BlockChain, CryptoCurrency and the Future with Ameer Rosic of BlockGeeks and Brad Hart of MMM

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. What's happening? My name is Brad Hart. I am joined today by the lovely Marianne Twitty and Amir Rozek from Block Geek. It's the premier site on the Internet of all things related to blockchain and cryptocurrency. And I run a site called Make More Marbles. And one of our many fascinations is finance and therefore cryptocurrency. I've been dabbling in space since 2009. And Marianne, thank you so much for having me. Alex, thank you so much for having me at Startup Week Chattanooga. Amir, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Quick little bio. Myself, serial entrepreneur. I've been in the online space for the last seven years, from E commerce to digital products to membership websites to SaaS. Got the crypto bug about 2, 3 years ago. Good friend of mine, his son created Ethereum and then we started to go into business, which is Block Geeks. And here we are.

Marianne, we'll get this on mute thing down, I promise.

Okay, so my first question for you would probably be. Just start from the beginning. How many people are familiar with blockchain? Assuming you got start. Let me see where we're at. Okay. What? You know what a blockchain is? The blockchain is. Okay, let's start with. Let's start with that. Or your screen sharing. There we are. Let's start with that. Tell me what a blockchain is, what the blockchain is.

So the blockchain is essentially a public ledger system. And back in the day when I wanted to write a check, let's say there were four ledgers in that transaction. There was my ledger, which is my checkbook. There's my bank's ledger. There's your bank's ledger. Marianne, let's say I'm writing you a check in this scenario. And then there's your bank's ledger. All of those ledgers need to be reviewed and agree with each other in order for that transaction to go forward and the money to take place to change hands. They call it clearing a check. Now, picture now that everybody has a copy of a public ledger, which is called the blockchain of every single transaction that's ever happened since the beginning of time. Now, instead of having to verify with a third party. We have what's called distributed trust across the network. So now 50 million computers around the world or more can verify a transaction in real time and then put it into the blockchain, which essentially becomes a transactional record, since the dawn of time, of every transaction that's ever taken place. Amir, do you have anything to add to that?

No. You're doing a good job. Keep on going.

Thanks. So, you know, the first questions that people come up with are like, okay, how is this secure? Well, since you're gonna ask me about Alan Turing anyway, I guess I'll preempt that just a little bit. And Alan Turing had an intractable problem, right? Alan Turing was the brilliant cryptographer in World War II Britain who said, okay, we have this Enigma machine. Every day the Germans are using this to encode messages to each other and send those messages. And there's 150 million different combinations for this machine. So even if we have the machine, we have to know what combination they're using. So even with 24 hours in a day and the smartest minds working on this, Alan Turing quickly realized that they would never solve the problem just by hacking it, right? Just by going after it with brute force. So what they decided to do instead, or Alan decided to do instead, was go into a room and building machine that could calculate the possibilities very quickly. And you end up invest inventing the first computer. And it would take about 20 minutes.

To crack the code.

And then they had the entire day before they changed the codes again to decode and transcribe German messages. Now, let's relate this to the blockchain. Now we have 50 million computers verifying within a 10 minute window. And the keys change every 10 minutes and a new block or hashtag function is added to the blockchain. And that makes the problem of hacking and security much more difficult to break. I would say it's virtually impossible. Not that it's never going to be possible. I'm sure there's many people in various places, and Amir will get more into this, that would love to hack the blockchain because that essentially would allow them to take the money that's in it, right? Or represented by it, including cryptocurrency. But the possibility is actually relatively remote of that happening. And every day that passes where it isn't hacked speaks to its ability to protect itself. And then as we go into the future, many blockchains will be used as various different, you know, platforms for a new technology and a new way to do Things with distributed trust, with ease of use, with no one third party that controls it or has power over it to influence it in any way. That isn't the best and highest good of the collective, if you will. So it's a really interesting system and a lot of people are really excited about it for many different reasons. So that's kind of where we're at today and where we see the blockchain going and changing various industries along the way.

Is this where I segue into a question about the blockchain being full and other woes?

Mir, I think you'd be better equipped to handle that one.

So what was the main question? Issues with scaling the actual tech?

More the scaling. Let's answer that one first.

Yeah, it's a good question. First we have to identify what we're speaking about. For example, Bitcoin and Ethereum, those are two different blockchains, they work completely differently and Ethereum will be completely different within the next six months. Then you have something like zcash, then you have something like Monero. You have some blockchains in China like Neo. So when we're speaking about a blockchain, we can't really describe every single one with a broad stroke. Each single one is different, has different application, has different consensus models, has different security models. But the most popular one, Bitcoin, for the longest time it's had scalability issues and just recently I think it was in August, they did a scaling upgrade on the network finally which was called segwit, which they kind of switched around the consensus protocol to make the headers in the block more variable and to create more space for transactions. So right now Bitcoin still has a scaling issue even though it has segwit and they want to activate Lightning Network, which should happen within a year ish or so. But once again you have to ask yourself, for example, in Bitcoin's case, some people view it as a currency, other people view it as a store of value such as digital gold. So if we view it as digital gold, for example, we don't use gold on a day to day basis as a legal tender. I don't go buy coffee with gold, I don't pay my rent with gold. So the people that view Bitcoin as digital gold, you don't really need scaling solutions. You really don't need to worry about high transaction fees. What you need to worry about is to have the longest, most immutable ledger and it's really difficult to change. That's the most important thing. If you're viewing in that specific paradigm as digital gold. But then we can switch over to Ethereum. For example, Ethereum is switching over to something called Proof of Stake. So Brad mentioned it briefly with computers, computers kind of doing brute force guesswork to figure out a block. That's the Bitcoin protocol. So you have something in each block in the blockchain called a nonce. It's a random number. And all these big miners around the world with ASIC cards, these specific cards for mining Bitcoin, they need to do guesswork and they just randomly keep on figuring out this mathematical equation until they get it and then they solve the block. For Ethereum, that's changing very soon for a new protocol called Casper, which is called Proof of Stake. So imagine you don't need any more graphic cards or any specific cards. In fact, all you need to do is virtual mining, where instead of us using electricity, AC, graphics card, etc. We actually stake currency. In this case, you stake Ethereum on the blockchain and become a virtual miner. So I think we are in the precipice of the evolution of the scalability the next two, three years. So we'll see maybe in two, three years transaction speeds of north of 10,000 per second.

And that's one of the many different problems with a blockchain based cryptocurrency is just you can't beat Visa.

Right.

Visa can process millions of transactions per second and the blockchain just wasn't designed to handle that. But it's becoming more and more relevant as people begin to adopt it more and more. And therefore there are many more types of coins and changes to the blockchain that are happening as a result.

Yeah, and also it's a little bit different though when it comes to Visa. Like for Visa, the biggest thing Visa is it's a fraud business, it's not a money business. That's a major thing that they do. For example, the blockchain, there is no fraud. If I'm moving money, I have the money. And if you're receiving money, it's your address. There's no me saying I pretend to have money. It's either you have currency, you don't have currency vis a vis a public blockchain. And I think where we are going with the, I would say with the developers focusing on the blockchain, I think we might actually see Visa levels within four or five years that are scalable, but not just scalable from a technological aspect, but scalable from a security aspect. It's One thing to have technology that scales to this. The second question is, can it actually handle the security requirements to handle the network of that size?

Absolutely, and that's a great point. I mean, as we introduce this into more facets of different industries, how can we keep the security high, but the usability also high? And the function of value in any system is how usable it is, how much it helps the people do what they need to do.

Mm.

So, Marianne, I'm gonna put it back to you. What would be the most and best, highest use of having. What would be the next best question to answer?

I guess, well, can we, can we address really quickly with, with the scale context in mind. Do you see, do you see these, the currencies that are available now, the different coins that are available now, do you see that as ever being a currency more than a, an investment?

You want me to take it?

Yes, please.

Well, first we have to identify a couple of things. A, what is a currency and B, what is investment, and C, the use cases of a currency. So there's two things happening in space right now. You have open source decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc. Then you have these tokens which are built on top of Ethereum using, you know, coding ERC20, which are more or less centralized tokens. They're not decentralized cryptocurrencies. They're controlled by startup or adapt, you know, decentralized application built on top of Ethereum. And they have a CEO, they have a CTO, they have a COO, etc. And they control the supply and demand for the most part of these, of these, say, tokens specifically, some call it utility tokens, some call them token applications, etc. So that's a big difference. First is understanding there is a difference between a token and a decentralized currency. You can't compare a Bitcoin and a Monero to a token such as token ABC that just did an ICO yesterday. Those are two different things. So if you're talking about investments and you're talking about, let's say risk tolerance, and you're talking about basic supply and demand, you're talking about use cases. I would definitely see a decentralized open source blockchains that have cryptocurrency as a much more investment vehicle as opposed to a token, because the whole purpose of a token is a use case token, it's not an investment. You need this API token to actually use a platform. Without this token, the platform falls apart. For example, even Ethereum, if Ether did not exist, you cannot have the transactions, you cannot have the security model, you cannot have the consensus model. And there's a bunch of tokens, for example filecoin, filecoin that wants to hash and encrypt all files on the Internet. Without the actual token, that whole system falls apart. So it's very imperative for us to figure out distinctions and difference between cryptos. Open source, private, on chain, off chain. And once these definitions have been identified, then you can determine what type of investment portfolio you want to create. How risk averse are you? What is your security protocols for actually keeping your tokens and cryptos, whether that's online, offline, etc.

That's a really great point. And I think that kind of segues nicely into. My next point is, well, why is this important? Obviously everybody's talking about it, but let's kind of give a little bit of grounding from the last financial collapse. So the last financial collapse was predicated on the notion that we couldn't service our debts and we could continue to print money regardless of what the actual value of the money was. And the thing that you need to understand about cryptocurrencies in general is that they are finite and it's coded, hard coded in the system that there will never be more Bitcoin, there will never be more Ethereum. Once they issue a token, there's only a certain amount and therefore as a function of speculative demand, the prices will rise right in that system, if the pressure to increase the price increases, then the price will increase as well. So it's not unlikely that you could see a very expensive Bitcoin. It's not unlikely that you could see a very expensive Ethereum. And these are not forward looking statements saying that you should invest in any of these things. I'm just saying that there's only ever going to be 21 million bitcoins. That's it.

Right?

So it's just really fascinating to think what the world could look like in a world of deflationary decentralized currency versus the current world where we can print US Dollars or Euros. Billions of dollars a day are printed currently and have been since 2008. In fact, just the US Fed, working with the US treasury, printed over $90 billion a day in the years following. I'm sorry, $90 billion a month in the years following the financial crisis to provide liquidity and to stem the tide of a falling market. How I got involved with this is actually kind of an accident. In 2008, I was making applications for the iPhone, which is a brand new business then. And one of the kids that was coding these apps for me back in the day, you just write an essay basically and put it on the app store and sell for a buck or two and just sell all over the world. I said, one of them got bought and I went to him and I said, hey, what would it take to, you know, to build your dream app? What would that be? He said, well, I build a bitcoin trading app and this is 2009, so like, what the heck is bitcoin? So I kind of fell into the space backwards. And he went on to try to create like the Coinbase basically was the app that he wanted to build and he obviously wasn't set up for the task and he failed. But had I just taken that money, put it into bitcoins? It was $5,000 at the time. At $0.05, I would add 100,000 bitcoins worth somewhere around $600 million today, not including the bitcoin cash and whatever, other forks and, and kind of hashes code. So just understanding like massive wealth is being created in the space and it's still relatively small. I just want to share one slide, just to give you guys a kind of an investment overview. And again, not a forward looking statement, not a recommendation whatsoever, but this is what it is, right? So here's the top 10 cryptocurrencies. I'm just going to share my screen as they were yesterday. Can everybody see this? Just nod if you can. So these are the top 10 cryptocurrencies you got, you know, bitcoin, ether, all the way down to Neo and Iota and their relative market caps. Now, $93 billion might seem like a lot of money, but in reality it's actually a very small percentage. If you take all these cryptocurrencies and add them up, the actual amounts compared to the relative amount of currency in circulation, which the best guess puts it somewhere around $85 trillion is a drop in a variable ocean. So you're talking about $150 billion roughly, compared to all M1, 2, 3 and 4 being somewhere around 85 trillion. It's a very, very small amount. We're talking an entire market cap of crypto that is about a quarter to a fifth the size of Apple, which is one company on one stock exchange in one country. So the amount of cryptocurrency that exists now and its relative value compared to what it could be if it became a more widely used store of value and utility aside, like, could be very, very shocking in the future to see what it, what it could be if it, if it became 1%. It still has quite a bit of upper side from here. So that's, it's just an interesting thing to look at. And I wanted to give you guys kind of a more basic primer as well. So I've also made like a little cheat sheet for when I do panels like this and that can be grabbed here in case you want to learn more. And it's got a few documentaries that are really great. And it's got a link to a mirror site, which is Block Geek, and he does some of the best guides on the Internet. They've received millions and millions of visitors to the site. It's some of the best content I've found. So if you really want to just get into it and understand it from a technological perspective, I recommend downloading this. It's a free little kind of cheat sheet. It has all the links to all the things you're going to need to know just to get educated about the space. Because we're still very early in early adopter mode and it's a really exciting time to be helping to create the future. And part of the future is not only understanding what the tools are, but using those tools to create better systems to serve more people. And if we want to create a better world, that's really where it's going to come from. There's an old Winston Churchill saying that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Well, the same could be said for capitalism and a bunch of other systems that we take for granted are the best that ever existed. And they are. But what's coming next and how do we create that? It's a really exciting time because we really get to look at the world in a whole new way. Taking power from the institutions that may or may not have been the best thing at the time that could have existed. And now what can exist as a result? So living in a world of possibility and, you know, I just want to speak to one more thing, and I'll hand the panel back over, is that you gotta understand, this entire space could go up in flames in 50 different ways overnight with zero recourse. There's no way you're ever gonna get your money or your money back. So if you do decide to do anything in the space, just do it with the caveat that there are a lot of ways it could go wrong. And There would be no way to get it back. It is not FDIC insured, for example. Like there's no type of governing body that allows to do that. It's basically the wild wild west of new tech. So with that caveat in mind, only look at it and invest amounts of money that makes sense that you could lose all of and be perfectly happy with as just taking a flyer on something. And that's been my strategy and it's worked out quite well. So that's all I wanted to say about that. Thank you.

Mary, did you want to add anything to that before I ask my next question?

No, that was good.

Okay. You described this world. That's possible. Could you, could you describe a few things that you're excited about and what that looks like either one of you.

From a technological perspective? Or are you just talking about blockchain.

Or in general, what you're excited, what you're excited about seeing if it happens, like if it doesn't go down in flames, what are you excited about seeing?

Self sovereignty. Giving back the power to people. I don't like labels, but the closest thing I view myself as is a libertarian. So giving power back to the people to make choices that they want to choose, invest in what they invest, keep the money that they worked hard for, create more tribal villages. You know, that's one thing missing in human society today. People think that technology is connecting us more. Yes, it's connecting us on a technological aspect in a 2D fashion, but on a peer to peer emotional aspect, on an empathy aspect, on a tribal knowing each other, on a deep, deep relationship aspect, it's not there. For God's sakes. I live in a big condo. I don't know my neighbors, I don't know anybody. I don't know their names. I don't know nothing about them. It can be a most beautiful human being living beside me or the worst human being living beside me. So what I'd like to see in the future is with this technology, coupled with AI and other forms of technologies, we can create more, let's say village like cities where it's peer to peer communication. Because at the end of day, what is money? It's a form of communication. That's all it is. So if I want to freely communicate with whoever I want, how I want, when I want, so nobody can impose their views and their power on me. For example, certain taxes that we pay, it's imposed by a gun. If I don't pay it, a sheriff will come to my house with a gun to my head and tell me I need to go to jail if I don't pay taxes. So I like to live in a future where we don't take things by violence from other human beings, where everything's voluntarily, where I volunteer to do things that I want to do. My hope with this tech and other technologies, with food and farming, etc. Is to create more of a new technological peer to peer, reverting back to how tribalism used to be. Well, I wouldn't say tribalism, but more like human connection.

I think that's a great point, Amir. And I just want to add to that. I think that a lot of the problems in the world, and I speak about this quite often, come from the perception of scarcity when it's not in fact real. And scarcity is real sometimes, right? Sometimes there's just not enough to go around. That's a fact. But when you zoom out more and more and more, and you know, you gotta understand, humans are by nature evolutionarily programmed to think linearly and locally. They don't see the global exponential world that's being created and the capacity to create more, that's being expanded all the time, geometrically. What you start to see is that our ability to provide for more people at a high level in a sustainable way, and I'm not talking mansions and private jets for everybody, but food, energy, water, shelter, we already have the ability to provide for most people on this planet if we just got past the idea that there's not enough to go around. It's a silly idea, it's not a true idea, and the science is making it more and more possible every day. So now if we have the ability, don't we also have the responsibility to create better systems to serve more people? And I think that goes and dovetails nicely into what Amir is saying. It's like, how do we create a better human experience for everybody that is also scalable and sustainable?

Can you tell me what given it doesn't go down in flames? Can you tell me what obstacles you foresee being available to maneuver around in order to achieve what you both have just described, aside from the mental space of the scarcity mindset?

Well, truthfully, I think that is the biggest hurdle. Technology itself never solves anything. For example, Tesla, the electric car, the first electric car was created in 1897, I repeat that, 1897, the first electric car was created. So technology is innate. It's a non moving object. Human beings have to adopt it, use it, and actually create a myth around it. If you read the book Homo sapien by Yobel no Hara. The number one tool, I would say, or technology that human beings ever invented was mythology, communication, storytelling. That's how we evolve as a Homo sapien creature. So my thing is we need to figure out and right back to what Brad said, we really do need to figure out how to eliminate this scarcity mindset in human beings. At the end of the day, if you look at jealousy, greed and all these so called sins, it's programmed into us because back in the day, for example, we went long periods without food. For example, if we look at tribalism back in the day with Dunbar's number, 150 people in our tribe, that's supposedly the maximum amount of people that you can actually create a bond with. That created in groups and out groups, in groups saves human beings. For example, you versus I, that you over there creates an in with us. You know, we're group A, that's group B. Group A sticks together and looks out for group A doesn't look out for group B. That did that served a purpose back in the day. Scarcity mindset served a purpose for survival back in the day. But right now, as Brad said, you know, for example, food. People think we don't have enough food. That's the biggest myth possible. We have so much food in the world. The problem is logistics and the problem is spreading out that food for globally, for the globe. We have so much of everything, so much of water, so much of food, so much of shelter. But the distribution of those commodities is very small. That's the issue. So we need to distribute it among everybody. So I think we do need to figure out ways from the ground up and maybe starting from kids, I'm a firm believer and live by example, right? That's how human beings learn. We have something called mirror neurons. That's how babies learn. Babies see their parents doing things, they like to copy them, right? So how, you know, I'm a firm believer in can we figure out to create societies or small villages or something like that that people can mirror other people can see by example. Wow, those guys did it over there. How we do the same thing.

I'll just add to that. We had a little discussion beforehand where you I said a common saying, right? Talk nerdy to me and you're like, I just said that yesterday. That's a perfect example of the world we're creating through the Internet. You saw a meme, I saw a meme. We both laughed at it and then we both used it in our lexicon going Forward. I don't live where you live. I don't know who you know, we only met last week and all of a sudden we have a common shared language that's only speeding up as the world gets smaller and smaller through technology. I have a supercomputer that exists in my pocket that didn't exist 10 years ago that I just emailed Ray Dalio, the famous investor, on this morning. How did I get Ray's email? Don't worry about it. But the point is, is that you can get to anybody nowadays and that creates a smaller world in which everybody can contribute, everybody can participate, everybody can grow at the level at which they feel comfortable. So I don't think it's an ability issue, I think it's a belief issue. Right, so with the blockchain, you know, let's just kind of run down the numbers. I mean, what if fraud went away? All the time, energy, attention and money, our resources are being spent, 500 billion a year just in money. Not to mention all the buildings full of people that just try to fix the fraud problem. What if there was a time machine like on your Mac that could roll back to where there wasn't fraud or it couldn't exist in the first place. You free up all that time, energy, attention that you spend on protecting yourself to now create, Right? We think of money as a discrete unit, or there's some story around it, but it's really just one form of energy. It's multiplication and it's leverage. Right? And what our really true human value is is the ability to take our time and using energy and attention to create something that is more valuable than it would have been if it was just squandered on whatever it was squandered on. We have a short amount of time to live. Why not spend more of that time in creation mode and making more and not just grabbing for what's already there, which serves nobody except ourselves and even that spotty, that kind of could go either way. The only thing I found to be true in my short time on this earth is that the more you give, the more you get. And that's built into our DNA. It's the law of reciprocity. You can ask Bob Cialdini about that. And in this new world where we can create these systems and serve more people, we can create this blockchain enabled society that changes real estate and changes identity and changes health care records and changes any number of different things. Well, what, what does that world look like where you're not afraid anymore? Just to be a human being where there's no one entity that could control or hack or persuade or dissuade or enforce their will because they are not in control of it. I'm in control of it. You're in control of it. Amir is in control of it. The miners in China are in control of it. We all have a piece of this thing. We all get to create and say what it's going to be. It's a pretty exciting time.

So in my understanding, in my short time on this earth or long time, whatever perspective you have on it, I'm curious because one of the things that I've seen is the eradication of a belief of isolation or eradication of isolation even. So, one of the benefits of the social media and the widespread access to each other that I've seen is exactly that. Being able to reach out and being able to connect, even if it's not real life. Moving past that idea of isolation now, with that being said, do you have any insight on what the next stage of that evolution will be? If isolation was the first one, or eradicating isolation was the first one, what would you say is the second one?

Well, with the blockchain, the major thing is going to be controlling your own identity and your data. The amount of. You guys hear me? Okay? Yeah, yeah, okay. The amount of money. Social media platforms, at the end of day, people view Facebook as evil. Listen, Facebook doesn't hold a gun to your head. Or Google doesn't hold a gun to your head. Like, hey, you have to use us. You're voluntarily using their platform. You can easily not use your platform. So they are a private company. So whenever people, like, get on these companies, I'm like, listen, they're private. You can. They can do whatever they want. They're not a. It's not a communist country. They're not a. They're not a company open to the public. It's a private company. That's private things. But at the end of the day, they still profit off our data. And there's a lot of situations. For example, Equifax, for God's sakes, it just got hacked twice. Not once, but twice. And all your private data gets leaked out with your SIN numbers, Social Security number, which people use for fraud and to duplicate your identity, and they sell your identity, globally speaking. So at least with the blockchain, what will happen? And there's people working on this, like Civic, like Uport, there are corporate. There's companies working on this where you control your data. That's Hashed. For example, let's say Brad has his hash data and he's using certain social media platforms. He can have now the ability to decide what he would like to sell to companies as opposed to the other way around where the companies just take his metadata or they take his likes, his interests, his habits, et cetera. Brad has everything controlled and there can be almost like a marketplace like hey, these companies are looking for X data. Brad's like, okay, I'll sell you this information of mine, but only this information for this rate that I want to sell it at. So in the future what's going to be really important for us is people need to take ownership and responsibility for their own data. And it's funny, when people complain about data, I'm like, do you ever take ownership of it? Do you ever ask yourself, you know, why are you using Facebook? Do you ever ask yourself, you know, why do you open all these cookies on Google? Do you ever ask yourself why using open wi fi in coffee shops like people think things supposed to be just done for them. If you really care about your data, take responsibility and onus for your data. So that's where we see like blockchain will help, you know, control your own data. It's going to help for communication, it's going to help for sovereign nations. It's going to help for me doing proper commerce with anybody I want to do. Like for example right now if I want to send Brad some money, I have to go through different systems such as PayPal and Stripe. And I don't hate them. That's a business. They did amazing things back in the day. But as like any business, they go out of business. You know, I don't see any horse and carriages anymore on the road. They're out of business. Same thing, union, they're gonna go out of business. That's a 500 billion dollar business right there. Remittances, people sending money from like, you know, North America, all across the world, like Philippines, Jamaica, Indonesia and China, etc. And certain companies take a ridiculous fee for sending money around the world. These companies called rent seeking companies. The only way that they make money is they're the middlemen. You do nothing but literally take a piece of the pie for just being there. Now imagine where I can control my own data. I can be anonymous if I want. I can choose not to be anonymous. It's up to me if I want to tell everybody, hey, this is who I am. And I can send Brad maybe $10,000 in Monero or Zcash and it cost me literally pennies on the dollar to send it to him. And the great thing about it is he gets it within. Within a minute. You know, that's where we're going. We're going through. We're evolving to a society of free speech, communication. Because everything we do is communication. I give you money, that's communication. I speak to you, that's communication. I send you an email, that's communication. I sell you a good. That's communication. I vote for something, that's communication. So we're moving to times where we can freely communicate peer to peer, as a human civilization.

And I think it also just from a practical perspective, I mean, think about what cryptocurrency allows you to do. You have security features, and we all recommend that you keep your keys offline and that nobody has access to those keys, because if you lose your keys, you lose your coins. But I can literally memorize 24 words and walk across a border with a billion dollars in my brain, and nobody would be any the wiser. Yep, that's the world of the future. So think about that as a sovereign individual who wants, you know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You know, if that's important to you, if you strive to those values, then this is the type of stuff you should be looking at.

Well, look what's happening in Venezuela. Like, everyone's using crypto now. Venezuela has burnt down. The socialist system there has collapsed. People are literally going to zoos to find food because there is no food inflation here. What was it? One Venezuelan dollar is worth one satoshi right now? Once a toshi, something like less than a penny. Like $1 in Venezuela is worth less than a penny right now in the currency market. And this is where cryptocurrency is helping people. People are sending money from all around the world, digitally speaking, and people are receiving money such as Bitcoin within 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or whatever forms of crypto with that. Zcash, Naira, Litecoin, and people in Venezuela are using this to survive. So there's a perfect case study example of people actually using it in real time to survive a government regime that's oppressing them.

I could ask you questions all day long. We have about 15 minutes left. Do we have. Do y' all have a lot of questions that. Yes. So you want me to take the last 15 minutes and let y' all ask questions now?

Perfect. Let's do it. Q and A style.

Thank you.

Okay, here we go. And I'm a reporting banker wondering how cryptocurrency makes sure the bad actors and the illicit funders are prohibited from the party. How are we keeping the bad money out of the system? Can you hear that?

So if you could just restate the question, please.

If I could reach the question.

Yes.

She says she's a recovering banker and she's. She's curious to hear your thoughts on how you keep the bad money out. Is that okay?

So I think what we're referring to is like the Silk Road stuff and Dread Pirate Roberts and drug transactions online.

Her facial expression is saying, yes.

Okay, cool. Okay, great.

So let me just speak to that. I mean, since the beginning of money, there's always been instruments that are untraceable, like cash or very difficult to trace. And, you know, blockchain isn't really anonymous in the sense that, yes, there's a public key and a private key, and only if you have the private key and say, hey, it's my coin, I'm gonna. I'm gonna get it. But the law enforcement officials also like to refer to the blockchain as what they call prosecution futures, that someday they'll be able to pin that transaction to you. And it's in the, you know, the fly is in the amber, and from the be of time, it will always be there. So it is possible that one day you could get pinned with a, you.

Know.

A felonious action or a, you know, a criminal act or buying or selling drugs or whatever it is in your particular municipality that they would like you not to do. So you do need to be aware of that also. I believe that human beings are going to find a way to get their needs met, whatever those needs are, and they're going to use cash or any other instrument to pay for that. So I don't think that blockchain or cryptocurrency particularly, that doesn't seem like a problem specific to that. I think that's just another thing that it could be used for. Just like it could be used to feed people and to, you know, help people out. Like in Venezuela was a great example. Or transact with lower fees or more transparency. I think that you can use a hammer to build a house. I think you can use a hammer to cave somebody's skull in. It doesn't make the hammer bad or wrong, just the choice of people. So to answer your question, I think there's ways to keep bad actors out of the system maybe, but I don't know that that's really the point. I think the point is that people will use whatever tool at their disposal to do whatever it is they're going to do in the first place. And this will only add the layer of verification, distributed trust, veracity and utility within the network that will allow it to happen more instantaneously and anonymously on the Internet, provided that they use that public and private key hash system that the blockchain is known for. Does that help or did I not quite hit it?

You hit the nail in the coffin. You hit the nail in the coffin right there. Like at the end of the day, why do we define these people as bad actors? You know, there's no difference. I truly believe all drugs should be legalized, controlled and taxed like no other drugs, no different than pharmaceutical drugs. The whole jail system, the whole policing system is based on getting more people inside. So we shouldn't be punishing people for consuming drugs or selling drugs. That is asinine. That is crazy. As Brad said, as soon as you make something illegal, and we can look at North America when prohibition was illegal, everybody's still drinking anytime. And this goes back to psychology of human beings. Anytime you tell any human being that you can't do this, mark my words, they'll do it. It's simple as that. So we need to destroy big business which is arresting people. We destroy big business which is putting people behind bars, which private prisons make $400 a day off of inmates. Some affirm, believe in the future, legalize everything, get better quality so people don't overdose on a. Take taxation off of that and people can use crypto for whatever they want.

And put all that money that she spent fighting the drug war into treatment programs which are actually proven to be way more effective 100% in Portugal. And heroin is a great example of that. And you can look into that if you like. You know, I don't do drugs personally, I don't. I don't believe in doing that. But that's not my value set. And I don't also agree with my ability to legislate somebody else's experience of life, provided that it's not harming anybody else.

So in the instance of human trafficking, would you have similar views of legalizing, of legalizing that and then prosecuting the perpetuators or the customers rather than.

I think I've already answered the question with I don't believe, you know, in harming somebody else in order to have.

My needs met, because that's harming somebody directly. Right.

That's a entirely different conversation. If I take a drug and I don't drive or operate heavy Machinery. I sit in my room and look at the walls. It's not the same thing as trafficking human and selling them into slavery. That's just apples and oranges.

Yeah.

Does that answer your question? It sounds like a porous system.

She says, a porous system.

A porous.

Porous. Oh, like not. Yeah, doesn't hold water. Okay. Well, Amir, you could speak to the, to the high end all day. I could speak to kind of the stories around it all day and the mythology around it, but I think at the end of the day, it's too soon to really tell whether it's a better system or not. Although it's getting a lot of interest by really smart people. I mean, you have people like Jamie Dimon jumping on saying, oh, don't buy bitcoin. I'll fire you if you buy Bitcoin. And then JP Morgan goes, buys a ridiculous amount of bitcoin. I mean, there's very, very smart people who are out there getting very interested in this technology. And I think it's safe to say that it's a bet that big institutions are willing to make on the future, or they're just too afraid not to be a part of it, to ignore it completely. So I think it's worth having a conversation about and I think reasonable discourse is perfectly acceptable and constructive criticism makes everybody better.

Let me, let me put it this way.

I don't want to, I don't want to invite throwing the baby out with the bath water. Sorry.

Crypto cryptocurrency is going nowhere. China will have a legalized cryptocurrency. They will replace Renminbi within three years. Estonia is looking at that. Barbados is looking at this. Hong Kong's looking this. Japan just announced this. Actually, cryptocurrency is a perfect form of money for government because if it's a private ledger, they can track everyone's usage of it and can take a flat tax from everybody. About 40% of people globally don't actually pay the proper taxes. So that's a lot of revenue loss, even though I'm in a different philosophical mindset for that. But when it comes to cryptocurrency as a utility for governments, 100%, mark my words, governments will be using it as legal tender and there won't be any cash in society.

There we go.

So many non social questions.

Okay, non social question.

Well, I'll start with the most pressing one. Over a thousand cryptocurrencies out there. What's the criteria? How do you go about evaluating what is it? Viable cryptocurrency which ones are worth using as investment. With?

Over. Did you hear that or repeat it again? You did hear it.

Please restate it.

Repeating it. There are over a thousand different ones. So how do you go about evaluating which ones to pay attention to?

This is a simple question. First off, like what I said at the beginning is there is a big difference between an open source, decentralized crypto and a token. Those are really, really different. Second of all, it's no different than investing in any. If you're familiar with angel investing, what do you look for? You look for the team first, look for the problem that you're solving and you look for the timing of the market. A lot of times what you see with the ICO today, they're complete pump and dump schemes. I won't name names. I know a lot of whales in the industry, a lot of crypto funds. I know that they will get discounts in ICOs, they'll arbitrage it by 200, 300% and they'll cash out. But ICOs make things a little bit more complicated and we're evolving. In the future you'll see crypto equity ICOs with dividends. So you won't just be investing in anything for the most part. People don't get this. When you invest in an ico, you invest in nothing, literally. You don't get shares, you don't get equity, you don't get dividends, you don't get royalty rights, you get vaporware for the most part. And Most of these ICOs are a joke, complete joke, rubbish. Maybe about four or five I've seen this year that actually have a solid team first, like really good human beings and a problem that actually makes sense, the timing of it makes sense and the technology is legit and they have the proper human capital for this. Another big issue in the space, maybe globally speaking. There's about 500 legitimate full stack blockchain developers that really, really know this technology and a select few people that know crypto economics. So the actual human capital to successfully undertake this is limited. They're busy building Bitcoin, they're busy building Ethereum, they're busy building these massive enterprise systems online. They're not building small startups. So when it comes to evaluation, it's no different than any evaluation. How risk tolerant are you? Are you investing in a human being? Are you investing in the technology? So look at these checklists. And for the most part I stand by the golden rule. If it's too good to be true, it's Too good to be true. And you're probably the schmuck at the bottom of the pyramid.

Yeah. And I'll just add to that. I think from an investment standpoint, you gotta understand utility and demand, which I think market cap is a great fundamental. Just, hey, what is it in relation to other things?

Right.

Why is bitcoin the most popular one? Is because of utility? I don't think so. I think there's much better utility cryptocurrencies, but it's also in the highest demand. So as a speculator, you can make money on demands and supply. Right. And the functions of markets. But as far as utility goes, there are certainly better solutions than bitcoin. Just to use an example.

Go ahead.

What are some of the ways that this can go down in flames?

This is a great question. Oh, so many ways. Well, if somebody were to hack the blockchain, that would mean that the trust would be gone, and therefore the value of anything riding on that blockchain would be gone as well. And now I want to just make a clarification point, because a lot of people have heard, like Mount Gox, for example, which was an early exchange that got hacked. That is not the blockchain getting hacked. That is a. An exchange and a store where these people had been storing their coins getting hacked, and then their keys were stolen, and therefore their crypto is gone. When your keys are gone, your private keys, it's as if somebody else has your money and they can spend it however they wish. They can stand up and say, hey, I'm taking this money, and nobody can say the wiser. And it's in the blockchain.

It's over.

So you got to think of it as, you can't go backwards. Like, you can't go back and change the past of what's happened in the blockchain. But going forward, understanding that you need to protect yourself and your keys is really important. So from an individual standpoint, that's one of the ways you can go up in flames. People have lost millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. I've lost bitcoin. That is pretty expensive lessons along the way just from not securing it properly. So that's from an individual standpoint. From a global standpoint, any hack that was to incur or any place where the trust was broken down would, I think, undermine the very. If you look at a dollar bill, I have a five doll, it says, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Right. That is why we say this is valuable, is because the government backs it up and it's not tied to gold or anything else, it's just paper. But the government says, hey, you got our full faith and credit that we're gonna protect and defend this piece of paper being worth five of our dollars.

Right.

And blockchain is, is not that. But in when you understand what it actually is and you understand that, you know, there are so many actors around the world using it and contributing to the security of it based on cryptography and sound principles of security that are way more advanced than, you know, I'm even qualified to speak to, which is why I have a mirror here that it's pretty dang secure and the fact that it continues to persist.

Bitcoin's the most secure network on the planet. Yes, more secure than any other government network. It's getting hacked every single day. The closest threat you have is probably quantum computers. Then we got bigger problems to worry about because I'll break every cryptography encryption in the world, including everything that DARPA does and Russia does. But there's also solutions for that. People have worked on the elliptical curve signature for Bitcoin. Quantum proof blockchains already exist. So there's plans both for Ethereum and Bitcoin to implement once quantum computers do arise. So people have been thinking about this already. Other ways issues can happen is for example, let's say the top exchanges in the world where all liquidity flows, governments can easily go to these individuals because they are private corporation like hey, you guys shut down. So the technology itself won't be, let's say, quote unquote hacked, but the actual liquidity supply. So supply and demand changes right away. So basically people get scared and what's going to happen, everything liquefies, the price drops, right? But then again, you know, people start buying afterwards. Once, once they figure out other ways that have liquidity. Decentralized exchanges are coming here. Within two, three years you're gonna have peer to peer, open source decentralized exchanges not controlled by anybody. That won't be a centralized exchange. That's like in Delaware or in Hong Kong. We have to do a wire transfer. So there's human elements over here. Then you have security like individual security, like let's say Coinbase, which holds millions and millions of dollars every day. Let's say they get, they become the next Mount Gox, which hey probability speaking, could be a possibility. Let's say they get hacked, the faith in that exchange loses and people start dumping money. But you know, from a purely hackable point of view, it's another thing to talk about. Also, you can't also describe everything as the same. Bitcoin is very different than Ethereum. DM is very different. The Monero Monero is very different than Litecoin. Litecoin is very different than say zcash etc and all these like Bitcoin cash iota, which is not even a blockchain. That's tangled technology. So all of these are different and have their own, let's say, strengths and weaknesses. So you know, each case you have to look at as an individual case as opposed to brushing everything as a blockchain and everything's the same.

That's a great distinction, Amir.

Thank you.

I'm learning more all the time, you know, little, little bits and bots and it's changing so rapidly. That's keep up with everything.

I can't even keep up every day. It's too much.

Yeah, you gotta understand, there's the smartest people in the world are working on this right now. And also the smartest people in the world are trying to hack this right now. And the fact that they're not succeeding is good sign.

A startup raising value with crypto.

Meaning like investment dollars essentially, or investment coins. Okay, yeah. So you're essentially talking about the ICO structure, the initial coin offerings, which a lot of people think, oh, that actually brings up another great risk is regulatory risk. You know, the SEC and various agencies around the world really want to regulate this and they're still kind of at odds on how to do that. They've regulated as a security already, which is just a blanket statement saying, hey, we're just going to treat this like a stock or any other investment. But also, as things go forward, there will be. I'm sorry, I lost train of thought on the original question. It was the.

Startup raising capital.

So through ICOs, there's obviously going to be regulatory issues, but it's, it's a very functional system. Right now we have people raising tens of millions of dollars in mere minutes on the blockchain. And it's happening so quickly and from so many places all over the world. There's no accredited versus non accredited. There's no, you know, barriers to entry, which is like the same thing that we had in the 30s and the 20s, which is why the stock market blew up.

Right.

Because you had uninformed, uneducated people who were farmers, had no business investing in the markets, throwing all their life savings in the markets because it's going up and up and up. So you have a similar kind of frothiness. But on A digital global scale now. And I think similarly, we'll need to have kind of a reaping of all the BS and pump and dump scams and the regulatory laws that come out to kind of call that as well. So, yes, it's a very effective way to raise money. You could go and put out a piece of vaporware like Amir said, and raise a bunch of money based on that or a white paper. People write white papers and they go and raise tons of money. And it's nonsense. It's entirely. There's no fundamental reason why you should be giving these people your money. And I would say unequivocally, 99% of crypto ICOs are probably scams at some level. And the problem is that the people who are creating them think that they're doing the right thing. They're not bad actors necessarily. They just don't know what the hell they're doing. Yeah, they can't create the thing that they think they can create.

It's also greed. Right? Human beings are very greedy. A couple of questions I asked for these ICOs, like, why do you even need a token? Because you guys have to remember, tokens aren't equity. They're not shares, they're not dividends, they're not royalty rights, not IP intellectual property. They're nothing. They're literally nothing. They promise a utility in their ecosystem. Like, you have to use our token or else our ecosystem falls apart. So you're not. You have no ownership of what any, whatsoever. Zero ownership. And you're at the mercy of the exchanges, you're at the mercy of the whales. You don't really get liquidity. How you want to get liquidity and you really don't. There's no revenue of a business if, if the revenue. Speculation. That's not business. That is not business. And I always ask them, like, why, why are you doing ICO? Why can't you just raise $200,000 from Angels for a pre seed to validate your idea? But blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

Because an angel look at that deal and say, you're out of your mind. Go away.

Precisely. Right. And the funny thing that, like Most of these ICOs are coming from places like China, Russia, the majority of them. And you have to ask yourself why? Well, a lot of people are trying to get money out of the country. It's a different living circumstances compared to, say, North America or Western Europe. So there's, there's reasons why people are doing it. And I just look at human greed and whatever there's Nothing wrong with that. They're doing what they're doing. But I just advise people it's too good to be true. Like why are you giving money to people if you think you're going to get a 400% return on this ICO, trust me, like you're not. People will, but you're not the one. You're at the bottom of the pyramid. And as Brad said, majority of them are scams. And it's not like they go out and be like, hey, I'm going to be a scam. It's like I actually believe what I'm doing to be good. But I'm so ignorant and I have cognitive dissonance. I have woeful blindness that I'm not listening to anybody else. I can't tell you how many times I told people that you don't need a token. This is bullshit. Like why do. Oh yeah, ignore, ignore everything and just keep on doing it. So we're gonna see a bunch of these things crash within two years because the Runway cash will run out or a bunch of them will be hacked, which we've been seeing on a day to day basis. A lot of people losing tokens so wallets aren't secured properly, they leave it online, etc. And then once, once these projects fail on the promise of even delivering a beta project or product, and once a Runway cash falls out, people realize that they're all garbage. And then like the story goes from the ashes of Phoenix Rise and within three years we're going to see like the future Googles and the future Amazons emerge of this industry.

And I think it's just important to understand as well that it's so early in this space.

Super early.

It's so early in this space and it's a brand new thing and just like a Kickstarter, that's like another great kind of corollary. He's like most funded projects on Kickstarter never actually get shipped.

Yep.

And we're talking about a product that we had the manufacturing capability to produce. We're not talking about intellectual capital and ip. And the smartest people in the world need to understand, like he said, crypto economics and the technology and the tokens and the pieces of the puzzle. And then you still have the rule of startups which is 9 out of 10 fail or more on top of all that.

Well, I hate to have to wrap it up, we're about five minutes past, but I would like to ask you if a quick link or where can they find out some more of your information. We've already said blackgeeks.com yeah, BlackGeeks is great. And then make more marbles with Brad.

I'm gonna go ahead and just share my screen. I've got a little slide for you real quick. And this is the crypto cheat sheet. It's got all my best learnings about the things related to crypto and whatnot. And you can go to this link mmm.makemoremarbles.com crypto to grab that. That's mmm.makemoremarbles dot com crypto and that also has links to all Amir stuff. Amir and some of his partners create some of the best content about blockchain and cryptocurrency on the web. Millions of people have already checked it out. It's where I've learned a heck of a lot. I read it all the time. Every time they come out with a new guide. These are like highly produced, multi thousand dollars each guides that come out very frequently. So that is one site that I send everybody to. I think it's phenomenal and the Internet agrees with me. So, you know, don't take my word for it. Look around on Reddit and ask people in the forums. Block Geeks is legit. You know, we are always excited to have more conversations about crypto and blockchain, and we look forward to you guys reaching out with additional questions or if you have kind of thoughts about it or you want to kind of talk, you know, don't ask me for recommendations. I'm not willing to make them publicly because I just believe there's so much crap out there and I just don't even want to be bothered with it. But if you want a really solid strategy, you know, take an amount of money, you're entirely okay losing 100% of every dollar and just pick the top 10, right? And then next year, rebalance in the top 10 and just kind of keep going on like that. So if you win, you'll win big, and if you lose, you'll lose small.

Right?

That's an asymmetric risk reward trade. It's an investment if you have the patience for. And you're not just trading these up and down, speculating, it might pay off in 30 or 50 years or may not do anything. And either way, it was an amount of money you could have lost. All of, you know, so just, you know, tread lightly. Don't take my word for it. Do your research, Learn about the space because it has the potential to change everything. That's all I'll say about that.

Y' all. Thank you so much for meeting with me and being available today, letting us ask all of our questions. Thanks y' all for being here. Reach out. I'm easy to find on like 18 different platforms. Thanks you again.

Thank you, thank you, thank you guys. Appreciate it. We're grateful to be here. Thank you Amir for being here as well. Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marvels podcast for more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing abundant life in your health, wealth and relationships, whatever that means to you. Head on over to makemoremarbles.com check out our cool explainer video about what we're about and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher or Google Play wherever you listen to your podcast and please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.