E99: Rollups on BItcoin - John Light Interview - Author of comprehensive Bitcoin Rollups research paper & Sovryn Contributor

[00:00:00] :  what is up you beautiful people Welcome back to the build on Bitcoin podcast where we cover all the innovation happening across the Bitcoin ecosystem. So you'll typically find me either giving updates on the latest happenings or more importantly, talking directly to the builders who are in the trenches, building stuff across all the different pieces, that is the Bitcoin ecosystem. And so today I have a fantastic conversation with johN light. So john he describes himself as a professional Bitcoin er he's been Bitcoin for over a decade, currently he contributes to the Sovereign Protocol, but recently he put out what is probably the most in depth research into roll ups specifically on Bitcoin. So the big topic, you may have heard these as zero Knowledge roll ups on something like Eve and there is a component of that, the zero component of a roll up, but in this, you'll hear that, hear it described as a validity roll up more commonly and that's what we talk about, it's, it's typically touted as one of the best and most likely scaling solutions for Bitcoin that crosses from the box people want. So we get into the weeds somewhat about that. I kept it more overview because there's a fantastic interview he did with kevin Rooke who's in a fellow podcaster on the same topic and they go much deeper and I really like that interview. So if you want to go in the weeds after this one highly, we're going to check out that episode with kevin Brooke and john Light, but that's what we have today. So we're talking to john Light Ones fan Fantastic. If you're curious about where Bitcoin is going in the future and how it can scale to much more people while still maintaining its key properties, things like privacy. Uh this one you're gonna love. So without further ado, but first, a quick word from our sponsor, We all know Bitcoin is for the innovators, the revolutionaries and the builders looking to build a better world for themselves. And for the next generation, we also know the saying the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is right now the same thing applies to building on Bitcoin if you want to come build with the most active developer community building new use cases for Bitcoin and it's time you make the leap to learning clarity, clarity. Is this tax smart contract programming layer, which enables us to work on defi smart contracts and so much more all built with the safety and security that comes with Bitcoin. Start today by going to start dot stacks dot org Start dot stacks dot org has a five step journey that will take you from complete stacks, novice to teaching you clarity all the way to finding a job with the web three stacks startup. Don't wait another month, year or decade, waiting to get involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Start building on Bitcoin today, go to start dot stacks dot org to start learning and building today. Thank you to my sponsor as always. So without further ado, let's jump into this conversation with professional Bit corner john light. Welcome to build on Bitcoin Jon heder and there my man doing great. Thanks for having me on jake. I'm excited to talk and you know, from what I know, like I'm newer to the Bitcoin space. I've been here for about a year, year and a half, but you start to see names. Thank you sir. I guess that's, that's your first question to ask real quick is like, how's the, how's the bear market been for you? How many cycles have ever been through? How you feeling right now? Um, I've been through more than a few cycles by now. So you could say I'm a grisly old Bitcoin veteran. Um, you know, one of those just, you know, send out like Bitcoin, it's way better doing way better now than I could have anticipated it was, you know, this length of time from, from when I first got interested in it. So, um, I'm, I'm very happy with where Bitcoin is and where it's been going and uh, yeah, there's, there's a lot to be excited about? Yeah, Okay, very cool. Yeah, this is my first cycle and it's like the fact is quieter feels kind of weird, especially as a content creator, both of me, like they lost their conviction. Like I just love everyone's heads down, building the fundamentals are still there, like it doesn't matter at all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean if anything that quiet time gives that additional breathing ring for having deeper conversations. Um you know, going further into the weeds on different topics and not kind of getting distracted by the hype and the noise and and you know, all the, all the tourists that come through. So you know, that's not to say, you know the the bowl season doesn't have its, you know, benefits and it's fun moments. But uh but yeah, I like this time for for building and getting to build a stronger, more cohesive community. It couldn't have been more, it's very well said, well I love to jump into this. We got a lot to talk about that. I think the big topic of the day is this research paper you put out on the feasibility of roll ups on Bitcoin and kind of the some of the nuances of that. But before we get into that I'd love to you know, Bitcoin is such, it touches people in so many different ways. You can be coming in from like the technical side, from the economic side from the sovereign individual side. And uh so that's just it's just crazy to me that you can ask a simple question like what Fascinates you about Bitcoin and get so many different answers. And so that is my question to start with is like you know what what do you find so fascinating and interesting about Bitcoin. The answer is probably changed over the years, but I think the core of what excites me and inspires me about Bitcoin hasn't changed much, which is to have uh stateless, decentralized electronic form of money um is very exciting to me uh if that idea first attracted me because I saw what was happening in the with the 2008 financial crisis and was very disappointed in how the government was like handling that situation, bailing out the banks, banks tres getting huge, you know, bonuses and golden parachutes and things like that. Um while my friends parents were getting foreclosed on and losing their jobs and stuff and it just the whole way that all went down didn't feel right. And I thought to myself, you know, if I was just coming of age as an adult at the time, you know, finding myself thinking about my future and all of that and I was thinking to myself, you know, if I have an option, I would like to remove myself from that system as much as possible. Like I might not be able to, you know, single handedly make that kind of system go away or stop that kind of stuff from happening. But I can at least remove myself from participating in it. And so I started looking for alternative financial systems, alternative monetary systems, that kind of thing. And over time eventually found Bitcoin and I found that Bitcoin solved a lot of the problems of other alternative monetary systems that people were using or experimenting with at the time. And it struck me as something that had the potential to be the future of money. Like I had this feeling that fiat currencies all have a shelf life um there's probably no fiat currency that's going to exist forever, whereas because Bitcoin is not tied to any single country, any single political entity or regime um or company, I thought that it had the potential to potentially be then like the next evolution of money that that could serve humanity forever or as long as you know humanity. Uh and and this kind of modern technology that we have exists and that was extremely exciting to me and I once I realized that I decided like this is what I want to do with my life, you know, I wanna I wanna try to make Bitcoin fulfill its full potential and get it into the hands of as many people as possible um and you tell tell as many people as possible about its benefits. So I started doing Bitcoin education, I started working on Bitcoin startups and have been doing this kind of Bitcoin evangelism. Bitcoin technology research um ever since, that's great. Yeah, it's it's so interesting like we all have the same response to the eight crisis, like if it was just such Bs on so many levels, but through all of that none of my thinking was the dollar was the problem like it just seemed so ingrained like why would I ever question that? And so I'm curious like you know you start to find out about Bitcoin and there's a jump from you understand technology to I'm gonna spend my life on this, so I'm gonna make this my career, you know like I've been in crypto now working here for a little less than a year and it was a big jump going from, you know, working at a grocery store or any kind of other cycles. I had to like being in Bitcoin or crypto. So what was that transition like where like you found out about Bitcoin, you know, you believe in the thesis of it to really starting to get involved at like a tangible level of putting that time and build stuff well it was a period of education um and getting myself to a point where I feel like I had solid footing to be able to even talk intelligently about it. Um and and to feel like I had something to say and to feel like I had the knowledge where I could actually help other people get into Bitcoin. Um and so I was working at a media start up at the time and going to school eventually dropped out of school to do the startup full time and then at some point like the Bitcoin bug just bit me so hard, I felt like okay I really understand this, I really understand like the potential here now, I want to like dedicate my life to helping Bitcoin fulfill its, its full potential and so I moved to SAn Francisco, which at the time was the closest thing that you could call to like a Bitcoin startup hub. Um companies like Trade Hill and coin base were just getting started and and based there in SAn Francisco at the first Bitcoin meet up, I went to their uh I met brian armstrong from Coinbase and Jared kenna from Trade Hill and just started networking with people in the Bitcoin community out there and met some people that I started working with, we started working on projects, people started raising money from investors and just through, you know the sheer force of will like carved out a place in the industry for myself and have been working on Bitcoin projects full time ever since. Love it, Love it, we are, we're thankful that happens. Um well yeah, I'd love to start to start to go down the rabbit hole of this research paper and roll ups and Bitcoin scaling. Um and for people to listen to this, there's a podcast you recently did because this is big, this is it safe to say that this is the most in depth paper on roll ups on Bitcoin to date is the piece you just released? Yeah, I would say so okay, so the, if you haven't seen or read the paper and you want to nerd out its Bitcoin roll ups dot org? Right, yep, yep, so that's a good place to go if you want to get in the weeds and hear it directly from john. Also though there's a fantastic podcast with john and kevin Brooke who runs a podcast focused mostly on lightning, but this was too important not to, not to have jOHN on and they basically cover the podcast I was going to do, I had to outline and I started watching this for for context and he just hit all the questions I had, basically in the order I had, so it didn't make sense. I'm not gonna double dip uh do the same podcast over and over. So for most people go check out kevin's podcast with john, it's fantastic. I think the way I want to attack this is more of a, this is like a teaser and overview for the person who like, they just want to get the bite size of what this means in like a half hour condensed fashion. Um and so I think it's good to probably start with what is the current state of Bitcoin scaling and kind of, all of it solutions like roll ups are one option, but what is out there, Cohen is being considered by the community or technically feasible that you're aware of. Um are you referring to Protocols or different features that aren't yet implemented or are you including even things that people could do with Bitcoin today? I would say both like if I'm looking at uh you know tech that might be in the works 10 years from now but we are even our like vaguely aware of now. And if something happens culturally or something that could be possible, roll ups are one, you know, I don't know if dr changed and whatever is a thing to help serve that. What's the current landscape of that look like? Yeah, good question. So in terms of what people can do with Bitcoin today, there are a few different techniques and scaling is an important topic to cover on multiple layers of like the Bitcoin stack. So um there are efforts at how to improve scalability at the networking layer. Um such as uh compact blocks is a is a technique that's currently in use, which is just a way to um send less data between full nodes and miners um so that they can get their blocks relayed across the network faster. Um there are on chain techniques, so there's ways that you can make more efficient use of your block space um such as transaction matching, which a lot of exchanges are using nowadays. So the old way of like making withdrawals from exchanges is that, you know, an exchange user would submit their withdrawal address and then the exchange would construct a transaction and send going to the withdrawal address and if you do that many, many times you have to have many many transactions which takes up a lot of block space. Um And so what trans what exchanges have switched to doing is matching withdrawals. So rather than having one transaction per withdrawal, they'll have many withdrawals in a single transaction. And you save uh a lot of block space. The exact amount of block space depends on like a number of different factors like how many inputs you need for your transaction and how many outputs there are and things like that. But but you can see you can save a lot of block space compared to the old way of doing things. Um And then there are some uh protocols that are like off chain protocols um which actually move transactions off chain. And so lightning is a is a popular example of this where users will do one transaction on chain to open a channel to some counter party that already has is a you know in the lightning network. And then once they have that channel open they can send payments to that counter party or other people that their counter parties connected to and people that their counterpart is connected to who those people are connected to. So it creates this big kind of spider web network of liquidity that people can send payments to off chain. So those transactions don't have to ever touch you know the Blockchain. And that uh that saves a ton of space basically every lightning transaction that's ever happened. Never touches the Blockchain. Um and and and people only have to go back on chain when they want to close their channel or they need to rebalance their liquidity in a way that can't be done through lightning directly or something like that. I've had one of my oldest channels I think has been open since like 2018. So all of the payments that I've done through the channel, it's like those those transactions haven't touched the chain in four years. So it's you know you can imagine how much black space that has saved. Um And then you multiply that by everyone that uses lightning and you can think of there's a huge amount of savings there. So there's a lot of stuff that's already being done to um like Scale Bitcoin. And then there are some more futuristic techniques, things that you can't do with Bitcoin today. But people are proposing as you know could be possible if we made some changes to Bitcoin usually with a soft fork. Um So you mentioned dr chains drive chains is one way that we could get more for transactions. They won't have the exact same security model as Bitcoin, you know using Bitcoin on chain today. Um But lightning doesn't have the exact same security model as Bitcoin either. And so you know some people find that that security trade off acceptable. Um But drive chains are basically uh new block chains that you can move your Bitcoin over to in a kind of trust minimized way and then do a bunch of transactions on this other Blockchain that um Bitcoin. Main chain. Full nodes don't have to validate, they don't have to validate, they don't have to replay these transactions, they don't even need to know these transactions are happening. So it's similar to lightning that way where you're moving the transactions off chain somewhere else where layer one Full nodes don't have to know about or store these transactions, verify these transactions or anything like that. Um Dr chains is a very interesting protocol. Um There are a few different dips that would would enable uh drive chains um There are techniques like op. C. T. V. Um orbit 1 19 which jeremy Rubin tried to activate earlier this year um which has some scaling benefits. Um It could enable um new more efficient uses of block space particularly for exchanges or opening lightning transactions in bulk um in ways that are uh aware of or sensitive to um block space congestion during periods of high load on the Blockchain rather than having to put all of these transactions on chain. And um and take up all this block space at the same time. Instead you can just put a hash on chain and then once uh so the the Bitcoins are basically owned by the recipients at that point in time but then the recipients can claim the bitcoins so basically like unroll the hash into like a tree of transactions um to actually claim the bitcoins at a later date, once the block space congestion has cooled down and transaction fees are are lower. So this is this is a way that you can that that exchanges and other like large lightning service providers can make more efficient use of block space even during periods of high um congestion so that they're not slowing down withdrawals or or lightning uh channel um you know recipients from onboarding, they're just uh they're just they're just delaying um when when those transactions actually um can be claimed by by the recipients. Um So op C. T. V. Is is interesting um there's also a technique called signature aggregation that some people are working on, where you can take The transaction or the signatures on transactions in a block and then like smush them together. So instead of requiring, you know, say you know, 10 or 20,000 bytes or even more, you know, for a bunch of signatures in a block, you can compress that down to essentially like the size of a single signature um which would just be you know, maybe a few 100 bytes. Um And so that would significantly free up space in blocks for more transactions. Um there's really like quite a large landscape of protocols honestly, so I'll stop there and uh but you know, if anybody is interested in going further down the rabbit hole of like Bitcoin scaling solutions feel free to like send me a tweet or or or something like that and and I can send some links to uh to more resources to check out. Okay, now that's that's a perfect overview and yeah, if you want to find him on twitter, it's at light coin. Um yeah, this is where I feel like I read, I try and read the Bit coin op tech newsletter and typically I'll just like skin for like the biggest things that I can 10% understand. But this is the stuff in Bitcoin where It's it's in the weeds. Super technical and it's crazy because the limitations of Bitcoin, like the block size etc. It allow it forced you to do things like this so you can't build a different crazy kind of L1 that just at the base level doesn't do the right things pretty centralization or whatever. And so it's just kind of, when I hear about these things, it just kind of makes me pause and it's amazing to see like so much innovation happening inside this bounded space and just trying to do so much at the fringes whether it's fifth-19 or roll up to drive change. It's it's it's fascinating. Yeah, it's not sexy, it's not flashy, but it's, to me it's art. I mean it's it's really amazing what the engineers in the Bitcoin developer community are able to do within the constraints that they've been given by Satoshi and the rest of the Bitcoin community um and you know, to the broader Bitcoin community, I think it's it's really admirable that people have been so um so committed to, let's say keeping blocks small or ultimately for the purpose of decentralization, um whereas so many other chains are willing to push further and further in the direction of centralization and I think that that experimentation um is legitimate, like, you know, they're they're not trying to be Bitcoin, there's something else and they're testing the boundaries of like how far can we push this before it becomes dangerously centralized, I'm happy that those experiments are happening, but I'm also happening that we have a community like Bitcoin and that it is Bitcoin in particular, that is um yeah, so strongly committed to decentralization because it gives us um I think very like saying constraints to like fit our engineering um into and forces us to think about just how we can use the limited resources that we have um as Bitcoin full nodes and the network as a whole as efficiently as possible and trying to squeeze every, you know, the maximum amount of value into into the smallest number of bytes, I think that's I think that's a yeah, just a really cool um constraint to work within and um I think validity. Roll ups are are consistent with that perfect. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, I think the things that make us so like inspired in awe is when something like you have physics which has its own limitations and someone kind of like pushes against physics whether it's like the human body or the human mind or the code base that has these these constraints and you say okay cool, I'm gonna build it to the edge of that as far as I can inside the box, it's it's very cool and uh yeah so so jumping into roll ups then and we're breathing through, we're gonna approach an hour real quick. No problem. But uh I try to keep this a half hour but there's just too much to cover. So let's jump in then you you gave like seven or so interesting things currently in development people are working on and exploring but the one you didn't touch on is roll ups. So yeah give us give us kind of the overview of what a roll up is in the context of Bitcoin. Sure. So a roll up is a Blockchain that you can trust Leslie transfer your Bitcoins to and then back to the the main Bitcoin Blockchain and the way that uh this is I should say there's not really any other protocol that gives you that benefit um with with the same um say flexibility as validity roll up. So this is a this is a unique uh protocol in that regard um and the way that roll ups enable you to do that is using two tricks one is that they store um a compressed version of their transaction data. So basically all of the transactions that are happening on the role of Blockchain. Get compressed and then put into a layer one Bitcoin block so that the data remains available as long as that block is you know, seated by the Bitcoin network. And that's important because of the second kind of trick that the validity that the roll up uses to enable you to trust Leslie get your Bitcoins in and out, which is a validity proof. And the validity proof is a cryptographic proof that as the name implies, proves the validity of the transactions that are happening in the roll up block. So basically you can move your Bitcoin into this other Blockchain, do some transactions. The roll up block producer is going to bundle those transactions into a block and then put the transaction data and then a validity proof that proves that all of those transactions are actually valid. They put that validity proof and the role of transaction data onto the layer one Bitcoin Blockchain and then layer one full nodes, they don't have to execute all those transactions that happened on the roll up. They just verify the validity proof. And if the validity proof comes back with a check mark and says yep all of these transactions are valid, then that roll up um block transaction is itself considered valid and the roll up block is confirmed both on the roll up and on the layer one. Bitcoin Blockchain and what this enables is that when you deposit your Bitcoin into a roll up the roll up full nodes are going to be looking at the the deposit contract on Bitcoin layer one and they're going to see okay some Bitcoins just came into the deposit contract we're going to now issue an equivalent number of Bitcoin to that Bitcoin address on the roll up So you send some Bitcoin to the deposit contract and then those bitcoins appear in your address on the roll up and you can send those bitcoins around on the roll up just the same as you would um send bitcoins around on on on Bitcoin layer one and then once you want to get your Bitcoins back out onto the layer one Blockchain you submit a withdrawal transaction And then um the withdrawal transaction is going to come out of the roll up contract on Bitcoin Layer one. Now the challenge becomes how does Bitcoin layer one know that the withdrawal transaction that's coming out of the roll up contract on layer one is actually valid. How do they know it's not just somebody else saying? Yeah I own these Bitcoins over here give give them back to me. Well they use that validity proof because the validity proof is going to prove that the withdrawal transaction is valid and if the validity proof itself isn't valid then the withdrawal transaction is going to get rejected and it's and and it's not going to happen so nobody can fraudulently take coins out of the roll up. They can only take coins out of the roll up if they actually own those coins. And this um this is in comparison to existing side chain protocols that we have such as root stock or liquid where this movement of bitcoins to and from the side chain is managed by a trusted federation. Like the same problem exists. It's just that today Bitcoin layer one has no way of verifying whether or not the withdrawal transactions coming out of the side chain address are actually valid or not. And so validity roll ups using this on chain data availability uh In combination with the validity proof provides that security and that trust listening to ensure that the only people who can withdraw coins from the roll up are actually the current owners of those coins according to the roll up. And another benefit that you get from this protocol is that it fully inherits the double spend security of the layer one Blockchain. So the exact same amount of double spend security that you get from sending Bitcoin from one layer one address to another layer at one address. You also get when you send Bitcoin from a roll one, you know a layer to roll up address to another layer to roll up a dress like you're you're getting that full Double spend security from 100% of the hashing power on Bitcoin layer one which again the side chain protocols of today. Um don't don't have liquid uses a federation for consensus root stock uses merged mining. And even if they had 100% of Bitcoin miners mining um their side chain, it's actually still not 100% of the the security of Bitcoin um because the side chain can be reordered independently of of Bitcoin layer one. Whereas with roll ups, if you want to reorder transaction on a validity roll up, you also have to reorder the layer one block that that transaction was confirmed in. So to summarize with a validity roll up, you have this separate Blockchain that inherits the full double spend security of your layer one Blockchain. Bitcoin. And it has a secure bridge that you can use to transfer your Bitcoin into this other Blockchain, do some transactions and then have a strong guarantee just as strong as your ownership guarantees on layer one that you and only you can withdraw your bitcoins and get them back on a layer one Bitcoin address. Ok, hmm I wanna I want to take a step back to the beginning a little bit and make sure I understand kind of like thematically how this works. So you say to trust this exchange to and from Bitcoin and people can kind of feel kind of what that looks like whether it's lightning which uses just cryptography to do back and forth. Or like you mentioned with liquid rsk, there's some kind of other model involved. Um and then you mentioned it stores compressed version of data on the L. One and this is something I've been trying to wrap my head around because most of my user base for my audience is more familiar with stacks and P O X. And the way I've been trying to describe to newbies, how that works is like I'm thinking about like the dewey decimal system at libraries where you have this index card system and it can tell you where a book is. So that's like the block on the stack side. But Bitcoin doesn't know what's in any of those books. It just knows where to point to at that level of the roll up. Is that does that analogy hold any water? Does that make any sense? As far as how the Bitcoin layer is compressing the data? Not exactly. So the full state or at least the state this that is you know like yeah this may be getting a little bit too technical but let's just say enough data to be able to reconstruct the current state of the roll up from genesis Is stored in layer one. Bitcoin blocks. So it's you're storing quite a lot more data than you would with the stacks uh consensus system and the reason why roll ups require so much data to be stored on layer one is so that the users always have enough of the data about the current um validity roll up state to be able to produce their own validity proof and get their coins out of the validity roll up. If for some reason the validity roll up block producers are trying to censor them or you know have completely gone offline are completely uncooperative whatever. Like if the roll up is completely failing them, they're not able to get a withdrawal transaction confirmed on the roll up then what they can actually do is they can go directly to the layer one roll up contract and use the data that has been put in the layer one blocks about the state of the roll up to produce a validity proof that basically says I own this much Bitcoin in the current state of the roll up. I would like to withdraw that Bitcoin to this Bitcoin address and then They get that withdrawal transaction with the validity proof confirmed on the layer one Blockchain. And the layer one full nodes are able to verify that validity proof and process the withdrawal transaction. So without that data they wouldn't be able to produce that validity proof because they just don't have enough information to be able to cryptographically make that statement. Like this is how much Bitcoin I own and I'm going to mathematically show you why that is true. Um It's it's just a it's a it's just a mathematical reality of how these cryptographic proofs work, but that's that's how you're able to get that secure Bitcoin bridge where you can move Bitcoin into the roll up and then have that very strong guarantee that you can always get your Bitcoin back out onto the layer one Bitcoin Blockchain, There's no other protocol um that can do that. Okay, that's that's super helpful and fascinating. This is where I gotta pause myself cause I want to nerd out about what you just said for like 20 more minutes but I'm gonna pause and keep it, keep it uh more of an overview. Maybe it's a good time for people to go jump into Kevin's podcast, do a deeper dive. Um a few more questions will kind of dance around here at this point is everyone's heard about ZK Roll ups. Up to this point, it kind of has like name brand recognition almost. And you've chosen to you call it validity roll ups which I'm sure you're choosing your words very wisely. So what's the difference between those two things or is there any in practice? There isn't a lot of people use the term ZK Rollup to refer to validity roll ups. Um and I don't know how this got started. I think people originally kind of conflated validity proofs with ZK proofs or zero knowledge proofs. And so when it came time to use these types of proofs in a roll up context. They just said, oh we're using Zero knowledge proofs in a roll up. This is a ZK Rollup zero knowledge Roll up But technically speaking a lot of the proofs that are actually being used in DK Roll up protocols are actually validity proof. They're not zero knowledge proofs. Um you can use zero knowledge proofs to create a validity proof but not all validity proofs are zero knowledge proofs. And so if we want to be technically accurate when we're talking about specifically the proofs that are proving validity of these um roll up state transitions, we would call those validity proofs. Some of them might be zero knowledge proofs and it might be technically accurate to call them zero knowledge proofs but just so that we can speak generally about this without getting into the implementation details. Um you know, I decided to use validity proofs because it, it refers to the broadest possible number of different implementation options and this is also the term that Stark wear prefers to use and it's a term that is gaining favor. Generally speaking in the research community, I would say because of this technical distinction. Okay, that's that's super helpful. Okay, um we're gonna jump ahead. This is a, there's a natural question here to ask about the ability proofs and how they get approved. I'm gonna skip that. Um I'm gonna point people to kevin brooks podcast. You give a fantastic example of where's Waldo puzzle and how this can kind of how this kind of work in that in that example which was super enlightening, I'm leaving that as a cliffhanger for people so go check out that podcast but I want to jump ahead, start to close this out slowly um and I think one of the things that naturally comes up is Bitcoin is so resistant to change, you know, you see Bit 1 19 which kind of like came and I don't know where it is now, 300 but on the sidelines forever and there's there's this kind of obvious culture that Bitcoin is hard to change almost to the point where it's like it feels impossible sometimes. And so I think the natural question is like this sounds super interesting, the benefits seem clear, how feasible do you think this actually is to implement? Actually, first question before we get there real briefly, how technically fleshed out is this tech currently like if people want to vote today and and pass it on, is it ready? Um No, I think that we probably have a few years of R and d ahead of us to figure out what is the best way to actually implement this on Bitcoin. Um two due due diligence on the existing validity proof systems that are out there and find out if any of them are really um ready for Bitcoin. So to say, you know the level of uh um security and maturity and um efficiency that maybe Bitcoin developers would be looking for. So there are validity roll up systems that are in production um but you know these systems are on the bleeding edge and a lot of them have frankly kind of cut corners in, in, in on their way to getting to production. And so none of them are really at the level where they're like, you know, doing basically doing the full roll up security model um and and that's because they're kind of hedging their bets a little bit, you know, they're saying like yes, we're building towards a validity roll up but the tech isn't quite ready, we're going to put some guardrails in place so that if anything goes wrong humans can intervene and maybe you know, try to mitigate the potential damage. Whereas I think anything that goes onto Bitcoin, it doesn't really have that luxury, it has to be ready for Main net, it has to be ready for, you know, to be used in a trust this way um and a kind of immutable way um once it once it gets deployed. And so I think just due to the way that Bitcoin engineering culture and standards work is that it's just gonna take a lot longer to get a protocol actually ready for main myth. So one of the questions I think kevin asked me this, it might have been on a different um show that I did recently but I was recently asked um you know how long do you think it'll be before this gets onto Bitcoin and I said like optimistically maybe within five years but I could see it taking longer if it happened faster. I think it's maybe possible but that would be you know very optimistic I would say. Um but I think five years or maybe a little bit longer is maybe more realistic to getting something like this onto Bitcoin. Okay perfect. You answered both questions and one wonderful swoop. So great job john um let me think now I had a question. It disappeared so I guess we'll jump into my last one which is not really uh it's Bitcoin related but it's more of a personal question because I like to ask, you know, I found it myself it's actually hard to dream big. That's kind of my my thesis like it's hard, it's hard to expand your worldview and actually think big. And so I had to put people in a situation like you know five years from now imagine Everything's going swimmingly. Like roll ups around. Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the top dog. It's $2 million John doing in that perfect future? What what are you what are you building working on five years from now that you'd be like. Overjoyed about oh that's really hard to say um just because of how how quickly things change in Bitcoin. I I tend to take things you know one day at a time here but based on the outcome of the research that I've been doing, I am pretty excited about validity roll ups so I hope that I'm doing something at the time to help validity roll ups get on Bitcoin. Uh if they aren't already on Bitcoin at this time, if they are on Bitcoin then you know I'm out there teaching people about the validity roll ups that people have built. Um Maybe I'm working with a team to you know get adoption for their roll ups um or something like that. Like the roll up use case is so flexible because really a validity role, it's a protocol for moving Bitcoin to other block chains. It doesn't necessarily define what those block chains can do. So like the Blockchain design space is very broad like people have designed all different kinds of block chains doing all different kinds of things. Like you've got stacks with their clarity language, you've got ethereum with the VM, you've got Z Cash with zero cash protocol, you've got grin with nimble, nimble like like there are all of these different experiments going on with different Blockchain designs and all of those could be validity roll ups And so I'm most excited about improving privacy on Bitcoin because it's just a problem that has plagued Bitcoin. Urz for so long and so you know five years from now, I think it'd be really cool to be working on a privacy focus validity roll up that's bringing zero cash protocol or maybe even something more private if something else has been invented by then um to Bitcoin so that Bitcoin users can get trust liss and to end encryption for their Bitcoins and we can have like a true peer to peer electronic cash system built with Bitcoin. Perfect. Yeah, that's that is fantastic. It makes me think too about um there is a lag between when the tech is like fleshed out and maybe put on Bitcoin and then implementations come out above that and like bring it fully to life. And I think you've seen this with like it seems like a further with taproot or it's like what taproot can technically do versus what's currently out there, there's a huge huge gap, you need debs, you need people, you know putting in mental cycles trying out things more infrastructure built out. So it sounds like what you're saying is it's kind of like that where tax rate is right now roll ups will probably be to where even though it gets maybe pushed into Bitcoin core, there's gonna be that time of like education tooling around for developers and that kind of thing to actually bring it to the masses. Yeah, yeah, I think I think that will, that will definitely be the case um but yeah, at the same time there are a lot of teams that have experienced with Blockchain like building block chains already and even building roll ups. So maybe adoption of validity roll ups will happen a little bit faster just because people, you know, as as we're working on like getting the role of protocols on to test Net and things like that, you know, maybe people will just be excited enough to start building stuff in parallel and once it goes on to Main Net, you know, you'll have, you'll have people launching stuff on main net like shortly after that. Um but uh it could, it could go a number of different ways. So you know, we'll just have to see like how much traction this idea gets, how you know, how many people get excited about it, how quickly the developer ecosystem develops on around it, you know, if such an ecosystem develops at all, um that kind of thing. So yeah, personally, like I said, I'm really excited about this idea, I think it can bring a lot of value to Bitcoin and I, the best I can do is shows like this and try to convince other people the same and and build a community around this and yeah, let's let's make it happen. And uh yeah, invent the most optimistic future that you can imagine five years from now, 10 years from now, let's make it happen. I I couldn't agree more john thank you because I'm not taking the time, thank you for being a Bitcoin educator and researcher and builder. Any any closing thoughts that you want to close on or I didn't touch on before we bring this to a close. Not really. Um, I think I think we covered a lot of good ground. Um, like you mentioned, I'm on twitter if anybody wants to follow me at like coin L I G H T C O I N. My website domain is very similar. L I G H T C O dot I N if you want to check out my blog and like the things that I've been writing about Bitcoin for the past few years and yeah, like let's keep the conversation going. Anybody who's interested in the roll ups or any of the topics I write about. I'm always happy to have a conversation, get feedback. Like even if you disagree, I want to hear why you disagree. So like, yeah, I'm all about the conversation. The Bitcoin community. So let's keep it going. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Especially cause like I'm, I'm Bitcoin focused now, but I came from stacks and you've always one of those guys that's like down to engage good faith debater. So appreciate you and all the knowledge you've dropped on twitter and sparse sparse pieces as I've seen you. But also this, this conversation and uh yeah, people are curious about the research paper or roll ups. Bitcoin. Roll ups dot org. I highly recommend you. Check it out. Uh Yeah, I think I think that's it. This has been fantastic, john Thank you so much, my man. Yeah. Thank you. Jake. Welcome to built on Bitcoin things on, but I'll be figure out a way to make it out. Make it out. Thank.