Veteran Bitcoin commentator and inventor of Drivechains Paul Sztorc joins the show to talk Bitcoin's sustainability and the role of merged mined side chains. In this episode: 

• Why Paul is the ‘Steely Dan’ of Bitcoin
• Revisiting ‘Measuring decentralization’
• Revisiting Paul’s argument on Proof of Stake being veiled PoW
• Why you should roll your own statistics
• Concentration of power in miners and mining pools
• Is PoW worthless if it isn’t challenged?
• How Bitcoin energy FUD is based on neo-malthusianism
• The Julian Simon / Paul Ehrlich wager
• Why none of our resources are finite
• How climate change diplomacy is neo-colonial
• Why and when innovation happens
• Why Paul is a critic of Bitcoin development culture
• Paul’s critique of Stock to Flow
• Why Bitcoin culture is static
• Why Bitcoin needs more satire
• Bitcoin fees are 80-100x less than those of Ethereum
• Why BTC fees are not sustainably high
• Why Bitcoin fees and security budget need to grow over time
• Can you just wait for more confirmations if security spend declines
• Are fees destined to be effectively 0 through the creation of more blockspace?
• The history of Drivechains /BIP300
• Does merge mining make it more expensive to run a node? 
• Do we know how to upgrade Bitcoin Core today?
• The relevance of sidechains and merge mining to Bitcoin today
• Was Satoshi into altcoins?
• Would more sidechain development have inhibited the growth of Ethereum?
• Does BIP300 solve the problem of the Bitcoin security budget?
• Why you can’t reduce blockspace to increase security budget? 
• Update on Drivechains

Content mentioned in this episode: 

• Truthcoin, Security Budget in the Long Run
• Truthcoin, Security Budget II, Low Fees, and Merged Mining
• Truthcoin, Measuring Decentralization
• Truthcoin, Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work 
• All about Drivechains/ Bip300/301

Sponsor notes:

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