Chun Wang: stakefish – From Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake #443

14 May 2022 · 46:35

Chun Wang, founder of the Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool and the staking provider stakefish, talks with Epicenter host Brian Fabian Crain about his path from proof-of-work mining into running one of crypto's larger proof-of-stake validator operations. The conversation compares the economics and centralization risks of mining pools against staking providers, covers stakefish's Ethereum staking product, and gets into MEV and how validators might handle it going forward.

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Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane, and today I'm speaking with Chun Wang. He is the founder and CEO of Stake Fish. Uh Stake Fish is one of the leading proof-of-stake companies and validators. He's also the founder of a company called F2Pool, which is one of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools uh still today and has been for a long time. So, he's kind of very unique in having been both part of this, you know, running proof-of-work infrastructure as well as proof-of-stake infrastructure.

So, really excited to speak with Chun Wang about this. So, just before we get started, uh a few words from our sponsors. So, first of all, we have the Gnosis Safe. So, the Gnosis Safe is a smart wallet that allows you to control digital assets with much more granular permissions. Uh you can use multiple private keys and use just a subset to approve transactions. They can be stored in different devices, software, hardware wallets, even across multiple people. So, it's the become the most trusted Web3 asset management solution for individuals, teams, and DAOs. And there's more than $70 billion worth of digital assets, you know, uh secured with the Gnosis Safe.

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And then, finally, we have SteakWallet. So, SteakWallet is your new your new favorite uh mobile wallet. Uh as you can deduct from the name, and kind of related to our conversation today, they're specially focusing on providing a great user experience for staking that's kind of unified across chains. And in just a few taps, you can stake and manage assets across 22 built-in protocols, including all the major EVMs, Algorand, Tezos, and chains like Cosmos, Solana, Near, and more. And they've also started adding some other things in there, like liquid AVAX, Solana, and Matic staking, and lots more things coming. And they also have multi-chain NFT support now. So, you can go and download SteakWallet on iOS or

Android. Now, steak is spelled like the meat you eat, not like the thing normally people do staking, so s t e a k, or you go to the website steakwallet.fi. And with that, let's get to our conversation. Joon, thanks so much for uh for joining us today. So, tell us first of all, where are you uh where are you calling in from? Yeah, I'm from the Longyearbyen, that's a small bird. It's a Arctic island. And uh Yeah, so weather is great, and uh I just uh have to close my curtain because uh it's super bright, but it's really beautiful outside. And I have about 24 hours sun, and uh uh it's wonderful

living here. So, did you did you cuz I was reading and writing that like, you know, you're traveling across the world and have been doing for a while, but are you now settled in this Arctic island up there? I'm trying to settle everywhere. But maybe yeah, this is quite a you know, strong preference. Like if I were settled down, I'd probably uh strongly consider settling down here. So, what what What What attracts you about this? Cuz I have never heard anyone say like, "Okay, I would really like to settle down on like some tiny remote island near the uh the Arctic? Yeah, that's the second best place on the Earth. And only after

Antarctica because you know, a few dozen countries signed the treaty in 1960s. And which forbids people living in Antarctica. So, yeah if uh uh that makes us robots the the you know, the best practical place if you value, you know, political neutral and you should definitely try this out. So, it It's cuz it But it's not its own country, right? You said it was part of Norway?

Yeah, it's part of Norway, but there's a treaty system signed in 1925 which allowed people from all the uh nationalities They must be treated as uh same as the Norwegians. They don't need a visa, you don't need work visa to, you know just come and uh Yeah, you can do like local Norwegians. I must say there's no local people here because uh it's not allowed to get born here. So, everyone coming from elsewhere. And then, how many people live up there?

Uh here in town, like more than 2,000 people. Something maybe 2,500. Okay, so it's this like tiny tiny bunch of uh sort of eccentric people who like ended up up there? Like, what kind of people are staying there? Yeah, it's not tiny anymore. It's more than 2,000 people, quite a sizable town. Yesterday, I was in uh like where Russians and Ukrainians they they living peaceful together. Uh that town has uh currently they have uh more little bit more than 200 people.

And uh about 50 km away from here. Um yeah. Compared to that uh Longyearbyen's quite uh big, I would say. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. All right. So, actually I kind of want to come back to something related, I guess, later in the in the episode cuz you talked about like space travel. But let's let's let's go back and start a little bit in the beginning. I mean, you've been involved in crypto for like a long time. Can you tell us like what inspired you initially? Like how did you get involved in the crypto space?

Initially, I was a contributor to SETI@home, which was using radio telescopes to collect the uh signals trying to find the aliens from a uh signal received by uh radio telescopes. And uh by doing that, you contribute to your computing power from your personal computer's spare time. And one day I read about uh Bitcoin from Slashdot. And uh I learned about it using one night, and uh I left my laptop running Bitcoin full node trying to uh mine something out, but uh second second morning it turned out to be zero balance on my wallet. So, I went to a local market to grab the tools GPUs.

That was year uh 20 2011. Uh since then I never uh stopped you know uh technically the miner, uh but uh I only personally mined Bitcoin in the first uh 2 years personally like, you know, uh using GPUs, later FPGAs and ASICs. But I stopped mining uh myself in 2013. Uh but started mining pool, and people contribute mining powers to the mining pool. Basically, I'm running the server side.

It's uh depends uh how you define the Bitcoin mining. Uh if you're using strict definition, I'm no longer miner. So, what was What did you What was your kind of idea? Like, what was your vision for F2Pool? Where did you want to take it? I think, you know, uh just to say the latest development, uh we all know like uh Bitcoin uh sorry, Ethereum Bitcoin uh change to POS pretty soon. Uh we don't know when, but I think probably that's a matter of a months. So, after that, we only see like how many coins we have. Currently, actually, we have uh 20 different uh coins, you know, but there's a very few uh innovations and development in POW

side. So, basically, I think after Ethereum become a POS, basically, we are F2Pool become a Bitcoin company. So, uh if I foresee anything F2Pool side, I think yeah we'll almost uh become a pure Bitcoin company in the next uh year. Now that you've been involved in POS as well as proof of work, I'm curious like when you compare uh proof of work and mining pool versus the proof of stake validators, what are the biggest differences between those two?

Mhm, to me, actually, it's quite similar, but a lot of other our team members, they probably have other idea, but to me, it's a very, very same thing. Uh just a secure blockchain, create a new blocks, you know, especially on Ethereum. Ethereum will become uh currently, it's running POW, and F2Pool take the responsibility to secure Ethereum network. Uh later on, Bitcoin uh Ethereum become POS, it's a StayFish in charge of this. So, what we're doing like F2Pool pool is very similar and they're kind of the same thing.

Right, right. Right, like there are obviously differences. So, I'm curious like what what do you think are the most important differences sort of in in terms of like running it as a company and and like Yeah. The difference I think there's there's there's a little bit much into the the details. Like you know, how you handle miners, how do you handle incoming hash rate, how you handle like validators. Uh miners at least you know some where they're from because you have the IP address.

Uh but stakefish, you you have you have absolutely no you know, no no idea where who your stakers they are, you know. So, there Yeah, in terms of a product design, I think there for sure there's some differences but for me like I try to like see them as similar way. I try to like see more the you know, what you know, they they share, you know, what the similarity like they share rather than the different from each other.

There probably some chance like later you see like these two company maybe they work very closely together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that is the big the big similarity, right? It's okay, you're like checking transactions, producing a block, like securing the chain, right? So, there's there's a lot of those similarities, but I'm kind of like You run the full you connect to other P2P network. Uh and then you join the governance. Let's talk about stakefish, right? So, I I remember, you know, uh in I guess, you know, cuz I I used to be part of the Tendermint team and then I started Cosmostation, right?

So, I was part of the the Game of Stakes back then, right? The The Cosmos original Cosmos testnet. And then you guys were Stake Fish was like very active in there. It was doing like an an excellent job, you know, one could tell that like okay these people already have a came with a whole bunch of experience that I think others didn't have. But tell us a little bit like how how did you how did you start Stake Fish? Like what was the initial I I must say I was pretty much by its own people back then when they started like POS. That was the year 2017.

And uh I would have been like operating since the 2013 and uh basically we are two-person business. Uh my partner like take care of our customer support my minor relationship kind of talk to miners. And I just running the servers. And I have Two-people business? Yeah, two-person business. Uh until 2016 we have our third guy join us in October 2016. And since then we started to consider to make it two-person small business like real company.

So we started to hire people in 2000 uh 2017. And by by uh by mid-2017 we started to have about the 10 people working in a small office. I actually in the beginning I I didn't want to do this in China. Uh so uh but the other two people they they have pretty strong preference. I already moved to Thailand in 2015 so I rarely visit office in Beijing. Uh you know. So one day my partner told me that we're going to move to bigger office because there are too many people there.

And his uh wife says let's let's just move the office to a secret place without telling me. So that's what happened. And uh Yeah, so I started feel like yeah, I don't have to spend that much time like I handle everyday payouts, you know, maintain the servers. So I start to think about something else. Actually second half of 2017 I gave myself a kind of vacation of a few months and that's also the time that Bitcoin like become Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin gold, Bitcoin diamond, Bitcoin this, Bitcoin that.

And I was thinking what's next. So I got some talk with a few people and yeah so lot of them sending me staking staking pool. So I started to think about something like staking related. But meanwhile I got a new domain name. As the guy says my partner at after pool maybe yeah, I just a secure domain name you wanted for long, you know. And maybe you can do something using this domain. So I didn't know what to do with that domain but yeah, so just to have a good domain name to find some good use of it. So that's

was bit.fish and yeah, so we started something at bit.fish and in Bangkok we got an office and even though I didn't know what to do you might still like how much maybe 10 10 million Thai baht and just to decorate the office. So fortunately we got a few interesting people joined us in the in the beginning. So that's how stayfish yeah, we only figure out to do staking and we name from bitfield to stakefish later I think in 2019. So that's how it started because I think mostly we started from nothing we started started from

no idea I must say yeah, just a good feeling this doing something yeah. so Yeah, but now we know like Stay Fish is here. You know, I think that's also our lots of confidence like what I used to be like doing Bitcoin, doing mining and Stay Fish is kind of doing similar thing to Ethereum and the POW combined with POS we kind of secured the Bitcoin infrastructures with good friends, you know. I think that's super important to the ecosystem because they're going to be eventually someone to talk to the P2P network to create a new blocks. And without the people like doing this block chains just simply

stuck. If you see we've got you know, developers they they they write full node, but our role is much like devops. We run infrastructures. So to make a system going don't just need developers but also need people like to maintain the infrastructure. And then so you guys were we're working on the Cosmos test nets. I guess was that your first network where you guys went live or Yes, Cosmos was first network because they kind of early in the staking. And despite the people talking about Ethereum these days seems like Ethereum become

just a tomorrow, but we still have no idea when it will become POS. When is it supposed to get merged? Yeah, I'm curious with Ethereum like I mean a lot of people right have you know, in the in the last years right we've had a lot of other layer ones come up, right? We had Solana, Cosmos, so you know, Cosmos I guess maybe many layer ones depending how you look at it, you know, Polkadot, Near, many others. Now you seem to be like very uh focused. Now I'm curious like Bitcoin focused.

You're Bitcoin focused. Yes. Cuz I heard you in the I heard you I listened to the interview that was the staking boss guys and in there you basically were like, oh, once Ethereum switches to proof of stake that like that's that's that's like the most important thing and yeah, how do you think about that? How do you think about the role of Ethereum and like the competition from other layer ones? I think Ethereum is still have the best team that we have just and what you mentioned previously, I think at least in short time this is uh probably no one can challenge this Ethereum position. Also like, you know, when people talking of flips I don't think even like Ethereum one day wants its uh valuations uh

uh there might be a chance like Ethereum could challenge Bitcoin in terms of valuation, but I think there's no chance Ethereum challenge Bitcoin in terms of a decentralization and in terms of a uh the people like accepted. Yeah. Investing uh what you mentioned Solana near uh um it's just like uh seem to me it's similar to like investing uh new startup companies. But investing Bitcoin is like investing, you know, in freedom, in in in in in in the future and that's have a fundamental difference.

When you talk about decentralization of like Bitcoin versus Ethereum, what what do you think are the things that make Bitcoin like fundamentally more decentralized? Uh it's because how they work. Ethereum uh you know, it's kind of uh this packages have been like uh much much better compared to a few years ago. It's still like have a central I must say still have a centralized planning. And when, you know, the decisions uh uh, how decision making and uh, how it's uh, you know, the everything is organized.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I guess you're wearing right there UASF hat right? Now, probably most listeners will not remember this cuz this many years ago, right? But there was the So, this I stands for, right? User Activated Soft Fork, which was the the big debate there was in Bitcoin where, you know, some people wanted to increase the block size, right? And they were like, "Okay, look, we need more throughput, we need more space." And others were basically uh, against this. And uh, and and I think, well, there was a lot of different arguments used. But later there was another another debate going on.

That's a big problem and I and uh, uh, rather than UASF, people started to talk about the UARSF. And uh, that's the opposite side of the UASF, but I think the philosophy is kind of uh, similar. When you think about like the future of Proof of Stake, do you do you think like Proof of Stake is kind of pretty established in how it works? Or do you think we're going to see a lot of changes and innovation and new types of staking mechanisms and protocols?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But once again, I think all this is uh, you know, it's uh, startup companies. And there's a a hundred, maybe a thousand reasons a startup company go wrong. Such like what do you happen what do you see what happened to uh, Solana, you know? Uh, I think they have a some, you know, a lot of headache to keep the network going. And uh, maybe yeah, I I think they have a chance like to get a problem fixed, but you know, as I mentioned like you will see a altcoin and smaller coin just like you invest in startup a But for sure like if you if you do it right, you can you can get a reward maybe 100 times, 1,000 times.

But, since you know, things could go wrong. There There's 1,000 reasons things could go wrong. So, when you think of like the future proof of stake, what are do you think the kind of dimension in which things will change? I think for stake future probably have a two kind of system going out simultaneously. Uh one is we still we will keep running validators. We'll keep like join the governance in good faith. And we will operate as much networks, I mean good reputation ones, as possible. And I would say like uh just check our portfolio like our website. And you can safely say like you

you you buy every coin we listed on stakefish. And you can quite good profit good good reward. And that's what we're doing like trying to support all the good reputed and good innovated coins in POS world. Actually, we were doing similar after proof of POW as well. But, unfortunately, there's not much innovation these days of POW world. So, we keep the delisting coins uh to pool.

Currently, we still have 21 coins. Uh include multi-money ones. Uh but, I think maybe they're only Uh they will more delist the listing new ones. POS is still like have a lot of innovations. I'm not sure like if the real bear market coming, uh what will happen to what kind of impact to the to the ecosystem, but I think, yeah, I still like to pack to lots of innovations in POS and in layer one.

What kind of innovation do you expect? If you ask the serious answer to me, I don't think innovation on layer one is good idea, you know. It's just like what I am using like iPhone and some other people use Android. Just a thing about this, if it's uh start someone start a entire new operating mobile operating system such like Microsoft mobile Windows mobile previously, even even Microsoft cannot do it well, you know. Uh we have Ethereum, we have Bitcoin kind of have a you know, entire ecosystem around these two mainnet layer one networks. And if someone start something new, then you have to start a complete new ecosystem

around it. Uh you can imagine how hard it is to do it. But you see do you see when you think of like stake fish in the future, do you think like, "Okay, it's basically like, you know, running validators for different chains, you know, participating in governance." Like if you if you project like 5 years from now, 10 years from now, what do you think? I guess that will still be there, right? Probably we still have proof of stake chains. They will still need like people who like run nodes, verify the transactions, create the blocks. They'll need people to doing governance, but what changes?

Uh I didn't mention Ethereum. Ethereum not part of this. Uh Ethereum will kind of uh you know, separate writing products around Ethereum. We probably invest more than half of our effort only on Ethereum. You probably see a new new Ethereum is start a staking service after a few months and uh with stake fish. Yeah, I have heard of that. But so tell us about this Ethereum staking service. Like what what does it look like? Uh I think we will probably do is uh compared to other competitor. I don't see them as competitors because they are doing the differently. Uh we won't repeat other what other people doing.

Lido is kind of become a monopoly these days in Ethereum staking service. It's not healthy to the ecosystem. Uh but what we are doing is that we're doing uh infrastructure level things. So, we'll probably uh do something a lot of more like uh lower level. And if you want to really want to have ownership of your own uh validators uh maybe you can you can, you know, check it out. So, yeah, like let's say if I I'm someone who has ETH and I want to stake, I could go to Lido, right? I could put it there. Uh in but for whom would uh Stakefish product be better?

Because we are running a lower level. You can have take a ownership of your own validator. And what the Lido doing is a kind of finance product. But what we're doing is providing the infrastructure. Uh it's much like you buy a a cloud server, and you can run whatever application on it. Uh we are kind of uh selling you uh a server, a product, uh kind of a uh platform. Uh Lido what they're doing is they offer finance product. They trying to tokenize Ethereum staking and give you good profit, good good API. Uh it's totally different.

Yeah, okay. But do you I mean, right now, right? We're seeing Lido having, you know, enormous growth. Uh do you think this is going to Cuz your product is not a liquid staking product, right? Like you don't have a tokenized Uh We are not uh tokenized today that I mean like we won't tokenize tomorrow. I I don't think like our token represent validator probably something like useful to uh to to the service. Do you think like when we talk about Lido and liquid staking, do you think Lido's market share is going to keep going up or do you think that uh more people after the merge will stake uh

maybe running their own validators or like a product like yours? I cannot make prediction for Lido what they perform. Uh we are kind of have a pretty close relationship working with like one of the five founding infrastructure providers to Lido. Uh we still support them very well and but I think uh what we going to do is a completely different layer of things. We're not a competitors. Uh we kind of just uh provide different solutions to the same thing.

One one thing I'd also love to talk a little bit about is you know seems to be something that could change proof of stake a lot which is MEV. What are your thoughts on MEV and like how how do you think Steak Fish will deal with MEV in the future? I think it's completely separate uh you know this you can write a you know uh entire book like just to talk about this the topic. Uh but the thing is uh I doubt the pool we already doing this. Uh we already doing it for almost a year. I think maybe you can reuse the equities like gained from uh after pool and try

to see like what kind of difference. And I think it mostly mostly it's kind of similar uh when it's applied to staking just the underlying uh consensus changed. Uh but I think you're right. MEV is critical to as a validator and if you want to do uh staking well then you cannot ignore MEV. Yeah. I get I guess maybe I should I should like add a few words to our listeners who may not be that familiar with MEV. Actually we did do a broadcast like a few weeks back where me and Fed X also from Chorus One, we talked about MEV in a bit more detail. But, on a high level, right? It's basically because the validator can

decide on the order of transactions in the block, and there's value in in that order, right? So, there's uh sort of value extractable. I can share with you guys. Like today, after pool, uh actually Ethereum takes the uh 80% of uh after pool profit. Uh the reason is because of my MEV. Uh when Ethereum become a POS, uh I'm not sure like if after pool could stay who survive or not. So, okay. So, 80% of profits are on after pool from MEV. And do you guys just run from Ethereum. Yeah. Yeah, from Ethereum. And do you guys just run flashbots there? Or do you guys do something else?

Uh there's uh different solutions, but uh lately we changed back to flashbots. And so, but you did you also like develop some of your own things and then Yes. Yeah, how do you think this is going to play out even after the merge? Do you think something like flashbots is just going to be adopted by, you know, like everyone? Or, you know, a lot of different validators will have their own solutions? Yeah. I I think uh flashbots have a uh great team. So, it definitely would like to support flashbots.

Uh but uh there should be some space. You know, this is a big market. I think we are always welcome to new competitors. Yeah, if uh Yeah, I think we also invested some time to do it in-house. And of course, MEV's also like a controversial topic, right? Where people will be like, "Oh, but this is like maybe bad for the chain, or maybe it causes like centralization. Uh how how do you think about that? How do you think about you know, are there negative effects of MEV and what do you think they are?

I don't think so. To me it's not a controversial at all because code is law. If you if you believe code is code is law then it's not controversial at all. It's a Yeah, it's a permitted by code then yeah, why is it controversial? Why is it not good? Right. Although code is law, of course even Ethereum, right? That you know, you're you're like If you think MEV is bad then change the code. Right, right. Although of course that line is kind of, you know, even the Ethereum community, right? Like when it came to the DAO hack many years ago then they were like, "Okay, now actually in this case code isn't law and you had

this social consensus that made the change there and kind of reverted this." So I would say even in the even in the crypto community, you know, like people hacking some smart contracts, stealing funds, right? Then they're like, "Well, that's a crime. That's not okay." Yeah, that's correct. That's a crime, but But then you don't think the line is blurry because if you have something like a sandwich attack, like you make some trade and then I'm I'm basically sort of like doing something that results in you getting a worse outcome.

Uh now okay, maybe not a crime, but I mean I I kind of agree, right? In the end you can say with MEV if if you assume that people are just going to basically uh kind of running algorithm, right? That maximizes the profits of each block. And then it's the job of like whoever's building the application on top to like build an application so that the users of the application don't like lose money knowing that the validators are going to kind of run this maximizing function over it. Like that kind of makes sense, I think.

Yeah. And all this law is not kind of that absolute because there's a lot of law in this world. Some law they are good law, some laws are not good. Like get to go eat as every day is also the law, you know? But uh legal and uh legitimate legitimate is is different. Something, you know, is legal but it doesn't mean like you know, you should like is is is legitimate and uh just like Afghanistan, you have to get mask. And uh in other countries, you know, but I think like there's something universal and

we kind of, you know, not just you know, blindly to just uh follow what we we told to. We kind of need to always challenge this a good good law or is this bad law. You know, there are always a bad law bad law in like you know, bad codes that's sometimes you know, programmers they they they write, you know, they write code which has a bugs. That's just mean like uh that's also law, you know, but the problem is a bad law. Bad law could happen.

There's some discussion I think in Ethereum knowing like separating the role of whoever kind of creates the block uh with the one who then kind of validates the block and Can you Can you maybe explain that? Like what's the thinking behind this and what are your thoughts on on this direction? I like this idea. But they didn't say like they separate the who create the block and who edit the block. But, it didn't say like didn't forbid anyone like who like takes the both role, you know. You can the same group people who can create a block who can also edit a block.

And and so is there still a benefit to their Ethereum proposal if that happens? Yes, that's uh make the I think that's make Ethereum more decentralized. And also prevent you know kind of too big monopoly. Well, let's talk let's talk about another topic that I saw you mention somewhere. You know, you mentioned that you were very interested in humans becoming a multi-planetary species. So uh why are you excited about that? Like It's not about the exciting or not. It's something like if a human ever survive this, you know, this universe it has to be.

And when human become a multi-planetary and the currency they use have to be multi-planetary as well. Just a think about it. Everything has to be multi-planetary. Uh heading to a quite exciting future. And they probably much time. Maybe we can see that within our lifetime. So, you you also personally do you have like a the wish that someday to you know, I don't know visit Mars or like other planets or do you may maybe do you plan on moving there? You might find uh like I've been living in Martian time zone for some time already and that's the one reason why I like to live in Svalbard because here we have 24-hour daytime.

You can live whatever, you know, you like, you know. Uh on Mars is one day is 24 hours 39 minutes and 35 seconds. So, uh it's kind of today you wake up maybe 6:00 a.m. to now you wake up 6:40. And you can only do this in server. Yeah. Yeah, I was actually thinking about this topic as well, you know, before. I think I was like doing some hiking last year and I was also thinking about okay, but now if you had Mars, like how would you work with cryptocurrency, right? This is of course the big

challenge, I guess, is that you have a long you know, information takes a long time to travel, right? Between places. So, well, how do you think What What do you think is the best solution to create a multi-planetary cryptocurrency? I hope that Bitcoin takes that role. Bitcoin has to involve a little bit to take that role, but I hope eventually it will be Bitcoin. I think for somewhat maybe I kind of understand trying to understand like what Luke Jr., the Bitcoin core developer, tried to propose when the debate like happening in terms of scaling. Some people wanted to have to enlarge the

block size. But basically only Luke Jr. proposed like we should not to enlarge the block size but to to reduce it. Maybe we should we should half in it to like half a megabyte. Yeah, if you if you want to have a Bitcoin like using for interplanetary settlement, I think not necessary it's a bad idea to reduce the block size. And also I think we need to change the consensus to make the do not want to like only have people on the Earth to have a privilege to to mine Bitcoin. To make the truly decentralized to be like a sample like regardless your uh

planet which planet you live on, and uh I think, you know, uh Mars should be able to mine Bitcoins as well. So, would you just increase the block time to like 24 hours or what? Or how would you change the consensus? Mm, that that that doesn't solve the problem, you know. It's a probably temporary solve the problem if we increase the block span, but uh I think there's uh other consensus algorithm is possible to handle this matter. Uh just uh we probably need uh a serious uh fork. I'm not sure it's possible to do soft fork, but we need a fork.

Uh so, what would this consensus algorithm look like? Mm, it could be like just like uh a, you know, instead of uh a uh block one block connect to another, we can make a graph. And uh uh Earth have uh you know, Earth can generate blocks, and Mars can generate blocks. Sometimes uh they sparsely like uh you know, just doing this. So, sometimes they basically kind of like sync or like how would it work? Exactly. You can you can generate block based on Earth's block, or you can generate block based on Mars's block, and create kind of a graph.

Yeah okay. And then you'd have Mars miners, but then it's kind of like Mars has its own little like mining uh thing, and Earth has its kind of mining thing. mining on Mars, you can also mining on astronautical mining, you can create a Dyson sphere. Uh people argue like Bitcoin uses too much energy. Uh I think so. I must say it's Those people kind of they have a valid viewpoint, but I think it's a little bit, you know, short sighted. Like, you know, because the the total energy in the our universe is in in infinite. And it's all depends how you find those energy. Yeah. You can you can you can build a Dyson sphere like uh

uh you know for mining Bitcoin and also for other uses. And uh if a Bitcoin has enough value to support a the start of such a project and we have such a project kicks off and that will benefit our whole society. That's actually the development. I mean when I when I was thinking about the Mars uh the Mars problem the the thing that stood out to me actually was that IBC, you know, the kind of Cosmos interoperability protocol, that feels like it should work really well, you know, because like if you have a chain on Earth and now I want

to transfer money to and let's say we have a proof-of-stake chain on Mars. You have a proof you have chains on Earth. Now you can make a transaction from Earth to say like, "Oh, I want to send you to the Mars chain, right?" It gets it goes in the block here. Now headers are synced, right, with the Mars chain, but it doesn't matter if it takes like, you know, an hour or like it takes some time. And then uh you know, like you can basically have have this IBC packet like put executed in the other chain. You can move coins over and then you can have a fast proof-of-stake chain here, fast proof-of-stake chain there. You don't need anybody to you know, I guess the challenge with

with some of the other bridge protocols like I guess like wormhole and is like, you know, the the operators are running full node on both chains and watching both chains. Well, but that doesn't work so well, right, because now you have chain on Mars, chain on Earth. I I don't think there are so solutions. But here like you know, I think Mars is a major planet in our solar system. It has to be a currency used there. It should It must not be a security or company coin uh using there. It could be MarsCoin.

Yeah, if I mean, if you know, Starship project going well, it's uh uh but, you know, uh I probably won't be, you know, I probably won't like to see the Mars uh as a SpaceX company planet, you know. It will be a uh public society, just like here is is kind of uh a few decades ago, it kind of like a mining company uh town, but it's very slowly is turning into a real public town. I'm not sure like uh Mars will like uh going the similar way, but uh uh I hope Mars will become like a public uh planet uh sooner than later.

Yeah. I mean, of course, another option would be that you have a proof-of-stake side chain on Mars, so you could use you could move Bitcoin over, and then you would use like proof-of-stake chain to make the transaction within That's possible, but it's not ideal. That's That's kind of uh a I think I see that kind of temporary solution, but uh it's far from a ideal solution, you know. Cuz the idea is like that you have Bitcoin consensus actually be able it's like Earth. It does still make the Earth a center, center central point of failure.

Because you see Mars like a side chain, you know. But this this planet will be like politically neutral, politically equal. Right. Right. Right. That's a very interesting problem. How How can you make Bitcoin have the solution and to make a Bitcoin like uh for interplanetary solution uh settlement, uh but to make a maybe another uh could be Bitcoin side chain, or could be uh other chains for like a local use, especially when it's a have a you know take a asteroids in consideration some natural probably just like private ones.

And they can they can use whatever they want so long they connect to the interplanetary settlement settlement networks and I think we shouldn't order like them to like for anything. Cool. Okay then well tune thank you so much for coming on it was a like a really pleasure to speak with you. I mean great admirer right also of your work with steak fish and you know how do you get Do not do not see after for like a side company it's not after after after pure W become pure S after after pure W will be focused on Bitcoin after basically will be like a Bitcoin company and

we'll make after pure Bitcoin company. Yeah, we'll we'll do a lot of things for Bitcoin. Yeah, that sounds great too. I'm just saying especially steak fish cuz I'm much more familiar with the proof of steak and deeply involved in the proof of steak ecosystem. But of course it's very crucial to have Bitcoin thrive as well and I'm excited that you're thinking about how to evolve Bitcoin make it multi planetary. Now I guess challenge is going to be okay how do you get some kind of hard fork or fundamental change into Bitcoin cuz right that is like very difficult.

Definitely possible if we have a consensus but you know if one day we have no choice but to make a hard fork I think a hard fork will happen. Okay well thanks so much tune for coming on I'm excited to see where you're going to take steak fish F2 pool and and sort of where this conversation evolves around crypto and humans on other planets. I I that's going to be actually I don't know if you've spoken about this on this podcast before. Maybe it's the first time, I'm not sure. But I'm sure it's not going to be the last time cuz I think that's going to end up being like a very important conversation, you know, in the next decade, two decades as this kind of slowly starts to

or quickly starts to progress. Yeah, for sure. All right. So, thanks so much tune and thanks so much for listeners for tuning in. Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you next week.