The Problem With Bitcoin L2s | With Mike Casey

Michael Casey was brought on by MARA to address an often overlooked problem in the world of Bitcoin Layer 2s… they generally don’t contribute much to the security budget of Layer 1 Bitcoin. We often hear concerns about fees being either too high OR too low depending on how you look at it… too high if you’re optimizing for 8 billion people being able to use the network in a self-custodial way—but too low if your goal is maintaining network security as Bitcoin block rewards continue to halve over time. In this episode, we discuss:- Why MARA is funding a Bitcoin side-chain development proje- The power of merge mining in solving this “fee-scaling dilemma” - How Bitcoin was used for payments in a pre-Lightning world- Why L2s ultimately need to pay Bitcoin miners to sustain the network in the long runWe also cover some fun Bitcoin history—like the impacts of Bitcoin’s cultural shift from being “network-focused” to “asset-focused,” why BIP300 may have been a good idea after all, and the little known history of Paul Sztorc’s BitAssets.As always, this episode can be viewed on Spotify or YouTube—full episode in the comments or linktree in my bio. This episode is powered by Best In Slot—the leading API for Ordinals and BRC20 data aggregation and indexing.TIMESTAMPS00:25 Intro to Mike Casey01:08 Why did MARA launch Anduro sidechain?02:00 Anduro: a merged-mined Bitcoin sidechain03:50 Are we thinking about Bitcoin fees enough?08:00 Price is rising - where are the fees!?09:30 When Bitcoin truly becomes vulnerable11:18 Will nation state funded mining take over?15:30 Mike’s role before working at MARA18:20 Mike gets obsessed with Bitcoin’s price21:00 The GM director’s Bitcoin presentation22:44 Mike moving on from GM to MARA24:40 Anduro chains: Alice and Coordinate26:10 Coordinate: a fork of Bitcoin core29:15 Fairer fee market: dutch auction fee mechanism31:50 Coordinate is getting OP_CAT!33:00 Spending BTC is long dead34:00 How does Coordinate compare to Lightning?34:55 Taproot Assets are quantum vulnerable!41:50 Taproot: Schnnor signatures and MAST43:00 Can the BitVM L2s be quantum resistant?44:40 Mike doesn’t want OP_CAT46:29 Ethereum’s Rollup Problem47:30 What about BIP 300?49:30 What are Bit Assets?51:00 There’s no ignoring Ordinals as a miner53:40 Bitcoin had the first NFTs54:45 DEXs on Coordinate56:00 Let’s not see Ordinals die