0:19BYeah.
0:19AIt’s something -- it’s great to be passionate. Like, I’m very passionate about ICP, right? And, you know, sometimes I say I am a maxi for ICP just because I’m so passionate about, you know, its proposition to an open internet. And but, you know, there’s great things that are happening in Bitcoin right now with, you know, Ordinals and BRC-20, which, you know, 5 years ago --
0:49BIt was basically unheard of.
0:52ARight. Right.
0:53BAnd you bring up a good point with that because when it comes to maximalism with Bitcoin, even some of the most deeply rooted maximalists come from Bitcoin because obviously Bitcoin’s one of the longest standing blockchains. It’s been around since 2011, 2012. And because it’s been around so long, people have, they believed in it because it survived that long. It’s grown since then. But me personally, I don’t believe in the maximalism argument against Ordinals because Ordinals are bringing community to the Bitcoin ecosystem, to the Bitcoin blockchain.
1:32ARight.
1:33BAnd the main argument that I hear is that, well, Ordinals are taking up valuable space in the ledger. They’re taking up valuable space within the Bitcoin ecosystem and other things need to be there. Honestly, they’re bringing community, they’re bringing, you know --
1:51AVolume.
1:52BA large amount of volume into the ecosystem. So, you know, I really don’t think it hurts very much. And some of these people, like, if you think about the Bitcoin ecosystem in general and the amount of file space you have to work with to actually inscribe something on the Bitcoin, like, into Bitcoin itself, It’s actually remarkable what some of these projects do to be able to create high-quality artwork and high-quality NFT projects. And they have such a small fractional amount of space to deal with. And then you start hearing about all these things like recursive Ordinals and all of these new type of Ordinals where they’re basically configuring Bitcoin to be able to work to their advantage so they can put more on the chain and they can be able to stretch that asset a little bit further. But people love it because you can forever inscribe your art on a blockchain, on one of the biggest legacy blockchains out there. And it’s honestly, I hope at some point that the maximalists, I don’t have anything against them.
2:54ARight.
2:54BBut I hope they do come around in understanding that these people love Bitcoin just as much as you do.
3:00ARight.
3:00BYeah. They just have a different idea of how to build or how to participate with it. And I’m sure you understand that where it’s like, Not everyone is a creative type. Not everyone is a developer, right? Not everyone is a founder. Not everyone is a community person. So everybody has different roles to play. So when you get all of these people in on an ecosystem, I feel like that’s the only way you can actually have it flourish.
3:22ARight. And not everyone’s a whale, right?
3:25BNo, not everyone’s a whale.
3:26AAnd I think that’s always been the thing about the democratization aspects of blockchain, right? Someone can get a fractional piece of Bitcoin and be just as much of a participant as anyone else. Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, I think that really did change my mind once, you know, the proposition of having DeFi on Bitcoin and NFTs on Bitcoin, I was like, all right, now it’s just dogma. You know, like, I thought it was to begin with, and it was almost like, you know, you almost think this, this couldn’t possibly last.
4:07BLike, this may be a fad. And then all of a sudden, it just becomes one of the biggest things.
4:11AWell, not even so much that, but just that thinking, okay, Bitcoin is first, therefore, it’s the best, and it should only be used for payments and peer-to-peer transactions.
4:21BThat’s it. And you know what the craziest thing is? I was speaking to people about Bitcoin back in 2012 and 2013. Now, if you got people together, whether it was people of financial institutions, No matter what kind of individuals you talked to that had some kind of prowess on technology, on finance, most of the people you would go to talk to Bitcoin about would laugh you out of the room. That’s fake money. That’s digital internet money. It’s never going to go anywhere.
4:47ARight.
4:47BSo, the fact that we have maximalists in today’s world when maximalists were such a small, minute fraction of people that existed back then, it’s honestly very surprising to me because it’s not something I expected to happen because the sentiment for Bitcoin back in the earlier years was it wasn’t very great. There were only a few hardcore believers that said, this is going to be around for a long time to come.
5:15ARight. Yeah. I think now, even the way that ICP has integrated the Bitcoin blockchain into CKBTC, I’m wondering how many people are thinking differently. Bitcoin maximalists are like, Okay, I can have a Bitcoin transaction for a fraction of what it would be. Probably to them, even though it’s not a lot anyway, but to use the Internet Computer to facilitate a transaction on Bitcoin, how does that make you think differently as a Bitcoin maximalist? I’m not asking you, but hypothetically, does it make you shun ICP and other blockchains more, or does it make you think, well, now what can be created through this efficiency?
6:08BBy having this facilitation that we never had before. Exactly. And somebody I turn to when it comes to dealing with the Bitcoin ecosystem, who’s very familiar with Ordinals, very familiar with people within Bitcoin, he’s a good friend of ours, Bob Bodily from Tonic and from Now Bionic, and as you know, Bionic is a it’s a marketplace for Ordinals where it’s a combination of the Internet Computer and and the Ordinal technology. And something that Bob explained to me before when it comes to people not really understanding, you know, why why would you use another chain to be able to do something with Bitcoin? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
6:08BAnd Bob explained to me using explaining it as. ICP being used as a sidechain, it being used as another chain to the side to be able to facilitate everything. You’re using the front end of the Internet Computer. You’re using the seamless, easy integratable interfacing and tooling to be able to speed up transaction times, to be able to get through the mempool quicker and be able to take off all the burden of experiencing the relatively you know, slower speeds of the Bitcoin ecosystem, because that’s something a lot of people complained about when they came to Ordinals is people are used to Ethereum being, you know, being relatively quicker.
6:08BAnd then they get to Bitcoin and they’re like, my transaction’s been pending for like 20 hours now. And obviously, you know, not saying that there’s anything wrong with Bitcoin, it’s older technology, but as Bitcoin changes and evolves, you know, we’ve seen the Lightning Network upgrade, we’ve seen the Taproot network upgrade, and even going back to maximalists, We’ve seen how that divided the community. It created hard forks.
7:58AYeah.
7:58BBut I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing because good things that are going to last a long time get improved to be able to keep up with the conditions of what they’re being used for. So with ChainKey Bitcoin, I think it’s an amazing thing that came out and it allows users that may not have had an easy time being able to participate with Bitcoin, or maybe not be able to participate at all, to help use something from the Internet Computer that uses chain key cryptography to basically own and take part in Bitcoin and taking away all of that burden on the user. I think that’s something that’s honestly incredible because it helps for people coming into the ecosystem. It helps for adoption. It helps for, you know, great use cases. And this is stuff we haven’t really seen before. When you look at other chains, you don’t really see chain key tokens. It’s a, it’s a brand new concept, right?
