I don't really work much on BitStream currently. The idea is already almost half a year old. I've mostly written it up for a friend who wants to implement it. He kept bugging me about it (which I am grateful for). However, for me it was just the predecessor that lead to BitVM.

Next step for BitVM is to complete a toy-implementation of the universal VM-circuit. Then we can compile Rust and C++ to the VM and run stuff like ZKP verifiers. All of that intends to enable bridging BTC to sidechains.

The ZeroSync header chain proof already exists zerosync.org/demo Hopefully, next year we'll complete the first full chain state proof. The good thing here is that it becomes easier over time because proof systems are currently advancing very rapidly.

The monetary system strongly effects almost all aspects of our existence. It is the most fundamental infrastructure of society. It is painfully obvious to me that our current societies are sick and self-destructive, and it seems like the most effective way to help heal is to accelerate the transition to a strong monetary system, that is based in math, to recover from this weak fiat money that is toxic to everyone, even including the people who think they'd profit from printing it...

IMO, our primary goal should be to scale Bitcoin to become the most used currency on earth. It's crucial not to leave the payments market to CBDCs as they are inferior money that is toxic to free societies. To the best of my knowledge, sidechains are the most plausible scalability solution we currently have.

The high-level idea of ZeroSync is to make it trivial to verify the chain state. Even on phones. However, that proof does not contain the UTXO set, but only a commitment to the UTXO set. The most simple UTXO set commitment would be Utreexo. A more sophisticated approach is to use something like a Merkle-Patricia Tree, which allows you to query all UTXOs of a particular address. This way light clients can sync by downloading less than a megabyte of data. Of course, that requires some kind of bridge nodes, which serve these inclusion proofs to the light clients. Moreover, in this model, clients sacrifice their privacy.

Still, that's the baseline idea and from there we can improve the properties with different tradeoffs. E.g. downloading more data than what you really need can give you much better privacy

What excites me is using BitVM to build trust-minimized bridges to sidechains or zkCSV protocols like zkCoins, because that allows us to scale BTC payments

It's hard to predict what will be in a decade because technology evolves so quickly. However, in an ideal world, decentralized platforms, like Nostr, would take over YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc, and then host their multimedia content on BitStream servers.

The first wallet will actually probably be Mutiny wallet. We're talking to others to integrate it too, but it just recently got completed to the stage where it made sense for us to reach out to wallet developers

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I'm just trying to save myself from CBDC-slavery :D

Maybe someone belonging to the "PayPal Mafia" was involved in the creation of bitcoin.

I very much love Tadge Dryja's lectures https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mas-s62-cryptocurrency-engineering-and-design-spring-2018/video_galleries/lecture-videos/

But you learn the most by building things. Also, toying around with building your own bitcoin library is a great way to learn about how things work under the hood

great question. I don't know anything really about hardware, but I am a big fan of ideas like mesh networking to decentralize ISPs. Unfortunately, I am not quite sure if that can really work in practice though

Here's the paper