DEBRIEF: The Robin Linus Interview

Hey guys, welcome to the debrief. Uh the holy grail for Bitcoin is at BitVM. We had the founder, Robin Linus, on this. Um, David, I I wasn't gonna do this episode actually. I was just like thinking, okay, this will be just uh

Optional, yeah.

a more a David research episode, but I'm very glad I came. I uh let me just say,

I think you're bad for every episode that you end up coming to.

yeah, I never I never uh like regret the decision to join an episode, but um we just say like

Bitcoin builders go hard.

Yeah.

Like

Dude, they're like kind of Chad's.

they're just like a different kind of breed, I would say.

Yeah.

They're just um,

I don't know, just hardcore. Like

so, and I don't think

Have to just chew glass to like dev and Bitcoin. You have to

hard

Yeah. Like

it's not easy. No, you have to be all in in order to like take on this painstaking work. And um, so that's one observation. Just like how he's like, I want to kill all altcoins.

It's just like something you'd never hear from Ethereum.

Robin, what do you think Bitcoin will be like in fifty years? Like, oh well, it will have totally eaten up the entire altcoin market. There will be no crypto market.

Yeah. And he says

Destroy crypto.

it without emotion on like a podcast like known for being like very uh bullish on the colour. On the long tail.

Yeah.

He's just like, you guys won't exist.

Your business model will suffer. That's funny. Um

but actually it didn't annoy me very much. I don't know why it didn't bother me, didn't annoy me. Even his quip about like uh yeah, Vitalik wakes up and you know, like hard forks and hard forks Ethereum in the morning. I was just like, all right, well played, whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

That's not how it happened.

Okay, so but like the Casey Rodemore is also like this, like chew glass Bitcoiner that believes in like the money of BTC, the Austrian economics, and all that stuff.

Sure.

But and they're all trying to make Bitcoin more expressive so you can build what the altcoin market is doing off Bitcoin and put it on Bitcoin. But then both of them have this like

existential identity crisis of like, oh, I hate

I built.

what have I done to Bitcoin? I've put the altcoin market on Bitcoin. Oh no, all the scammers are on Bitcoin now.

Yeah. They're all Dr. Frankenstein's, right? And they're just looking at their creation and they hate it. In fact, that's I feels like that's part of the that you th well, I don't think it's an act. Let me just say that. But like it's part of the culture to to do that. Like you built something that um spits out scam or enables scams and you know. Well, it enables it.

Everything including scams. And then scams come first.

They have to get over that. I

Yeah.

I just I think

They know.

Yeah, and uh they know, but

I mean, I guess they have to get over it. They have to get over it to the extent that they're willing to do it, knowing that this is not just the possibility. That's like absolutely going to breed a new game of like investor casino. And um,

but they don't have to be okay with that. They can still say every like m 99.9% of the projects built on top of this protocol I built are shit. Don't buy them. And that that's kind of like Casey and Robin had that in common.

Right.

What right? What did what did you make of I I think we stumbled, at least I didn't know this was a beef. I think we stumbled uh upon a Bitcoin.

Yeah.

Um beef of like

um Eric Wall in the Opcat Warriors, right? They're trying to get a uh a soft fork into Bitcoin to add uh OP cat.

And Eric thinks that this is incredibly important. Uh

Isn't this like uh because um Robin was like you can't do multiplication on Bitcoin, but OP cat means OP Cacatenate, which like is a stand in for multiplication. I think that's kind of the deal.

I think so. I mean, the gist of our episode with with Eric, which bankless listeners uh guys, if you haven't listened to it, like you gotta listen to that one too.

Um he apparently talked.

According to Robin, so this is the beef. Like uh Eric is all in on OPCAT, and he basically says that

everything we built on top of something like BitVM will be inferior, uh inferior

and inadequate until we get OPCAT. And then OPCAT, we can actually create like true, true roll-ups, right? And uh his take was because of the um the capital challenges, he he didn't say two weeks, by the way. He said like in the worst case scenario, Eric Wall did anyway, uh, you get some sort of um well the operators of bit VM have to have reserves of like six months, not just two weeks. Like two two weeks is like the best case scenario. He was saying like up to six months, and that's like

Like way too capital efficient. And by the way, when it all collapses, it'll collapse in a way that is similar to like a you know like chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Yeah.

And so you're kind of like built on, and so he basically like bit VM has this fatal flaw and it's not gonna work. And so we need OPCAT, and uh you know.

It seemed like Robin was having none of that. He was just like,