 This is one of my favorite events. I'm so grateful to EVE, our presenter, for being here today to take us through the wide world of Web 3. A little bit of, um, quite a bit of preamble. Well, first importantly, I want to acknowledge that I am sitting in San Francisco, which is the unceded land of the Ramatashaloni people, and they have never ceased in their responsibilities as caretakers of this land, and I hope to learn from their example. And now I am pleased to introduce EVE, who is a, um, knowledgeable individual in this area, and I have learned a lot from his sessions. Um, and I know he's a very creative and, uh, technically savvy person, and I, I'm going to let you introduce yourself, EVE, because it's really, it's very cool what you do. And I'm so grateful that you were here today with us to spend this time. So thank you. Thank you, Cabe. It's always enjoyable to be here, and I love doing this every year. Um, and hopefully that little dog will be presenting for all those sessions. I love that dog. He is never going away, and he is on Muni buses this year. Awesome. Okay. I need to get my own little doggy. All right. Hey everybody. So I guess getting into this, my name is Ed, as Kate said. I'm with a company called Digenator Labs. Um, it's a small design and development agency that I actually co-founded. Um, what we do is we create mobile apps and enterprise software to support social impact projects. So we work with like a lot of nonprofits, government agencies or like social impact founders to build good tech. If you want to check it out, go to our website or if you want to ever contact me, there's my email and I'll give you the email again at the end of the talk. So who am I? Um, you know, we're all multi-dimensional people. So this is pretty much who I am. I'm in tech. I'm a product designer, also software engineer and a general technologist, but I've also worked on human rights issues like fighting human trafficking and poverty alleviation issues over the last actually like almost 15 years now. I was in the music industry for roughly 20 odd years and I left and, you know, just the lover of different things. And the reason why I put this up isn't to talk about myself really. It's like, I give a lot of these talks and I always appreciate people for showing up and learning about new things and just encouraging people to constantly come to these kinds of things and learn and, you know, open up all those little multiple dimensions of yourself and just acknowledging that we're all different people. And so yeah, just keep that in mind. We're all not just one-dimensional, we're multi-dimensional. So why are we here today? We are here to talk about Web3 and crypto currencies. You've probably heard this term thrown around recently, Web3. I've probably heard a lot about crypto like Bitcoin, Ethereum and NFTs and all those crazy stuff. But what exactly is going on, right? So some of you may be familiar with all this stuff. Some of you may not. So I'm going to try to keep this as plain language as possible. There's going to be a lot of technical jargon, but I'm going to try to keep it as simple as possible for all of you. So we're going to talk about Web3 first and then later I'll talk about cryptocurrencies based on how much time we have. And then afterwards we'll take the questions. I may answer a few questions here and there during the talk if it's relevant to exactly kind of what I'm talking about at the moment. Otherwise, I'll probably go through the Q&A at the end. Before we talk about Web3, we should probably talk about the evolution of the worldwide web. Web1.0, you know, we're talking like way back in the 90s, probably even late 80s, maybe a little bit, was very much a decentralized world. You didn't really have an ability for people to create content. It was just a content consumption and digestion. So it was just a bunch of people getting online and reading chats or reading message boards and all the kind of stuff. And it was really just the wild west of the internet and the heyday. And then eventually evolved into Web2.0, which is where we are right now. Web2.0 was like the advent of the content creator, you know, also the advent of things like social media, cloud computing, cloud platforms, all these things basically instead of like this one directional thing where you're just reading content like in Web1.0, it became multi-directional and people could connect in all sorts of interesting ways. However, it also became very centralized. It's when we started hearing the term big tech, which was like, you know, like Google or Facebook or Microsoft, all these big tech companies started controlling the internet basically. And the biggest thing to control is our data and our data privacy. It's in their hands. It's not very transparent and it's not very accountable. So out of that thought of thinking on how to solve the centralization issue and try to get data and a more public domain back in the hands of the users, it started to be this thing called Web3 that started being talked about. And Web3 being based on like blockchain technologies and decentralized technologies. So it's kind of coming full circle to Web1.0 in terms of decentralization, but it's far more advanced and far more evolved. Web3 can sometimes be confused with Web3.0. Sometimes people use these terms interchangeably, but Web3 is mostly concentrated on the decentralized technologies such as blockchain. When you're talking about Web3.0, sometimes it includes, not sometimes, but usually it includes something called the semantic web. I'm not going to talk about that today. If you want to wiki the semantic web, you can feel free to do so. But in a nutshell, the semantic web has to do with the protocols that govern how data is used across the world right about. But we're going to concentrate just on Web3 as a terminology today and talk about blockchain cryptocurrencies and the entire ecosystem. What's going on? So Web3, just so you know, before I get into the points of what's involved in Web3, Web3 right now is theoretical. We are actually not in Web3. We're not even close to getting there yet. So the dream right now is to make it an actuality, but it's highly theoretical. And the theory around it is to basically create permissionless blockchain, basically making the web more decentralized, less centrally governed, and basically putting a lot of data back into the control of users. So that's the big dream around Web3. So I'm going to go through this list. There's going to be a list that I'm building here and why we're talking about Web3. So DAPS, what are DAPS? They're part of the Web3 ecosystem. And they're also part of the Web2.0 ecosystem right now. DAPS are essentially decentralized applications. We all know what mobile apps are. These are simply decentralized applications. And what makes it decentralized is that right now, with the mobile app publishing situation, it's really just controlled by two companies, Google and Apple. It's the only way you can publish apps or consume apps. Highly centralized. We're talking about just two big companies that control the entire app publication ecosystem. It's a little bit crazy to think about just having two companies control the entire environment. So decentralized apps are about building applications and watching technologies and not being controlled by any one publishing house and putting publishing back into the user's control, back in the developer's hands and designer's hands, giving us way more leeway. For example, through Google and Apple, whenever we publish an app that has in-app purchases or whatnot, you're locked into this 30% takeaway. They take 30% of the fees. There's no negotiating that at all. You're just locked in because we have zero negotiating power. We can't really fight back unless we try to take it in the court that's also expensive. So by opening up to the more decentralized application environment, you're giving publishers way more control over how they charge for their apps. They have more control over fee structures. They have more control over the content. There's less censorship involved. Like with Apple and Google, they can censor apps. It's a good and bad thing. It's a pros and cons of that. So I'm not going to get into the philosophical ethics of censorship here. But with DApps, there's just more leeway to be more creatively. You can stress the creativity a little more. That's kind of going back to the heyday of when mobile apps first started coming around. There was way more creativity happening there. DApps also have the possibility of creating smart contract transactions. So for example, let's take a rideshare app like Lyft or Uber. With Uber, you don't know when they're going to do service pricing. And also drivers really have no control over how they get paid. They have no control over their pay rates, which just move all over the place. I used to actually drive for Uber for about a few months. So I know what it feels like to just not be in control of how you get paid. But with decentralized apps built on blockchain technologies and things called smart contracts. And by the way, I'll talk about blockchains and smart contracts in a bit because there's more to that. But with smart contracts, you can basically put in stone, program how rates are calculated, program how riders are charged. And it's not at the whims of just human beings at a company deciding when they want to hike prices or change pay rates to drivers. So there's a lot of benefits to decentralized applications using smart contracts and blockchain technologies. The biggest, I think cons right now, the negatives to dapps is that there's not a lot of users. The user base is still pretty small. Also, they're not very well designed. The UI and the user interfaces and user experiences, the UX generally kind of sucks. Which kind of makes sense because like, you know, when you're dealing with early technologies, it's mostly engineers designing these things. And, you know, myself, I'm a designer slash engineer, but I started as a designer. We don't, we need more designers in the space. So as we get more designers in the space, creating better experiences that are UI, hopefully that promotes user growth and growth ecosystem. I think another con right now through dapps is that because the user bases are small, it's also more susceptible to security breaches and whatnot. So it's a bit of a catch 22 right now where you want the user growth, but there's also concerns about security and just design issues. So this is not inconsistent with any technology that is growing and in its infant stages. So I think with maturity and designers coming into the space, and more security experts coming in this space, we'll get to a place where the technology behind centralized apps get better and better. So that's dapps in a nutshell. Web 3 also will give back the rights for users to monetize their own data. And not necessarily even monetization, but at least control over your own data. Take Facebook as a company, for example, or I guess they're called Meta now. So Meta, they whenever you give your data to them, we have little idea on how they're using them, how they're using data, how they're synthesizing it or interpreting it, how they're selling it. We know they're selling it to third parties. And even now, even though they're legally bound to delete data, if we ask them to, do they really delete all data? How do we know? Where's the transparency and accountability there? Right? And I'm not just talking about Meta, like Amazon, Google, any company, right? It's all completely obfuscated. And it's just this black box. We don't know how they're handling our data. They have no control over it. And they're making tons of money off our data. Why can't we benefit from that? Right? It's our data. It's our lives that they're monetizing. So with Web 3, the dream is to create a permissionless blockchain where people have more control of their data. There's transparency and accountability because the blockchain is what's called a distributed ledger, meaning all the transactions are actually recorded on this ledger. So if you see your own data flowing around, you know exactly what's happening with it, right? And let's say I ask a company to delete my data or stop using it, you can see, you should, well, theoretically, be able to see when they do the deletion, how they're deleting it. Did they reach out to third parties to help you delete data from there? Because, you know, let's take Amazon, for example, even if you ask them to delete your data, they've sold your data in multiples of times. Are they reaching out on your behalf to third parties that they've sold to to help you delete the data? Of course not. You got to reach out to them and you got to figure out who their third party vendors are that got the data sold to. So, yeah, just with transparency and accountability, it's such a big problem right now with data and privacy issues. Web 3 is meant to solve a lot of that. So, and right now, like I said, with Web 2.0 is controlled by all these kind of big tech centralized big conglomerates. So, we just got to get the power out of their hands and back into the users. Another thing that's really going to be a big part of Web 3 are NFTs, which are actually part of Web 2.0 right now. You've probably heard a lot in the news about NFTs. But for those of you who don't really know, NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens. And what that means is it is the digital rights to artwork. I'm going to show you an image of Nyan Cat here. You're probably all familiar with this thing. It was a big meme. It's been around for decades. The NFT, the non-fungible token, the digital rights to this piece of artwork was sold for like $580,000 for some crazy reason. But the person who bought it didn't buy the artwork. So, there needs to be a clear understanding of what an NFT is. Digital rights do not equal the art. So, when you're buying an NFT, you're buying the digital rights to own the art, not only art, but own the rights behind the art. That could be publishing rights, could be mechanical rights, could be selling rights, whatnot. But you don't own the artwork. So, for a publicly published piece of art like Nyan Cat that's been just shaled like millions of times on the internet, it's easy to find. You don't have to worry about never finding the art just because you own the digital rights. But let's say it's like a private sale between I'm the artist, you bought the digital rights to my art. Now, unless I'm hosting the art somewhere online, you won't be able to see that art. You need to host it somewhere. So, a lot of times when people buy NFTs, they're also buying downloading a copy of the art. So, they actually have the artwork and then they host it somewhere. So, I just wanted to educate people around that because there's some confusion sometimes around. Are NFTs the actual art? It's not. It's the digital rights behind it. But you can create NFTs out of any digital art, any digital artifact, basically. You can make NFTs for music. You can make NFTs from digital trading cards. You can make NFTs out of tweets. I think Jack Dorsey's first tweet sold for like a million dollars or something like that. Some ridiculous thumb. And NFTs have been big in the gaming ecosystem. So, for instance, like the sandbox is the decentralized gaming world built on blockchain technology. They sell and trade NFTs of virtual real estate or virtual goods back and forth between the players and the game denizens. So, NFTs are really interesting. It's open a whole new world for artists to have more control over their art, how they sell it, how they publish it. You can also program into NFTs, residual royalties for the original artist. So, let's say, I bought an NFT and then I sold the digital rights to somebody else for some and some. The original artist could program into that contract, but they still get a percentage whenever that thing is passed from end to end, which is a great thing for the artist because, you know, right now artists are at the whims of like their managers or publishing houses or whatnot. And they have to just kind of trust that their contracts are upheld, which we know that in the art industry, especially the music industry where I came from, there are huge problems with that. So, NFTs have been a really great boon to the artist communities. The other thing that's part of Web 3 is the metaverse. And we've probably heard all sorts of stuff about the metaverse in the media recently. Something to understand about the metaverse. And I know Facebook changed their name to meta, which is like, for me, it's a huge jug. And personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg is the devil incarnate, but, you know, they're trying to create their own metaverse. And you probably heard the media talk about the metaverse. It's like this new thing. But the crazy thing is, is that the metaverse has actually been around for a very long time. If you've played any kind of open gaming world, like World of Warcraft, or like even back in the heyday, like EverQuest or Ultima Online, or any just open world game right now that has like people going in with avatars or, you know, there's an economy happening through these games, that's essentially the metaverse. The next evolution of the metaverse will be taking place through AR and VR, which is augmented reality and virtual reality. And that's where meta or Facebook has come in saying, hey, we've invested in the Oculus, we're big on VR, so we're going to create a new metaverse through VR. My personal opinion is that it's very dangerous, or not dangerous, but it's just not the desire that these big companies in a centralized fashion create the metaverse. Because again, they're just controlling your data. That's really the big sell here is to get more data in through these worlds, finding other avenues to get more and more data from people. And there's kind of recreating stuff that's already been recreated in the gaming industry. But if you think of the metaverse in terms of in evolved technology in like, let's say 20 to 50 years from now, if it goes beyond AR and VR, there are a lot of unlimited possibilities here for people to experience different realities outside themselves. It could even be really important for people going through therapy for depression or trauma to go into these like worlds to rehabilitate themselves and not have to live in the world that is traumatizing them. So there's a lot of uses for the metaverse that the media isn't really talking about really correctly. They're just kind of concentrated on the sensationalist parts of it. But these things are all kind of created for to generate more possibilities for human beings to communicate better with each other. And the metaverse is really all that is, is just another really evolved communication platform and a living platform for us. Obviously, I can take more questions around the metaverse analysis later, but I see Desiree, to get back to the data real quick, you asked what data are these companies selling? Think about anything you have given in terms of your personal data to any company, which could be at the most basic level, your name, maybe you shared your address, maybe you shared your email, your phone number. But a lot of it is your online behavior, everything you click, the way you click, the way you consume content, what ads you click on, how long did you look at something? They're collecting data at such a minute level, and it's highly important to their business model. So we've essentially given away all that data for free. We've just given it away. And we're at the wins of their terms of services in the privacy policies. So that is just not a good thing. The next thing that will be hard a bit, web three, are permissionless blockchains. You've kind of heard me throw this term around already. I'll explain how blockchains work as a technology a little bit later, but kind of get into permissionless blockchain. There's private blockchains, there's permissionless blockchains. Permissionless blockchains are basically the blockchain, but open to the public. You don't need any permission to take part in it. So it's decentralized for transparency and accountability to the distributed ledger. You can choose to be anonymous if you want. So you don't have to, you're in control of what data you share theoretically, right? You don't have to share your name or phone number addresses. And if you do, there's a ledger of how your data is used or passed around. I do want to caution with anonymity part of it. You're not fully anonymous if you're dealing with like financial transactions and stuff like that, which is probably a good thing because there are bad actors, you know, like laundering money and whatnot, but they're also bad actors in the financial banking system, non crypto, just a regular financial system that are laundering money or using money for drug trafficking, weapons trafficking or human trafficking. So a lot of people think, oh, you just get pure anonymity through the blockchain. It's not true. So let's say I use the pseudonym to buy some cryptocurrency and then I cash it out. You can track it down to the actual physical bank that I sent the money to. And eventually with the bank, you can probably learn who I was. So it's kind of pseudo anonymity, but generally the anonymity part of it is important because take like an activist or journalist, for example, if they need to act in an anonymous matter, because we know that journalists are attacked all across the world, activists are attacked all across the world through blockchain technologies, they can that can provide a safety layer for people like that. But I do want to caution that this technology is agnostic. There's good and bad uses for all these technologies. So take anonymity as you will. And then the currency that is used for permissionless blockchains or actually all blockchains are the cryptocurrencies or the tokens that are built off of spun out of cryptocurrencies. So for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the main cryptocurrencies that are traded. There are some other ones, but then you have all these tokens primarily built off of Ethereum of blockchain like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or you know, all these other like random tokens that are created. But that's the general currency of the blockchain. You don't have to rely on centralized banking. And what's great about permissionless blockchain is that take for example, people who live in poverty who don't necessarily have access to financial institutions through cryptocurrency in the blockchain and all these kind of decentralized financial companies, they suddenly have access, which is a beautiful thing. I'll get into the access part of it a little bit later. I see some questions coming in. I'll talk about private blockchains just in a second. I see some questions coming in. How does the metaverse differ from pumped up second life as Facebook looks like that, but Nvidia is different. Actually, that's kind of a complex question. I'll save that for later because metaverses can look very differently based on how you build it. Just depends on how what the company is trying to get out of it. But it's a great question. I'll get back down. So private blockchains, difference between permissionless blockchains and private blockchains are obviously they're private. You have to have permission to take part in them. They're not necessarily a bad thing. There is actually a good purpose for private blockchains. Take a company like Ripple, which is another crypto company. They've created a private blockchain and they use it for things like internal staff reviews or internal board meetings or internal records. So these are probably not things as a private company that you want to share publicly. It could even be innocuous things like product roadmaps. Maybe we're working on something. We don't want the public to know you. We wanted to be surprised at the public. So you can put it on the blockchain, share it internally and kind of track the progress of your projects, track the progress of even accounting or holding employers accountable to the things they promised their employees. It's all sorts of uses for private blockchains. So I personally think it's a beautiful thing, but obviously you can also use private blockchains for nefarious reasons. Again, it's an agnostic technology. So it's going to be good and bad either way. Another big part of Web 3, and this list is growing, is AI and machine learning. In the last, I think 10 years, so maybe 15 years though, we've seen a proliferation of AI machine learning algorithms and they're getting smarter and smarter. They're going to be super important to Web 3 whenever Web 3 actually becomes possible, because the vision and the theory behind it is that machine learning will help evolve Web 3 based on the data that comes in. I know that's kind of abstract. So to give you an idea of what that means is take Web 2.0 where we are right now. In the early days, websites were built to be viewed on the desktop as form factors, very specific dimensions, screen sizes and whatnot, but then you had the advent of mobile technology and there was this kind of slow conversion and movement over to mobile web, responsive web design, mobile apps and helping designers understand how to make that transition was a very, very slow transition into this. They were still seeing a lot of companies who haven't converted their websites to be mobile friendly. Now with AI and machine learning, you know, some of my designer friends may or may not like what I'm about to say, but you could have AI assisted design. You're actually starting to see some of that right now with companies like Wix.com that help you build websites. They're using AI assistance or machine learning assistance to convert desktop websites to mobile websites that are easily consumable on your phone. For a designer, such as myself, to do that conversion is very time consumer. It's consuming super hands on, you know, it's high effort, high time intensive. So I would welcome any kind of AI or machine learning to help me design at least conversions from old websites to new mobile web friendly websites. Of course, it doesn't mean that designers all of a sudden going out of, you know, going away. There's still a lot for us to do, like, you know, all the new technologies are coming in designing UI and UX around that. So AI and machine learning will be really critical to how Web 3 evolves from a design side, and it couldn't even be really critical to how it dissolves from a software engineering side as we see machine learning assisted coding programs coming on. I see Joe in your chat and says, what about the environmental cost of process transactions and blockchains? Yes, I will get to that when I start talking about how blockchains actually work. The energy consumption part of it is very, very important. So I'm glad you brought that up, Joe. Now, what's fun about machine learning with NFTs right now is that some of you may be familiar with the board apes artwork. So what you're seeing right now, all these variations on the original board, so the original board was created by somebody, but then what he did was apply a machine learning algorithm to the artwork so that it was automatically generating new board-aid art. So all these things that you all these variations that you see right now are created by machine learning algorithm, not hand drawn. There's so many creative things you can do with machine learning in the art space. So, you know, the possibilities are unlimited right now. It's really, really fun to think about and as a musician myself, I'm super excited about leveraging machine learning into my art. So it's really cool stuff that's happening. So the final, probably the most important part of turning Web 3 from theory into actuality is interoperability. Without interoperability, Web 3 will not become a reality. So, you know, despite all these things that I listed beforehand, all of it in terms of like just being able to say Web 3 is now here and now, all of it depends on interoperability. What interoperability means is basically, oh sorry, let me go back. So all these blockchain companies right now, it's kind of, well not kind of, it is pretty much centralized right now. You have like specific crypto companies creating blockchains. They're the ones in charge of how it's evolving, how it's being built, all the ethics and the philosophy behind it and the protocols behind blockchains on how they communicate or don't communicate with each other. So just like with the World Wide Web, in terms of building data protocols and how everything communicates with each other, blockchains are in its like infant stages of understanding how blockchains can communicate to one another. So for instance, let's say I'm using the Ethereum blockchain and there's a secondary blockchain and they want to be able to do interoperable transfers of currency between themselves. In order to do that, you have to have another company or these companies need to spin off and create bridge technologies. And then if you have a third blockchain company who wants to interact with these two, you've got to create another bridge and so on and so forth. Bridges, bridge technology is not sustainable for growth. You know, there's high maintenance involved, a lot of time and effort that goes into maintaining and building bridge technology and as blockchains evolves, the bridge itself needs to keep up in order to make sure that bridge remains stable. So it's not sustainable and this is not interoperability. Interoperability would be where the blockchains themselves can easily talk to each other and it's going to be a fundamental tenet of making the web through a reality. Without it, it would all just be theoretical because if you want to have permissionless blockchains, basically a public domain for the web and putting it into the user's control or democratically putting it into the user's hands, you have to have interoperability. You can't have users dealing with high learning curves on how to use this blockchain versus that blockchain versus this one. You know, it's just the learning curve is way, way too high. So that, I guess in a nutshell, is web three. There are more parts of web three that I won't get into. A lot of it is very, very technical, but I just kind of want to keep it very high level and simple for you today. So I'm going to move on to talking about, I mentioned blockchain and cryptocurrencies quite a bit. I'm going to move on to talking about, like, what's all the fuss about cryptocurrencies and blockchain? Well, just hodl it. So what does hodl mean? A few years back, when cryptocurrency was starting to go crazy in valuations, somebody tweeted, hodl, what they had meant to tweet was the word hold. It was just the typo and it became this massive meme. So now we all see all of us who are crypto enthusiasts, we just say, just hodl it. So it's just a funny thing to say. It's really kind of nonsensical. But you'll probably see the term thrown around. So what is all of fuss? Well, cryptocurrencies, they're basically, technically, they're decentralized cryptographic currencies. And you're probably wondering, decentralized, what are you talking about? Right? So the fundamental pillars of cryptocurrencies are that one, there's no central authority, meaning no banking institution can control it, no government, one government or two governments can control it. It's in the public domain. There's no central authority. So decentralized part of it. There's full transparency, which is the blockchain, the public ledger, the distributed ledger. What that means is, like, every transaction that happens on the blockchain is recorded. You can't not record it. It's not allowed. So every transaction that flows, money transaction, data transaction, smart contract, anything that's happening on the block is recorded and transparent and accountable to the public. Now, like as I mentioned before, it's secure global access for me at least is probably the most fundamentally important part of cryptocurrencies in the blockchain. In a lot of regions of the world, you know, in underdeveloped regions, like there are still regions like in South America, parts of Africa, parts of India or even China, there are all sorts of places that are still kind of underdeveloped. There are also a lot of people who are dealing with poverty or don't have access to financial institutions. The crypto financial ecosystem creates access for them to have access to some kind of financial environment. So to give you a really concrete example, let's say somebody's been living on the streets. Actually, to give you a little context, as a teen, I was actually living on the streets for a little bit. I was homeless for a few years as a teen. And I can tell you firsthand that getting an ID, getting access to a bank, even back then, which was like pre-internative days, was very, very hard. Even now, it's very hard. Imagine, let's say I'm coming out of homelessness, I found a job, but I'm still in this weird limbo of trying to secure a residence. So I don't have any documentation to prove where I live. So it's hard for me to get an ID. And without an ID, I can't get a bank account. So this is like this catch-22 situation while you're trying to sort your life out. And you don't even have to be homeless. You can be experiencing poverty, living check to check, and really just not have any access to a bank. Well, decentralized finance, that ecosystem allows you access without an ID, without proving your residence. You just have access to this ecosystem. Now, this isn't to say that if you wanted to buy cryptocurrency with a U.S. dollar, you would need to have a bank account. You would need to use centralized exchanges. But let's say I'm in an underbuilt part of the world, and let's say it's highly corrupt, the government's highly corrupt. Banking institutions cannot be trusted. There are many places like that. So because the blockchain is very trustworthy, it's fully transparent, you can feel good about taking part in that financial ecosystem. And you may not be able to buy cryptocurrencies, but let's say more and more stores start accepting crypto to buy product. Well, now I don't have to have a bank account to buy crypto. I can actually have somebody maybe donate me some cryptocurrency, and all of a sudden I have the means to buy product, right? I don't need to tie it to the U.S. dollar or the euro or whatever currency, you know, your country, country you're in. So there are a lot of possibilities here in terms of secure global access. Another thing I kind of want to point out is, you know, it's been in news is the Ukraine and the Russian war. Currently the Ukraine has been accepting millions of dollars in crypto donations because their financial institutions are on complete lockdown, just out of necessity. And so they're able to take money through the crypto donations and fund their efforts in their fight against Russia. Now this isn't to say that Russia can't take advantage of that too. There are sanctions being put on Russia, and there's this fear that they're going to use cryptocurrencies to avoid the sanctions. But the bigger picture here is that this is an agnostic technology. I've said this before, but I'm kind of going to beat that drum. And it can be used for, you know, balanced purposes, I'm going to say, good or bad purposes, right? Depends on, you know, who the actors are good or bad actors. So that's secure global access in a nutshell. And again, I want to stress that this part of it is not talked about enough. The media is always talking about the sensationalist part of cryptocurrencies. The one thing I do want to caution is if you get your information from the media about new technologies like this, in terms of any other kinds of new technologies, usually the media is years behind in terms of their information. And they're usually just talking about the most sensationalist aspects of it. So in terms of crypto, they're always talking about, oh my God, it's worth this much. Is it gold? Is it digital gold? And blah, blah, blah. They're not talking about the fundamental ethical reasons and philosophical reasons why this technology exists, which is the decentralization, the democratization of online transactions and data, and secure global access. These are the fundamental reasons why people work in this space. So like I said, it's based on a distributed system without one single authority, hence decentralization, and it's all built on the distributed ledger. So what is the blockchain? The technology itself is pretty complex, but it was built by either a person or a group of people called Satoshi Nakamoto. To this day, we don't know the identities of who or they are. There are all sorts of theories being thrown around. If you want to go down and unravel, go online, look up Satoshi Nakamoto and see if you can solve it, but nobody seems to have solved it so far. Either way, what this person or group of people created was a fundamentally game-changing technology, which is the blockchain, which essentially is encrypted data. So the way this works, and I'm going to make this just insanely simplistic, it's not exactly how it works, as I'm going to explain it right now, but just to keep things in plain language and not super technical. Let's say I have a block of data. It could be whatever. Maybe it's like the first transaction of buying a cryptocurrency or something like that. Now that block of data is now added to the ledger. It's the first block. Now let's say soon after there's another transaction that happens, you need to add another block of data. That's why it's called a blockchain. It's a chain of blocks. Go figure. In order to add that secondary block, you need to validate the hash on the first block, which is encrypted. And by hash, what I mean is there's a string of numbers, usually very, very long and complex, and then that number is thereby encrypted. So you don't really know what the original number is. In order to add another block of data, you have to have very, very powerful computers that can decrypt the original hash on the original block, the previous block, in order to verify that that block's hash is correct so that you can add a second block onto it. So to give you a really simple example here, let's say the first block that hashes some ridiculous number like 123, and it's encrypted. In order to add another block to it, I have to use my computing power to validate that the hash on the original block is 123. Now, once I validate it, I still don't have the ability to add another block. I have to validate that with other computers. They have to look at my proof of work and say, oh, okay, you did the work correctly. Your computer did the work correctly. So thereby, we say as a community, a consensus that it's okay to add this block. And the consensus is usually being run by computers. It's not like humans are sitting there hitting a button go, okay, it's good to do. It's usually done automatically by computers. So then that secondary block is added to the first block, but it's not 456. What it does is it adopts the original hash and adds additional numbers. So the second block is the hash for it becomes 123456, or some other randomized number. And again, that's encrypted. So to add a third block, you not only have to validate the second block, you also have to validate the first block. You have to go through the entire chain of validation. You can't just go, okay, I validated the block before, so I must be good. Now you got to go through the entire ledger. So whoever wants to add the third block on, that computer needs to validate the hash on the second one. It needs to validate the hash on the first one. And once it says, okay, the first block is 123, the second block is 123456. I can add the third block after the consensus. This said it's okay to add. So I can create a third block that has 123456, 789. So you can kind of imagine with now like just tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand transactions of blocks having been added to the ledger, that this hash is ridiculously long. And that's why it takes more and more computing power to process and decrypt and validate blocks. This is where all the energy consumption comes from. Obviously in the early days, it took less energy to run these validations. But with proof of work, which Bitcoin is built off of, to add a block now takes insane amounts of energy and processing power from the computer. So it's not really sustainable from an energy consumption standpoint, and it puts a lot of burden on the energy grid. So what people, what other companies are doing are developing different proof technologies. So like I said, Bitcoin is built on proof of work. Ethereum is built on, or now it's built on proof of stake. What that means is that, so proof of work, you can have thousands or tens of thousands of computers around the world competing against each other to validate blocks on the blockchain. The reason why they compete is because they actually get rewards. The first computer to process the new or to validate the new block actually gets Bitcoin in return as a reward. So there is this incentive to really try to keep it uncorrupted and to gain the rewards from the validation. Unfortunately, you've got a lot of computers using a lot of energy, using a lot of processing power all at once to try to validate each block at a time. That's why you have countries worth of energy being used on a daily basis just to validate the blockchain is crazy. So what proof of stake is trying to do is saying, what if let's say I own a thousand Ethereum coins and you own 500 and somebody else owns another 500, and we pull our coins together to create a stake, together we have 2,000 coins. Now if another pool of coins is like 2,500, or let's say there's a third pool of coins, that's like 1,500. It's usually in like the millions, but we're just using simple math here. The one that has higher staking pool gets the first rights to try to validate blocks, and it goes down down the line in terms of rights. So proof of stake doesn't compel every single computer to be working at the same time to try to validate the blockchain, which is where all the energy consumption is. So proof of stake brings in energy consumption way down by I think a factor of like seven right now, which is still a lot of energy being used. So there are other companies that are trying different proofs like proof of space, proof of time, all sorts of different ideas that are being thrown out to bring the energy down. So this is probably another barrier to making Web 3 happen is the energy consumption and the ramifications around that. So that's how the blockchain works. That's how cryptocurrencies are built on the blockchain. So all these transactions being sold, selling cryptocurrencies, buying cryptocurrencies, they're all being recorded on the blockchain and they're powered by the blockchain. Now I could go into cryptocurrencies and how to buy them and sell them and all that kind of stuff, but I think I'm going to get into the Q&A because I see a lot of questions coming in. And if you want to ask about, you know, crypto wallets, how to sell them or buy them, you know, feel free to ask and we'll go into the questions right now. We have a lot to go through in the Q&A. I guess we'll go through the list here. Somebody asked, oh, getting back to the original question I put on hold was how does the metaverse differ from pumped up second life as meta for Facebook looks like that, but NVIDIA is different. You know, think of like gaming companies, they're all building their own worlds. So they're all going to differ from each other. You know, there's no standard in place. You know, it's not like there are probably like design practices like UX practices that are kind of not standard, but they're just kind of best practices right now in terms of how you interact in the metaverse, but with AR and VR, it's starting to create more design possibilities and who knows where that technology evolves in the metaverse too. So yeah, if you're looking for some kind of standard metaverse that just doesn't exist right now, it's kind of up to the winds of the companies creating the metaverses. And yeah, second life was actually one of the original metaverses. So it's been around for decades. It's not some new thing. Charles says, would it be possible to hack into a private blockchain? Theoretically, yes. And it's actually been done before, but it's very, very, very hard. The hackers have to be incredibly motivated. The most fundamental way to hack a blockchain is called a 51% attack, meaning that if you get 51% of the computers trying to validate the blockchain, if you get 51% of them to get together and work together, they could theoretically create a consensus hack of the blockchain. Now, the problem with trying to do that is that first of all, let's take Bitcoin for example, because you get rewarded for validating. You're not really incentivized to hack this proofing system because you want the rewards. If you hack it, you're breaking the blockchain. You're breaking the technology and you're destroying the entire ecosystem and de-incentivizing everybody all at once. So that's why you see Bitcoin and Ethereum, they're really, really hard to hack because you also have to be able to coordinate that attack. 51% of the computers in the world to try to attack these fundamental blockchains. It also creates a lot of headaches to try to organize that. Now, like I mentioned, it has happened, but usually it's happening to blockchains that are falling out of use. They don't have a lot of users. They don't have a lot of computers trying to validate. So there's just a small pool of computers, so it's easy to organize a 51% attack. But the problem here is that they're hacking something that really is falling out of use. What's the point in hacking that? Maybe just to have fun and try it out. So to this day, all the fundamental blockchains that are being used in mass scale have not even come close to being hacked. And I guess you could even say theoretically, couldn't the encryption be hacked? You would need like a quantum computer to even do that, right? And we're so far away from quantum technologies. Or maybe we're not so far away, but we're pretty far away from it. So hacking blockchains is fundamentally incredibly hard. Now, that's not to say that companies themselves can't be hacked, or you've seen Coinbase, for example, get hacked. You've seen other companies get hacked, but what's being hacked there are the companies themselves. They didn't do a good job of protecting their data or whatnot, or they're using like cloud computing third vendors that get attacked for their data. It's not the blockchain itself being hacked. It's just like any other normal, well, not normal, but any other company that gets hacked. Another question, do you need access to the internet to have access to cryptocurrencies? You do, unfortunately. So that's one thing in terms of accessibility that kind of sucks. You do have to be online or have some kind of Wi-Fi network. But there's a lot of free Wi-Fi networks now roaming around. So you can go to the public library and probably trade crypto. I mean, unless the library's put a block on all that stuff, I don't know. We have, I don't know, I'll ask you about that later. There's a little bit of history there. Just scrolling back up, making sure we got this question about what does this have to do with things like Lobby 3 DAO? Did we? What does this have to do with things like Lobby 3 DAO? I don't know much about Lobby 3 as an organization, but DAOs are essentially decentralized companies and they operate in a decentralized fashion. Like I mentioned Ripple earlier, they have a private blockchain. So like board member voting or any kind of like charter changes to their company happen on the blockchain. That's essentially all that is. So if you hear people talking about DAOs, that's just decentralized companies. And they're doing it all in different ways. So there's really no standard there. Thank you. And then a question, if I make some drawings, in this case, unique Christian drawings to create an NFT and sell it, can I still use these drawings with print on demand, to mugs, t-shirts, etc. So IP. Yeah, I mean, IP comes down to rights, right? So if you sell the digital rights to somebody, you have handed over the rights of publishing the art. Now, that doesn't mean you can't build into a smart contract. You can put into the contract that you still maintain publishing rights. You still draw royalty. So you can work with a seller or it's not really about working with a seller. You can go to let's say a platform like openseed.io where a lot of NFTs are sold. You can actually just put into the contract up front. Like if somebody wants to buy the digital rights of this art, they know up front what's the contract entails. And they can decide if they want to buy it or not. Maybe they find, okay, I'm okay with that. You know, that's fair to the artist. They've been a lot of good work. So I'm okay with buying digital rights that still gives away publishing rights to a certain degree. Or maybe I'm a seller just says, no, I want everything. You know, I want you to hand over everything. So it's up to you. You can just code it into the smart contract. I'm sorry to be jumping around a little bit. You have a couple of questioners hungry for sort of a practical real life example of how the blockchain might work, like a purchase of something that's reflected on the blockchain. Yeah, I mean, just the general trading of cryptocurrencies is the most fundamental real world we've done. So let's say I go onto Coinbase, which is a centralized exchange. I buy some crypto with my bank account. Let's say I buy like, I don't know, one Bitcoin. That transaction, the transference of that Bitcoin to me to my wallet, my crypto wallet, is recorded as a transaction on the blockchain. So think of the blockchain as basically, I hate to say this, but it's like a glorified ledger, like a glorified excel sheet. It's like an encrypted excel sheet. So if you think of every cell in line as a block, it's like each cell is encrypted in a data block. So every single transaction that is going back and forth in terms of buying or trading or selling crypto, every single transaction is recorded. Tying a couple of questions together. How much fluctuation is there in cryptocurrencies compared to the US dollar? And why is the value of cryptocurrencies so volatile? That's a complex question. The one thing to understand that I caution here is that I'm not a financial advisor. So take everything I say with a grand assault. I'm not going to give you any advice or suggestions here. I can just give you what I know as a human being in this space. It's a new technology. It's a new space, just like with any financial market when it first comes to be. You're going to see a lot of volatility. Back in the heyday with gold and the US dollar, those are all very volatile. That happens with any kind of new financial system. The hope is that with more adoption, it will become more stable. And you're starting to see governments adopt cryptocurrency, like I brought up Ukraine earlier. Ukraine, prior to the war, a few months before, I had actually made cryptocurrency governmentally. They'd legalize it for all use in the Ukraine, which is awesome. I think it wasn't the other company recently, a South American company, not company, but government recently adopted cryptocurrency. I forget which one it is, but you're starting to see governments adopted. There are also governments that are trying to ban it, like China, for example. But with more adoption, you start seeing less volatility. In fact, we're kind of seeing that right now because before, the crypto valuations weren't really tied to the stock market. The stock market would just do its thing and the crypto would do its thing. There weren't really much correlations. But now, in this recession, with the stock market going down, and I hate to say this, the crypto valuations have kind of been going down in tandem with the S&P and the NASDAQ. So you're starting to see them kind of tie together a little bit, which ironically means there's probably some stabilization occurring fundamentally, meaning that there's more validation being given to cryptocurrencies as valuation. That's not to say that once we come out of a recession or once a recession stabilizes, that we're not going to maybe see more volatility again, because it's still, again, like I said, it's a new financial sector or financial ecosystem. You're just going to have a lot of volatility until you get more and more stable adoption. And then you'll start seeing less and less volatility, hopefully. A couple of questions are coming in from our friends watching live at the main library. And one of them is, I know we've said we weren't going to get into this too much, but what websites would someone use to buy crypto if they wanted to? You can use the central exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini. I kind of shy away from Binance, because they're not based in the US and they've run into some legal trouble in other countries. So be careful with Binance, but they're also well known. Coinbase is probably the most popular right now, but those are essentially controlled companies. There are other decentralized finance apps, exchanges that you can try, but there's a trade-off with Coinbase. It's fairly regulated because it's traded on the stock market as a company, so the government looks at it. But you might get overtaxed or you might have over-privacy intrusions through a centralized company versus a decentralized exchange. You kind of get more anonymity. You may not have to ex-submit all these IDs and stuff to verify your identity, but the trade-off is maybe you're putting yourself a little bit more at risk in terms of security. So use it at your own discretion and educate yourself about it. Okay, so I got a couple of questions with regard to exchanges of things for NFTs in particular. And so maybe I could just whip through them really quick as a summary and you could sort of choose what you want to answer. So for the fall. Lightning round, I love it. So there's this thing called a gas fee, and is that related to putting the transaction on all this processing power we've been talking about? Yeah, anytime you want to conduct any kind of transaction on the blockchain, there's a fee involved. Gas fees, gas fees are pretty volatile. So depending on the time of day and the amount of activity, it can be very, very expensive. Ethereum charges gas fees. Other blockchains are cheaper. I'm a big permanent of Cardano, their technology. And I think typically they have like just like a flat fee of like 1.74 ADA, which is their currency. So every blockchain company kind of has their own fee structure. Ethereum probably has the most volatile one. So thank you. And I was noticing that some people seem to get scammed. And I'm wondering if that's because... So my understanding is if I have an account through MetaMask, for example, that's actually an address on the blockchain basically that things can be put on. Is that correct? MetaMask is a cryptographic wallet. In terms of scams, a lot of scams that happen are simply because people are being really, really frivolous with their wallet address, addresses, and their personal information on how to, their secret keys, basically. So this is something I didn't talk about. So just like in your passwords for like your bank account, you don't share that with people. So when people ask for it, don't give it. It's a simple thing. But for some reason, this still hasn't really stuck in people's heads. So like when people are like online trying to scam you or these crypto scammers, they're usually asking for your secret keys. Why would you give that to anybody? Just don't give away your secret keys. You're giving away the everything that's in your wallet. I get that. I also wonder though if there isn't a bit of confusion that comes in because of the fact that you may not be sort of aware of... I mean, if you're going to be going between blockchains, then you have to be using some sort of exchange, correct? And maybe people aren't really aware of where they are on the blockchain. Is that possible? As a general layperson, I wouldn't worry too much about that. So let me try to understand what you're saying. So let's say theoretically I own some Ethereum. I might want to convert that to Bitcoin, which are two different blockchains. Is that kind of the scenario you were talking about? Yeah. Okay. There are ways to do transfers, exchanges, but like I said, they all occur through these either decentralized finance exchanges or the centralized exchanges. So you can actually exchange Ethereum for Bitcoin on Coinbase. It's a very safe transaction. You got to pay the gas fees, all the kind of things. You can also do it on decentralized financial exchanges, which may be a little bit faster, maybe a little easier to conduct a transaction. You can also do it through bridging technologies. So there's all sorts of ways to do that. You don't necessarily yourself need to know which blockchain you're on. I guess once that transfer takes place, once I convert to Bitcoin, I'm on the Bitcoin blockchain block. And because everything is on a public ledger, you can actually look up that block online to see when the transaction occurred and how that transaction occurred. So it's all transparent. Thank you, Joe. I'm going to hustle us along a little bit and go back to the scam tip real quick. When you buy an NFT, how do you know that the seller actually owns the digital rights to that artwork? Again, it's recorded on the blockchain through a smart contract. Everything is there in the ledger. You can't really fake that or plagiarize that. Yeah. Everything just goes back to the blockchain. Does a user have their own wallet or financial custodian hold your wallet? That's a great question. Before I answer that, I see one you asked, where can you get cryptos or by crypto? You heard never in Coinbase. I didn't say never in Coinbase. I say be careful about Binance as an exchange because they're not US based or foreign based and they've run into some legal trouble here and there. So just be careful with Binance. Coinbase is pretty stable. It's a US based company. So it's pretty well regulated. In terms of wallets, yeah, there are in order to buy or sell cryptocurrency, you have to be using crypto wallets. Now, there are different types of wallets. There are custodial based wallets, meaning that these are wallets controlled by exchanges like Coinbase, even PayPal has their own wallet, that they control. You don't control. Then there are non-custodial wallets, which are wallets like MetaMask or Lumie or all sorts of other different wallets that keep popping up. And those are usually like mobile apps that you can use on your phone or maybe they're browser based, like MetaMask is browser based and there's a mobile app for it. So those are called hot wallets, non-custodial hot wallets. Then there are things called cold wallets, which are hardware based wallets like Ledger or Tesor. Basically, it's a hardware device that you use to verify or to give permission to conduct any kind of exchanges buying or selling. The benefits of a cold wallet is the most secure. It's very hard to hack because you literally have to have your device plugged into a computer to conduct a transaction, then you just remove it. How is anybody going to hack a hardware device that isn't connected to your computer? I cannot talk right now. And then hot wallets are kind of in between. They're not unsecure, but you could give away your secret keys unknowingly and then all of a sudden somebody could just download the app, the wallet onto their phone. They have your secret keys, so they can just recreate your wallet within the app. They're just using your secret keys and just take all your currency away. But what hot wallets do is they create more convenience from a custodial wallet, meaning that you don't have to go through an exchange. You can, as long as you have your phone, you can conduct transactions very quickly. Cold wallets, like the hardware devices, take longer to conduct those transactions because you need to plug in the hardware device. You got to validate all that stuff. There's a little bit more steps to conducting transactions. Hot wallets are very, very quick. And then custodial wallets, I feel, not feel, but it's known that they're probably considered the most insecure because let's say you hold all your money in a coin-based wallet, which is controlled by Coinbase, and then Coinbase, their processes or protocols get hacked. That's not good for anybody. So I 100% recommend using non-custodial wallets, either a hot wallet, which is a mobile app, or a browser-based wallet, or a cold wallet. If you own a lot of crypto, definitely use a cold wallet. Thank you. A couple of philosophical questions. Are you ready? Sure. From Lawrence in the chat. When you say that these new technologies are meant to give transparency and control back to the users, I'm still confused about whether the users are the developer community or consumers, having trouble seeing the benefit to consumers. They're both. I highly encourage people to be more educated, more savvy. And this is my own personal opinion is that software engineering skills or just rudimentary coding skills should be part for the course for everybody going forward in the future. This should be like a course that everybody takes in elementary school or junior high. There's just no way you can avoid not participating technologically in the new world that's coming. This is not to say that you are a bad person or a good person for knowing how to code. I'm just something I suggest. The public web 3 or the theory of web 3 is for developers to develop on a permissionless blockchain and whatever they develop is publicly transparent and accountable to the public users. So as a user who takes part in this ecosystem, let's say I'm buying something at a store through like an e-commerce store and I paid in cryptocurrency, that transaction is on the public ledger. And I don't have to keep some paper receipt. I don't have to remember when I conducted this transaction. I can go and look at this transaction at any time in the ledger, see that it was conducted cleanly. And it's all transparent and accountable. So there are other things you can put on the blockchain like smart contracts are there, everything behind NFTs. So like if I transfer the digital rights of an art to another person, that's not me being a developer. That's just me being a seller or a buyer of NFTs. And it's all fully transparent and accountable on the blockchain. So a permissionless blockchain where everybody can participate, developers and users benefits everybody. Thank you. And then question about whether or not crypto companies care about moving to renewable energy sources? Of course they do because it's the only way that you can sustain the technology going forward. Everybody in the crypto space is thinking about this, trying to solve this. Because if there are two basic, two things that the community is trying to solve is the energy consumption coming up with different ways to proof or validate the blockchains. And the second is what kind of protocols need to create interoperability so that the Web3 can become an actuality. So it's top of mind for all crypto companies. See there's a great question from our friends in the main library that I'm saving for the end because it's such a great finisher. So how about, can you explain a little bit about DeFi? Decentralized finance. Fundamentally it's basically what it says, decentralized financial environments, ecosystems, not to be relying on these black boxes of the banking system or having governments controlling financial systems. Let's take, let's talk about the U.S. here. So like, you know, when you go to a bank like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, whatever, you're completely reliant on the bank to conduct your transactions fairly equally across the board. Now I ran across a story maybe a few months back where a Chase customer went into Chase Bank to deposit a check. And usually there's like this kind of period between depositing a check and actually becoming firmly in your account, right? There's this kind of processing period. Now the person left the bank and wanted to go back to the bank a few hours later just to ask a question or to check on something. And the bank had gone out of business. It literally just closed down. And the check that he had deposited went into limbo. He couldn't get it processed all the way through because the original teller wasn't working there anymore. He didn't have anybody to call at the original branch to validate the transaction. And when he called the main Chase customer service, they had no idea what was going on in this branch. There was no accountability there. And he finally eventually got his money, but it took weeks of just sleuthing detective work to make it happen. He had to put in all this work to do this. This would never happen in a decentralized financial ecosystem because it's not controlled by one central authority. There is pure transparency on the blockchain with every transaction that is recorded. You can't have a company hold your check hostage or your currency hostage like that. This is even more important like in places of the world where governments are corrupt or financial institutions that you cannot trust at all. So you need to have these permissionless blockchains just as a trustworthy mechanism for your finances. That's why they're really important. Thank you. A couple of global questions. Is crypto legal everywhere in the world? No, it's not. There are definitely governments that are trying to ban crypto. China is famous for trying to do that. I think India is trying to ban it. When I say ban, it's not because they don't like cryptocurrencies. They're trying to ban it because they want to put out their own digital coins, which kind of defeats the purpose because they're just trying to create their own private cryptocurrencies. So they're just against public blockchains. And then is the digital yuan, pardon my pronunciation, working as planned? And when is the U.S. going to come up with its own cryptocurrency, crypto currency? I have no idea how to even answer that. First of all, I don't take part in the digital yuan. And whether or not the U.S. will create its own digital dollar remains to be seen. I mean, we see the regulations starting to happen. It's definitely not off the table, but I'm not the president. I don't work in Congress. I don't know. There's a request to go over staking again. If you were investing in ETH today, should you stake? Why or why not? We should definitely stake. There's also benefits to staking that you can passively earn more coins. So to give you an example, I'm part of Cardano staking pools. Cardano is a competitor to Ethereum. Their coin, like I said before, is called ADA ADA. In order to, you can basically join a pool. And as those pools validate more blocks, you get a percentage of the fee or the reward that comes with validating blocks. So if there's two advantages, the higher the pool, the more power or really voting power you give to that staking pool to have priority to validate the block transactions. And you also get, it's kind of think of it like passive interest, passive dividends off your staking activities. So yeah, it's really great to stake. You should totally do it. Great. One of my favorite questions, and then we're going to go to Mark, is the public ledger public in the sense that a parent can see a child purchase a $2,000 Chanel bag? Yeah, it's probably my favorite question. When we say public, it's public. I don't know if Chanel is accepting cryptocurrency, so I don't know if that example might actually work. But yeah, if I was to go into a store that accepts crypto as currency and I can buy a product, yeah, it's recorded as public. Thank you. Mark, do you want to go ahead and unmute? Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you for hosting this. And I have a question about beyond money, I see that maybe the future of this is where people are on the blockchain. In other words, everything you do, where you live, what you buy. I mean, is it going to go there someplace where you, in order to get hired for a job, they want to see your blockchain? And if you could speak to that a little bit. You know, in terms of those questions, that's all, the possibilities are endless. It can go either way. And also, it's a very democratic system. You don't have to take part in it. It's not like you're going to be forced to use permissionless blockchains. I think it's really just a lot of the ethics or the ethos around it right now is that currently in Web 2.0, we are far too centralized. We have to be able to hold current companies accountable for their activity. All of our data has been sold. We have zero control over our data. So those of us who are in the cryptocurrency community, we're trying to create mechanisms to get the claw back that control and put it back in our hands and create these mechanisms so that kind of future proof, centralized companies for me being able to do this to us again in the future. That's really kind of the fundamental reasons why, you know, blockchains exist. Whether or not in the far future, everything is conducted in the blockchain. Yeah, theoretically it could happen. It could, like you said, be like an employer who wants to look at your transactions on the block. So, you know, I mean, look, if I'm laundering money or trafficking weapons or drugs or whatever, I probably shouldn't be hired for anywhere. Anyways, so, I mean, you know, this is all philosophical discussions we can get into, but yeah, there's a lot of, I think, good and good or bad ramifications that can happen. So it just kind of remains to be seen how the community evolves and technology evolves. I don't have any concrete answers for you, unfortunately. It's still a great answer because, you know, I think in terms of the companies want that data and, of course, the way to do it is maybe this, but like you said, if enough people stand up and say, no, you know, then it's not going to happen. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. A couple of quickie government questions. Do you know what, and I don't expect you to know this, but did you know what the IRS is doing with the Do You Own Crypto question on the tax returns? I don't even think the IRS knows what it's doing. They just want to know. Yeah, they're starting to attempt to track cryptocurrency, just like they track stocks, right? So they're forcing exchanges like Coinbase to issue out, you know, tax forms at the end of the year to people who have conducted any kind of transaction. So they're using exchanges to try to tax people because the IRS just doesn't have the resources to track down anonymous wallets. So they're using exchanges to try to do that. It's just not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I'm a big proponent of paying my taxes as long as it goes through what we pay it for, you know, education and all sorts of stuff. But they're still trying to solidify that. Like I said, I honestly don't even think the IRS knows exactly what they're doing yet. But and you're seeing Congress now starting to discuss regulations. So they're all trying to sort this out. But it is on the horizon. Expect to be taxed for your crypto. Don't try to hide those transactions. You know, like when I did my taxes this year, I stated on my tax return that yeah, I did crypto transactions. Thankfully, we're in a recession and I'm taking a loss on everything. So I have to pay taxes on any of it. But if I were to turn a profit, yeah, I'd pay taxes on capital gains. Thank you. And then speaking of, is there some sort of equivalent to the FDIC for crypto wallets and exchanges or any developments on that front? We're probably going to see stuff like that being introduced down the line as Congress figured out how to regulate it. I think it would probably be more pertinent if the US ever decided to do its own digital coin, which they would probably ensure is my guess. But right now, there isn't anything like FDIC insurance for crypto. So if you lose it, you lose it. Right. A little trip down, should we buy crypto and how do we buy crypto lane? Should you buy crypto? Yeah, should you? I'm not gonna say. You can't really. Yeah, why might somebody want to? How about that? To take part in, well, okay. The big thing is the investment part of it. You know, a lot of people have bought into the hype and it's true. A lot of people have actually made a lot of money in the last few years they're supposed to do in a pandemic. Myself, I made some money. A lot of newly minted millionaires and billionaires. But I think we're moving into a phase where that's going to be harder and harder to happen. Hopefully what we're starting to see is a more mature reaction to cryptocurrencies too, so that we can stabilize the valuations. And you're seeing more companies adopt cryptocurrencies as a means to purchase goods. That's where we need to see the market go. That's where the stabilization starts happening. So if you do want to buy crypto from that standpoint into having crypto in the future to use, then you should. If you want to take part in that ecosystem, as an investment, I'm not going to give you any advice either way. Let's say somebody does want to buy crypto, but they want to use a decentralized marketplace, not Coinbase. What are some options out there? I'm highly hesitant to give you an advice on this. I would just hope you can Google decentralized finance apps. There are exchanges out there, but I said there's risk. That's why I don't want to make any suggestions here. Do we need a broker like Coinbase to buy and sell crypto? You do need an exchange of some kind too. Well, that's actually not true. If you own a wallet and a friend wants to send you some crypto for maybe like you sold them a car and they want to pay you in crypto, you can go wallet to wallet transactions. Actually, you don't need an exchange to do that. Kind of like Venmo. You can just Venmo somebody like that. Some great ones to think about wrapping up on actually, you said that there is a need for more designers. What careers do you think are trendy in tech in terms of what the industry needs today and in the next five years? Man, I mean, that possibilities are just limitless right now. We're in such an instant stage in terms of all the apps and markets and metaverses, all the gaming environments that are being created. So there's a huge need for designers of all different disciplines to come into the space. There are simple things like designing better UX or UI for crypto wallets to enterprise dashboards for decentralized financial exchanges. Those need to be designed. And I mentioned metaverses, gaming companies are starting to figure out that they need to have great design in those environments. And there's probably just things I can't even imagine right now in the future. So design is always going to be needed and there's just not enough designers in that space right now. So we need to all sorts switching over as designers. And then there was a question earlier. What websites do you check or use to stay current and up to date on information about this area? There's this one one I like to read called the daily hodl. But that's more like investment news. I'm pretty active in checking out NFT platforms like openc.io in terms of because I'm creating my own NFT. So I kind of check out the platform to see what other people are doing and to kind of stay in touch with how NFTs are evolving. In Cardano, for example, they actually hold weekly town halls that you can publicly attend to kind of plug into the communities. Reddit is a huge there are huge communities on Reddit. So go on Reddit. There are communities on Discord. So just find your communities. They're all out there. You can probably even just Google search and figure it out. Three questions that came in today and I'm really excited by the interest in it. Yeah, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for this overview. We are very lucky to have you talking to us here at the library. So I do always appreciate you taking the time out. Real quick before you ask, if you all want to reach out to me, Ed at diginito.com, feel free to reach out. Any other questions? Go easy on him, guys. Yeah, he's got a take up. So somebody is, Catherine would like to see an example. I don't know if we can do this tonight, but example, maybe screenshots of what it actually looks like to buy crypto online and what it would look like if it were stored in a wallet. I'm not sure how we would do that. Actually, I think Coinbase has some pretty good tutorials. Check out Coinbase.com. Yeah, and if you don't want to go to Coinbase, you can easily just Google how do I, right? And if you do want to reach out to me, I actually had a lady reach out to me a few months ago to basically help her buy her first coin. I just walk her through over the phone. Yeah, it was kind of fun. Okay, I think that might be the ball game.