David began by unpacking the history of zero-knowledge proofs, what Ethereum has already done with them, and the potential they create for allowing “rollups” on Bitcoin - a promising solution for bringing scalability, privacy, and programmability to the original chain. David and the Alpen team are currently building Strata, a “trust-minimized” ZK-based rollup on Bitcoin.

This is pretty technical stuff, but David did his best to explain words like “ZKPs” and “BitVM” for us in childspeak. If you can follow through to the end, consider yourself not a beginner anymore!

https://x.com/david_seroy

https://x.com/alpenlabs

https://x.com/Strata_BTC

TIMESTAMPS

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00:00 The “Bitcoin Season 2” Podcasters

01:50 The history of zero-knowledge proofs on Bitcoin

04:28 Privacy, SNARKs, and STARKs

06:25 What took so long to get ZKPs for Bitcoin?

08:10 Rollups VS Sidechains

09:30 Zero-knowledge proofs explained for dummies

12:00 How Ethereum laid the groundwork

13:45 Tradeoffs with trustlessness

14:55 Ethereum is still on training wheels

16:55 Bitcoin’s big unlock

19:48 BitVM: What Robin Linus figured out

21:55 BitVM2:ZK verification on L1

23:30: What is “optimistic” verification?

25:30 1-of-N: The new trust assumption for Bitcoin L2s

27:25 Making verification as efficient as possible

30:15 Normies won’t use BitVM2 bridging

32:29 Working around BitVM’s liquidity problem

35:00 The BitVM operator fee market

38:45 Rollups clear up Lightning Network’s issues

44:15 Why Alpen is not launching a token

50:00 “Tokens are f***ing brutal”

52:35 What Bitcoin maxi culture got wrong

54:55 OP_CAT making BitVM irrelevant

58:00 MEV concerns about OP_CAT are overblown

01:02:00 “Udi derangement syndrome”

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