 That's really exciting. And so now I will introduce Sam Cassatt, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Consensus. He's doing a lot of great work around bringing the applications that we're building to a point where they're gonna be market ready and he's very, very knowledgeable. We're lucky to have him here today and he is going to talk about the promise of decentralization. Thank you very much, Carolyn, for that introduction and thank you, Daza. Am I sharing currently to the hangout? Okay, great. So I'm very excited to be at the Media Lab today. Consensus generally loves the Media Lab. We love being a part of a group of people that's so innovative and so on the cutting edge of the technology and I think we're really happy that we've been able to help and, you know, provide some of our tools to the audience here. So Blockchain, I think, is going to do a number of things to our economy. It's gonna do a number of things that are enabled by technology and there are a few themes that sort of emerge from those things. So I wanna talk about what decentralization is gonna do for us. And as I do that, as Daza mentioned, it would be helpful for our format if people went to the website and they submitted questions or they submitted an answer to my question, which was how can rich notions of reputation enhance economic interactions on the Blockchain or just generally? I think that's one of the most important things here. So trust. Trust has a lot of meanings. It means many things to different people. The Economist recently called out the notion of trust in their description of what Blockchain technology is going to do. They call it the trust machine. So let's think a little bit about what is trust in this context? If we have a Blockchain, we have something like Bitcoin. The central innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows us to agree upon information at some time step without necessarily trusting the other parties. Even if someone were trying to sort of game the system, they were trying to say that my Bitcoin account balance is not what it truly is. I don't have to worry about that being a problem for me because the system through its inherent properties is eventually going to make sure that we all agree upon the actual trusted value. So let's look at how do we have trust in our society right now? What businesses, what economic activities depend upon trust or provide trust? So for instance, banks, right? Banks have physical buildings. They have doors that you can go knock on. They have the ability to interface with regulators. So if banks are doing something that is not trustworthy, like stealing my money, regulators can come knock on their door and they can do something about it, right? And so that's why I trust the bank to hold my money and I don't trust a random person to hold my money, right? So they're capitalizing upon their ability to be a trust provider in our society. At a larger scale, the DTCC, right? The Depository Trust and Clear Incorporation. So what this company does is if I want to do a large financial transaction, so say I have a million dollars and you have a million stock units and we want to trade those things, I have something called settlement risk. I'm not sure that you actually have those million stock units so you're not sure that I actually have those dollars. And when it comes time to actually trade them and we're both holding on to the stock and the dollars and we say, who lets go first, right? They provide that trust. They allow that settlement to actually happen, right? And they're a pretty inefficient organization when viewed through the lens of a technologist like ourselves, all they're essentially doing is something that I could simply write into a piece of code that said, take these two things and atomically swap them. And that's the promise of what smart contracts on something like the Ethereum blockchain could do for us. And that's why we have companies emerging. I think some of the first really interesting, possibly profitable, very valuable companies emerging, digital asset holdings in T0. T0 says the trade is the settlement. And what they mean by that is that I do not have to trust that this settlement is going to happen. I can have a smart contract written on the blockchain that can hold a token that represents a unit of stock. It can hold a token that represents a dollar. And that contract itself can execute that trade and ensure that it's atomically swapped. So what does that mean for trust, right? If we can disintermediate some of these organizations that right now their function is to provide us with trust, where does that move that relationship? What does it move the notion of trust in our society? So one possible answer is that it moves it into the blockchain. One possible answer is that it moves it into other sort of trust provider entities. So for instance, say I lose my private key to my Bitcoin wallet, maybe I wanna recover that and maybe that's a kind of trust. But I think it's going to open up new questions about who can provide us trust and where does trust require? Probably less so than we've had in the past. So identity. This is another important topic in blockchain technology. So what does identity mean in the context of blockchain, right? Identity, it seems like a very simple concept, but it can have a very rich notion. And in fact, it does in blockchain technology. So at the very most basic level, an identity is just a cryptographic key pair. It allows me to interact with the blockchain network, right? It could also be something that is generated from a hierarchical deterministic tree for people who are more technical in the blockchain space. Maybe you realize that what this means is that from one key, from one cryptographic notion of identity, I can generate an infinite number of identities. Maybe in the future, I don't think the technology is there yet, but maybe this could be constructed by a biometric. I have an example of a signature as the original biometric. It's something that derives from our physical capability and maybe some of our cognitive ability, but it serves as a pretty good marker of this. There's a company called Identity 2020 that's trying to provide this type of cryptographic identity to Syrian refugees, because if you have this kind of identity, you have access to a global economy that you didn't have access to before. So what happens when you give that kind of power to people? One example, even though they're not using blockchain technology, but I think operating in the same principle is M-Pesa. So as many of you know, probably the Kenyan dollar basically became worthless and I would have had to carry around wheelbarrows full of cash in order to buy a common item. So it was a pretty good market to enter for Safaricom, who said, well, we already have this infrastructure of places where people can go and purchase things like cell phone minutes. So why not piggyback on that and create a payment network, which is exactly what they did. So with just a feature phone, you now have access to a global economic activity of access to a global payment network. ABRA is attempting to do the same thing, more focused on remittances than just payments locally, but ABRA is using blockchain technology. And if you combine that notion with what ID 2020 is doing and what Safaricom has done when ABRA has done, you can imagine a future where a very large swath of the population of the planet that hence to forth has not had access to financial services, has not had access to identity as we traditionally consider it, is now empowered. Other people have tried. Other companies have tried in the past to modify the notion of identity and failed. Open ID, why it's a great idea that you can control your identity. Nobody used it. Mozilla persona project closed its doors about three weeks ago because they weren't able to get market adoption. And the problem is market adoption really, right? The closest thing we have, which I think is kind of sad is Facebook Connect, right? But Facebook owns your data. But this is the promise that if you owned your data, if you owned your cryptographic identity, your Bitcoin wallet, what have you, and you use that to log on, that is where the information is contained. That's where the notions of identity are contained, like metadata about yourself and your behavior and your preferences. If you own that instead of a company like Google or Facebook owning that, that also empowers you and it gives you the portability of identity that we hope to give with Washington technology. Just as an example of that, Uport is a technology that a consensus we're developing. It's a way for you to control your persona, control your identity, control access to your identity. It can have rich metadata that's associated with it like reputation and preference. I wanted to note also open mustard seed, I think is a great example of this and it came out of Patrick Deegan's work who has spent some time here at the Media Lab. And importantly, obviously, it's accessible to everyone on earth because with something as simple as a feature phone, you can access this. Reputation is one of these sort of metadata properties that I mentioned that's useful. It's already ubiquitous. We already use it all the time. If I wanna know whether this Uber driver is a good driver or he's a safe person to have me in his car, I wanna know whether this restaurant is good. And if I'm a financial institution, I wanna use your FICO score to determine whether or not you're worthy of a loan. Even though that's relatively poor as an indicator, I wanna know whether someone's a good handyman. So these are great, but they're siloed and they're owned by. The data about this is owned by the company itself. It's owned by TaskRabbit. It's owned by Uber. So where blockchain will go further, as I mentioned, why blockchain will succeed where others have failed in providing these notions of identity and reputation is that there's no core utility to something like a persona project, right? You can say, well, that's nice that I can log in to something in a different way, but why do I care? Why would I use that instead of just my email or my Facebook ID, which is already ubiquitous? But if our entry point to a new global financial system that provides an incredible amount of value is this open standard of reputation and identity, then we can succeed where others have failed. And because that reputation and identity is portable because I own it and it's not siloed into a particular company's database, it means that I can use it in a new place. It means I can go to the next service that a kid in his garage or whatever innovator that sits here at the Media Lab thinks up, I can come in, I can use it for that. And that data can enhance the experience that I would have in that new area. And it can enhance the ability of innovators to use that. So this is a report from Goldman Sachs that relates to my next theme, which is the socialization of finance. I guess before I go down this, I would remind people I'm getting towards the end of my remarks. So if you are on the internet and you would like your answers to the question to be included, try to wrap it up the next. So the question was, how can notions of rich identity enhance economic interactions or general interactions on the blockchain or at large? Okay, so Goldman Sachs estimates that there's a $4 trillion with a T addressable opportunity in what they call the socialization of finance or what you could also call peer-to-peer finance, right? So this is something like equity crowdfunding. This is when an engineer says, well, I do have $5,000 that I'd like to throw into that really innovative company. And until relatively recently that would have been impossible, I do have a few thousand dollars that I would like to lend to someone on the other side of the planet. And I didn't have any way of really understanding who they were or what their reputation was before or whether or not it would have been a good idea to provide them a micro loan in order to get their business started in Africa, let's say. But now I do. So how can we sort of unlock this value? There's this value that's hidden in people's bank accounts. It's hidden in communities. It's hidden all around, but we have no way to access it. And so one of the promises of blockchain technology is to allow us to use data, to use reputation, to use the analysis of what people are doing on the blockchain to provide even additional value to them and to unlock this value that's already sitting there. So one can imagine what this looks like if you think of something like Uber. Uber is a two-sided marketplace, right? Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace. It provides a thin layer that intermediates between people who would like to do business with each other. But if you have economic interaction that begins to sit on the blockchain and that information is open and accessible and it comes with portable reputation and identity, then third parties can come and they can analyze that and they can provide additional value to that. So maybe if Uber were sitting on a blockchain, that layer of intermediation would be even thinner for one thing, right? Because the blockchain, no one owns it, it's very cheap to operate. So the large infrastructure that Uber maintains in order to allow it to operate wouldn't be as necessary. So for one, there's a market efficiency there, but third parties could then come along and they could say, well, I can analyze the data of this behavior and I can see that this is a driver who with a high reputation. And if I were to provide him some financial services like say a loan or say I were going to come along and provide another service like the ability to background check drivers or something else that I can't even think of, but I'm sure some innovative kids and garages can think of, then we have a much more efficient economy. We have a market network rather than a two-sided marketplace, an end-sided marketplace. So I think that's one of the most important promises of blockchain technology. And so as an example, a consensus, these three sort of products in the middle are things that we're working on. Wayfund is a way for us to distribute tokens to essentially IPO a company on a blockchain by distributing tokens. Those tokens can be purchased and those tokens can represent something like our financial community has already imagined, something like a bearer share that allows voting or it could be something more complex, but those shares or those tokens could allow participation in something like a boardroom. So boardroom instantiates a virtual decision-making process that's predicated upon your ownership of a particular cryptographic token. So one could imagine that a group of decentralized people could fund and govern an organization maybe having never even met each other, maybe having never met their financiers, but yet that economic interaction can be facilitated and made more efficient. And then once those tokens have additional value that could be traded on EtherX which is a decentralized exchange that allows counterparties willingly to conduct business with each other and trade those tokens openly. And we could have, for instance, a kid in Africa that IPO a company and it's governed on a blockchain by a bunch of people in Africa and Germany and in India and we could have somebody in Silicon Valley that's sitting there analyzing the data and deciding that it's a good idea to provide additional financial services to this company and help it grow all with such a thin layer of intermediation that it's much more efficient than anything we can imagine right now. I guess just to sum this up, I think what the internet promises to be, what it has promised to be for us is almost a meta-layer of our cognition as human beings on this planet. We've added another layer of communication and speed and what blockchain, which many people call Web 3.0 promises to do is it promises to add a layer of trust and an economic interaction and money to that nervous system that is the meta-layer of our planet. And I think that's the promise of decentralization of blockchain. So, those are the end of my remarks. And... Well, I think this is a good time for applause. Thank you. Thank you. That was awesome. So in the future, we're gonna have people like Sam speak at the beginning of the class. Because there's a few things you said that really opened my mind to some of this. So thank you for making a trip from Brooklyn up to the Media Lab.