🎙️ HODLing is old news. What’s Bitcoin’s next chapter? @gazzajenks & @NathanOnCrypto talk with Ilia Volokh, Bitcoin Lead at @StarkWareLtd, on turning $BTC from static value to a dynamic tool for DeFi.

The reason I need a time machine: In 2013 I met Vitalik for the first time at the Bitcoin conference in San Jose. He was a reporter at Bitcoin Magazine. A few weeks later, he visited Israel and we sat together for hummus at Technion (where I was a professor at the time) We chatted about ZK, about how it could help with privacy and scale on blockchain, and how we could use it to do a whole bunch of transactions off-chain and then update the state of the network on-chain. (This idea ended up being StarkEx and Starknet). We also chatted about how general computation could be placed on a blockchain by demanding the transaction submitter to commit and pay for computation in order to overcome the limitation of the Halting problem (this means it would be impossible to know how long a computation, or transaction, will run). Some time later Vitalik reached out to say they had written a yellow paper about this, and asked if I'm willing to read it, comment, and perhaps take some part in the process of jump starting this project. I went on a zoom call with one Vitalik and many folks who seemed to me like very savvy business sharks, and I thought to myself: "In the best case scenario it ends with Vitalik in prison, in the worst case scenario it ends with him getting killed." So I politely declined and got back to my academic work 🥲. Which is why I need a time machine. The second I have it I'm going back in time to tell Vitalik: "Bring me on!"