bitcoin kind of quote unquote, layer two community. So something like Stacks, is that a layer two? Something like Rootstock, is that a layer two? Are these kind of like, more like sidechain types of networks?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  I mean, they're more like sidechains. There's kind of multi-sigs, or they don't necessarily anchor to Bitcoin. I could quasi call them like, like layer twos, and I guess they are. But for me personally, it's like, no, like, I want like, this path towards like, fully trustless, like, ZK rollups. And the closest thing we could possibly get there is like, some sort of integration with BitVM.

• 38:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So aside from BitVM, are there any sort of layer twos? And, you know, in the Ethereum definition of a layer two is basically, it has to be kind of secured, settled by the base layer, or be on a trajectory towards being fully decentralized. Is there anything else besides BitVM?

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, in terms of like, the level of trust that you guys want, the only thing is Lightning Network.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Lightning Network from a security assumption standpoint is like very, very strong, but it just comes with like so many other pitfalls.

• 38:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay. So we've been talking so much, like you've been alluding to this BitVM project. Like, what is it? Where did it come from? Like, why are you so excited about it? You don't work for the project, so I think you're looking at this from a Bitcoiner that's very excited about this building Renaissance, and you're just kind of evaluating in this, and you're like, this is the future. But yeah, give us some context for this. What is it?

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so BitVM is a way to verify any arbitrarily complex, like Turing-complete, you know, contract on Bitcoin. And the keyword there is verify, not necessarily execute. And so if you read the BitVM white paper, there are two key references in there. The first is optimistic rollups, and the second is Taproot, which was the last Bitcoin software. So as you guys know, you know, an optimistic rollup performs this computation off-chain, and then it submits the results of that computation back on-chain along with the data, and you optimistically assume that it is valid. And if somebody says, hey, I do not believe this is valid, I believe that you lied, then they can use the data

• 39:45Speaker 00

  that was posted on L1 to create a fraud proof and say, hey, this is incorrect, and then the transactions are essentially rewound. So worst case, the transactions get rewound, the fraud gets discovered, but because of the game theory, you assume that it's going to work correctly. BitVM is similar, except it's not actually posting transaction data on L1. Instead, what it's doing is it's committing on-chain in a Bitcoin transaction to perform a certain set of computations, and it will do this off-chain. And it says, I will perform all of this computation, and then it will do it off-chain in kind of a prove or verify setup, where there is a prover that's performing this off-chain. And then

• 40:28Speaker 00

  if they do not perform that computation, then the verifier can take a piece of that and submit it to the Bitcoin L1 and say, hey, here is fraud, they didn't follow this computation. And the prover, just like an optimistic rollup, essentially gets slashed.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  The way that this works, because Bitcoin can't, doesn't have any sort of scripting language and it can't like verify these kind of like, like, like complex, you know, programming languages is, is interesting. So, most programming languages, I think pretty much all of them, like for example, like take Python, is built in a hierarchical manner, where Python was built on top of like C++ which was, you know, an extension of C which was built on assembly and it goes all the way down to kind of the, the circuits or the binary bits, where literally if you have two wires and they're going into what's called like a gateway, if two of those wires have electricity pulsing through them, maybe the gateway lights up, maybe for other types of gateways, if one wire is on, one wire is off, the gateway lights up. The point is, is that, that these small little electrical signals in these gateways create

• 41:28Speaker 00

  the basis for like zeros and ones in binary language. And then that binary language, it becomes the basis for, you know, letters and further numbers and then all these codes. So what BitVM is doing is it could take some sort of code, say like a ZKP verifier, and it will break it down to its fundamental components, down to those little binary gates. And then it will commit all those binary gates into what's called like a taproot tree, which this is a Merkle tree. So if you imagine like, you know, an upside down, um, yeah, or just kind of like a pyramid structure where you have like the root and then you have all the binary trees, like you would have this massive tree that has all the different chunks of, of this essentially code. And you can embed that into a Bitcoin transaction.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  And so in this situation, again, like the prover is putting money at stake and they're saying, I will compute all of this, uh, like this ZKP verifier off-chain. And if you feel that I am lying, then you can submit a single small transaction, uh, as part of one of these taproot trees or part of this Merkle tree, and you can identify that as fraud. And if I'm found to be fraudulent, then you can slash and take my funds. So you could have a situation where you have one prover, you have a thousand different verifiers, and you yourself could be one of the verifiers. And what this essentially allows is, um, you're optimistically creating a ZK verifier, if that makes sense.

• 42:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it does. I think it does. I'm gonna have to like do some, you know, more research on this myself and ask some other folks. But let me ask you, the BitVM project, how close is it to mainnet? Is this kind of, this is beyond the white paper, but?

• 43:06David Hoffman?

  Is that even the right question to ask?

• 43:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I follow a lot of the Telegram chats pretty closely. It seems like they're making progress. Like, I don't want to hold them to anything, but like, I think, you know, I think we could be looking at this stuff like within a year or less.

• 43:23David Hoffman?

  Is mainnet like the right phrasing for this? Or is there a more precise word?

• 43:29Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. I'm not, I'm not sure what would we call it.

• 43:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there would have to be some chain that I can interact with that is some sort of like, you know, virtual machine type chain, whether it's EVM or something else that ultimately settles to Bitcoin. Or is that not what, like you're describing here, David?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  So, I mean, all of this, this computation for BitVM, it's happening off-chain. It's happening just like, you know, on a server or a computer or anything. Like, you don't need any sort of blockchain, because again, you're kind of like optimistically assuming that this stuff is being done. So you're, you're saying, look, like, here's, I don't want to say this, like, here's all this code that I'm essentially going to run. Like, before you run it, you say, here's all this code that I am promising you I'm going to run. And you're breaking that down all into the binary parts and you're submitting that into the Bitcoin blockchain. You're committing to it. You're basically saying, I am committing, you know, 10 Bitcoin, that I'm going to run and operate this code off-chain. And so what's happening off-chain is the prover is running it and the verifier is simultaneously verifying.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  All this is outside of a blockchain, this little game that they're playing. There's a lot of kind of interactivity that's happening between these parties. But if the verifier discovers and says, hey, you're being dishonest, they can go through and they can arbitrate that on the Bitcoin chain and be like, hey, do you remember you committed 10 Bitcoin to execute this? You committed and you promised that you would execute it this way. And I'm now providing a fraud proof to the Bitcoin chain, proving that you did not follow the code. And that's how they essentially punish or slash the off-chain computation.

• 45:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, does this sound a little bit like NiBRA to you?

• 45:07Speaker 00

  I'm not sure what NiBRA is.

• 45:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  The NiBRA project that we've talked about.

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a proof aggregation layer.

• 45:15David Hoffman?

  No, I don't think so. Like, I think what I'm trying to get my head wrapped around is like, because with like Arbitrum and optimism, you and I are very used to like blockchain, like alternative blockchain networks that are blockchains that settle down to Ethereum. And it's another entire like parallel system. And I don't think that's what's going on here. It's not a blockchain, right? It's like exploring like the world of like expressive layers on top of Bitcoin. You can't really like take your Ethereum frame of mind and apply it to Bitcoin. You can start there, but the outcome is completely different. And, and so like, there's just like some things that don't cross over the chasm in terms of what they look like on Ethereum when they're applied to Bitcoin.

• 45:58David Hoffman?

  It's just like a different construction. Like, for example, David, like, the nature of the computation that would occur in a BitVM like Layer 2, it's not going to be like, like NFT trading on a Layer 2, or, or maybe, maybe it is, but even if it is, it's going to look different, right? Like, maybe you can help continue this conversation. Like, what, how is the different nature of like Layer 2 computation going to be like on Bitcoin?

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Well, I guess I just want to like, to maybe help this, like, I think Ryan's like, having trouble thinking that this is like this off-chain computation on a blockchain. And I'm thinking like, in the context of rollups, like, like a prover is not a blockchain. Like, you have this, this, you have this blockchain, but then you're, you're taking all that and you're putting in this like hyper-centralized, just like, like, prover computer. And that's, that's kind of what's happening, you know, on the BitVM side. It's not a blockchain whatsoever. You're performing it all off-chain, which just means on a separate computer.

• 46:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so BitVM is more a prover, it's not an entire chain, but like you could just use the prover to validate the entire chain, right?

• 47:04David Hoffman?

  Are Layer 2s on Bitcoins blockchains?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So what BitVM is really focused is on is the bridge to get you to this L2 blockchain. So like, there really be two different ways that I think people envision using BitVM. One is like that traditional rollup setup that we talked about, where you have the L1 contract, you have the L2 blockchain, it compresses the computation as ZK proof, and then there has to be something to receive and verify that ZK proof. So that little bridge component right there that exists or can be arbitrated by the L1 to verify the ZK proof, like that is one use case of BitVM. And you could build a true, or kind of like a more traditional ZK rollup that way.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  The other way that people could use BitVM is just to build like a Bitcoin bridge. Like instead of using WBTC or a federation, like you could bridge Bitcoin, say, into some sort of wrapped Ethereum ecosystem, or you could bridge it into another side chain. And it has that same trust assumptions where you only need to trust one honest party out of, say, a thousand as opposed to a federation, and you can bridge it into another chain. And maybe that chain, you then build rollups on top of that. You have a settlement layer, you have, you know, 20 different rollups, they're all using the same ZK circuit, you're getting the cross-composability, you know, all the kind of advanced topics that you guys are talking about, like that's the potential for it.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  So to recap that, you could create a ZKP verifier that's arbitrated by Bitcoin and just have a rollup that settles directly onto the Bitcoin L1. Or you can create a pegged version of Bitcoin with the same trust assumptions, and then in that new ecosystem, you could build rollups on top of that.

• 48:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, so it sounds like the emphasis that you're trying to place on is that this is a bridge primitive, but what is on the other side of that bridge? You know, Bitcoin's on one side of the bridge. What's on the other side of the bridge? What's on the other side of the bridge could be a whole, like, open field of innovation, where it could be a blockchain, it could be like a tokenized implementation Bitcoin elsewhere. It sounds like it's up to developers to imagine what could be once on the other side of that bridge, once we have that bridge standard. By the BitVM team. Is that, is that fair?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And that's why I think, you know, I started off this conversation describing that, that idea of like the chasm, right? Like you're crossing the chasm and where I mentioned that like bridge that we're building, both like a technical bridge and like a metaphorical bridge. And if you, if, if you're willing to, to trust that bridge, this one of N trust assumption, this kind of like optimistic as opposed to validity proof type, type setup. And if you can cross that bridge and you can cross that chasm, then you are into the new frontier, right? And, and could you build a bridge to Ethereum? And everybody's like, well, hey, we don't want any of this stuff on, on Bitcoin. Like, we just want like a trust minimized way to use Bitcoin on Ethereum. Like, maybe that's the route some people go. And maybe some people say, no, I want true roll up where you're posting the data directly on Bitcoin.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Maybe other people say, we want this, this settlement layer where we have this world of different rollups that are all cross composing with each other. Yeah, like, like BitVM like enables this kind of design flexibility, again with that caveat of the one of N trust assumption.

• 50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess more, more my question was, why don't they just attach a chain to it then? They're doing the work of creating the bridge. Like, this is essentially what Arbitrum or Optimism have like done is they've done the kind of the bridge piece. But then they've also just slapped a chain on it too. Is that out of scope for BitVM?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  I think for the BitVM team, it's, it's probably out of scope, but there are a lot of people who are very excited about using BitVM for that exact use case. Where, where they want to, to, to use it as a bridge to their chain. And there are some people that are doing the, the traditional rollup path and there are other people that are using it for like side chains. But yeah, like I, I don't think Robin in the BitVM team is, is building a chain themselves. Like they kind of want to let a thousand flowers bloom. Like Robin is on record saying, you know, a, a world of like, you know, an arbitrary amount of like side chains. All with different experimentations, like a free market of side chains is kind of his vision.

• 51:06David Hoffman?

  Right. Yes. Okay. The, the bridge, the metaphorical bridge that you're talking about is landing way harder for me now. It's like, once you get over this, this, the literal, once you build the literal bridge, you get into the land of just like, hey, what's on the other side of that bridge? What's on that destination is like a startup that can actually raise to build something. That they see as like cool and unique and that's something that they want to see for Bitcoin. Maybe that's not your vibe, but maybe market forces are asking for like a different product or solution on the other side of that potential bridge implementation like, well, we can go build that too. I think maybe on net, what's on the other side of this bridge that is being built by the BitVM primitive is expressivity. So like you can have expressivity on the other side.

• 51:50David Hoffman?

  And it's up to the Bitcoin builders to like decide what they want to build either by market forces or their own intrinsic curiosity or whatever.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there, there are, to be clear, there are teams building all the stuff that you're talking about. Like there are teams like building these other environments and these different like design trade offs. But like, once we get over that, that, that bridge, then we get into all the fun stuff that you guys are talking about. Like we talked about data availability layers. You talk about like what different type of execution environment you want. Like maybe somebody wants to build like, like a proof of stake style Bitcoin chain that specializes in NDA, like all that stuff you can have. One thing that we didn't mention, and just so the audience knows, it's like, like a roll up in and of itself is not like a magic bullet, right? Because you still have to post that data in theory, like onto the Bitcoin L1. And because the blocks are, they're not one megabyte, they're technically four megabyte, you know,

• 52:39Speaker 00

  like a pure roll up could probably still only get like, I'm going to guess anywhere from like 10 to maybe like 50x improvement in scaling if you're posting all of the data on the L1. So that's, that's still pretty good. It's not bad. It can expand self custody. It can make things a lot cheaper. But eventually Bitcoin is going to have to go down the same path that Ethereum is going down where it's like you're going to have these, these dedicated data availability layers. And that gets a little more advanced, a little more nuanced.

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  Okay. So David, you presented that this as if people are willing to accept the N of one trust assumption, then we can eventually get to this world of expressivity on Bitcoin. Do you think the Bitcoin set of people, that's a, that's a pill to swallow? How big is that pill to swallow? Will people swallow that pill?

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. I think it's gonna be absolutely massive. I think-

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  You think people are gonna, largely as a whole, like the laser-eyed Maxies aside, Bitcoin is going to accept this N of 1 trust assumption?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's good enough to get us there again, to cross that chasm. And then you can get the fully ZK-verified, cross-composable, you know, chains with like, you know, the beautiful UX and the forked Ethereum smart contracts. Like, I think that's gonna be good enough. And I think that there are beginning to be use cases that even the most ardent Bitcoiners are like, "Oh, like, that's kinda dope." You know, like, I think that's one of the criticisms of like sidechains is sidechains were like a little bit ahead of their time. You know, like, none of the good applications really came out until like, you know, DeFi summer. And yeah, there was so much frickin' grift and so much scam and so many shitty products. But like, the idea of, you know, being able to like borrow against your Bitcoin at 0% interest in like a liquidy style, you

• 54:26Speaker 00

  know, with like a very small origination fee, provably over-collateralized, like, that is badass, you know? Account abstraction wallets is like another great one, you know, obviously sending private payments, you know, being able to earn yield. Like, there are, um, there are teams, like, I'll give a shout out to like Botanix, you know, they're doing this thing where you can stake Bitcoin, you can earn yield on it, and it would create like a two-way peg to another chain. And so they were thinking about building like an EVM chain. And I was like, "Guys, look at what EigenDA is doing." Like, you could stake your Bitcoin, you could create this separate layer, you could have a dedicated data availability layer that all of the rollups use and settle to. It's earning real fees because people are paying

• 55:06Speaker 00

  to use that blob space and all the ropes can be built on it. Like, you can have a decentralized AMM perpetuals platform that, you know, is going, uh, you know, long the proof-of-stake Bitcoin and, you know, short in the perpetuals and you can create like, like the inverse perpetual, you know, stablecoin. Like, this whole world, it really gives new life to the Bitcoin monetary maximalists. Like, right now-

• 55:33Speaker 00

  All of these people are complaining about ordinals and inscriptions and it's like taking away from like, you know, the spam is like increasing cheese and it's like pricing out, you know, monetary use cases. It's like, well, you need a scaling solution that aligns to the higher fee environment where we can create economic density, where you could have dedicated rollups that do tons of transactions and tons of DeFi and tons of privacy and you could batch all of that and you're willing to bid way more than any of the inscription people in order to place your rollup transactions, you know, onto the L1. Like, that's how you beat out all this kind of arbitrary data on the L1. And I think so many Bitcoiners are just missing that. It's like, all right, guys, chill. Like, we're gonna build it and, you know, you're gonna be happy.

• 56:15David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the world that you're describing, kind of, I've always thought that building on Bitcoin is like building in a wasteland just because the whole entire construction of Bitcoin is just like optimizing for simplicity. You know, it's a philosophy of subtraction rather than addition, make Bitcoin simpler, make it harder to build on Bitcoin, just have BTC the asset. That's always been like my kind of like philosophy is like how Bitcoin has grown. But what you're showing me is that like, well, maybe that was true with like the Bitcoin base layer, but once you build this Bitcoin VM thing, it goes from like building in a wasteland to just like fish in a barrel. Whereas like, well, there's all this other innovation that so many other ecosystems have already built. So we already have like a lot of the ideas and the research and development like out of the way. Now

• 56:57David Hoffman?

  we just have to build it. So it's just like, you can't, at some point, you just can't miss. Like, DA on Bitcoin, somebody's gotta go build that, right? Like, I don't know, Optimistic Rollup or ZK Rollup on Bitcoin, somebody just goes and builds that, right? So Bitcoin Builders Renaissance, we've already seen the culture start to shift this way. What are some of the ideas that like are super hot, like right now? What are people building that's very hyped in Bitcoin world? Well, if Ryan and I were big Bitcoiners, what would we be excited about? Give us the next five episodes, Bitcoin episodes on Bankless.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm a bit biased here. I wrote an article on Bitcoin Magazine where I kind of talked about.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  You know Bitcoin-backed stablecoins, you know, and I reference like liquidity like that is when I even I talk to my most like, you know hardcore Bitcoin maximus friends. I'm like, I'm like, oh, like you call yourself a Bitcoiner like you're never going to sell your Bitcoin until you have to. I'm like, you're selling your Bitcoin. I'm borrowing against it and I'm doing it like without a custodian and I'm doing it 0% interest. Like, like I'm more of a Bitcoiner than you, you know, I'm holding one longer than you. You know, I'm just like, just, you know, like poke at them. Of course, of course. And, and then, you know, even if you get to this world, like inevitably there are going to be people who like they're just not ready for Bitcoin. They're like, they're like, I'm living in fricking Argentina, you know, off of like $5, you know, like I can't sit here and be having like a crazy volatile asset. They're like, I need stablecoins, you know?

• 58:19Speaker 00

  And if you can say, well, hey, look, here's this stablecoin. It's, it's decentralized. It's provably backed by Bitcoin. It can't be censored. Like that is a nice little ramp for them to get into this world. And then as they get savings, they can invest it into Bitcoin. It's like all this stuff that you guys have been talking about. I just think it's a better fit on Bitcoin and we're going to bring it.

• 58:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool. Yeah. Is there anything else? Like I've heard of restaking protocols on Bitcoins, like one's called Babylon. It's crossed my desk before. Obviously there's kind of like everything that's going on with ordinals and BRC 20s and that kind of thing. Anything else that we should keep our eyes open to?

• 58:56Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, pretty much just like take all of your guys' prior podcasts and things that you're excited about and say like, we can bring them on Bitcoin. I think account abstraction wallets, like I'm very excited about. I'm also really excited about the prospect. I mentioned this in the tweet, like this is pretty far future facing, but like if you could use something like storage proofs to, to kind of trustlessly give an attestation from like a data availability layer, you know, you could use something like Celestia or like a dedicated Bitcoin DA layer and you could relay that information trustlessly to the Bitcoin L1 and like. That just kind of eliminates like the the risk of somebody's data availability layers.

• 59:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, this has been a fascinating conversation. This is exactly what I hoped for when I opened up that tweet and I didn't expect you to reply. And I just want to thank you for replying. I mean, from my perspective, Bitcoin is maybe starting to get interesting again. I sort of left it off as sort of a store of value and it's a uncensorable store of value and that's great. One part of the bankless journey, but like it was missing DeFi, it was missing expressivity, it was missing all of the potential that Ethereum is unleashed. And if you're telling me that it's starting to get that back again, and there are some ways where it can start to follow more closely, something, its own version, but something closer to the Ethereum roadmap, that to me is very exciting and leads to a more bankless future. I guess I got to ask though, David, are there are there

• 1:00:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  more of you out there? Because I think the the overwhelming message from what like the social layer, at least that is loudest in Bitcoin, does not talk in the way that you are talking, is not a listener to the bankless podcast necessarily, is not focused on building, is very focused on kind of like monetary properties and like Robert Breedlove style, which is fantastic, right? But just like not talking about this sort of thing and is thinking, still thinking that lightning is going to solve everything, all of the Bitcoin scalability problems. And yeah, are there more people like you actually like digging in and coming up with these new roll up style solutions on Bitcoin? How many of you are there?

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  I mean, you could probably count it on, you know, one hand. But no, no, no, I mean, in all seriousness, like it's a small but but but but growing movement. The problem is is like there are some projects out there that are trying to like hijack this narrative that that really are not the true builders. It's it's for sure grifting. It's for sure scams. And I think people need to like really have their guard up, not to go like full on Bitcoin maximalist, but like, yeah, like this stuff is real. But a lot of the stuff you will end up seeing on Twitter is definitely not. And you know, Ryan, kind of what you were saying, like, I remember, I figured it was a podcast you guys had like many years ago. And somebody came on and just like really applauded you guys and said, like, like, when you guys were getting into it, like, nobody gave a shit about Ethereum.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  It wasn't even like, hey, that was a bad idea. It's like, dude, we don't even want to talk about Ethereum. Like, like, why are you guys doing this right now? And you like, you stuck to your guns because like, you understood the, the potential and the revolution. And you said, I don't care. Like, like, I, you know, will, will, will, will, will die on this hill because I essentially believe in it. And there is that small contingent of us that feel the same way about what is potentially happening in Bitcoin. And sometimes I look back and I'm like, oh, man, like, if I found Bitcoin in like, you know, in like 2011 or, or whatever, like, like, I have had the conviction to like, stay on, stay in it. And the answer is like, you know, probably not. Who, who, who knows?

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  But, you know, back then, like, you don't have the foresight of like, all of this development work that's already been done of like, all of the podcasts, of all of the articles. But that's kind of how I feel about this, this, this whole broader, like, L2 renaissance and, and what's possible in, in the Bitcoin world. Like, I don't care if it sinks or swims. I'm pretty sure it's going to be very successful. But even if it's not, like, this is ideas worth pursuing, you know, like, we are fricking, you know, missionaries, not mercenaries. And if people disagree with it, it's like, bring it on, you know, I'm on Twitter all day, you know?

• 1:02:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I love that. That level of conviction is going to get you and the small but growing tribe quite far and totally applaud it. I mean, this is very much, you know, bankless aligned, I would say, very, very excited to have more bankless money systems built on top of Bitcoin. So, David, I'm going to ask people, including the show notes, a link to your, your Twitter account. Because I was not following you before this, my mistake, but I am now following you. And you, my friend, are going to be my Bitcoin signal, I hope, so I can start to parse out what's really what's not. You're the go-to now, Bitcoin Dave. So, like, with that power comes great responsibility. Please do not lead us astray, you know, show us where the true decentralized rollups are building on Bitcoin.

• 1:03:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And thank you so much for your time today.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks, guys. I do want to give a quick shout out to people like John Light, you know, Robin Linus, you know, Alexi Orkin. Like, these are like the true builders and people, if they follow me and see their names, like, like, like, those are real deal people.

• 1:03:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. And of course Satoshi, who started it all, right? Right Bitcoin Dave?

• 1:03:58David Hoffman?

  Alright, thanks guys.

• 1:03:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can't forget him or them.

• 1:04:00David Hoffman?

  Thanks Dave.

• 1:04:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the Twitter handle is David underscore C Roy. So D A V I D underscore C Roy. Got to end with this, of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. Frontier is not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.