Some favorites:

The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch
The Elephant in the Brain, by Robin Hanson
Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt
The Strategy of Conflict, by Thomas Schelling

Also The Hobbit

Scoresby sent me a very polite (public) request on Twitter, to do this AMA. That is why I am doing it.

It certainly isn't an endorsement of Lightning. Lightning is a dead end. I have demonstrated this to an utterly overwhelming degree -- especially here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhJoJPf76Pw .

In fact, it's much worse: Lightning is a cancer, rapidly metastasizing and killing off BTC. Lightning spreads to unrelated parts of Bitcoin, and destroys those as well.

Your very post (rude, inaccurate, yet overconfident) is further proof of this fact! At this rate LN will kill BTC sooner than I had thought.

The irony of using that cliché, originally used for Trump, which turned out to not be a derangement but a totally valid anxiety....

I requested that he do an AMA here.

Ability to ask questions to people we don't agree with is a very valuable thing, no matter how stupid/wrong the thing they work on may be.

I expected either Justin or DarthCoin to "ask" something like this though, so that's good.

this is the sort of autism i expected

I was originally pro-LN and even made up a LN prediction market trading thing back in 2016. And a way of doing fraud proofs with LN, in 2018.

• https://bitcoinhivemind.com/blog/lightning-network/
• https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/fraud-proofs/

Unfortunately, LN doesn't actually work, this is a summary article of my latest LN thoughts (from 2024): https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/ln-blackpill/

Lightning does a lot of "stolen valor". It routinely gets credit for things it didn't do. Imagine that you opened a "pet training school" -- where you teach birds how to fly. You spend hours and hours training them. And then they fly! And you tell your friends how great the school is. But actually you are just being tricked.

Most lightning is "custodial lightning". Which is a lot like saying "dry ocean" or "consensual rape" -- or calling a motionless staircase an "escalator". It is not a trivial detail -- it is pure, solid, fraud -- and it is directly at the heart of the matter.

A naïve child sees a magician, and he runs back to his parents, saying "Mom!! He sawed a woman in half!" The Mom says "no, honey". And the child says "Yes - he really did -I saw it with my own eyes!". -- Anyone listening to this conversation, knows [1] the woman was not sawed in half and [2] the child is gullible and easily fooled.

That is what it is like when people say "lightning works - I used it!" It's just embarrassing for BTC and it digs us further into a dishonest hole. Probably, we are already in too deep.

lightning doesn't/can't scale to 8 billion active daily users and dev time spent on it has been a waste

this waste is a threat to btc, he has written and talked about this ad nauseum

https://archive.ecash.com/archive/bitcoin-lightning-network-is-broken-w-paul-sztorc-btc-layer-twos-ranked

There are two main "flavors" of success:

1. Dethroning BTC, skyrocketing to $200,000 per coin, and eventually $20 million per coin -- in (what used to be called) "hyper-bitcoin-ization" . Although in this case it would be "hyper-ecash-ization".
2. Serving as a nice demo of BIP-300, and as a proving ground for different L2s. An educational tool / science experiment.

I suppose option #1 must sound very extreme.

But my view is that one cryptocurrency will make it to a $200 Trillion market cap -- and the rest will die. And BTC seems to be unable (or unwilling) to make the jump to "8 billion users" -- (aka "all internet users", comparable to email / phone number). So BTC is dying off and the #1 spot is wide open for the taking.

surviving at all , is my guess

bitcoin's dev culture is a death wish

A lot.

Similar to a young child, having just seen a magician saw a woman in half, go up to their parents and ask "What would it take to admit you were wrong about Magic being real?"

I worked on LN tech in 2016 and 2018 -- and last year in 2025, I did a debate at TabConf , which included 10 min with Tadge Dryja the inventor of LN. I believe I am one of the most knowledgeable people, about LN, in the whole world. Despite spending less than 1% of my time on LN.

To me it is a completely settled issue.

But some concrete things would be:

• Realistic plan for onboarding 8 billion people to LN
• Realistic plan for using HTLCs when L1 feerates are volatile
• Realistic "brand control" to kick out custodial LN
• People who work in LN full time, would have to /stop/ coming up to me in person, and whispering "you are right" all the time

But -- none of those are going to happen ever.

For eCash to succeed, BTC must fail.

Now -- I hope that BTC does NOT fail. I hope I am wrong about (what I call) the "Derangement" of Bitcoin -- https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/derangements/

Unfortunately, I have a history of being right -- often years before other Bitcoiners.

Anyway, how does BTC fail?

Primarily, BTC fails if we stop being honest about it. Lightning (and ARK) have been doing a great job -- the more BTC talks about LN, the more likely BTC dies.

The more time BTC spends talking about Luke's nonsense, the more likely BTC dies.

The fewer soft forks BTC does -- more likely BTC dies.

How would we fire Bitcoin Core, if we wanted to? How would we fire the CEO of FoundryUSA? -- If these questions are confusing, or cannot be answered -- then BTC is likely to die. (Accountability is a necessary part of survival.)

eCash could still fail, even if BTC fails.

I hope that -- in that scenario (ie, if BTC fails, and then we try eCash) -- we will at least learn. It would be like a science experiment. Like a SpaceX rocket launch -- we could figure out why it failed , and what to try next.

I'm not familiar with Tachyon specifically

As you (probably) know -- we already have "zSide" which is a privacy L2 based on Zcash's orchard.

I'm not in favor of "gatekeeping" the L2s. We should try all L2s -- including the bad ideas.

So I'd prefer /not/ to be in the habit of judging the L2s. (Although, to some extent, it is inevitable.)

Supposedly, Tachyon improves zCash performance -- but ...is performance a key blocker for zCash-orchard? That would be a clue to if Tachyon is useful as a new sidechain.

Of course.

The success of eCash is VERY uncertain. Most new projects fail.

However, I have been part of the Bitcoin community for 15 years -- and we are the Titanic headed for an iceberg. It isn't too late!! We could still save the BTC project. But it is time to start hacking apart the dining room tables, to fasten some rafts.

When people talk to an AI, and consume "tokens" -- that is a kind of micropayment.

So, it would seem, reality disagrees with Szabo in that case.

Talking about blockchains / payment networks specifically -- I certainly think it is likely that micropayments would take the form of "Buy $20 worth of tokens -- then slowly consume the tokens" -- where the tokens are "custodial" (only valid at the one merchant).

what is a "mental tx cost"? The difficulty to do one on lightning ?

1. Both of those are dead projects, as I see it
2. eCash.com was available and cheap
3. it is a high quality name -- easy to spell and pronounce, short, etc

thanks, just checked a bingo square from this

I think Bitcoin was being adopted just fine, back in the day.

Roger Ver was wrong about a few things -- but a few of his arguments were just common sense. Bitcoin has decided it would rather commit suicide, than admit that arguments such as:

• "merchant adoption is good"
• "how do we scale past 5 tps?"
• "txn fees should be lower than credit card fees"

We have already tested our L2s to roughly 50% global txn throughput. https://drivechain.info/blog/perf-contest/

So the first step is to be technically able to do it. Network effects (and "number go up") will help take care of the rest.

Of course, the best thing that BTC ever had going for it -- is that nearly all fiat currencies are committing suicide. And nearly all governments are spending their way into bankruptcy. Even Elon could not cut his planned $2 trillion , with DOGE . The USD is only safe (for now) because of the tremendous strength of the American Entrepreneur.

he already addressed this in the bitnames essay

what matters is that your audience can find you, even if its at fiatjaf888 forever

to change the tld redirect will be a matter of bringing it up with the facilitators/brokers who will specialize in that task

I think a lot of people are bullshitting us -- one way or another.

This is a perfect case for a prediction market: we could have some specific ones, such as:

• "QC demonstration which "steals" a Bitcoin ECDSA txn without prior knowledge of the private key (at marginal operating cost <$1000), by Jan 1 2027" [ Yes / No ]
• "... by Jan 1 2028" [ Yes / No ]
• "... by Jan 1 2029" [ Yes / No ]
• "... by Jan 1 2030" [ Yes / No ]
• "... by Jan 1 2031" [ Yes / No ]

Then, people could make money by pushing back against the bullshitters. This would benefit us in the audience.

Hopefully.

But I'm not sure anything can rescue the BTC culture, at this point.

it will be too late. they will wake up at 75% of their MC but it will be too late by then

even the testing ground theory no longer applies to BTC development

things that work on litecoin are no longer adopted by btc once proven

IMHOP

I probably should, yes!

Yes - I can see that you appreciate the magnitude of the problem.

First, development will not be as hard as it might seem:

• The L1 is a copy of Bitcoin Core -- and will remain so. So we automatically tie Bitcoin for 1st place, in development.
• We can (and have) added to Bitcoin Core, using CUSF. So we can actually exceed Core, without changing any lines of code in Core.
• Most of the L2s have already been built. And since they already work, people can fork them to make new L2s.
• Mostly -- "development" is done by a lone wolf genius. Bitcoin Core is a pointless bureaucracy that just merges new unit tests, and in general they cause far more problems than they solve. That isn't the "development" we need.
• Most of the "good" altcoins -- fought tooth and nail to be a part of Bitcoin! That was their desire. To develop on Bitcoin. For example -- ETH and Bitcoin Cash -- Vitalik tried to add smart contracts to BTC, and largeblockers fought to get a blocksize increase into Bitcoin. They didn't want to launch an Altcoin! So -- the bottleneck is not "development". The bottleneck is actually "removing the barriers".

Imagine that each cryptocurrency is a ladder. We are climbing the ladder(s) to the top of the mountain. We have climbed very high on the BTC ladder. I am proposing we go all the way back down, and then up the ECX ladder. Why would I suggest this? Because the BTC ladder doesn't actually reach the top. It reaches very high up -- but not to the top. We can either remain in denial about this fact, or we can just Solve The Problem.

ecash inherits all past and future anything bitcoin does or develops + much More such as self custodied scalling to 8 billion people, privacy

all on day 1

and all existing bitcoiners inherit eCash

the question will rather be: why use Bitcoin

There is an active prediction market, Truthcoin, on eCash (currently signet) right now.

This is an open bet on the winner of the World Cup Final tomorrow. 1 million signet sats available.

That is kind of ridiculous, isn't it? The current market value of ECX is surely much less than $65,000 per coin.

Recently it has traded hands, privately, for amounts near $30-$36

Currently, there is an accidental "natural experiment" because there is a giveaway of about 2000 real ECX , in return proportionally for a solana memecoin. The marketcap of this memecoin is like $180k -- this would seem to imply a current market price of about 90 USD/ECX. Although it is quite a contrived and limited and unreliable way of estimating the price.

I think so.

It's hard for me to speculate on other people.

Also, my definition of "influencer" would be like FiatJaf or Robin Linus. People with actual knowledge.

inshallah

Mostly, I have been very happy. But it is mixed.

Good things:

• Brought "prediction markets" concept significantly into the mainstream
• Advertising, lobbying, huge $$ backing -- all of this gives prediction markets more cultural power
• Vindication for me, having backed this idea for 20 years -- I always knew it would be big

Some bad things:

• Overfocus on sports gambling -- this will probably lead to horrible backlash, as it did with cigarette smoking.
• Blurring (unfortunately) the line between "investing" and "gambling" -- this is something I had hoped would go the opposite way.
• Very slow to adopt conditional markets -- should have been in there by Year 2. And even now, they are just imitations of parlays. Very disappointing! Huge missed opportunity to take the moral an intellectual high ground.

he has mentioned that truthcoin can do more, in a self custodied more cencorship resistant way. PM just now introduced conditional bets

This is a case where group psychology >more relevant than> tech.

The important thing about Lightning is the emotions behind it. Everyone is a bagholder. They cannot admit they were so, so wrong. They squirm away from accountability -- prolonging our collective misery.

Everyone has a brainwashed liberal SJW friend, and a nutty aunt/uncle who is the idiot flavor of MAGA. These people are lost causes. It is all wishful thinking, confirmation bias, post hoc "rationalization" -- they are basically impervious to argument.

ARK is basically the refuge for smart LN people. They are smart, so they realize that Lightning doesn't work. Much like Burak -- the inventor of ARK -- said: "I’ve always been a big critic of Lightning. I had severe objections, right? ..from inbound liquidity, to inbound receiving interactivity … I wanted [with ARK] to address the inbound liquidity problem, but I really couldn’t find a cure for it. … I fail to see Lightning scaling." -- one of my many quotes here https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/ln-blackpill/

Unfortunately, ARK still inherits two large problems from LN:

• its txn fee is not passed down to the L1 miners, setting the stage for eventual conflict (or a vertical integration that renders the cryptography pointless)
• liquidity (although, it is much improved and now transformed in a complex fashion)

I think the complexity of ARK gives it an allure. But this will ultimately turn out to be nerdsniping. (LN itself followed the same pattern.)

What do you think of the idea that Bitcoin has to be primarily private, not only have opt-in privacy?

What we really want is cheap privacy. And we want sufficiently many decoys in our anonymity set.

• https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/expensive-privacy/
• https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/zside-meltcast/

Shouldn't eCash have its scaling sidechain (Thunder) be a sidechain with full privacy from day one?

No - I think we should just try everything. Let's be pluralist.

Many reasons.

1. As Jameson Lopp said recently on Twitter, eplay protection is essentially admitting defeat, right off the bat.
2. With no txn replay, your chain might look like a ghost town, even to people who are totally neutral to the coin (or who don't know about it).
3. I don't believe in coddling people -- at least not in the investing world, or the tech world. If you aren't paying attention -- you'll be left behind! And, if you pay attention to the wrong people (or wrong projects) then you will suffer horribly. Pain, blood, and suffering are the best teachers!

Many more reasons are here, in these articles (from 2018):

https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/garp/
https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/imex/

The eCash L1 is just Bitcoin Core + like 7 small commits. We are trying to crunch it down as much as possible.

So any question you ask about eCash L1, you could also ask about Bitcoin Core.

Are these multiple nodes useful? IDK. Probably not.

There used to be a javascript implementation of Bitcoin Core called "bcoin" (maybe there still is). It was not taken seriously /as a replacement/ for Bitcoin Core -- but it could do a bunch of neat tricks, like run in a browser. This was entertaining and often educational. In particuarly, bcoin actually had comments in the code -- so you could point people there to read, and learn how Bitcoin works.

libbitcoin only exists because Core is terrible at their jobs. I would be pretty ashamed, if someone (for example) rewrote the Bip300_301 as, like, a lib_bip300_301 enforcer.

The way I see it, this is still "negative time". It's all icing on the cake. Compare it to BTC itself -- how much attention did BTC get, in December 2008? Basically none. Even when it launched in Jan 2009, it got very little attention.

eCash's survival is not (primarily) based on its own merits -- it is based on the eventual failure of BTC.

Pre-fork, there is NOT much of a reason to advertise, or evangelize. People will want to invest, first. When they hold different proportions of coin, then they will favor one side over the other.

I have a pretty strong feeling that a great deal of advertising will arrive soon.

There is no such concept as "getting" miners onboard -- they will follow the profit motive. So it is just market_price * blockreward - cost(difficulty) . So, to answer your question, the initial eCash difficulty is set very very low.

After the DAO hack in 2016, I decided to buy $2000 of eth-classic. I backed up my ETC private keys (I thought) but, being unfamiliar with ETH, the wallet came with some kind of password. So the ETC was unspendable. Lesson learned, haha.

Thank you!