Dramatis personae:

Hari Seldon Empire. The Mule. Bitcoin. Paul Sztorc (Pronunciation) Bitcoin Maximalist’s DriveChain

We describe parallels between real-life Paul Sztorc, DriveChain, LayerTwoLabs, Hari Seldon, Empire and the Foundation from the book series by Isaac Asimov and the TV series based on it.

A humble servant of Empire (Toxic Bitcoin Maxi’s) discovers a troubling truth using his skills in Psychohistory (Statistics). He announces the inevitable collapse ( or potential for a collapse in Paul’s case) of galactic civilization. Hari then gathers resources to build a refuge that can out-last and shorten the dark age, called the Foundation (DriveChain/LayerTwoLabs). Hari Seldons actions and alarm invoke the dismissive contempt and wrath of outsized egos and institutional personalities (Bitcoin Twitter). A few sympathizers from within the existing infrastructure see the potential and do what they can for this new project despite the hostility, all in an attempt to save the galaxy from a deep prolonged darkness and ignorance. What no one anticipates is the Wildcard, Chaos, the unplanned variable, the Mule, which for Bitcoin very well could be technological or social innovations that fracture the core worlds of an ossified and comfortable Bitcoin Core.

Through spooky action at a distance, memes and institutional inertia and incomplete heuristics, the Bitcoin echo chamber resembles the ossified Empire and Core worlds found in Foundation. Having survived the block size wars, the crypto wars, countless FUDs and boring shitcoin battles, whales and small investors alike sit idle, happy, waiting for the programmed demolition of the global financial system to roll along with only minor improvements along the way to Bitcoin. Riding in the back seat to every bitcoin argument online, like a creepy unwashed incel surrounded by bimbos, is the assumption that Lightning will eventually give one all the functionality one could want from a peer to peer money system, if given the time. Inflation will go up, central banks will go mad with power and money printing, while Bitcoin reigns supreme through it all. Pitching competing planets (countries) against eachother, Empire and Bitcoin will wait for all challenger shitcoins to burn themselves out.

Through statistical and social analysis, Hari Seldon, Paul Sztorc, recognizes a problem in this logic, and further, develops a series of "Foundation" like software projects ending up with its current incarnation as LayerTwoLabs. Based on rationale strongly resembling the fictional science of psychohistory, this "Foundation" creates enclaves, networks and tools to save civilization from a long darkness. In our case, digital enslavement and the slow moving behemoth of Empire who itself is fighting a million little cuts on the periphery of its power. Like Hari, Paul does not interview well. Whether it’s his vocal delivery which drips sharp sarcasm and little patience for fools who have not done their research or pretend at understanding the topic, or the self-assured righteousness of the mission he is on, it can be intimidating. Like Hari Seldon, it can put off Empire and those who listen to podcasts and lectures for the quality of tone and the amicable small-talk of participants rather than the ideas or truth being discussed. Those in the comforting echo chamber of Bitcoin back-patting that is both Bitcoin Twitter and Crypto Youtube, are not trained to listen to ideas seperated from their presentation. With dessenting shitcoins on the outer-rim biting at the heels of core world developer talent, funding and social goodwill toward digital commodities, CBDC's and state terrorist carry out unbanking and canceling attacks to intimidate political dissenters and neutral coders alike. The beast is thrashing about. The intersection between the comfortable core worlds, stable coins, Venture Capital and government attempt to shine brighter than the rot around us. We ignore Drive Chains and Paul Sztorc, Hari Seldon, at our peril.

An insurance against potential future innovations that might threaten the historic rationale of Bitcoin. This innovation could be assimilated into the Bitcoin ecosystem without a hard fork or splitting the community and developer efforts in a competing and hostile infrastructure, the way shitcoins do today. Enabling a two-way peg with Bitcoin, while experimenting with credible community driven projects and self-directed investments on L2.

We cannot know what or when a future innovation might threaten Bitcoin. We only know one will. Some suspect it might be anything from Quantum computing and everything up to and including Aliens bestowing information theory breaking FTL technology upon us. What we can say with some certainty is;

Slow, soft Bitcoin forks are a good thing. It’s what’s happening now. It’s what one wants in one’s money. The shape and quality of silver dollars, gold and even the once gold backed fiat remained for hundreds of years. They were useful physical forks of gold ingot and ore, convenient media for transportation and novel uses of value across time. Bitcoin cores sheepish priesthood has successfully navigated the storms of the block size wars and other mean tweet brigades. For Bitcoin to scale and hyperbitcoinize however, according to Empire (you Maxi’s), Bitcoin will have to get faster and better through layer two projects like lightning and be given the time to do so. It has to do all this while competing with both human low friction preference, disinterest and state backed “solutions” for the very problems it created ( more accurately, created by individuals, boomers, who allowed these abuses to happen).

The Rube Goldberg Machine of Austrian Economics, Fiat failure and Institutional incompetence spinning around in a playground of apocalypse needed to make Bitcoin “hyper” is not guaranteed to happen before the State unseats Bitcoin or “something” better comes along. Maxi’s suffer from a tragic complex of “fait accompli” and disconnection from real human behavior at scale. The Super-State or its successor could find some innovation in the period between slow collapse and Bitcoin mass adoption, enforce it at gunpoint and snuff out Core as we know it, well before Lighting is anywhere near usable to the average person ( it's really nowhere near usable now, in real and complicated transaction situations, sorry plebs) the way alternatives are usable right now. By contrast with bitcoin or lightning Monero is extremely usable in time sensitive and complex trustless/non-custodial interactions. Private by default, stable and low fee. It and its wallet clients “just work”. It's the Apple Pay of digital peer to peer exhange, at the moment (2023). DriveChain can implement these advantages with a Monero token, with all the technology, benefits and ease of use found therein, on top of Bitcoin. Zcash and Eth already have their own “Drive Tokens” and demonstrate this useful feature of DriveChain, the merging good ideas.

In Asimov’s Foundation, The Mule is a powerful psychic antagonist that emerges out of nowhere and beyond the calculations of psychohistory or the plans of Hari Seldons Foundation. The Mule stands in for that unforeseen factor and quality that undoes the plans of mice and men. We’ve done our economic homework, we are well read austrians and ancaps, liberty minded folk. But what about our “Mule” what force might arise that otherwise could have been embraced, welcomed and integrated, but instead will undo the immaculate conception never to be repeated of Bitcoin? A case could be made that because of the Foundation and the precautions championed by Hari Seldon, civilization did much better than it would have, had the Mule arisen without a Foundation to challenge him. We cannot completely anticipate what future wildcard technology or even person and their movement might arise to challenge Bitcoin. We can however, create what Paul calls a “lifeboat” and embrace a new way of thinking about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Community, that is, influencers, influential voices, developers and conferences are being studied by its enemies. Its enemies are methodical, well funded and patient. You may believe what we have seen so far are successes in favor of Bitcoin and evidence for its resilience, however we have not yet really seen what a system in decline really looks like. Few but hunters and farmers know the violent struggle and death cries of a living animal in its last moments. It’s not China’s bans, It’s not India’s censure, its not even a question of what the U.S will do. There exist social structures that have dictated , assimilated and responded to civilization disrupting technologies with a unified coordination going back generations. From the printing press to electricity to the internet itself, it seeks control at all cost. The response from the State has been relatively silent compared to other technologies, almost coy. The happy compromise, balance and adjustments we have made in modern times between these forces, technology, power structures, commercial interest and even unconscious things like our biological in-group preferences (racism) or tribalism, are the outcome of decades, centuries of bloody struggle and wasted life. The worst and best lies ahead. None of these innovations, the printing press or electricity, succeeded by ossifying the initial form it was discovered in and leaving future adjustments to be directed by a core priesthood of conservative pull request hoarders, scared of mean tweets. No, an explosion of new machines, standards and designs spilled out from a few core rules and principals once discovered. Bitcoin can be the substrate for this future-proofing and anti-fragile innovation rather than one day becoming, “that coin we used to use before X”. To die on the ideological the hill that nothing will improve upon Bitcoin is to simultaneously claim omniscience and ignorance of history.

A common reflex response, for the most part grounded in reality, by Maxi’s to the long years of boring proposals for Bitcoin alternatives by shitcoin peddlers is that they do not offer any real improvements on Bitcoin or that the authors do not understand Bitcoin enough. When it comes to DriveChain the obverse is perversely true. The authors of such critiques towards it, often do not understand DriveChain. Bitcoin has one trick that can’t be duplicated, first on the scene, early adopter, The Hipster of Crypto. Lindy liquidity, and it’s getting old. First responders at a crash scene give way to doctors in hospitals, Diva’s hit the wall and age out, knees pop on Basketball players. This is the way of the world, the fire we did not start. A positive transition can happen, with love and patience, it can bind the future and past through this transition by way of integration. DriveChain is logical.

The Empire is collapsing at the fringes, it may crumble. The real Empire, the Pax Americana. God save us. The sharp chord, a string of military failures. Over leveraged debt and inflating bust cycles. Economic revolts by newly emboldened polities on the fringes of the known universe (BRICS). It rhymes with history. If the Bitcoin experiment does not or cannot create a better product desperately soon, with an easier, faster, lighter, onboarding in the way DriveChain can enable, and do so in the vital near future, CBDC's or some other low effort solution will. It will be the solution most will flock to, those who could otherwise have been Bitcoiners. It’s happened before, with Ethereum. It can happen again. If that or some other digitized fiat succeeds and Bitcoin does not win; It's game over for the galaxy. Forever.

TLDR; A soft, forward compatible way to expand the abilities of Bitcoin.

Note 2: Imagine if one month after Vitaliks Ethereum was launched, a drivechain token like the EthDrive (that exists now, years of drama too late), had been launched. How many lost billions would still be in the Bitcoin ecosystem ? How many rug pulls and FTX victims would have been spared if the Bitcoin Community could have set aside their differences and been able to say to ETH “We can do that but better and safer”. As it is, countless dev man hours have been wasted on what is now a Piece of Shit money by decree. DC can act as a Vaccine (in the traditional pre-covid sense) against present and future infection of “crypto”. Like favorable temperatures and easily accessible resources found in pre-history. DriveChain creates the environment for a Cambrian explosion of competing experiments, within and backed by Bitcoin. The misallocated resources wasted by state subsidized (in a lowinterest rate environment) venture capital investments in scammy "crypto", can give way to valuable innovations with skin-in-the-game and market discipline for bad ideas. No need for or ability to ICO, rug pull or pump and dump, one can see bad actors months ahead of time. Genuinely useful projects get support directly by the Bitcoin community, 1:1 pegged to a DriveChain token or service, ShitTokens (say that ten times fast) have their users withdraw and kill it.