Understanding Blockchain With Tracy Hazzard From The Larry King Now Podcast With Larry King

On Larry King now understanding blockchain.

It's a shared database. It's possible for everyone to agree on what the content is of this database, but no one person has control. So it's decentralized.

How does it apply to different industries?

If I have a Main street business and I want to reward and attract, I don't want to be paying Groupon to attract customers. Why can't I give that straight discount and cut out the middleman?

And what's the future of blockchain?

The world is going to become very efficient. I'm in China and I'm watching about a thousand people come through this little bakery, and it's because they walked through, grabbed what they wanted, scanned a QR code and walked right out.

It's all next on Larry King Now.

Welcome to Larry King Now. Today we're diving into a subject many people have heard about, but let's actually understand blockchain. The buzzwords are bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain. They seem to be everywhere. What do they mean and how do they relate to the real world? To explain, I'm joined by Larry Sanger, the co founder of Wikipedia. He has since left the company and joined Everipedia as the chief information officer to help the company with its mission to become a decentralized online encyclopedia. Eric Tibbets, the co founder of Nasco, a marketplace for decentralized apps hoping to make blockchain technology more accessible to everyone. And by the way, my wife Sean has been working with that company as a consultant. Marcus Levitt is the co founder of xyo, a company created to decentralize GPS technology through blockchain. And joining us via Skype is Tracy Hazard, columnist for Inc. Magazine. She also co hosts a podcast all about blockchain called the New Trust Economy. Okay, guys, now this is all very new to me to a lot of people, so we'll start. Larry, with you just in a couple of words. What's blockchain?

It's a shared database that a lot of people different have different copies of, but they're. They match. So that essentially it's possible for everyone to agree on what the content is of this database, but no one person has control. So it's decentralized.

All right, how does it relate to cryptocurrency, Eric?

Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that everyone can use. Everyone can see it's open and transparent and, and can create a very fair and open way to transact with each other.

Is this design, Marcus, to replace money as we know it?

It could, yeah, I hope the cryptocurrency enthusiasts hope so. At least. I think some central banks around the world are playing with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies of their own. Transaction costs, for example, are very, very low when you transact with cryptocurrencies. So it makes sense in a way that maybe you have a hybrid system where you have offline money and the online money is in a blockchain type form.

Tracy, what was the need for it?

Well, you know, there's a lot of needs for it. There's opportunities where we have a lot of disenfranchised people who don't have access to banks, for instance. And that's where cryptocurrency may come in play. It actually already is around the world. And there's a lot of also Main street needs where we don't trust reviews and we don't trust Wikipedia some days because we've heard of hacking and scraping and all sorts of things that happen there. So we need to have something that's more immutable, which is what we call the blockchain, something that's more verifiable and able to be hacked only through extreme measures of which we'd find out about really quickly.

Eric, does it cut out the middleman?

Absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a way for, you know, I look at artists. So for yourself, it would be very simple to tokenize Larry King and create a Larry King token. So you have a token that you have fans and you have followers that want to interact directly with you. So let's say you have content that you would like to put out there, and it's exclusive content that your fans and followers could use their tokens to actually purchase and get access to that type of information, that type of insight, vip, events, content, whatever it might be. So it's really a very simple way to have a verifiable open interaction with somebody directly.

Does it eliminate the bank, Markus?

Yeah, it could. The bank is a middleman. Right. So key about blockchain technology is a peer to peer transaction. So if you want to pay me a dollar today electronically, it goes through a bank or another payment system with blockchain technology. It's from you directly to me. So yeah, in that case it eliminates a bank.

Tracey, are there actual coins?

So yes, there are and there are some that are working really well. I was referring to banking that's going on in other countries. There's a company called Walla that is doing a coin that is being utilized to redeem for food aid and being able to be utilized in small amounts. Because in other countries there might be a situation which there is no bank, so there are coins being utilized. There are also tokens being utilized, as Eric was referring to. We do it in a reward system. We've been actually doing it since like, you know, the 80s. We had our arcades and we would put our coins in and we get to use them for things. So we are earning coin in other places. It just may not be redeemable across platforms.

Larry, wasn't there a downturn in the bitcoin business?

Yes, there was. It's a bear market basically since about.

January or so or February last year. About a year.

Why?

I think essentially there was a hell of a lot of speculative energy in the market and everybody was getting in and not enough institutional support perhaps to justify the ongoing boom.

How far are we, Eric, from cryptocurrency taking over from banks?

You know, we're on our way, but we still have a lot, a lot more education. I think for the average person, when you see blockchain and cryptocurrencies and bitcoin, they're thinking in a speculation way way. It's a money making, like, oh, it's going up, it's going down. You got to get out of that mindset. Look at a digital currency is a simple way to have globalization.

If I want to get into this, Marcus, what do I do?

It depends what you want to get into. Do you want to get into blockchain technology? Then, you know, you get informed. Try to work with one of our companies, for example, if you want to invest in cryptocurrencies. And that's a distinction. I think you can go onto a cryptocurrency exchange like Coinbase and Gemini and there are a bunch of others, and you can buy your cryptocurrencies.

What do you think of its future?

It's going to be epic.

Epic.

Epic. It can be.

That's a good word.

It can be very transformational in that. Imagine all the middlemans go away. What it would do to your costs and to your individual freedoms if you have complete control. Everybody talks about blockchain because it's a hype word and it's sexy. It sounds good, right? But it's actually about the solutions we provide with that blockchain technology Coming up next.

Now that we have a little better understanding of blockchain, how does it apply to different industries? We'll talk to each of our experts to better understand what they're doing with blockchain technology. Don't go away.

Now we'll have some individual questions for each of our guests. Larry Sanger, you co founded Wikipedia in 2001. What is the new company?

It's called Everipedia. It stands for the encyclopedia of everything. And we are putting Wikipedia plus a million of our own articles on the blockchain. This is going to enable people to be incentivized, unlocking tokens for themselves when they write and edit articles. This is going to motivate contributors and also help vet the content in ways that Wikipedia can't.

How is it doing so far?

It's doing quite well. The token is called IQ Token and we have a lot of things in the works for not just encyclopedias, but other things that are going to be built part of the network.

Okay. Eric Tippetts, Nasco. My wife has been working with you a bit on this. What is nasco?

So people think of the Internet. They don't know how the Internet works, but it works. So we wanted to create a decentralized Internet but also incorporate like what GoDaddy did to the Internet. So people looked at the Internet and they said, man, I have no clue how this works. But then GoDaddy said, hey, look at how simple this is. Come over here and we can get you a website. We can put you buy a domain, build you a website. Nasgo, our mission is for small businesses to be able to buy a domain address on blockchain, be able to tokenize their business in less than a minute. And now they've got essentially a loyalty token or something asset that they can incentivize their customers, they can grow their customers using these tokens.

You mentioned artists, entertainers and influencers. How does your company help these people use blockchain?

Well, you know, that's a broken model. Entertainment industry, music industry, you've got these engines that the content creator, they're the last one that actually gets paid pennies.

How would I use it?

So you would tokenize the LK2 token and it's something to where like I look at China, most of our audience, we've got 3.5 million people in China. These people, they are, they love content, but they don't have access to your content. They and being able to monetize it there in China with piracy and with firewalls and with currency. This would allow you to take your token, be able to on nasgo, be able to then show it in China.

Now, Marcus Xyo, your company deals with location verification and tracking. What does that mean in terms of Blockchain?

Yeah. So right now the problem is location is that it's easily spoofed or hacked. So the predominant location source is gps and you can just hack it with our technology. We use connected devices like your cell phone or Bluetooth beacons and other type of technology where all those devices verify each other's location independent of satel. And we record in our blockchain type system. And this way you have verified location.

Is it different from gps?

Very much so.

What's wrong with gps?

Tracy, for example, she mentioned reviews that can be easily hacked or Wikipedia, and all those information sources actually rely on location. So if you speak about a restaurant, let's say you can just put a review up on Yelp, for example, and say I pretend that I was at the restaurant and put a review up with our technology, you can say someone was here at the show, then went to a restaurant and then went back to the office and wrote a review about it. You would have a location verified review.

Is this technology going to track us?

It's not going to track you. It's going to verify path and supply chain, but it is not connected to your personal id? No.

Tracy, you have a podcast called the New Trust Economy. What do you discuss?

We discuss more along the lines of use cases of blockchain. So, like, how. How it's working. And part of it is I started it because I was looking at. I have a podcast network called Potatise and in Poditize, I wanted to make sure that influencers at a lower level, they're not as famous as you, Larry King. So you know how they get to monetize as early as possible. And by the blockchain verification, both the brand can verify they were actually listened to and the host can verify they're going to get paid. So you're paid for your content. So that's what attracted me to it. Can we find these use cases, these stories of how it's working and how they produced it and enacted it and built their blockchain, because that's how we're going to generate and move innovation.

How do you introduce blockchain to the average person?

You know, it's always through storytelling. It's always through examples. So whenever I talk about disruptive innovation or I write about it in my column, I'm always using a story about how it might work. So in other words, if I have a Main street business and I want to reward and attract, I don't want to be paying Groupon to attract customers. I don't want to be Taking all the cut. Why can't I give that straight discount and cut out the middleman and be able to reward people not only for coming in but for coming back?

After the break, what's next? The future of blockchain and how we can start to use it in our everyday lives. Stay right there.

We're back with Larry Sanger, Eric Tippetts, Marcus Levin, and by Skype, Tracy Hazard. Where do you see it in 10 years?

10 years, I think we will see more use cases so there will be more widespread adoption by providing easier access to cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects.

Will there be a time, Larry, where everyone's using cryptocurrency?

Yeah, I think so. Cryptocurrency? Yes. I think it's more likely that there will be a time when everyone is using utility tokens, in other words, that they are using Internet apps and actually a lot of things offline that are made different and better decentralized by being tokenized.

Eric, do you see cryptocurrency eliminating regular currency?

Yes, I do. I think paper money is inefficient. It's dirty, has germs all over it. And it's something that, you know, just the velocity. I'm in China and I'm sitting there having a cup of coffee one morning and I'm watching about a thousand people come through this little bakery and it's because they walked through, grabbed what they wanted, scanned a QR code and walked right out. There was nobody pulling out cash and pulling out like any change. So the world is going to become very efficient. I'm already seeing it from around the world. We're extremely slow here in the US and understanding like these kind of velocities. Oh, it's, I come back here and just see the inefficiencies and the ineffectiveness of, of paper money and things that are happening currently. It's just we have a really hard time. Everybody's so skeptical. They're so, they take such a long time to move to that next generation.

Tracy, does it have an effect on credit cards?

I think it has an effect on all the ways we look at money because, you know, we have a generation of kids. So I have a 23 year old daughter and she is annoyed when the bank assesses an overdraft fee because she missed the cutoff to move money at 8pm Eastern time. And we live on Pacific time. Right. And so she can't understand it. She's like, you know, business is 24 hours, the money's moving 24 hours. Why is this arbitrary 8pm thing and it's the same thing with fees and credit cards are filled with fees. So our next generation doesn't understand it. So it's going to have to move away because they'll start to move to things that are more efficient. And as these blockchain and cryptocurrencies, digital currencies processes come in, we're going to just say, let's get rid of our credit card.

They I believe, you know, the year of 2020 is really where blockchain is going to kick in. I think the education we've been laying the foundation, 2020 people really start utilizing it. And I think a lot of especially public companies, I mean, why would you not put a public company on blockchain? Instead of doing these quarterly filings, why not have a tour? If I want to know what you're doing in sales and what you're doing in transactions, I go look in your blockchain and I can see it, Larry.

What industry should be using it more?

I think supply chain is an absolutely perfect fit for blockchain. And the other one I also have to mention is education in general. I think that it's a great idea to put transcripts online. And when that happens, it's actually truly a revolutionary idea. Takes power out of the hands of centralized universities.

You were saying it helped charities.

You know, you start to think about charities and these don't these donors that are going in and you know, the donations go in and you have no clue where the money goes. And I think we saw that in Haiti where everybody said, wait a second, how did billions go in? And it never went to the people in a charity. They are accountable. You see the money and you see money donated and you also see where it was donated to and how much. It's a complete open transparency model.

In our final moments, our panel will answer your social media questions about blockchain. Stay right there.

Okay, guys and gal, we have some viewer questions for all of you. Lebondaz on Twitter asks in 2019, it is just another Uber or Tesla. A lot of buzz globally, but fails to generate any revenue. Want to comment?

Well, I think it's because you've got 2017, 2018 were the year of speculation. You know, a lot of ICOs, initial coin offerings, people using stories to raise money, where I believe 2019, 2020 is the year of utilization. So your question is exactly right on. It's, you know, we need to get from the storytelling to hey, what are real use case studies, how Are small businesses the lifeblood of every economy utilizing digital currencies to enable their business, not just this speculation period?

Marcus Edward Keys 6. Where does the value of cryptocurrency come from? Is it real money? I have to do deposit on the Internet or what? How in the marketplace does it work?

It's actually a complex question because there's two sides to it. It's difficult to evaluate cryptocurrencies. I think if you look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a basic accounting system and then it has very limited inherent value. And you believe if it has value, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. But in the case of our currencies and your currencies, of the companies who work with you, you actually have an underlying system which provides the value for that token. So in our case, xyo's case, you have access to our system and to the location verification and get verified location data with xyo. And this way you can evaluate the cryptocurrencies.

Wally Dreaming on Facebook asked Tracy, what are the risks in investing in Bitcoin?

Oh, well, you know, it is a lot of speculation today. I mean, as everyone's been kind of referring to as that. So, you know, there is a lot of that. But when I look at investing in companies, as opposed to just investing in cryptocurrency, what Markus was just referring to is that you're talking about securitization. So is there underlying value? Does that company make money? Does it have a possibility of making money? Is it built on a large user database? Like there might be a lot of people trafficking the Everpedia. So, you know, you have all of those possibilities as to adding the value and creating the new value source. It's just not one single value source, which in cryptocurrency you would love it to be like backed by gold or backed. Backed by what? You know, backed by the dollar. Like whatever that is, it's not going to be the case. And so you can't evaluate it the same way.

Austin Kelly on Facebook. What's the benefit in investing in Bitcoin.

Eric, what's the benefit? I don't see a benefit. So. And when I say, when I say that is, you know, if you're getting into cryptocurrency and into Bitcoin for the speculation, the investment side of it, again, I'm a very simple person when I look at cryptocurrency, what's the demand and what's the supply? And so if you look at anything and people wonder, well, why is bitcoin getting beat up so bad? It's because when you don't know what exactly what the demand is, then it'll always fall. It's a house of cards. It falls until there is true utilization. It's something to where it hits where there's true utility. People are actually using it. And now you've got a foundation and you build from that foundation. You guys, we were in a crazy time, you know, back a year or two ago, when it's at 20,000 and people are going, I don't even know what it is, but just buy it. Like you make money.

It's crazy.

Cryptokitties.

I mean, come on.

Cryptokitties.

Susan Wells asks, how do you know when it's a good time to invest?

You never do.

Again. Going back to investing, these are questions from somebody that maybe hasn't invested because you're trying to ask questions of speculation like, when can I hit the bottom? Like, that's, you know, if we knew that, we'd all be gazillionaires. Investing is about understanding what is the company. Tracy just said it. Do not look at the coin, their token. You're looking at the company who's utilizing it, what's behind it all. Each of us have tokens. There's a very clear business model behind what's going on.

What do you want people to take away from this discussion? Larry?

Let's put it this way. I think we need to.

Look at Bitcoin and all the cryptocurrencies as the fulfillment of the promise of an open source software.

Originally, with open source software, it was possible to organize a lot of different people to create great software. And then the principles were used for Wikipedia, but those people weren't. They didn't become owners of their products.

Eric, what do you want people to.

Take away that, you know, people use the Internet every day and they don't know how the Internet works. Blockchain is the same thing we, you know, nascar. We tried to make it to where the everyday person, a small business can immediately use the apps that we built, start to increase their business, you know, get more customers, increase loyalty, increase profits. And they don't even realize that they're actually, that token's on blockchain. But they're all the applications that are not complex, they're not techy, they're not code that I have to write. They're very simple.

Marcus.

I think what we're creating is a world which becomes less complex. As to what you say, we simplify the world where you and I can interact without all the middlemen and all the things we really don't need and fees and so on and so on. So, xyo, we do that with location. At Nasco, you do that for business, and at Everypedia, you do that for education and knowledge. But there's thousands and thousands of projects out there which are in their infancy right now, and they're going to grow over the next few years and we're going to change the world together.

Tracy, finally, what do you want the audience to take away?

Well, you know, we didn't all, we all grew up on the Internet. So, you know, we grew up when it was at its infancy stage. Some of us did, and we built businesses on it and we started using social media on it. All of these things were built on something that wasn't, didn't know what it was going to be when they started it. So imagine if we now are building a new highway, a new highway that is going to allow a broader community, a broader bandwidth, a broader ability to prevent hacking. Like all of those things that we see every day that we complain about, like, why is this always constantly hacked? I can't trust the reviews here. I'm afraid of this. Like, we are going to be able to build something that is an infrastructure underneath that, that allows us to be able to solve those problems now that we know kind of what we want to build on it. But the best part about it is the more involved we all get at the earlier stage, especially women and minorities, the diversity that we build into this, then the better the Internet. The new Internet is going to be for us. The blockchain is going to be for us all.

Thank you all very much. A big thanks to our guests Larry Sanger, Eric Tippetts, Marcus Levin, and Tracy Hazard for joining me to shed some light on a topic that has many confused. A fascinating conversation. Thanks to all of you as always. You can find me on Twitter at kingsthings and I'll see you next time.