 Okay, so we have talking for the next 30 minutes, Alan Stevo, who is the chief of staff at Kraken Exchange, which supports Monero and we have a strong relationship with, and he is also the author of the Bitcoin Manifesto book. So let's give a hand for Alan Stevo, please. Now, when you zoom the microphone out, when you zoom the microscope out a little, a New York apartment building and a Moroccan rural village, they share the same internet challenges. This would be inefficient methods of distribution across the last mile. And an idea, an idea that we have come up with is to address this inefficiency, to provide greater internet availability than user. And this presentation is going to discuss the concept of micropayments with strong privacy protections that address these challenges. And the challenges, the solutions we're talking about would make the question of who can thank you for that shush back there. We have such a rowdy, full group here. It's amazing. The idea for this came out of a series of discussions with Peter Runyon, who along with me is available to speak further about the idea afterwards, if you may be so inclined. Today, I'm going to present to you a draft from a white paper that we are working on how to deliver internet access across the last mile to users globally. Now, to contextualize this, if you turn on antenna, everyone in this room knows this. If you turn on antenna or phone or computer in many urban areas around the developed world, and even in undeveloped areas, it's going to show you 30, maybe 40 accessible and publicly identifiable routers. Then there may be other routers that are not publicly identifiable. And very few of these routers reach their capacity each month on their bandwidth allocation. Now, how many people here, how many people show of hands, please, a little audience participation? How many people have utility service in their homes? Water, gas? Some people are not raising their hands. Maybe they do not have utilities. Maybe they are shy. And how many people have internet access in their homes? I am not trying to social engineer you. Thank you. Thank you. Now, setting up monthly internet in a home or office is just something people do. And it's considered a cost of living on your own. It's a necessary utility. Just like having electricity and gas. And electricity and gas are paid for in units rather than as a flat fee. Now, internet users tend to pay with a flat fee. So there's a flat fee for monthly internet. And this is closer to a wholesale model, I would argue, than how electricity and natural gas service are handled. And there's an opportunity to make it a little bit more retail. And I think that there's incentive for people to do good. There is incentive for profit. And there's incentive to spread the internet further through local networks. Some that do not yet exist. It's often because of a lack of communication between neighbors that this situation can even exist. And if a technology existed that enabled and proved communication among neighbors on this topic, then a marketplace would immediately form. So there's an issue of communication here. And a little software, a little software in the middle can help neighbors communicate with each other better. It can help with a communal aspect of sharing the resources we have if we so desired to, if we felt so incentivized to. I'd like to go through a few of the problems. Because there's more of a wholesale environment than a retail environment, I'd like to go through a few of the problems that that seemingly simple zoomed out microscope view creates. And in addition to access to food, water, and shelter, to be part of the global economy, you need information. And how do you empower people with that information, with that access? And it's through the internet. And internet service is of poor quality and expensive in many areas of the globe. And internet service often does not easily reach the users who want it without significant infrastructure challenges. And we've addressed a few topics as they relate to developing nations. Also, developed nations have some other concerns also shared by some developing nations. This would be ISP throttling, where large enough adoption of a software like the one we describe would allow people to assert direct file transfer without the risk of information being slowed by someone who might disagree with the information being transferred. There's privacy concerns. There's the certainty related to that first. There's that certainty that the information is going to arrive at its intended destination. There's government interference, of course, in determining who has access to one information. And users most often agree to one month or longer contracts rather than bite-sized chunks. And in a developed world, many users will end up using five or 10 gigabytes of internet a month. There's a tremendous amount of room here for software that would encourage some of that excess capacity to be utilized. And to summarize this problem in one sentence, there's residential internet usage continues to exist in a wholesale environment rather than a retail environment. With the consideration the internet has the ability to change the world bringing education and work and a world economy to every person in every corner of the globe who wants it. But we'll have a very hard time doing it if it cannot reach every corner of the globe. On this topic, the words of William Gibson from the early 1990s remain true. The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. Our proposal is a software system to enable a sharing economy for internet usage among people who do not already know each other. And to take this software and to combine it with a useful payment system that would ensure privacy, like Monero, is how we envision that. The software to enable better communication and privacy combined with an ability for users to pay for services they've received, for value they have gotten, and an ability for providers to obtain payment for the value they have provided others. Now expected outcomes of this are places where people want Wi-Fi, are going to have Wi-Fi. And this will simply be an impact of creating a market environment here through software like this. It doesn't have to be more complicated than simply incentivizing. I believe places where people don't want Wi-Fi will not have Wi-Fi. That's another consequence, I believe. This transition will be incentivized to take place virtually overnight in some places. The infrastructure largely exists already. The cost will be very low for Wi-Fi customers under this model. In the market environment without centralization, without regulation, users who desire privacy will incentivize providers to give them the privacy they desire. There will be competition among providers for how to satisfy a consumer. Two networks will consequently form most likely. There will be flow of information through the ISPs. This will be one type of network. There will be a second peer-to-peer network that will likely form where no one is going to want a sensor. There will be no incentive for anyone to want to sensor what you do across that peer-to-peer network. And on top of that, we're likely to see additional applications built. Now, governments take it upon themselves to perform an array of social good. And many voters expect that behavior. Non-profits pick up the slack when possible. Many find it impossible to imagine a world any differently than that. The truth is that the vast amount of social good, I think many in this room would agree if we discussed the vast amount of social good and cooperation among strangers, takes part in a market environment, motivated by profit. It's how we get our food. It's how we get our clothes. And in almost all situations, it's how we get our shelter. It's how we get cars, leisure, and technology. And true to this principle, our system will incentivize internet node holders to deliver the internet that last mile. Who here has used couch surfing before? Please raise your hand if you've used couch surfing. Cool. A few people I've used couch surfing. I love it. How many people in this room have used Airbnb? More people. More people. I use Airbnb. I love it. And there's a difference there. There's a difference in between couch surfing and Airbnb. And there's really neat models out there for providing internet. There's LibreMesh right now, for example. Really cool concept for how to provide internet that last mile. And I think the difference there is perhaps comparable to couch surfing and Airbnb, if you compare LibreMesh to what I'm discussing here. That the ideal is to incentivize the provider. Some retailers exist already, such as Boingo would be an example like that. They provide mobile access to consumers using wireless devices, but there's much more potential here if the software existed for that potential to exist. And there's several impacts of that kind of software I'd like to point to for a moment or two. What would be an example of a network of peers? So the network will eventually connect nodes outside the ISP. So one way to transfer information will be across the network, peer to peer through wireless connections between nodes, as I described. This will have profound implications that there's no central source to throttle internet communication. Internet through producers fighting with each other, there's the idea that free internet, free internet is what we need. And I don't believe free internet is realistic because of the amount of effort that goes into creating internet access for someone. But it's entirely plausible to imagine nearly free internet. It's entirely plausible to imagine a network that spans the globe and provides nearly free internet. And not nearly free internet that someone is going to extract your data from and make you the product. But really, truly free internet where you have a private presence on that network. Anyone of course who offers free internet should be looked at suspiciously in this era. Certainly everyone in this room understands that, you know, what's wrong with the quality or how many advertisements will I see or who's my data going to be exposed to? And I believe with the technology like this, we're done with the idea of everyone paying 50 to 80 dollars a month for home internet service with virtually no options available in some areas in terms of competition. Now a few use cases, a few use cases here, a residential apartment building in New York City for example, maybe not the most attractive use case to begin with, but one that is perhaps readily accessible in that you have a three to six unit building, you can end up in a situation where people are paying maybe 15 or 20 dollars a month by simply communicating with each other, by simply sharing the internet resources they have. This would be kind of a nice advantage, it's not groundbreaking, it's not that impressive, but it's a small change, right? Maybe you save a percentage off your monthly budget, whatever. But to imagine where that can go as you make internet available, as you encourage someone to create a node around their home, as you encourage someone who lives near Times Square perhaps to create a node, and what that suddenly means for internet usage in a public space, and what that competition means is we suddenly enter into a place like New York City where we suddenly have 10,000 or 20,000 people becoming an ISP effectively, and what that could mean to the marketplace, how disruptive it could be, and how sad, how sad the telecommunications companies might be when an individual suddenly has a little bit more leverage against them. Another example might be a rural US downtown, you know, we can imagine that for three years the mayor has been promising in a rural US downtown that he's going to try to get Wi-Fi in an upstate New York area, and he's not feeling motivated, so Jane who owns the coffee shop makes sure that her Wi-Fi is up and running whenever a customer wants to use it, but Jane also doesn't feel incredibly motivated about it, and she lets it go down from time to time. Jane implements her software by the end of May, perhaps Jane ends up with 80 new people paying $5 to $10 a month for a little bit of internet access here and there when they're visiting, and they have reliable internet access, they have faster internet access, because Jane making maybe $500 a month now suddenly has a new source of revenue, and suddenly has an incentive to make sure that internet is great, so she hires a local college student to come by and look at the router every two weeks, maybe she pays him $75 a month, she's still making profit, and gives them a few free coffees. Here it becomes a little bit more interesting where we're building more access for people who do not have access, and couch surfing once, I had the pleasure of staying with a gentleman in his family in Morocco, and theirs was the last town right before the Atlas Mountains, and his father was, I don't know, maybe 70 years old and blind, and he was the man who went to go into the mosque to announce the call for prayer five times a day, and this gentleman, Muhammad, he ran a little kiosk where he'd sell these Made in China phone cases, and Muhammad would be a perfect example for me of where this technology would suddenly begin to make a real difference, because around his phone case store there was kind of a buzz, people would come around and hang out around there, it was a place to be, imagining him having the capacity to sell internet access more easily, 24 hours a day perhaps, I can imagine the comparison of wells being built, wells being built in villages, and how the water moves out in various channels from that well, for profit and more altruistically, similarly if an internet connection were set up in a village and allowed to information to be meshed out from that central location, or we might have a different kind of example, perhaps we're not going to go to Morocco, but a place like Bratislava Slovakia where we have Daniel who works in his office from 9am to 8pm each week, and his neighbor Julia runs internet marketing design firm out of her office 500 feet away, and the bulk of her internet usage is during the day, and he never uses the internet during the day, he only needs it during the night and she never needs it at night, here there's comparable uses, and perhaps there are 20 neighbors who might have a similar use in that area, now there's functionality to this idea that would be attractive, one example might be a public bidding system, does anyone have any familiarity with cryptocurrency in this room, raise your hand if you've, cool, a few people, a few people, I am not trying to social engineer you once again, who knows Bitfinex, who's heard of Bitfinex, same people awesome, now when someone's trading stocks or other instruments, there can be a need for the person to have access to instant credit, the same with crypto, you might have an opportunity where you need to immediately buy something, and if you're relying on the, let's say the US banking system, can I get a boo for the US banking system, if you're relying on the US banking system, boo, come on, let's hear it, boo, or maybe you love it, let's hear it, if you love it, let's hear it, silence, silence, okay, if you're relying on the US banking system, maybe you end up with two to five days waiting for money to move around, which is incredibly, can be incredibly frustrating dealing with these choke points, and in crypto, there's kind of some other neat solutions that are arising, in Bitfinex, on Bitfinex for example, there's a peer-to-peer credit system on the exchange, so because the peer-to-peer nature of this marketplace, there's no set official price deemed appropriate by a centralized body, no one is saying credit on the exchange costs this much, the price of money, the price of money is another word for interest, is at a moving price on that exchange, so when Bitcoin moves quickly or another crypto, it tends to increase the demand for quick money on the exchange, consequently the price of money moves up, again the price of money is interest, and this has the effect of preventing a shortage by incentivizing lenders to enter the marketplace who wouldn't have lent money at a lower rate, which makes perfect sense, and this market dynamic in which individuals lend to individuals has a very powerful role in providing for the needs of the individual in the marketplace and is a smart decentralized and arguably old-fashioned method in our era, this is an old-fashioned way to make sure crypto functions well, this old-fashioned method is simply letting people interact with each other, that's it, and Bitfinexa software allows people to interact with each other, and what is what's innovative is that it allows a trader, right, it's not just these two gentlemen who've walked in who know each other already, perhaps allowing them to interact with each other, Bitfinexa software allows, you know, arguably a trader in Nairobi with funds to lend on the exchange, and a trader in Tokyo who might be short funds at a given moment, they're able to do business with each other, one is able to lend to another, though those two may have no interaction with each other, though those two will never need to know each other, the software allows that ability, and for those who've just entered, I'm discussing a software that can kind of introduce an Airbnb idea to the last mile of internet service, a software that can incentivize someone to provide internet service to retail users, and similar to Bitfinexa, our internet protocol would, you know, there may be times, there may be times where it may cost one one-hundredth of a cent per gigabyte to purchase on our software, maybe that's how a provider sets it up, other times it may cost ten cents, or maybe it's twenty cents a gigabyte, maybe forty cents, and maybe you have information that you need so desperately at that moment that you will pay forty cents at that moment of high traffic, and when the price goes up it incentivizes more people into that marketplace, more providers into that marketplace, like Bitfinexa, the software is suddenly allowing people who do not have contact with each other to do business with each other, to provide for one another. Another aspect of the software that would be ideal is the ability to connect several nodes at once, and for a large data upload, if you could connect not to just one node and be throttled, but connect to forty nodes perhaps, your data upload might quickly be handled, or if one of the nodes were to go down you wouldn't have to be too reliant on it, there would be redundancy in the network with a quick ability to switch nodes. Another ideal might be a calendar system where a user, many users, perhaps a tourist or a business traveler or someone running errands around the city, they might need internet just for a moment or two, but other users might want some stability, and the idea that this gentleman here might sell this gentleman here, internet provisions for three years or two months to ensure some stability, that might be advantageous, this would even invite what farmers might do, farmers to protect themselves, they set up an insurance policy, for five or ten percent of the price they're cropped they can set up an insurance policy commonly known as futures today, a futures contract, and this might invite futures contracts for the price of internet, increasing the ability for low prices to be discovered in all likelihood. Here very attractive to us is that this might enable charity, this network, and a person who believes in free wi-fi for all can simply fund and run a wireless router with no password on it, and that person would be sharing their internet with anyone who identifies that open node and the internet connection could also be shared with a plethora of bad actors and that individual might be put at risk in a variety of ways at the same time, it might be hard for them to segregate or limit traffic, it might be hard for them to even figure out who is on the internet, which isn't necessary, but perhaps they might want to, I don't know, but it's the hope of the authors of this white paper that will inspire people who believe in free internet for all not to turn to government for the solution, because government has failed us repeatedly on this issue, and I promise you, I promise you, government will continue to fail us on this issue. Our system, we hope, will provide incentive for someone to privately fund charitable gifts of free internet for all. We believe that with our idea this can finally become a reality, this would bring us tremendous joy, and that it be done with recognition of how to effectively do well in a local environment. Western gifts of charity to Africa for some time have been derided as being detrimental to a local economy. If the US government suddenly dumps three years worth of corn on the African economy for three years, it will destroy the local farming economy. This is sometimes done with no regard for the local economy. We believe that we can help, through the proper software, we can help charitable giving in local economies of internet service to be done in a way that's more localized and more in line with what the local economy might need, more committed to a local economy. Billing is important for the idea. Now the greatest promise of micro payment technology exists in the realm of cryptocurrency in areas where KYC laws do not apply. Please raise your hand if you understand the term KYC. Okay, maybe half the room. When you open a bank account, you're asked for your ID, you're asked for your address, you may be asked for quite a bit of information, depending on what jurisdiction you open a bank account in. This is a know your customer. KYC is a know your customer law. Now the know your customer laws, they put a considerable amount of compliance, legal regulatory overhead onto payments. It's been estimated, it's been estimated that a PayPal transaction, so a PayPal transaction is free. It's virtually free for me to give any of you guys money by PayPal. PayPal is really a tremendous system. PayPal could be used to beat cryptocurrency many times over in cryptocurrency's current state, except PayPal has KYC. PayPal spends an estimated 25 to 30 cents per transaction on KYC. PayPal duplicates and goes beyond in some situations banking laws so that PayPal can entirely cut people out of an economy. It's disgusting what PayPal does. Fed up with this enough. A few cipher punks, knowledgeable about economics, said maybe there's a better solution out there. And we've arrived at Bitcoin. We've arrived at Monero. We've arrived at currency that's very hard to censor. Beautifully, if we can combine that technology with this idea, we arrive at internet that's very hard to censor. This inspires me beyond belief that that is possible, that we can have internet that is not able to be censored. And I believe it can be done with a high level of quality, if there's a profit motive involved. Now as the nodes of this network establish a reliable connection and reliable customers, they'll begin to reliably understand their income, their income potential. And they'll begin to invest. They'll begin to invest more and more on that potential. There'll be some people who do it as a hobby. Some people will do it as a business. And others are going to seek to try to provide a more robust network. The way the economy around internet provision has been structured to date is very siloed and prevents a great deal of competition. And I believe this will be a method of breaking up that siloing and introducing a great deal of competition. I'd like to thank you so much for your time right now. If anyone has questions, I'm going to stick around. If anyone has feedback to give me, I'm going to stick around. I'd really love to hear it again. Pete Runyon who's thought through this with me as well in the back there would also love to hear this. Thank you so much for your time. If you want, I'd be happy to. Okay, thank you so much, Alan. We have time for about two questions before I proceed. Does anyone have any questions for Alan? None? You covered everything during the talk? Okay, one here. Hi, thanks for the talk. I guess I'm trying to connect what you've just presented with your day job at Kraken. I'm guessing that has to do with globalization and seeking out coding talent throughout the world even if they don't happen to have super good internet. Is it something like that? So I'm here today totally on my own. No connection to Kraken. Kraken has no interest in this project. It is 100% a suggestion that felt like it fit this venue. But I can talk more. Anyone want to talk about becoming a developer at Kraken or local talent at Kraken? I'll talk about that all day too because I think we're going to do really awesome things and we're looking for people to be on the team. Excellent. One more. One over here. Thank you. I enjoyed your talk. I was thinking about how do you envision you would purchase like parcels of internet? Would it be beforehand or could you do it like per bit? Or what's the right sized lump of internet to buy? I guess that's my question. Yeah, this is such a good question. So like from the 1920s to like the 1980s, there was one cell one one telephone provider in the United States that was allowed effectively was AT&T. There were some that's not 100% true, but it's almost totally true where you only have one one option and you would have the Harvard economists and you would have the the PhDs on the news and the government PhDs and they would say they would say there's only one way to do any utility. It's natural monopoly theory and they would teach it in colleges and they would say there's no room for competition in here. You're going to destroy an industry if you even try to introduce competition. This is insane. And the people who believed in a marketplace who said, hey, there's these all these other times where marketplace functioned and it really benefited the consumer. It really benefits society, arguably. And the the PhDs would say you're going to destroy everything and the the person arguing for for marketplace would would say, you know, would have no real answer of how that marketplace might look like. It's impossible to know. And they would say, what, you want three telephone lines down every street? You want three buttons on every phone? You're going to make our neighborhoods look ugly? Well, I don't know. Maybe it will be three telephone lines on every down every street. Once once that once that monopoly came to an end, you know, it was almost 40 years of everyone in the same household in the US practically had the same telephone, right? You had you had you could have black, you could have cream, you could have like this pinkish color, but almost everyone had the exact same technology. And if you connected some technology that you bought in Japan, the phone company might find you for for trying to ruin the phone lines. So like there is tremendous pushback about any little inkling of competition. That's like 40 years of American technology. Then you end up, you end up, it took 27 years to go from to go from end of monopoly to viable supercomputer in your pocket marketplace profit making supercomputer in your pocket with the iPhone in 2007. And this is a true testament to what the marketplace can accomplish. If it's just allowed, if all that happens is for consumer, you and entrepreneur, you to be able to interact with each other in the marketplace, but you may never have met each other before. This is beautiful. So you ask me a question that I have no answer to. And the important thing, the important thing is that the marketplace will solve this. And I bet I bet there's going to be 10 people doing one thing and 10 people doing another and it being figured out. And importantly, importantly, when you hear people speak about Monero today, Monero is a great example because it's become the boogeyman of cryptocurrency. That's where all the bad criminals have gone to now. When you hear people speaking about this, you will notice, you will notice the, the PhDs from Harvard, the government PhDs saying the exact same thing they said in the 70s saying there's no room for competition. If you introduce competition to national currencies, you're going to ruin it all. And it sounds real familiar to me. And I know what happens. I know what happens 27 years after you introduce that competition. You don't even recognize what the future looks like. It's beautiful. Thank you for your question so much. All right. Let's give another hand for Alan again.