Q&A part 2 | Jack Saba

He had his hand up and then I'll come back to you.

It sounds incredible. Are there any main valid criticisms that have been levied at the system? Because it sounds like it could change everything.

Regulations are going to be the biggest stifle to innovation. So it's going after really heavily regulated markets in healthcare, in finance, in insurance, in govtech, and IoT. So they're saying that it's probably going to be like 8 to 12 years before it reaches widespread adoption in developed markets. which provides an opportunity for emerging markets to be the initial movers, because these are solutions to problems that earnestly need to be resolved in emerging markets, so regulators are willing to work with these companies and find the solutions and figure out how to regulate, and they can lead the way on this next wave of innovation. You had a question?

So yeah, a set of 2 questions. So do you think it's gonna change daily transactions? Like, for example, if I have a product So we'll probably use Bitcoin's other thing to sell and for the customer to buy from me. Is it really hacker-proof? Because I mean, if you talk to a cyber hacker, he's going to tell you there's nothing that's hacker-free. Not free, but they can hack anything basically.

All right, I'll come back to the second point. The first point, as you transact online, because they don't trust each other, because we don't trust each other, I have to leave my name, my address, my credit card, my debit, my zip code, and all these different pieces of information. That creates one record for my transaction, right? During the Target hacks, 70 million such records were taken. They had your name, they had your location, they had your credit card, and they can now use that information. Had they used Bitcoin, all they would have had was your public address, some random long string of numbers that said X15973. I'm okay with them having that. And you would have your money, and that's what that provides. So it will be used in everyday commerce, and it will facilitate, it'll create a velocity of money and open up emerging markets to being able to transact on services that they have not had access to otherwise. The second point, is it unhackable? Nothing's unhackable, right? But the principle of the blockchain is that information is linked together, and the longest chain that exists is the valid one. So if you wanna go back and change a piece of information over here, and say that the money didn't go to this account but it went to my account, you would have to change all the information that happened after it, as this chain continues to grow. So it's not impossible, but it would take an incomprehensible amount of computing power in order to do it. That being said, any company is susceptible to being hacked. Like, so exchanges have been hacked. But the problem was that they kept the public key, as well as the private key, which is your signature, on it, and it was able to take the money out. So if it just had your public key and not your private key, then the money would not have been taken. So the blockchain in itself is damn near unhackable. Services are always gonna be susceptible. Yeah? So going back to IoT, is the blockchain adaptable to some of the technology that's already in the market, or would it have to be developed to blockchain from, like, its inception? It would be another layer on top. So it would be something else on top that enabled it. You would register the unit, whatever it is that it is, whether it's a refrigerator, a washing machine, a car, you would register it to the blockchain and give it an identity, and then it could interact with all the other things.

What technical skills do you need?

What technical skills do you need?

Is it going to be something that you have to be like a programmer or something like WordPress that everybody can do?

Anytime you're creating software, you need to be somewhat technical. And right now it's a bit more complicated than most other systems, but they're creating tools to make it easier to work with. And people are creating APIs so you can pull in other information and stuff like that. But you don't need a technical background to understand its potential and to create a company on it. I'm not a technical individual. I'm not. But I've read so much information about this stuff that I have a truly deep knowledge in this space. I might not understand the math behind the cryptography, but I understand the principles of the cryptography and what it can do. So, you don't need— don't allow your lack of technical skills to stop you from pursuing something on the blockchain.

So, how do you reduce barriers to entry, or alternatively, how do you create take-wins? For example, you approach a client in the healthcare sector and you're like, okay, let's We want to try this out for you, but of course they might not take all their records and dump it with you. You want to create some sort of quick-win situation for them where they can put one foot in and then ease themselves into the technology. How do you think that can be done?

So I'm working with— in the process of working with some government entities in an emerging market, and what we're saying to them is to de-risk the potential of this new technology, do a sandbox test, which means that it's not live with anyone's real information, it's not live with anyone's real money, but set up a few locations and facilitate a few transactions. Show that this works. That's phase 1. Phase 2 is rolling out to a small group of users with a small amount of value, showing that it has— like where the volatility is, where the risks are, where these different things are, and then resolving that and then rolling out to a larger scale. So start small and with information that's not going to put anyone in risk of being sued at first, and then you roll out to larger. I'll come over to you in a minute.

So like for the banks, you said the transactions would be like small, big, and then little, and then big. So you're saying when this becomes really standard, all these banks are not really going to exist anymore, sort of?

So they will always fight to exist. They will always fight to exist. But the thing is, the banks are the first adapters of this technology because they saw what happened when the internet came around. They were the banks that didn't innovate, and they're no longer with us. And there are the banks that did innovate, and now they are where they are. What it's gonna do is take out the central clearinghouses. So now the banks don't need to interact through an entity to interact, like Bank A doesn't need to interact with the clearinghouse to get to Bank B, it just goes directly to Bank A and B. So it's just gonna create efficiency in that location. You had a question and then I'll come back to you.

I wanted to ask, this is kind of hypothetical, because each bank Each transaction is on the blockchain. Could it be possible to, I don't know, do something like a DDoS attack on— with the idea of like, I will do 10 billion transactions where I will give you 10 Bitcoins, you will give me back 10 billion times. This will increase theoretically the size exponentially that it will kind of in a way cripple or kill the database.

It costs you money to send that money. Just a little bit, but it does cost, so to do something like that would be inefficient, and it would cost you too much to try to take down the network that way. Additionally, the Ethereum blockchain, which is the second most powerful blockchain, big proponent of them, they have this thing called gas, and so if you wanted to do something where it was an infinity loop to try to slow down the system as well, you have to send a certain amount of tokens, and if the transaction's not completed in that amount of gas, then it stops. So, they've been thinking about these things and ways to slow that down. You had a question?

So, this is like a closed system, right? You cannot— so, if I understand the exchange rate for like, I want, like, I have my dollars here in my pocket, I want to transform this in Bitcoin, but then I need to transfer this How do I exchange money to someone who's not on the system? So can I exit it and—

Yeah, yeah, in every market, or in almost every market, and growing exponentially, there's an exchange there. So someone that wants to hold dollars in whatever form it is, whether it's euros, pounds, US, Canadian dollars, they want to hold dollars and they want to accept Bitcoin for it. So there's a marketplace where that can happen.