#15 Monday Night Konsensus: Decentralised applications in real life

All right, all right. So first of all, very, very lucky to be here. Very nice to be here. Thanks for the invite. And I'm Ilmari Konttilainen, and I work at a company called Streamr. And what we do at Streamr is we basically build a decentralized ecosystem around real-time data. So you could call Streamr something like Amazon of real-time data or eBay of real-time data. But what it really boils down to is that the idea is that we want to put the people, that they will regain control of their data, that they produce and own. And what Streamr allows anyone to do, whether it's a company or an individual, is to start monetizing on the data, and especially on the real-time data that they have. And so Streamr has launched a real-time data marketplace quite recently. So it's like, let's say, ahead of 99% of the current crypto and blockchain projects by having something working on production. And so in that marketplace, anyone, whether it's like a, you know, a car manufacturer, or any data provider from financial data, from IoT data, has the ability to monetize the data that they have. So that's for the short introduction.

Yeah, that sounds really cool. And what I really like about the Streamr is that—

Niko, you are muted, but I guess Oh, sorry,

I was muted on Zoom. I have to toggle with 2 mute buttons. I have to remember to click the Zoom mute and the OBS mute, but I'll get the hang of it. This is only my 15th show, so it can't be perfect, right? So yeah, what I was gonna say is I really like the idea of Streamr of bringing this monetizing your data. Like, we generate data so much every day, and what happens currently is that Facebook or some other company takes that data. We use these free services, but actually when you have a free service, you are the product. So you have been— your information is constantly and data being sold. And what this kind of decentralized applications can do is to actually channel those revenues to the users, which is pretty exciting to me. Like there's some platforms like Steemit already doing that, which hasn't really taken off yet, but we are in the beginning of the technology, and this is why it's so exciting to be here. And Streamr especially, I'm working on a project called Weconomy, and our lead developer couldn't make it. I'll talk about that a little bit later, but I think there's a huge, like, really good opportunity between Streamr and Weconomy to build some synergy. But yeah, enough about that. Max, why don't you tell, tell us about NX Solar and what you've been doing there?

So I've been an entrepreneur for, I think, ever since I was roughly 14 or 15. And the last couple of years, I decided to focus my work especially on open-source companies. And mainly, and first and foremost, is it the spreading of the word of Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin is sound money, and that will bring economic and financial freedom if it prevails. So I see this as the highest priority. However, this is of course not everything, just talking about Bitcoin. We actually need to do stuff. And so I decided that for my bachelor thesis that I'm writing, the first part I already wrote back in 2017, was on project finance in ICOs, or how to finance projects with Bitcoin, with currencies that are of the digital age now in cyber utopia. And this was a nice theoretical paper. I thought it had promise, so I decided to go out and do something with it. And of course, Of course, I would start only an open source company, or company if you even want to call that. So I started Annex.Solar, which is this network of some agorists just working together voluntarily. Niko is part of it. And we just build on this project to finance small to medium-sized photovoltaic power plant directly peer-to-peer from the investor to the consumer who actually is building the power plant and using the electricity on a daily basis. So we really want to make sure that the small-scale communities can get their hands on green electricity and do this without the intervention of the government. Do it with only free and voluntary transactions. And we do not want to coerce people. So everything we do is voluntary, and that is the fundamental building block of open source entrepreneurship.

Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, it's worth pointing out here that, well, Myself and Max, we are at least so-called Bitcoin maximalists. Like Max said, I'm not sure about Rico. Maybe you are a Bitcoin maximalist as well. And we have Alex and Ilmari here who are kind of— I don't know if you are Ethereum maximalists or not, but let's say that you are. It's interesting because we do have the common goal here and we are kind of protocol agnostic. I'm not going to hold on to Bitcoin forever if there's a better protocol surfacing. What I'm all about is just like Max, the freedom of choice, freedom of doing whatever you want with your money, investing in whatever you want. Like, if you want to invest in solar power for the future, I think everybody should be able to do that. And NX Solar is aiming to do that. And it would be great if we can use the Bitcoin blockchain, which is something we're looking into. Like, there's interesting projects like Rootstock and Liquid that are sidechain solutions that could prove useful. And yeah, we'll just— we're in the process of deciding on the protocol. And none of the protocols, by the way, are up to scale right now. So we have— I think we have time. What do you think about these 2 projects so far? And what's your take on this open source entrepreneurship? And what are you doing?

Am I muted?

Yeah, now you're good.

I'm from Paris, exactly. Sorry guys, this is a new streamer for me, so I'm a bit shaky with Zoom. But as an entrepreneur, I think that the one thing I value most as being an entrepreneur is my time. And something we discussed earlier is the time, the idea of being able to get more out of your time and get paid just as much. I think that Bitcoin, blockchain technology, all these new applications is gonna— it's gonna slowly be the new age of jobs. There's a lot— there's a lack of jobs because of technology. There's a lack of jobs because of people's laziness. As an entrepreneur, I think that it's not— it's not because we're lazy. It's actually the opposite. We're actually working really hard. I work about 13, 14 hours a day. I have to go out in the public and advertise myself and my services. And I don't have the actual technical background. I have more of the application backgrounds. And I've understood the bank systems. I've researched a lot of different currencies, whether it's blockchain or just fiat. And I finally made the consensus that Bitcoin seems to be the answer for a lot of of the questions I've been looking for at least. And that leads me to the point where now I have to apply it. And so in my business, I'm starting to ask my clients to pay me in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. Because I think by questioning your audience and questioning your customers to be able to pay for something in a different manner really is the big bolt in the, you know, in that plate that needs to be set. Okay, are we gonna go this way? Are we gonna keep going the way that it seems to be working out for us? And if you study markets, there's always that massive dip or crash, and then we come back. But I think at this point, I'm just tired of repeating the same wheel, and I think that Bitcoin is in blockchain. Blockchain specifically more than Bitcoin is the answer to that. So yeah, I'm all about maximal liberty. That's where I found you, and also about string economics and sound money. So As I may not be technically applicable to creating new code at this moment in time, I'm just trying to practice it and tell an audience of people who don't know anything about cryptocurrency or blockchain what technology that's at hand while it's still young can be, you know, slowly implemented into their lives. Because once it hits mainstream, it's gonna be really hard for people to get that fork in the road, I think.

Thanks for that. Yeah, that's good points. And what you said about being lazy, I disagree with you on that. I think all of us are super lazy. The thing is, once you combine laziness with setting goals, you get efficiency. So I think that's an important point. I don't think the guy who invented the wheel was a hard worker for the sake of hard work. He was a lazy guy who figured out a way to get things from place A to place B more efficiently. So something that I like to say, laziness actually can be good, depends on what you put it into. And what you said about accepting those payments, I think that's awesome. I think we need pioneers like this Bitcoin pizza guy, for example, what he did back in the day when he bought those pizzas, 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. We need those guys. Like, if you don't have those guys, how are you ever going to break to mainstream? gotta, you know, bleed a little bit for the technology to take off. All right, Alexei, you— I think you are probably the most well-versed in coding here and developing per se. I'm personally a generalist, so I don't— I can't really go into that much into depth, but it would be interesting to hear a developer's take on these kind of decentralized applications and Do we have really something groundbreaking here or is it just a lot of hype? What do you think, Alexei? And while you add it, just tell us a little bit about what are you doing in the scene as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I'm currently working, yeah, entrepreneur, software development, embedded development, some UI design, mobile devices, all sorts of stuff. And yeah, as you point out, the decentralized applications that I have presented, for example Streamr from Ilmari and Taras Ethelend, in the Helsinki Ethereum meetup scene, these projects have always been prominent. And I really like to see 2 of these in Finland. Yes, good stuff. As a developer, I really think that this is the as the— there's the foundation for Web3, and that's a very, very good comparison because Web 2.0 was basically the social media and Web 3.0 is that we don't need infrastructure per se to run our software or host our platforms. do our disk storage. Everybody can join in on that. It's no longer in the walled gardens behind the computers, companies, I mean. And it's really going to change how the IT industry and industry in general is going to shift in the future.

Yeah, it's really cool. It's nice to have you here on board. And Alexei has recently also joined our kind of a think tank. That we we aim to try and help develop all these good projects, and and especially lately the Finnish projects, and of course the projects that I'm I'm a part of because I only only want to develop projects that actually they solve a problem, a fundamental problem of humankind. And to to with that segue, I will talk a little bit about Weconomy now since Alexi Melder who's Original idea was Compi here, but I've been developing it with him. The idea and the game theory behind it for for most of this year right now, and I would say that it's the most interesting project that I'm a part of right now. And yeah, but the reason for that is because it aims to onboard mainstream Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies mainly Bitcoin. So it will it will it's kind of like an interface. Like if you know Open Bazaar. which is a decentralized marketplace in the blockchain. It's kind of like that, but it should be more for mainstream. So the idea is that people don't even need to know that they're using crypto, just like an internet protocol like TCP/IP. Most people don't know how it works. They don't need to. I don't know how it works. I don't need to know. I just use internet every day. And I think that cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, should be the same. It's a money protocol and you shouldn't have to think about it. You just check your application and you want to buy something, you want to sell something, You will see the prices denoted in your local currency, whatever it is. And then in the background, all the exchanges will be happening in the Bitcoin blockchain. And this is something that raises a lot of development and game theory problems because we want— we need to make it decentralized because it's going to disrupt so many industries. And if there's a company behind it, it's going to be run down right away. So that's something interesting that we are developing now, and if we can reach with this video, any people who resonate with that, just go to weconomy.io and alpha.weconomy.io. You can join the alpha, and we would really love the data and the ideas. And we've been basically growing organically ever since the beginning of the year when Alexei started. He was left alone with the project, then I got in, I helped with the growth, and now we have like around 10 people who are into it pretty actively. So we are steadily growing, and everybody's welcome to contribute totally. It's an open, open source project. And our aim is to bring better money for people essentially. Like imagine being able to use your social media and, or let's say your eBay and selling things. Like instead of selling those in Facebook and letting Facebook take all the ad revenue, why don't you just pocket that by yourself by using something like Weeconomy? Because there's no middleman and all the data will be peer-to-peer. So then we can have a smart contract, for example escrow, that will then release the money as certain conditions have been met. let's say that thumbs up have been given on both ends. And this is a very simple simplification, of course, of the idea. And then there will be a treasury model that will pay out these rewards for each cut, for each transaction. And for new users, there could be like airdrops to help onboarding and stuff like that. So yeah, that's, that's pretty psyched about that. And also NX Solar is a pretty exciting project. It's more like at the moment for me it's more like in the back burner because it doesn't bring that kind of like urgentness and actionability as Weeconomy does. So I think Weeconomy is like at the moment priority project and Nxt for me is probably the second project. But also we are actively looking for other projects that we can develop with, we can work with, such as Streamr. very promising, like I mentioned earlier, like what Streamr is doing and what Weeconomy is aiming to do. We could put something together like gathering the data of purchase behavior that's immensely valuable, which is currently sold to, you know, whoever. We don't even know who is that sold to, but Weeconomy could channel those profits to you. It looks like Ilmari has something to add here. Go ahead, Ilmari.

Yeah, yeah. So you could think of it as like a kind of like a cashback for doing transactions in the Weeconomy. So if you, if you could get, let's say, 1%, 5%, whatever that number is, back from all of your purchases by simply essentially monetizing your data, your statistics in an anonymized way. Yeah, that's one way for it. users of certain applications, whether that's Weeconomy or whether that's any other applications where there happens like transactions. Yeah, Streamr enables just that.

Great. And do you guys have anything you want to ask about the Weeconomy? Anything to add? Max?

Yeah, absolutely. I think Weeconomy is a great project and really interesting. Because it brings together the market, right? It is a marketplace, and free exchange and voluntary exchange is fantastic. And especially because we here at the, you know, with the Bitcoin blockchain community, whatever you want to call it, we want to build agorism. We want to build agoristic projects that work just without any government needed. It just works. We do not use violence and the threat of violence to force people to behave, but we use incentives to make sure that the people do behave, right? Because incentives and game theory is so much more powerful than coercive rules and regulation. So Niko, a question for you. How did you take the incentives into account when thinking about the economy and programming it?

Well, that's really the key question, isn't it? The incentives. Like, everything boils down to that. You have to be able to build a game that everybody first of all wants to play, and once they do play optimally, everybody wins at the same time. That's what Bitcoin does. And that's a tall order, I'll tell you that right now. But I think it's doable. Like, it's, it's been done in Bitcoin. I think the incentives are there once people see it. Like, why wouldn't it be there? It makes sense. It makes sense if you imagine that you want to sell your old guitar, for example, for somebody across the world. First of all, you have to make an account to eBay, you have to generate some kind of status there so people trust you, so they will send you the money, so then you send them the guitar. There's a lot of things can go wrong and maybe it's not super efficient. But imagine if you have a platform that you can just instantly go there, upload it, and then find a buyer for whatever you are selling, and then you can just do the transaction that way. And of course you will ship it there. Regular way, you will even get the chance to give positive or negative karma, which is kind of like what eBay popularized, this kind of trust system. And this, I think, is the main key of the motivation and incentivization, because what we want to build is actually not just a marketplace but a trust platform. So once people start transacting on this, making transactions, buying things, selling things, they will start accumulating karma and which we call— well, it's karma. Like, it's positive or negative points. So each transaction you will get, like, let's say from -3 to +3. And once your karma goes to too negative, maybe you get a penalty, like your stuff vanishes from the list for a while, and then until you reinstate your level of karma. So this would create an incentive for people to regulate their behavior and provide quality service because this they want to have high karma. And high karma will also boil down to this kind of like, for example, dispute resolution. It will lend us a trusted quorum kind of like model that we've been thinking about. So high karma holders could form a quorum that whenever there's a dispute, it will be sent out to like, let's say, top 5% karma holders. And once 50% of those accept, And they can make a verdict based on the data collected on the dispute. And the incentivization to participate in that would be that you get a reward if your verdict is correct. So if your verdict is 51% or more, you will get a reward. If you are voting for the minority, you will get nothing. So this would incentivize people to participate, actively try to think about the game theory. What are the others thinking? what is the correct way to solve this, and I think that's the way to go. What do you guys think about that? Rico has his hand up for a while. Rico, you go ahead.

Okay, so I've just been researching We Economy, and it seems like what comes out from a general perspective after looking at it, it really is incentive for people to take initiative. And we live in a world of complete control, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Centralized banks. And I think with blockchain, it allows people to not only take action but create change. And often when we try to create a change, it doesn't happen because there's just so much in the way. But with blockchain, I've noticed— and being an entrepreneur is more so— you can make change, whether it's in your personal lifestyle and your families and relationships that you have, or on a massive scale. It's something that you had said earlier that keeps playing in my ear is long-term gain, long-term money, money that's going to be around for a while, not instant. And I think that with any job and company, that's kind of what you should be looking for. But just with so many applications and people trying to get into quick instant money, you end up seeing— you end up losing money and time. And in the end, you're thinking, I shouldn't have made that error. I feel like WeEconomy is allowing people to be involved at an early stage, create change, and advocate change by getting back incentives by the economy that they're creating. Essentially, they're creating their own community, which I thought was really quite interesting. I know it's not really international yet, and you guys are pretty much just in Finland to translate the website. But all in all, from a perspective from an outsider who doesn't go into coding and stuff. I think Weeconomy is just allowing people to get involved at an early stage, and blockchain is still at such an early stage. So I think it's a good thing for people to look into, even if you have a job and maybe you have something you really like to do on the side, and you can slowly get into that if you're trying to get away from a job where you have to check in to a corporation and you get paid through them, or you could kind of start creating your own income and creating an economy that is created by other entrepreneurs. So I think that was a really good project that you have kind of started off.

Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, that's what I like to say. I don't want to get rich quick, I want to get rich slow. That's a much more sustainable way, and then hopefully I will get the Lambo one day, but not today. Ilomare, do you have something to add to that? What do you think about this game theory scenario?

Yeah, I mean, I think it boils down to a little bit about like getting small streams of revenue from various different places in the future. I mean, at the moment, a lot of us probably have or at least had like 9-to-5 jobs, and I'm still working on on one of them. But where I see, and what I have at least understood, that where the future is, like after joining the Streamr, I see that in the future it's kind of like similar, like, you know, you invest in a stock that yields dividends, whether that's yearly or whether that's like monthly. So you get like a small stream of like dividend like every month. And so you can basically do the same with other things. Well, of course, now if we talk about Streamr, then it would be the data that you provide. And one of the examples that I actually used to always tell to people when people ask, like, so what is the, like, real use cases of Streamr? So how do I monetize the data? What data do I monetize? So I take the example of that. So I'm a runner, I do, like, marathons maybe twice a year now, at least for the past couple of years. And so I train maybe 5 or 6 times per week. Okay. And so I gather a lot of heart rate data as I'm using my heart rate monitor whenever I'm running. And so that data could actually be quite valuable to, for example, my insurance company. So my insurance company could actually pay me to get that data, or get that data from me and from many others who are doing this kind of running. And what is actually interesting is that I used to just tell this as a story, like it was just in my head, and I was thinking, okay, this could be like one of the use cases for streamer. But now, like a month back, we were in like one conference in Dublin, and there was actually this like wellness device manufacturer who actually manufactures these kind of devices that measure your heart rate and whatever, something else. And we started to actually brainstorm about this idea, and they were very, very motivated and very interested in taking this forward in a way that they collect the data from a lot of like the end users And they monetize the data through the Streamr data marketplace. And then they give back like part of the profits or like, I'm not sure whether the percentages are, but so that the end users actually start receiving some basically money, fiat money from the data that they produce on their devices. And we are like constantly evolving the Streamr platform, the marketplace included. And one of the features that we are going to develop in the future is something called, well, community product where you can basically join to a pool of certain data types. So whether that's the heart rate monitor data or whether that's something like, for example, your GPS location data, anonymized of course. So you can join a pool of data providers and monetize that pool of data to a bigger company and get a portion of those revenues. So I mean, what I see in the future is that the control from the data, like we see with the GDPR and similar cases and legislations, is that the control of the data, whether that's real-time data or like more static data like in the STEAMIT example, the control comes back to that one who produces and also, if we say, owns the data. And so then the companies need to start like act on it and start like actually paying for the data. So yeah, that's what I see in what's happening in the future. And that, of course, you know, rains to the end users as they get either like better service or more quality service, let's say less ads on a web page, or they get like, you know, money or data coin or Bitcoin or whatever that is, the means of exchange.

Very, very cool project indeed. Ricardo, you have a question?

Yeah, listening to what he's talking about makes absolute sense. I never thought of it like that. Your data is your personal intellectual use, whether you're running, whether you're searching something, whether that's a recipe or where you want to go on vacation, or maybe some more private things. Let's say you have to research some things that you don't want people to know about. There's companies that are using that information and selling it. They can use it for a long list of things. And for somebody to have to pay you for that, that sounds ingenious. I never thought of it like that. Your data is your personal use, and whether it's a company using it for how to market something, or it's private NGOs, non-government organizations, using it for other things, if you have control of who takes it, at least you have a little bit of say in it. That is really interesting. I know that— VPNs are becoming really big just because of everything from Facebook to Twitter and other things being shadow banned and searched and followed. Your data is a huge part of who you are, especially in a world that you can't see that connects everything. Because if the net goes down, that's— I mean, it's a lot of data, but the net controls everything. So in a sense, it does kind of control every interaction, whether you're buying something or whether you're visiting a website. It's quite interesting. I never thought of that.

Yeah, it is interesting, and data is one of our more valuable assets. I wonder if we lost Ricardo.

No, I'm here. Oh, you're there.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, no worries. Yeah, the data is super important, and as you said, like, even confidential and sensitive data, like let's say patient records. I heard of this project, I'm not sure if it's a scam or whatever, it was promoted by none other than John McAfee, so, you know, you be the judge. But he was talking about this project called Docademic. The idea behind it sounds ingenious though. The aim is to provide healthcare for everybody in the world in a decentralized way for free, and the monetization model is patient data, anonymous patient data that will be sold and then used to pay the doctors. So that way just by using the application, you could just, if you have a smartphone and this application, you could talk to a doctor. And that's, to me, that has a huge, huge potential, but I'm not sure how the whole business model plays out in the end, but certainly something to look up. And I think that that would be a great application and certainly badly needed. Healthcare is quite important. Max, you have a question? Yeah, I have a question.

Exactly, yes. I mean, I personally am a cypherpunk. I value my privacy really, really high. And I do think that we should first and foremost work on technology that preserves privacy, and that makes sure that our right to be left alone— this is a natural right, okay— is honored. And we do this with self-defense. So cryptography, just like Bitcoin, is a weapon for self-defense. And I think it is really important that we just speak out that first and foremost, the standard should always be privacy. You should never have to opt in privacy. You should have to opt out of privacy, right? And but as soon as you want to share your data, as soon as you want to be public with it, and as soon as you then opt out of privacy and opt into the sharing mode, then we know for certain that this is a voluntary transaction. Because if we make transparency and sharing the standard, then we do not have any privacy by default. And this means that people are being stolen from in their personal data, in their right to be left alone. And we have to give them a weapon of self-defense. That is the cypherpunk's dream, right? We need to make strong cryptography so that not even a state actor can take away this liberty from us to just keep the stuff private and share it selectively. So the standard should always be privacy. But then, Illuminari, I agree with you. It's like, as soon as it's voluntary and as soon as the people want to share, for example, their health data with the doctor, then yes, this is a massive tool that we can use. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up voluntarism because that's, that's what should be the basis of each and every transaction. And I don't believe that's what we have right now. I think, like, for example, Facebook starts to be pretty coercive, actually. Like, are you really free in not having a Facebook account? I mean, it's almost as if you face social ostracism by not having a Facebook account, which is like what I recently experienced by deleting my profile. And then I had to create a new profile just so I can get to share my stuff. I mean, my videos and stuff to reach more audience. So I don't feel like it's really, you know, I'm not opting in. It's kind of like I have to do that if I want to reach more people. So it's not really voluntary, is it? And they are trying to monetize, they are trying to steal from me. So I don't give them any extra information. I only shill my projects there. So there. And for that, they actually banned me twice already. So I keep making profiles. But this is the world we live in. This is not a free world. You think you're using a free service. You're not. You're the product. So we can take that back and use these kind of awesome products in the future, I think, what we are building here. And yeah, Ricardo, go ahead.

I wanted to ask Alexei and Ilmari a couple questions because I know that there's a difference between coding with Bitcoin blockchain and Ethereum blockchain, there's a huge debate. And for somebody who's maybe not using one or the other, who's new to it, it's probably a bit of holes and some things that are really good about it and some things that are really bad. And I was kind of just curious about that because I'm not really clear on that, to be honest with you.

Yeah, so well, I can give my, my like insights and ideas. So And what actually Niko also briefly talked about. But so my understanding is that the difference, the biggest difference between the Bitcoin and the Ethereum is that the smart contract capabilities in the Ethereum are like more superior, at least at the moment, to the Bitcoin. Now, with that being said, there is of course this project, especially these sidechain projects on the Bitcoin that basically enable you to do similar things or same things with, you know, in other ways. I'm like, my, like most of my knowledge is on the Ethereum on the other hand. So I can't say like whether there's like this and that. But at least what we see on the new tokens and new dApps being developed, like most of them are being developed on top of the Ethereum because of the standards. So for example, the ERC-20 standard that defines the standard for utility tokens, the ERC-721 standard that defines the non-fungible tokens, and so on. So there is more, how would I say, standardized ways, built-in ways, or common ways to do stuff on Ethereum. And that's why, for example, Streamr chose Ethereum because there were already like some of the things like groundwork done in order to get get like stuff done and get stuff out. So for example, in the Streamr data marketplace, so whenever you buy a subscription to a data product that enables or gives you access to the data streams, so you basically execute the smart contract. So there is a contract between the data provider and the data buyer. And so there's no like central entity there. But I'm not sure whether that same would be possible to do in the Bitcoin. blockchain. But maybe Alexei can continue on the matter.

Yeah, certainly. Can I also take a little bit reflection on what has been said thus far?

Oh, please. I was gonna give you the floor next. You've been quiet for a while.

Okay. Well, to answer Ricardo's question, yeah, Bitcoin has its own mechanics to do programming or scripting, but it's, as far as I know, it's a little bit more inferior to Ethereum's stuff. And Ethereum was first marketed as the world computer, and it still is. And in my opinion, that's my take at least on— I don't care much about the tokens or anything like that. So I'm more interested in the computational aspect of Ethereum and the possibilities it can bring. The actual— the most severe problem is that once you put something in there, you can't take it out. So that includes all of your programming errors or bugs. And if there is some way to exploit that, you can lose money like in DAO hack happened. So it's programmable money pretty much right now, but I truly see the potential more on the actual computation platform like decentralized CPUs, essentially. So it's, it's a promising future so far. And I'd like to continue on the, the health data from Streamr. I just thought about the medical data, if you, you can provide that, for example, to medical research. You could have basically a control set, and then you study some specific group, and you get the data from the group, and then you do your control studies. But there's very— the process you have to do in order to participate in these studies is quite convoluted. difficult. So Streamr could really streamline the process in my opinion. And really, Streamr as a platform could benefit, for example, the cars, for example, and stuff like that. So I'm really looking forward to what the future brings in Streamr.

Awesome. Thanks for your input. Max, you have a question, and then we're gonna go through one more topic, and then we're gonna take the audience questions. So hopefully we'll be done by 8. Go ahead, Max.

So my question, or my statement, or my monologue, whatever you want to call it, but please feedback, is that most of the stuff that you need smart contracts for can be done in Bitcoin pretty much since today. The scripting language Bitcoin Script is actually quite exhaustive. It can do really a lot of, lot of stuff, and new functions are always added. What Bitcoin cannot do is that Bitcoin is not Turing complete. So this means that, for example, Ethereum is Turing complete. So you can make any program that you would like, anything from an operating system to the electronics of a wheelchair. It doesn't matter. You could theoretically program everything that you want on the Ethereum protocol. world computer. This is cool, right? It's nice. But it also opens up immense security flaws because you, you have now unlimited bugs because you can write unlimited programs. And so testing Ethereum for bugs is impossible. It just is because Ethereum is by definition Turing complete. Anything can happen. And this is a trade-off, right? Do you want to have Turing completeness to build cool stuff in a decentralized fashion? Yeah, but then you also have to pay with the risk factor, because it's not going to be as secure. And so Bitcoin really strives itself in being one of the most secure, if not the most secure, ways to store your wealth in a digital fashion, both in its monetary policy, but here in this context, in the technical capabilities. And yes, you can right now at this day do ERC-20 tokens and ERC-721 tokens. It's all possible on Bitcoin. It has been since like 2012, 2013 with colored coins and master coins. So, you know, most of the stuff that you need to do can be done in Bitcoin. And especially if we have more specialized parts of the Bitcoin blockchain, for example, the Liquid sidechain, which will let you handle assets on the Bitcoin sidechain. So we keep the base layer, you know, the money base, as secure as possible. And then on several layers above, we can reduce the risk. Sorry, we can increase the risk but decrease the security. Why? Because again, it is opt-in. We want to make everything as voluntary as possible. So the base should always be private, censorship-resistant, and secure. And then in higher levels, we can add the opt-in features like scalability, cheap transactions, like privacy, Nimble Bimble, for example, like Turing completeness, like with RSK, or a special sidechain just for assets. That is Liquid from Blockstream. So I would say that scaling and security, but keeping the core secure, is really, really important. And therefore, I do think that most of the stuff that is interesting can still be done on Bitcoin.

Oh, that was an interesting monologue. And what Max here pretty much said is that Bitcoin can cover like 95% of the bases in the future. Which I believe as well. And now, before we go to the final topic about gamification, I would like to reserve the opportunity for the Ethereum guys to maybe take a stance on this. Ilmar, why don't you go first?

Yeah, well, maybe it's better like we talked in the beginning that we should stay more agnostic on the blockchain technologies and rather like choose the best tool at the given time to that problem at hand. So, for example, at Streamr, when we were like starting to build the marketplace, we evaluated of course the different opportunities. And well, of course we had done our token and the ICO on Ethereum, so Ethereum was quite obvious choice for us. Had we done the ICO last autumn with Bitcoin or some colored coins or whatever, probably they might have chosen another way. But it's all about like choosing the right like tool for the right problem. And well, so far for us, it has been Ethereum. And yeah, so yeah, but yeah, without going like further into that, into the debate, because we could be probably here tomorrow discussing that, which one is actually better and why. And yeah.

Yeah, that's a topic for a whole other show. Alexei, If you want to add something.

Yeah, I was, I was going to have a lengthier response, but I'll talk to Max separately. It's not that simple that Turing completeness or non-Turing completeness implies the presence or absence of bugs. So let's talk about that later.

All right, cool. So what I wanted to talk about last is the gamification. decentralized applications, which I feel like is super important in terms of game theory as well, and as to get the incentives correct. And after that, we'll take the audience questions. So if you have any questions, think of them now, put it in the YouTube chat. Hopefully everybody can see them. And while you're at it, smash the like button, share, share it, and then at least people will see that your questions being answered. And yeah, the gamification, this is actually— there's a project called Envirate that really caught my attention. What they are doing is kind of like you— like if you think about Pokémon Go, right? That was a huge rage and it had augmented reality and people went outdoors and, you know, actually got some fresh air and exercise, which was awesome for a while. Of course, the game was pretty— it sucked pretty hard. So, you know, I stopped playing it after 2 weeks after I accomplished everything I could. So, but the idea is solid, and maybe we could do something similar to, for example, like in Weconomy, you could actually expand it with these plugins of, you know, gamified content. So what Enviride is doing is like you can go to a place, a park for example, if it's like super dirty or whatever, you can give it like a you know, red score, which means that it needs to clean up, needs to be cleaned up. And then high karma holders or whatever, the in-rate point holders will then go, go and check if somebody has taken care of it and then distribute points. And I think like a lot of these ERC-20 token projects are justifying the use of, use of these ICO tokens as, as the main means of incentivization and rewarding the users. So that's something that comes into play as well if you're using Bitcoin and how to channel the rewards in Bitcoin. That's another thing. But what I really wanted to talk about is how— what other kind of things do you suspect that could be a good game for people to play? Because people like to play games. People like to use apps that are nice to use. There's some nice animation, there's some nice sounds like that. I mean, you don't have to like it. It's not like it adds any functionality or anything like that, but we are visual people. Humans are visual, and if we really want to speak to the masses, we gotta make it fun. We gotta make it fun as hell so people have no choice but to— I mean, they have choice, but they really want to use it. And that's where we want to go with this. And this brings the whole ideology to light as well. Ilmar, why don't you talk about the game theory and gamification a little bit here?

Yeah, so actually I forgot to mention I'm also working at Enviraid as their advisor, so I know a little bit about the gamification elements on that front as well. Thanks for mentioning the project. So yeah, so I mean, I think like what Pokémon Go did especially well, extremely well, it kind of popularized this kind of like location-based incentive mechanisms and gamification. Yeah. And as you said very well, the NVRAID application kind of tries to replicate the same, of course, with more economical incentives because we are talking about tokens there as well. And so I think like if you talk about like crypto economics, which is a way of kind of a way of gamification, or at least like incentivizing people to act on the way that we want them to, So from streamers' point of view, the gamification element is quite simple. And so it's basically, you know, you provide data, you receive money or tokens, whatever that is. But then if we go to more, how would I say, game-like environments such as Envirate, so there, of course, you kind of like earn some tokens when you complete some actions. So whether it's like cleaning a park or whether just like just putting the ratings in. And there's of course like dynamics because whenever you create anything like related to game theory, you always have people who try to cheat the system. And it's same with the Streamr projects and with the community project. So if we think about that, we have like a pool of data providers. And so those pool of data providers will get like a lump sum of tokens as a reward for producing the data. So what if like, so there comes this kind of like free rider problem. So one of them might not actually produce any data, but would still get some incentives out of that. So we need to actually kind of solve this kind of like game theory problems where like, how do we vote out those who don't provide the data, or if they provide the data more infrequently, than the others. But unfortunately, we haven't solved all of those problems, but it's an interesting problem set indeed.

Yeah, that's super interesting. I met with the Nvirite representative at one of the meetups, and I was immediately interested and hooked in the concept. Really good idea. Really hope we can do some work together and maybe help you guys solve some game theory problems. Max, why don't you

This is fascinating, interesting, right? Because, because now we have a money that we can use in games, like in digital games. That is fantastic. Actually, with Julius, a previous show guest on Niko's show Maximum Liberty, and I, we together attended Mises University. And before that, we had a week-long stay in Atlanta. We talked a lot about how we can use cryptocurrencies in gaming. You can do this on, you know, for example, just imagine a real economy like in World of Warcraft or any of those other massive online multiplayer games, but not with game tokens, but with real money, with actual money that you cannot just spend inside this game, but everywhere. I mean, that is fascinating, right? How is that like separate community gonna be tied to the big economy of the entire society? How can you use those game tokens in, in real world? Can you, through, for example, multipath and multi-currency Lightning routing swaps, can you just route your payment out of one of those World of Warcraft tokens over to Ethereum, over to Litecoin, over to Bitcoin, over to Monero, and back to Bitcoin, and then pay it all within a millisecond? and atomic, that would be fantastic. And then how does the real-world value of this coin, of this token, or of whatever, how is this going to affect the game itself? Because now as a game developer, you do not just have to take into account real gameplay and make a nice and compelling game, but now you have to also think about economics, right? And how to use this currency in your game. Because if you have a bad currency in the game, well, the bad will be— the game will be broken, right? Just as World of Warcraft had a shitty currency system, right? It didn't really work. They inflated it to shit. So it kind of destroyed the entire economy. But now imagine playing World of Warcraft with Bitcoin, where you know that 1 Bitcoin is 1 Bitcoin, and it's a politically neutral and sound money, or any other currency for that matter. But just imagine having a game with such a currency. That is fantastic.

Fantastic. Yeah, I really like— my mind boggles when I start to think about the possibilities. We're moving into an age of scarce digital goods. So a game like World of Warcraft or whatever is going to happen. It's just a matter of time when you'll be able to sell your armor for Bitcoin. And that would be awesome to see that kind of economy happening. People are going to shift from actually buying so-called real-life goods to digital goods, which will be great for the environment as well. You know, think about it. You can just efficiently produce these kind of things without actually going through the natural resources to do so. Ricardo, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I wanted to come from an outsider's perspective because I'm not a huge gamer, but I can understand the theories of game. And even being an employee back in the day when I used to work for companies and they would give you an incentive to do something, the incentive was The part of the game, the doing, was just what you had to do to get the incentive. So, whether or not it's your information being tracked to your hospitals for the doctor's information, or you're running and your insurance company is paying you for that information, whatever it might be, whether you're shopping somewhere or watching a show and people are like, okay, well, we're going to pay you to tell us what you think of the show. We'll pay you even more to give us a description. That is a whole— it opens up a whole list of jobs, platforms, and I think the incentives of people using these cryptocurrencies and blockchain is that's the key, that's the wedge. Whether it could be anything, whether it's gaming gaming or just like your daily use of postal services or whatever it might be, it's just a huge list of things you could do that with.

Awesome. Alexei, your final remarks on this and then we move on to the questions.

Yeah, well, Windows 95 got sold with Solitaire and other good card games, so it makes sense in this world to have games to be the front runners. CryptoKitties have already been that, and you pretty much incentivize, for example, bug bounties. They were in CryptoKitties. There was a goal to find a way to create your own cat. Yeah. Because usually the cats were randomized and then you would basically force a cat to be a certain kind and then you got a reward for it from the developers that you found a bug and you created this. Well, I'll post a link somewhere, but it was quite strange cats, but it pretty much showed that you can gamify even the bug bounties. So

yeah, absolutely, post me the link. I always put the links in the description, and as well, I'm gonna also put your guys' social media profiles there so everybody can find you. Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks for a great insight. We are kind of running out of time here, but let's do the questions. We have a couple questions in the chat. If you have more questions, now is the time to add those. We have Henry who is asking, what do you guys think about securitizing your own data and possibly selling it to the market? And there's a follow-up: financial data is transferred without your permission. If you, let's say, tokenize all your data, and the industries that are using your data should always pay you in exchange of the data. So this is about, as I understand, tokenizing your data and selling it. What do you guys think? Ilomari?

Well, I mean, with tokenizing your data, it's possible to a certain extent. Now, so let's say if you have real-time data that we work with, with Streamr, it might not be the easiest way to, like, how would I say, tokenize that entirely. Because if you get, like, let's say, a value like, let's say, 1 or 2 or 3, you kind of, if you can read it, then you can replicate it. So even if you tokenize that, like, what is the benefit of the tokenization? Now, of course, if we start, like, come more with the GDPR and that sort of like personal information and digital identity content such as blog posts like in Steemit or something like that, then the tokenizing of the data might be more, how do you say, lucrative opportunity to prospect. But if it's like a very frequent set of small data points, the tokenization of that data might not be worth it. But of course, for any larger data chunks, like, and especially for your, like, digital identity and that sort of things, like, of course, it should be like, it would be very nice if I could just say that, okay, here is my dataset, or here's my, let's say, like, a Merkle proof of my whole dataset, like, whatever I have there. And like, I could basically prove that, hey, this was the picture I took, like, when I was 30 years 13 years old and when we visited Greece or something like that. So of course it would be very nice and it would allow like even more of this kind of like micropayment. So whenever somebody actually was looking at my picture that I took, I would get like a fraction of a cent to my account through some mechanisms on the services that are showing. So it would enable a lot of like very interesting and lucrative business opportunities and monetization methods. But there is like a certain extent to where we can extend it. So because when it boils down to numbers, especially on the like financial data side, that when we see a number 1 or number 2 or number 10, we can always replicate that. And then the kind of like the whole tokenization of that data kind of vanishes or the benefits.

Great. Max?

Yeah, really interesting because I work in the financial sector and I see how transparent the current financial sector is. And again, when we're talking about selling your data, you can only sell something if you have ownership of it, and you only have ownership of it if you can defend it. And data can only be defended with encryption, with cryptography. And in the incumbent financial system, there is no cryptography whatsoever. I can see every transaction that you have ever made, where you made it, what you spent it on, how much it was, with a click of a mouse. I don't even need to have any special permission in a bank. It's like every low-working bank employee can do that, and that is horrible. We don't want that. So again, in order to sell something, you have to have ownership. And it is amazing that now with cryptography— and it's a cypherpunk's dream, right? We have cryptography and money, so we can actually mathematically make sure that we do have this ownership over our money and that we can protect it with mathematics, right? And then we can sell it. And that is amazing because now we can target with whom we want to make business and with whom not to. And so if you want to sell your data to Facebook to get better, I don't know, a better transaction or chat feed or whatever, yeah, you can do that. But you have the keys in your hand. And if you hold the keys, you are the ultimate authority of who you're going to make business with. And now it is on us entrepreneurs to provide a business that incentivizes the user so much that he voluntarily gives up his property rights in his data. He shares it with us. He gives it to us. And again, data is mostly non-scarce goods, so they can be shared freely at no cost. And now we have to make a product that the consumer actually wants. That is perfect. That is exactly where we want to be. But we have to give the consumer the choice. But I agree with everything that was said so far.

Yeah, definitely free market all the way. There's a question I think that is directed to Alexei. I'll just— since we're running out of a little bit time here, we'll try to expedite it. Do you guys believe Ethereum Proof-of-Stake protocol will be successful when it's released? And do you think Ethereum miners could swap to mining Ethereum Classic? Interesting. Alexei is probably the most well-versed to answer this one.

Yeah, okay. Well, I think proof of stake has to happen. I don't, I don't really see any other, other point in having a, having a system that pretty much has so much crud in it that you only verify transactions. You can do it with the with the currency that is being staked on. So traditionally you do lots of computations, but now you just put your money out on the line and you say that these transactions are valid. That makes more, much more sense in the long run at least. And well, I don't know that much about the mining aspect because I don't have any powerful rigs myself, but It can be a little bit, a little bit of a bad move for in the mining sense, but that proof-of-work is a little bit outdated in my opinion. So we need to find a little bit more efficient way, efficient ways of doing stuff.

Yeah, that's a good answer. I do think that Ethereum Classic will have a niche. I think there will be a proof-of-work work Ethereum and to some extent because there's a— there's community support for it for now. Does it make a big difference in the future? I don't think so, but it will be there. I don't think a lot of projects will go to zero. Did you— any of you guys have anything to add to that? I'll take one more question and then we'll wrap it up. If not, then yeah, sorry, One Way, I skipped over your question. You were asking, I would like to ask, how long do you guys think it will take for decentralization to really happen in reality? 5 or 10 years? That's an interesting question. I don't think decentralization is something that, you know, is going to happen and then suddenly we have decentralization. We have decentralization all the time. It's just a matter of how we apply it. And for that end, I would highly recommend a book called Starfish and Spider. Really helped me understand the true power of decentralized organizations. And, you know, it was written like 2 years before Bitcoin, but it tells pretty much the story of Bitcoin. And it's really a you know, mind-blowing how strong and resilient a starfish system can be when it's decentralized. And it's more of a question, will we adapt the mindset of get rich slow from get rich quick? And I think that's the kind of mindset that will change with the global economy. Ricardo, you had something to add?

Yeah, actually I did. I wanted to just quickly say about the adoption of being decentralized. I think everybody chooses what they want. You can go decentralized. There are speakers out there, there are maximalists for Bitcoin who get paid only in Bitcoin, and you just have to go an alternative route. I did want to answer one thing quickly on Henry's question about the tokenizing of all your data. Whether or not you guys realize that your data is worth something and If a company is out there willing to not only protect your information but give you money for it, I think that's something we're overseeing. Because banks, they charge you for every transaction. So why shouldn't every transaction you do be secret? You can get paid for that, or you could pay a company to protect you. So I think adoption is all decision and choice, whether you're starting with a VPN or getting your own wallet. to getting paid in cryptocurrencies or maybe quitting your job and just going full head and heels into all these new markets. Adoption is your choice, I personally think.

Yeah, well said, well said. Alexei, you had something to add?

Yeah, it's already technically doable. For example, in IPFS you can have a shared you can share your static website pretty easily. It does have some, some stepping stones, and you can get, get burned a little bit on how you update, how you keep it updated and stuff like that. And when, when computation and storage become truly decentralized, then we are really talking. That's going to be the, like, well, that's how it's going to start. when you have to do things there, and that's it.

Awesome. Max, you had something to say.

Yeah, and I agree with all those points. Absolutely, it's, it's on the individual to actually choose the decentralization, to choose to use Bitcoin, Ethereum as a currency, to choose to drop out of the system and work for an open-source and free and natural company. But I think hand in hand with the effort of getting more decentralization comes the result of more and more freedom. Because decentralization, by definition, means anarchy, no rulers, no masters, and no slaves. So by definition, a decentralized system such as Bitcoin or Ethereum— might argue there for a bit— but they are absolutely free systems. Because they're all opt-in and voluntary. And historically speaking, there has been a huge trend towards a more free and prosperous society, especially in the last 30 years with the internet. And now you might say that the 20th century was horrific for our freedoms, and I would agree. Yes, many freedoms have been taken away from us. And we will gain more freedoms, and then we will lose some freedoms, and we will gain some more again. This is a never-ending cycle. This This will continue to happen. This is the fight towards liberty, towards your natural rights, and this will not be solved within a couple of years. No, it will not. This will continue for several hundreds, if not thousands of years. But where do I see the trend? I do think it is moving towards freedom and in quite a huge, rapid pace. So I think we are fighting a good battle here. We are on the strife towards more liberty and towards more decentralization, which is, I think, fantastic.

And with that, we're gonna wrap up the show. Will you, Max, since you're talking about going towards liberty, I think we are going towards there, would you tell our audience where they can find you and how they can reach you the best?

Well, I just love to plug the domain name of my website always a little bit because it is towardsliberty.com. And I just love that domain name. Yeah, so I got all my stuff on there. If you want to find out more about Bitcoin, go to towardsliberty.com/bitcoin for a Bitcoin library of useful stuff to do research. /economics if you want to do more research in economics, and especially Austrian economics. And if you go to towardsliberty.com/anarchy, you'll find my paper on anarchy and money and why we need a need for nor want government regulation in money. It's of course an open-source and decentralized paper that I'm writing. So if you would like to contribute, thank you very much. And on Twitter, I'm quite active there, @HillebrandMax. Thank you very much. It's been a fantastic show, so I'm looking forward to the next one.

Awesome. Thank you. Ilmari, why don't you tell people where to reach you?

Yeah, so, well, I'm also a little bit active on social media, so Twitter, you can find me @kondulai. You can also find Streamr, streamr.com. So if you want to see one of the few actually working in production crypto projects out there, you can find both our marketplace and our real-time data editor from there. Yeah. So thanks everybody for the show. It was a thrill.

Thanks. Ricardo, where can people find you?

Okay, you guys can find me on Twitter @ricoreport. It's @ricoreport. And you can also find me at Rico— excuse me— on YouTube at Rico Coin Report. If you want to read my blog, it's ricocoinreport.wixsite.com/2018. You can find the link on my YouTube channel, but I'm trying to get on to other things like Steemit, Yours, Gab, AI, BitChute. So even decentralizing your content is what I'm trying to go for, but I just started about back in May. So yeah, if you guys want to take a look, feel free to comment, subscribe, and like. Thank you so much for letting me be on here as well. It's been a great experience.

Awesome, awesome. And like I mentioned earlier, we're all kind of working together with World Crypto Network now, and we're super psyched to keep creating new content, and we're all new in this. And yeah, it's pretty much try to inspire people. Just if you have an idea, just go for it and do it. Alexei, where can people find you?

Well, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, search for LocusF, L-O-C-U-S-F, and you'll usually find me there. Now, I'm not that active on YouTube, so I'll Probably post that somewhere else when I make videos. So thanks, thanks a lot, guys. This was really, really awesome.

Guys, I really enjoyed my time. And for the viewers, thank you for attention, and really cool that you liked it. We had quite a few live viewers. And if you're interested in my stuff, you can always find me on ConsenSys YouTube channel. I have also my private channel, Maximal Liberty, which is mostly a little bit longer Higher high quality panels about interesting stuff. I'm active on Twitter under name Omnifin, and I'm always always on Telegram at N1KOFI and in the consensus group, which is mostly in Finnish, but also all our projects are mobilizing in Telegram. So definitely can reach me reach me there if you have any interesting projects that you would like me to work on. I'm always happy to lend an ear. And thank you for the panel for your awesome insight. Thank you for being a part of this, and let's do another show. And with that, bye-bye.

Yeah, thank you. Bye-bye.

See you guys. It was a good one.

Bye.