 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. We are now live today, Sunday, February 18th, 2018. My name is Janati Stolerov II. I am the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party. And today I am proud to host a panel jointly with the Institute of Exponential Sciences, an organization we have been allied with for a long time and to have as my co-moderator, Damien Zivkovich, who is the president of the Institute of Exponential Sciences, welcome Damien. And I am also pleased to have three expert panelists who will spend two hours discussing today how cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies will possibly affect future economies and everyday life. Of course, this is a broad topic and we have intentionally selected a panel with diverse perspectives on it. So without further ado, our esteemed panelists are Chantelung, who is the creator of CryptoCity.com which is a social media website focused on building the future world of cryptocurrencies by connecting crypto enthusiasts and the general public about cryptocurrencies. He is also a full-time trader and participates in the HyperStake Coin Project, which is a Bitcoin alternative that uses the very energy-efficient proof of stake protocol, also known as POS, which we will discuss in the course of this panel. Welcome Chantel. Then we have Laurence West, who is a Dutch engineer and chief engineering officer at the Institute of Exponential Sciences. Furthermore, he is the owner of Intrafix, a company focused on custom 3D printed products and software solutions. He has also studied artificial intelligence and is very interested in transhumanism, longevity, entrepreneurship, cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology and art and a lot more. He is a regular speaker for the Institute of Exponential Sciences and is very committed to educating the public on accelerated technological developments and exponential sciences. And finally, we have Moritz Birling, who in his work for Exosphere Academy, a learning and problem-solving community, has organized a space elevator bootcamp, an artificial intelligence conference, and an Ethereum training course, while also offering a primer on the emerging discipline of alternate reality design. As blockchain reporter for the Berlin Blockchain Startup Neufund, he has educated the city's venture capital and startup scene, as well as the broader public on the applications of this groundbreaking technology. His work has appeared in a number of blockchain related and libertarian media outlets, such as Cointelegraph, The Freeman's Perspective, bitcoin.com and the School Sucks Project. Welcome everyone and let us start with your introductory remarks, Chanta. How do you think cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies will affect future economies and everyday life? Hello, Chanta. Okay, sorry about that, I was muted. Okay. Well, blockchain-based technology is really going to change a lot of things that we've currently already seen with the government and banks, scampering about the technology and how they're going to go about it. It's an alternative to the current system that we have. And what that means is a lot of things are going to be decentralized. And with blockchain-based technology, it's also going to be connected with, for example, the facilitator of Internet of Things. So machine to machine transaction, people to machine transactions. And it's basically going to decouple the medium of exchange for a lot of people from local to global. And that's going to make a very big impact, especially people that don't have the resources. For example, banks, people that don't have bank accounts, especially in less developed countries. However, a lot of those people have mobile phones. And especially on a local level, people will now have the option, and this will only increase is they will have the option of using a form of exchange that they believe in and something that they support rather than having only one choice, which is the current Fiat system. And that's very important, because then you get rid of the middleman. So the transactions that occur, regardless whether it's finance or anything else, will be less friction, would be much easier to transact. And I think that's really the important thing. And it will definitely enable or empower a lot of people to connect in exchange for normally, it would be very cost-perhabited to do. Thank you, Chanta, for those remarks. And you have touched on a lot of themes that we will explore later on in this discussion. Lawrence, what are your introductory thoughts on this subject? My introductory thoughts on it are that blockchain technology can kind of be seen as some sort of an internet 2.0, because when the internet was first introduced, it was primarily composed of a small network of a few computers that were able to communicate to each other. That was followed by the World Wide Web, of course, where dedicated servers provided services for other clients. And currently, blockchain technology is, of course, where everything is decentralized and where there's no central server anymore. So what I see in the future is that the revolution that the internet brought along can be quite similar to the revolution that blockchain is going to bring along on the ground scheme of things. Thank you, Lawrence, and I agree there does seem to be a revolutionary potential to this technology, of course, depending on how it is deployed and how widely it becomes adopted. Moritz, what are your introductory thoughts? All right, bless you. Well, my introductory thoughts are that blockchains are an already obsolete technology that, however, have already introduced an innovation in basically the ability to transfer value over a digital space to the broader public that in the future will be taken over by other crypto-based technologies, not blockchain-based technologies, that are actually able to sustain and to manifest the vision that was laid out by Bitcoin and the subsequent other innovative protocols that have the idea of basically disintermediating relationships, making relationships unenclosable. So basically, it's entered into a specific space and then extracted for value. And I agree with the previous speaker about kind of the internet itself from its very beginning having started with this kind of client-server model where we have a master-slave relationship between individual computers where there's an absolute view of truth managed by the administrator of a server and then the client's kind of being like slaves to that view and blockchain for the first time made it possible to share value over digital space that is not copyable, not arbitrarily changeable. And now the next generation will introduce what I call agent-centric computing or agent-centric architectures where value and information gets exchanged on an agent-to-agent, so peer-to-peer basis, where all of the code is on the individual machines that run these softwares rather than on a server or that the client accesses. And blockchain kind of got us over the initial hump and now we are seeing a Cambrian explosion of new technologies kind of taking up the baton and carrying it forward into the future. Yes, thank you Moritz. And certainly during the course of this panel we will address what some of these emerging technologies would be, how they differ from blockchain, how they might be an evolution upon blockchain. But this is a very interesting premise that you laid out that blockchain may already be obsolete but it has paved the way for other innovations. So with that Damien, what would you like to ask the panel? Well, I'm wondering about how fast is the blockchain space developing? We currently hear a lot of things about new technologies that are based on blockchain but that take the technology to another level. So what is it the next step from blockchain? Where do we go from there? All right, anyone who wishes to offer thoughts on this please feel free. Well, I think like you said previously that the blockchain right now is currently what we're working on and it is paving the way to new technologies. And for us, working on the HyperStake coin project we're also working on what's called HyperChain. And that is something that is somewhat similar where it will be able to facilitate the internet of things. So it goes beyond the blockchain even though it's built on top of the HyperStake blockchain but it enables people to do other things kind of like a form of almost like a distributed a limited distributed form of distributed computing which is going to be very interesting especially going forward in the future because it's gonna open up a lot of doors in terms of record keeping and not just like for financial transaction but many, many other things. And this seems to be along the lines of what Moritz was discussing, technologies that transcend the blockchain but perhaps build off of the premise of the blockchain. So I'm curious Chanta with regard to your remarks on distributed computing because I've participated in various distributed computing projects over time. And my late person's understanding of the difference between blockchain and distributed computing is a blockchain is essentially a ledger where everybody who participates in the system has a record of every transaction that took place and the way you verify the integrity of a transaction is that everybody has the record of it so you don't depend on a single intermediary whereas with distributed computing at least in the projects that I've participated in which have been projects to perform calculations for scientific research or for solving complex mathematical problems there would be a central server that essentially farms out the work units to individual computers who participate in the system and then the individual computers run the calculations and report the results back to the central server which then essentially validates them and the owner of the project determines what to do with those results. So I'm curious how those two get combined in the approach that you're describing. Well, the HyperStake coin project uses what's called a proof of state protocol which is different than the proof of work in the term where you don't need miners or special equipment or expensive equipment and tons of electricity to run it. Anybody can participate and but the thing with these servers is that it needs a little bit of centralization to basically keep all the peers in consensus with each other. Otherwise they would be prone to attacks because if you have differences in the peers then obviously you would have problems and that's one of the things that the current blockchain or the hybrid chain that is being worked on right now we have a white paper that's gonna be coming out by the end of the first quarter but what this allows is, for example, the current thing that we're working on right now is a governance system and what that enables people to do is for example, if they have issues or they wanna work on, let's say the wallet holder will be able to simply vote from their wallet through the staking process and be able to participate in the direction of the project, of where the project is going. And in that sense, everybody has a form of a decentralized wallet. Now obviously everybody's hooked up to the network, the hyperstake network and everybody has like a decentralized ledger so everybody has a copy of the same ledger and that in itself is consensus and every one of those ledgers or every one of those wallet has to have the same information. However, with the hyperstake or the hyperchain it enables third party companies or individuals to be able to use the hyperchain and create their own somewhat applications and be able to use that. And that's really the exciting part is it opens up a lot of doors to individuals and any type of entities or companies that wants to use the hyperchain. And this is a very interesting concept. Now I think it is a good bridge to a question that I had in mind since you mentioned proof of stake as essentially the basis for allocating units of a cryptocurrency as opposed to proof of work which was the earlier model with Bitcoin and other altcoins that were derived from Bitcoin. Essentially with proof of work you have to devote a lot of computing power to quote mining these cryptocurrencies and as a cryptocurrency matures mining becomes more difficult to the point that there are specialized server farms essentially that mine bitcoins. Whereas in say 2009 or 2011 a person using a desktop computer could have done it now that is essentially impossible to do. Whereas with- It's very expensive for the individual to be able to participate. So with the proof of work especially in the Bitcoin it would be very difficult for the individual to try to compete to get into that space where the proof of stake it's very affordable where anybody could be able to participate. All you need is a working computer any basic computer or it'll even run on a Raspberry Pi. So it makes it very affordable and easy to participate versus the other alternative and it's very efficient. And I think that's really the important thing is for anybody to be able to participate. So other thoughts from the panel on proof of work versus proof of stake and also how that would relate to Damien's question in terms of the development of blockchain-based technologies and where you see the future of that development going will it be through more of a proof of work basis or a proof of stake basis or something else? Well I can definitely speak to that. So I mean in my introduction I alluded to the onslaught of new generation crypto technologies and so from my understanding the proof of work and proof of stake solutions to achieving consensus which is really just like consensus and both of these algorithms are in place to ensure what is called intrinsic data integrity meaning that once data is committed to this record it cannot be altered and it cannot be changed by anybody arbitrarily. And so all of the records are stored but this is also one of the problems of blockchain because everybody has to hold all of the data and because these algorithms are so expensive in terms of energy and even financial cost they drive the centralization of the entire network ever closer to basically one monopolist. I mean right now the Bitcoin networks power 80% of it I believe are controlled by just five miners or five mining pools and so in principle there's nothing stopping those five to collude on changing the network other than a phone call basically. It's just a phone call away to do that. So even though in theory and at the very beginning it was true that Bitcoin was decentralized it was distributed it was impossible to change the networks integrity through economic means. This today is no longer the case and this is because the proof of work and proof of stake algorithms drive exacerbate the Pareto principle which already is so horrendous in financial any kind of endeavor where creativity and ability distinguished themselves and kind of compound have this compounding effect on each other in this digital system when you have the capital you will have access to more capital you can generate more returns which you can then use again to generate even more returns and so you have this driving of centralization. Now, the next generation of crypto technologies that don't use blockchain but still maintain intrinsic data integrity the one that I'm most familiar with or there are several ones actually. There's one that's right blocks which has currently some problems. So it's not perfect. There's hashgraph which is kind of taking the blockchain idea but then making several kind of chains work together and interweave. Then you have IOTA which has its problems which I don't think is a credible project as well. And then what my favorite project and which I think kind of takes this all the way to its extreme to the absolute extreme in terms of agent-centric computing is called Holochain. And basically what it does is it guarantees data integrity through basically a combination of a validating sharded distributed hash table basically the technology we already are familiar with from Torrents. So whenever you want to download a file from somebody else's computer what you do is you go online Pirate Bay or whatever else you consult for your favorite files. You look for a particular file by name that file then gives you a hash on this hash table which then allows you to look at that file directly on other people's computers and then you get the connection and you can download that file. That's how Torrents work. Beautiful technology, old proven actually the start of the kind of pirate movement as well. I think it's great stuff. And that combines that with what is called hash chains which are also a proven technology and have been part of the internet for a long time especially if you've ever worked with GitHub you're familiar with hash chains. They are basically what make GitHub able to have versioning have integrity assured that the code that is there is the code that was put there. All of this stuff is guaranteed by that and then combining those two with specific application code in Holochain you get the properties of internet data integrity which blockchain pioneered but which it cannot achieve at scale and at reasonable cost and even speed. I mean, the Bitcoin network right now is I think at seven transactions per second fees are skyrocketing. There are of course more innovative blockchain frameworks that are faster, that are more effective, et cetera. But due to the simple architecture choices made from the beginning to ensure the integrity of the network blockchain has inherent hindrances to scaling effectively. And so in my estimation until the blockchain community as a whole figures out a way to short block chains or to solve the scaling problem in any other way it is an outdated and probably absolutely going to fail way of organizing this data integrity system. There is some ways you could migrate from a blockchain at a specific point in time and then reset all the records but maintain balances and then move to a new blockchain. That's one way of doing it. There are many ways that you can do this but it hasn't been done and it's not likely to happen that way. So I won't go into the technical details because we're talking more to a general audience. I think not everybody here is familiar with photography but suffice it to say that there are other things coming and I think the way forward for blockchain specifically is to ensure high value use cases like super high value financial use cases where let's say a title registry or high value assets securing that kind of I can see as a valuable application for backchain technologies but the kind of microtransactions or even non-financial use cases of intrinsic data integrity are unlikely to in the future be done by blockchain. Yes, thank you for those insights Moritz and there is a lot that we can go into many directions this conversation can take based on your remarks. I wanted to also ask Lawrence what are your views regarding proof of work, proof of stake, agent centric computing, any of the emerging technologies that Moritz discuss as well as what the places for blockchain in terms of future financial transactions? Well, my expertise isn't really exactly in proof of stake for proof of work but for source my knowledge goes is that my personally I have a lot more faith in the proof of stake concept also since I've been following the Ethereum chain for a long time and I've been seeing that most investors are tending to go more towards Ethereum. Of course, Bitcoin is a lot bigger these days but that's more because it was the original cryptocurrency and I think that that's had its time a bit. I did. So the proof of stake concept also seems far more durable for in the future and I think that's the way we should go but I don't think that this is the final solution or anything I think there is still a bit in its infant shoes, so to speak. And I'm not quite sure at this point where it's heading and I don't think that anyone really has the final solution on at this point in time. So while I think that proof of stake concept of itself is better, I'm not quite sure that we're there yet. I wouldn't say that this is really the way to go. All right, thank you, Lawrence. Now Damien, I will ask you to pose the next question and after that, I will have a question as well about Bitcoin, but Damien, you go first. Well, I would like to ask our current panelists about whether the, do you think that cryptocurrency in its current form has a future or is it just a stepping stone to another technology like just a start of something much bigger? Well, first, who's the one first? Lawrence. All right. Well, personally, I think that it is a stepping stone for something bigger. I mean cryptocurrency has, of course, even today, it's still just some form of speculation. You can barely buy anything with it. Since I believe 2013, some companies have tried to introduce the concept of paying with Bitcoin of other cryptocurrencies in certain shops. I mean, even here in the Netherlands, Amsterdam is considered to be the Bitcoin city. That's been for about one or two years, I believe. But it's still not really catching on, even despite the insane growth that Bitcoin has had in the past year. So the adoption by the public isn't really going that fast, as people might have expected. So that might also be some sort of an evidence that cryptocurrencies, as they are now, are not really going to become the thing that we all hoped for eventually. But I do think that indeed, at the same you said, that this will prove to be a stepping stone for something bigger. And I think that's also the reason why there are, well, over a thousand different cryptocurrencies at this point. I see it as something that's shown development that people are trying all different kinds of configurations, trying new different, how do you say it, different versions of the same concept, trying to figure out which one works best. And I think we're all waiting for a new breakthrough that's really going to make it possible to make cryptocurrencies a viable new system within the current economic system, because the hopes have been high for cryptocurrencies to replace the current financial system. And I don't think that's something that's going to happen in the near future if cryptocurrencies are going to remain as they are now. So a new breakthrough definitely needs to happen on that front before that's going to happen. All right. Thank you, Lawrence. Now, Chanta, what are your thoughts about cryptocurrencies and whether they are the future or whether they're just a stepping stone toward something different? I think with cryptocurrency and the current blockchain is just basically a doorway. It's just the beginning. It's not even scratching the surface of what we're exploring. But it is very exciting. And in the future, we might not even recognize Bitcoin for what it is today or any other cryptocurrency for that matter. Currently, with Bitcoin, it's getting fairly expensive to use. And due to the power requirements, which is totally insane right now. So it's very difficult for people to participate in that respect, especially in mining. But on the other hand, with the current size of the blockchain with Bitcoin, which is currently almost 200 gigabytes of information. And that's the current ledger. And that's huge. So it's not really portable. And in order for people to currently use that on their, let's say mobile devices, they actually have to use wallets that retrieve information from a centralized server in order to facilitate that. Because a lot of those devices, well, they simply wouldn't be able to have 200 gigabytes of information on your mobile device. So it's not very portable in that respect. But in the future, that will have to change. And especially because not every device is going to also be connected all the time. So that is something that will also have to be considered as well. And I think it's very exciting to see a lot of other companies or projects working to tackle that in that respect. Now, in terms of creating an easier barrier of entry, I think currently the proof of stake will allow a lot of people to be able to participate in that. And because of the low power requirement that is necessary for people to be able to get onto the network and be able to participate. But I think the most important thing is like any technology is through the adoption. I mean, it's all based, it all revolves around the community. If you don't have the community, regardless of the technology that you have, if nobody uses it, then it's kind of moot at that point. So building the community is just as important as the technology that is being developed as well. And I think that's going to be the difference between the technology that will continue to drive or just die off. Yes. Thank you, Chanta. And you brought up a lot of noteworthy observations, the transaction fees for sending any quantity of bitcoins right now are in the tens of dollars between approximately $20 and $50 roughly because the exchange rate between bitcoin and US dollars continues to fluctuate dramatically. But that pretty much rules out any sort of everyday consumer-oriented type of transaction as you pointed out. And the blockchain size is indeed also an impediment because I became introduced to cryptocurrencies fairly early. I tried to pursue the very fundamental route of downloading the entire blockchain onto my computer. And I used the Bitcoin Core Wallet. It did pretty much occupy the entire disk space of one of my computers in order to be able to do that. And I do not have large Bitcoin holdings. I acquired a tiny amount at the time through donations to my website, the Rational Argumentator. And if I had liquidated them during the cryptocurrency boom in December, I might have gotten, say, $50 for those bitcoins. But the transaction fees would have consumed pretty much all of that amount, so it wasn't worth it to liquidate. And those are indeed serious obstacles to mainstream consumer use. So Moritz, what are your thoughts about cryptocurrencies as a stepping stone toward perhaps something different, something more consumer-friendly? Well, I think I've already made my basic view pretty clear, so I won't go into that too much detail anymore. I basically just think that, again, blockchain-based systems were the first stepping stone. We're moving towards these agent-based systems or agent-centric systems. But to take a more broad point from blockchain-based systems is this understanding of money and currency as being two distinct concepts and that these are not equivalent and that currencies are a much broader category than just money. So if you think about money and Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems trying to replicate money in the financial space, what they're doing is they're trying to make uncopiable digital objects that you can move between individual holders. And so the data or the objects are independent of any individual user. They're attributed to an individual holder, but they're kind of these independent objects. Now, currencies are kind of a way that we collectively measure what we find valuable both on an individual and on a collective level. So you can think of, for example, a bachelor's degree as a reputation currency that you can acquire by performing the required work to achieve credits, which are basically a time-based currency, and then to also get the right grades in those classes which are a performance metric or performance currency. And if you do all of the required things that give you these currencies, I know that this is kind of understanding of currencies a bit unusual, but if you just bear with me for a moment, the flow of education throughout the institution of the university is structured in a way that then ends up with you receiving that final kind of token of appreciation or reputation, which then you can't transact, for example, right? It's something that you can acquire that has value, distinct value, but it's not transactable, but it's still a valuable thing. And so we need to see this notion of currency much broader as kind of a formal symbol system that shapes and enables flows of information and value throughout a collective. With that kind of more esoteric understanding of currency in mind, when you then apply this to the agent-centric architectures, you see that these currencies are not these kind of tokens independent of any particular person, but they're implemented in a different way. Cryptocurrencies in these agent-centric architectures are implemented as mutual credit cryptocurrencies. So in a mutual credit currency, regardless of whether it's crypto or not, what happens is the entire balance in the system is always zero. It's basically just an accounting system for all the participants to always equal out. Like if you have a business, you always want to have the same amount of credit to debit, so you always have these cancelling and other things. What these agent-centric architectures achieve is to generalize this kind of system to an entire network of people who might not even share company or other kind of group boundaries other than being users of that system and whenever one person has a positive account, another person has a negative account. This is kind of the way that you implement currencies in agent-centric architectures and it enables a whole range of use cases that in the blockchain paradigm are not possible simply because these tokens are kind of so expensive to account for, to account for their movement between different accounts that the mere computation required to account for them is more expensive than the actual transaction value itself. And so if you want to have broad-based acceptance of cryptocurrencies, you need to have a way to kind of batch microtransactions over time and then just clear them whenever they reach a kind of value that clears, like is high enough to make that worth the effort of the network. And then if you achieve that, you need one more thing to actually have a broad-based acceptance of cryptocurrencies which is an ability to blacklist bad actors from the network. And once you have those components, you can actually achieve a cryptocurrency at scale that kind of fulfills the original vision of Bitcoin and other currencies and a true digital cash that is independent of control that you can transact with anybody at any size of amount and that is kind of uncontrollable by a central medium and that doesn't require you to do some fancy stuff with technology or have unlimited hard drive space available. Yes, thank you Moritz. By the way, Denora Delphine in the comments has stated that your thoughts on the subject are brilliant so you are getting some audience approval here. Now, it's interesting because the ideas you mentioned having a clearing house essentially to batch transactions and clear multiple transactions at the same time as well as the ability to keep out bad actors is essentially what banks do today except banks are fraught with other problems being essentially intermediaries in a position of power that have the ability to game the system and the political rules in their favor. But if those functions can be addressed in perhaps a decentralized manner that doesn't create these kinds of issues. Right, right. Then that would definitely be quite a promising innovation. Now, I think all of the comments made thus far are a good bridge to my next question. And the premise of the question is this. I think it has been mentioned already that Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency. It is the best known cryptocurrency to the general public as a result on exchanges, especially between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies. Bitcoin commands the highest exchange rate thus far. That exchange rate has experienced extreme volatility unlike perhaps anything else that the world has yet seen. And the question that I have is, are the people who are currently investing or speculating in Bitcoin going to be sorely disappointed because some of them may think Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency or the strongest cryptocurrency, but in reality might it just be the first and best known one that is going to be superseded by something else fairly soon. And the people who put in tens of thousands of dollars and some who imprudently say took out mortgages to purchase Bitcoin are going to be, let's say, left with very little or nothing. What do you think in terms of the next few years and how this will play out? I think Bitcoin definitely is, you know, they do have the first mover effect. And they are the most popular, but as time goes by and more miners or especially mining farms getting to the space, it's going to become more difficult and more resource utilization, especially in terms of power. When you consider Bitcoin is using more power than a portion of countries, it's pretty insane. And the problem with that is as it gets more difficult, it requires more resources to be able to mine Bitcoin as well. So again, it becomes very cost prohibitive. And if it gets to the point where it gets really difficult to mine Bitcoin, what that means is that it slows down the blockchain. And if the miners don't mind what happens is the problem with that is that the transactions don't move, the blockchains don't move. And I think that's one of the major problems and that's why we're seeing lots of delays. Plus the other thing is the block size. So one thing that the proof of stake has been, you know, that has addressed is basically more it's actually touched on an interesting topic in terms of microtransactions. You know, the problem with Bitcoin today is that it's very expensive and when it gets very difficult, the miners takes longer to find a block. And what that means is that it also slows down, you know, the blockchain where the proof of stake concept kind of resolves that because the blockchain will always continue to move regardless. And that's really the nice thing. So it's pretty frictionless when that is concerned. However, it, you know, currently is not the solution. However, it does offer a cheaper and more fluid alternative in that regard. So in the future, obviously, you know, the technology will continue to develop and continue to exchange to change. And right now, I think the most exciting part about crypto is how it relates to the individual or group and how it applies to them. Once they look beyond the, you know, of just financial aspect of the technology, I think that is where the exciting part begins. You know, where, for example, more it's talked about currency. And currency is, you know, just a form of value that is greed between two parties or more. So what, for example, let's say the hyperchain technology that's currently being worked on for the hypersteak is that currency could be anything. It could be beans. It could be, you know, cabbages. It could be that applies to the specific to the individual or the group or the two or more parties. And I think that's the exciting part about, you know, what's going forward in the future is it's no longer about one currency or, you know, or the US dollar or any fiat currency, but something that is applicable to the individual or group that is participating within those groups. And I think that's where the really exciting part is, because it's no longer a few currency but multitude of currency that is applicable to, you know, the different parties. Interesting. So Chanta, building off of that, let's say that there is a desire within the cryptocurrency community to, let's say, help out those who invested in Bitcoin and participated in that network, even though, let's say, at some future date it has determined Bitcoin was a stepping stone. It's obsolete. It should be superseded, but we don't want the people who contributed to that system to lose fortunes as a result of that evolution. So could they potentially use Bitcoins the way they would use beans or US dollars or any other medium of exchange on a hyperchain or some future evolution of the blockchain so that all of that investment isn't lost. There's still some recognition that some effort went into it and that it may still have some value. What do you think of that possibility? In regards to the value and retaining that value is really up to the, it's a matter of confidence. It's really up to the community. For example, the Bitcoin community. If they feel that Bitcoin is no longer viable and there's other alternative, then, you know, then there's a good chance that people will flock to other available technologies or tools. You know, just like the same thing happens in the currency space of, you know, let's say the fiat system and that happens on a daily basis where, you know, if one currency is starting to devalue, obviously they'll go into something else and we're starting to already see that where, you know, obviously where the current traditional currency system will continue to devalue and that is one of the reasons why a lot of people are flocking into Bitcoin because, you know, it is somewhat deflationary in that regard. So, and plus, you know, it's limited. But however, you know, there are billions of people in the world with very limited supply. But as far as, you know, retaining the value, that is really dependent on the confidence of what the community believes that value is. You know, will they flock to other technologies? I think at some point we, you know, we're definitely seeing that. You know, there's definitely thousands of alternative out there. And as far as a hyperstake, it's only one of the alternatives. But I think the important thing is to see many, many projects out there that is making, that is paving the way for newer technologies and newer approaches for the solution. And obviously there's no one solution, you know, to really address, you know, the current situation that you've mentioned. Yes. Thank you, Chanta. And now, Lawrence, what are your thoughts about Bitcoin and its future, whether it is already the cryptocurrency of the past or whether it might have a future and if it does, and what form that would be? Well, what I think is that Bitcoin, as mentioned previously, has indeed a first move for advantage. And because of that, I think it's Bitcoin has become like the public face of blockchain and cryptocurrencies in general. What you've seen in 2017 is that far more people, not even the hardcore cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but also the more common investors have become increasingly attracted to the whole concept of cryptocurrencies, like, oh, I've seen in the news that Bitcoin has gone up from $1,000 to $3,000 in the past few months, so they all wanted to jump in. And, well, obviously the most well-known cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, of course. But, yeah, since Bitcoin was the first, that, of course, doesn't make it the best cryptocurrency on the long run. It has been the most well-known, of course, it was also introduced even at Wall Street, where they offered future options to invest in. But I wouldn't necessarily say that Bitcoin has already practically dead. I think it still has some future, but I think that within, my guess would be that within two, maybe three years, Bitcoin will not have the largest market cap anymore, and I think that it will most likely be superseded by Ethereum or probably IOTA in first place. All right, thank you, Lawrence. And, Moritz, what are your thoughts with regard to the future of Bitcoin, as well as any of the other cryptocurrencies that have been mentioned? Let's bring Ethereum into this discussion, as well, since it is an evolution of the cryptocurrency concept in the sense that it enables more than just singular transactions. It enables the creation of smart contracts, for instance, or even decentralized autonomous organizations. So, what are your thoughts in that regard? So, with regards to Bitcoin, I kind of have two perspectives. At the same time, incredibly optimistic about Bitcoin and incredibly pessimistic. And that might sound weird, but it's because of two reasons. One, I'm incredibly optimistic because it has and still does have a huge community of very smart people trying to work out problems that the technology has. I myself, however, am pessimistic that they will be able to solve those problems simply because the architectural choices from the very beginning prevent it from competing with these new generation technologies that take a very different kind of fundamental technological approach that don't have those same problems that the blockchain has. Now, Bitcoin will continue to matter for a year or two or several even until it runs into the energy problem that it's just the energy necessary to continue the network itself until it will exceed the value of the Bitcoins generated at the margins for the miners. And so the whole network will come to a halt unless they find some other way to either decrease that cost or to increase the value of those Bitcoins or to some other way lighten the load on the entire network. With regards to crypto currents in general and other systems, now Ethereum is an interesting system. It also has the most potential after Bitcoin to become even more used and accepted. It already has the largest developer community. It has the largest number of nodes. It has the most acceptance from existing institutions like the old corporate world as well as governmental bodies. So it definitely has those network advantages. But again, it also has, in my perspective, although of course there are others, the fatal flaw of being a blockchain-based system and until they find a way to scale that, I'm pessimistic that they will be able to have that thing survive, especially once these new technologies do get going and actually kind of come into their own. And so that is going to happen very quickly. So the problem, even though they have these huge network effects, and remember they got these network effects because they were very beginning, were able to gather up people from other systems where they were dissatisfied and thus gather them around them, I think we need to think about these systems in terms of evolutionary capacity and learning capacity in the way that blockchain-based systems, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever they are, they don't have an in-built governance layer, meaning that they might have some rough governance mechanisms, so rough and so poorly steerable, let's say, that they are unable to adapt to new information quickly enough, especially if the new ones are able to do that and are even less expensive and faster and have higher throughput, all of that. So I think that's the future of the cryptocurrencies, that the shift will occur from token-based cryptocurrencies to these agent-centric, mutual credit cryptocurrencies, and they will just slowly and maybe at an accelerating rate eclipse the old ones, and I hope that there's a way to give the people who bought into Bitcoin a way out, let's say, but for any way out, there has to be somebody else who accepts them, so it's hard to find a way that everybody walks away from this unscathed. I just want to make one last thing clear. I'm by no means an opponent to Bitcoin's success. I would like nothing more than for Bitcoin or Ethereum or all of these other systems to succeed. I just cannot from a professional perspective recommend anybody or tell them that this is the case from my understanding and that they will actually be safe investments, and so I have personally recommended to my friends and family at some point to get into this and to be part of this just to understand as well, but never more than they are able to lose and kind of see that something new but not something that they should put their savings in. So people who put up mortgages for this, I'm incredibly sorry, but you should not, if you try to find a way to get out of this or to play with it and not bet the house on it. I would say if you would look at the top three technologies that would supersede Bitcoin or Ethereum, what would they be? What would you say from a professional point of view that are the best competitors? So right now those are the ones that are currently already existing are Hashgraph, which kind of takes the blockchain idea, kind of adds another dimension or kind of expands it. Then there is BitLattice, which is an experimental project, which I have no BitLattice, which is an experimental project. It's a bit like Bitcoin and then Lattice, like L-A-T-T-I-C-E, which is an experimental project, which I have no ability purely from a mathematical and technical perspective to evaluate properties. So I leave that up to other smarter people than myself, but it definitely introduces very interesting concepts about Lattice around Lattice-based cryptography, not elliptic cryptography. And so that solves some problems. IOTI cannot recommend because it has security problems, and it seems like the smartest people that I know think of it as a laughing stock, basically. And then Hashgraph I already mentioned, but this is proprietary, so it's not an open-source project, so I'm more for open-source things. I hope that this will also succeed, but I can't say it's the solution. And then the thing that I think, like that I personally am invested in emotionally and, let's say, time-wise, and not money-wise so far, except for supporting the crowdfunding they've done, is Holochain. Holochain is not a cryptocurrency. It is not a network, a platform. It is a technology. And what that means is that if you want to build a currency application with Holochain, you can do that. So it's a blockchain competitor in that sense that does intrinsic data integrity through agent-centric computing and using these technologies that I already outlined. And I think with their designs, which are inherently kind of built around biologically-inspired processes, processes that work in nature, that actually scale and that don't hit diminishing economies of scale early, they're actually able to pull off the original vision of Bitcoin, which was to have that kind of digital cash, but that now has kind of been scoped down to a digital gold, and I fear in the future will be kind of digital plastic or digital notes, and those are not very valuable as we know. Yes, indeed. So I am actually curious, and this is derivative off of Damien's question as well. There was a time period when one could mine Bitcoin using one's personal computer around 2009 to 2011. If one got into that system back in 2009, one could potentially obtain tens of thousands of Bitcoins, and if one just held on to them and sold them during the last boom, one would have become a multi-millionaire to say the least. So that was quite an interesting opportunity in the sense that one could obtain large holdings of a cryptocurrency without sacrificing much of anything, essentially. One just had to have a personal computer and make the decision to mine, and one didn't have to become a spectator, the people who entered the Bitcoin markets later on and bet the house on purchasing Bitcoins when the exchange rate was several thousand or 10,000 or 15,000 US dollars per Bitcoin are essentially speculators. But do you think there would ever be an analogous opportunity in the future with regard to some of the blockchain successor technologies where an ordinary person could do something that doesn't involve a large upfront investment, but just by virtue of being in the system early, that person could gain significantly? Are you asking me or everybody? Everybody, but you're welcome to comment. No, I'll let the other ones go ahead first. Okay. Currently, you know, what I've been doing since 2014 is I've been giving away lots of hyperstake in order to introduce people to cryptocurrency and, you know, given the opportunity to see how it actually works. The nice thing about the hyperstake coin project is that just for the simple fact that you hold coins in the wallet, the wallet holder participates in securing the network and also verifying confirmed transactions. So every wallet pretty much does the same thing as what Bitcoin does with miners, just without, you know, the power resource requirement and without the expense of equipment. And when they do that, they are rewarded coins, you know, which is why it's called proof of stake, simply by holding the coins and that's rewarded directly into the wallet to be able to participate. So in that respect, it does give people a very low barrier of entry. You know, for some, obviously it doesn't cost anything because I've been giving tons of coins away and I still continue to do it, you know, until today and I will continue to do that in the future as well every day. And more, it's actually brought up a pretty important topic in terms of governance and that is something that the hyperstake coin project is going to introduce in the very near future along with the hyperchain. We're actually working on the white paper that will detail all the goodies of what's coming ahead in the first quarter or towards the end of the first quarter. And what happens is even Ethereum has realized they are having the same issues as with Bitcoin in terms of the mining efforts and the power requirements. And, you know, what Ethereum is looking at is they, you know, suggested that it's a possibility that they may go into, you know, switching over to the POS protocol or the proof of stake protocol. Hyperstake has been doing that since 2014 and, you know, with the governance system that's very important part of the core infrastructure because what that allows is, you know, imagine having a government without any biases of people. You know, you have a set rules and it's not discriminatory of anybody. It treats everybody the same as long as they participate in the network. And I think that's very, very important. So if we're looking at, you know, huge billion-dollar cryptos like, you know, the Ethereum platform, thinking of switching over to the POS protocol, that's a very, very important, I think, aspect of where things are looking to go. And I think, you know, their recognition of that is important to really be aware of. But again, it's not the only solutions out there. The technology will continue to evolve and that's happening at a very fast rate. Now, a lot of problem with a lot of projects out there is, you know, in terms of finding, it's how are those projects funded? And that's another thing that we're looking to address as well is going forward in the near future. The Hyperstake project is going to be self-funded from the network itself. So then the project will be able to continue to develop and, you know, continue its marketing and support efforts and whatnot. And that's going to be important for ongoing projects in the future, you know, regardless whether it's Hyperstake or any other projects out there. And I think that is one of the important parts that really decides, you know, whether a project is going to continue to evolve or not going forward in the future. Thank you, Chanta. And now, Lawrence, what are your thoughts about essentially what the post-Bitcoin future might look like, what technologies would predominate, as well as whether there are any technologies right now where there is a sufficiently low barrier to entry that ordinary people of ordinary means could participate without risking very much? Well, on that question, I don't really have a concrete answer right now, but I was thinking about the topic of mining that you mentioned previously. So if it's not a problem, I would like to add something on that part. Certainly. Okay. Well, what I've noticed lately is obviously the cost of mining and the energy consumption has become a problem, certainly for Bitcoin, but also for the other large cryptocurrencies. So what you've seen is that people have started to look at other ways that those coins can be mined. So what you've seen is that websites, some websites at least, have started offering people choices to either have them be shown ads, or instead of that, they can choose to not get any ads on their website, but instead of that, they offer their computer as a mining device while they're viewing websites. And that can be a large contribution where you're talking about a website with millions of users. Because that way, you essentially have a mining farm that's comprised out of a million computers that mine coins on a regular basis. Yes, indeed. So I think this is a good bridge into the next question that I have. And this will be my last question before we get into a lot of the audience questions and comments. But ultimately, the great promise of cryptocurrencies toward the end of the last decade was to enable consumer-oriented transactions to occur in such a way that would preserve value despite the evaluation of fiat currencies. So I always want to be comfortable in knowing that I can go out and buy a sandwich after having done a certain unit of work, let's say, that is suitable for enabling me to buy that sandwich. No matter what happens to geopolitics, to monetary policy, to fiscal policy, I want to be comfortable that if I've worked for it, if I've earned a certain number of units, I can always go out and buy that sandwich or buy that widget. And I know that there are millions of other people out there who are willing to sell me sandwiches and widgets based on what I have earned. That is essentially in a very layperson-oriented language the promise of cryptocurrencies early on. So far that promise unfortunately hasn't materialized in the sense that you cannot go to your corner store and purchase a sandwich with a Bitcoin in most places throughout the world or with any of the other altcoins. And another obstacle, of course, is a lot of the altcoins are not directly tradable for US dollars at present. On Coinbase, one can trade Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and now Bitcoin Cash for US dollars and for some other fiat currencies, but not all of the thousand plus other altcoins that are out there for which one has to go through a series of exchanges essentially to convert them to one of the major cryptocurrencies. So how can we get to that point where for a consumer seeking to use blockchain-based technologies or their successors in everyday transactions, this would actually be feasible, and this would be a safeguard against devaluation. I think currently, even though the technology of the blockchain and also crypto in general is decentralized, one of the problems that we're facing is that with decentralized technologies, when it comes to the financial aspect of it, you still have a centralized exchange. And with a centralized exchange, you still have that problem. But I think going forward, as people adopt, you mentioned being able to buy a sandwich with your Bitcoin. For me, it's just the fact that people have to be able to wrap their head around a different form of currency than what they know from the legal realm. That's what everybody knows. And plus crypto in general for a lot of people, it's difficult to get into or to get their foot in the door, so to speak, in regards to Bitcoin. So that is another reason why for me, I make it a mission to be able to introduce crypto and to educate people about crypto, not by saying, hey, you should invest in this, but to actually give it away. And for them to be able to experience that. And for me, you mentioned being able to buy a sandwich. For me, it really all comes down to the individual or group to say, hey, this is a new technology. This is something I can get behind of. And let me adopt this and let me, how can I apply this in my daily life to the things that I currently do? For example, my neighbor, I give hyperstate to my neighbor in exchange for a dinner. So that's kind of like my form of exchange. So I think that is like the difficult concept for a lot of people to wrap their head around is that money or the US dollar is not the only form of currency that could be used as a form of exchange. And I think once people start to get past that, then I think it'll be a lot easier. But I think right now it's still so early that the only thing that people see or recognize or that attract people to crypto in the first place is the financial gain aspect of it. And I think that is kind of like the con and the pro because the pro is that it gets people into crypto. But the con is they're not looking past just the financial aspect of it. And I think that is something that we have to overcome. And that's why I'm making it my mission to really everybody that I have contact with on a daily basis. It doesn't matter who they are. I'm going to introduce crypto to them, whether I have to give it to them or whether building a website like CryptoCity, I'm going to do it. And that's going to be a lifetime project for me. Well, if you're handing some out, I can always give you my address. Yeah, I mean, you know, just touch base with me and then anybody else that wants to get some hyper stake, I'll be more than happy to set that up for you. The only thing you need to do is you do need to download the hyper stake wallet from the site from crypto-city.com and once you do that, send me the address and I'll send you some coins. And that goes for anybody in the room. If you would want to give a lay person advice on how to get into hyper stake, what would you tell them? Download the wallet. There's video tutorials. There's, you know, a whole education system or section on CryptoCity that is specifically geared to educate people about crypto. And the thing is, you know, we'll get everybody started on it. You know, as far as looking at from a financial aspect, one thing we always want to try to do is educate people in terms of look beyond the money aspect of it. Look at what you could do as a participant and how you can help to evolve that infrastructure going forward and how it's going to affect you in your personal life. What can you do with it? With your local community and globally. And the great part about it is once you download a wallet, if you decide to accept a hyper stake for your goods and services and anybody could do that, you know, if you have a special set of skills, if you do consulting, if you do arts and craft, you can say, hey, instead of a US dollars, send me hyper stake instead. And that actually helps you to bring up an interesting topic and they're going to say, hey, what's hyper stake? And they, you know, and it basically helps you to introduce crypto where you're not forcing anything down their throat, but you're bringing up something which they'll find interesting. But the first thing you're doing is educating them about crypto rather than giving it to them as a financial vehicle. Yes, indeed. And I think it's quite noble that you seek to essentially introduce people to the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies, give them a little bit to start out, but primarily as a means of enabling them to be informed and to see the potential directly firsthand without becoming a speculator. So I do admire that. And if they hold the coins in the wallet and become a participant in the network, they actually get rewarded for securing the network or having their wallet online. So it becomes almost like, you know, there's a saying, you know, you become your own bank. Well, in return for participating in the network, you also get rewarded directly to your wallet over a period of time. And that continues to compound as well. So it's almost like, you know, your wallet is doing the mining just without the cost that is involved. And the more coins that you have, you know, as you continue to, you know, increase the amount of coins that you have, the better that, you know, the better that it becomes for you as a participant. But the really nice thing is that if you wanted to use strategy to increase because obviously there's going to be people that have more resources than you. You know, for example, somebody that has a million coins versus somebody has, you know, 10,000 or 100,000 coins. Obviously someone with a million coins is going to be able to use different strategies to try to maximize their returns within that network. You know, because it's almost like a competition. Every week, anybody that holds a coin automatically qualifies to participate to win rewards. And that's really the nice thing about it is it's incentivized for people to participate. And just for being a participant, you're not required to really have like a huge outlay to be able to get rewards in return. But it does require some, you know, for you to be able to learn about the network, learn about the system and how it works for you to benefit from it. And I think that's a really important aspect of that. So basically it's just getting people involved. That's really the first thing. And then over time, that will continue to evolve. And that's the other reason why we've, you know, or basically developing the governance system because it enables every wallet holder to become a participant to have a say in which direction the project goes. Or if they wanted to say, hey, you know, I want to do a conference or, you know, they want to change certain aspects of the network or aspects of the protocol, anybody could do that. They would simply submit it along with their stake. And I think that's really the exciting part of it because right now it's still an experiment. But if everybody has a part in that experiment and if there's a consensus on the network that says, hey, this particular individual has a great idea, let's do it. And then we do it, then it becomes a very interesting ongoing evolution of the network. Thank you, Chanta. Now Damien, any further questions that you would like to ask the panel? If I may, I would like to give my brief opinion on this as well. I'll keep it short. Oh, okay. Certainly. Because you asked everybody. So just a couple of points. So one, there's kind of this fallacy of money. We have an understanding of money because it has been traditionally state managed. And if you want to learn more about this, I really recommend the book debt 5,000 years by Graber, David Graber. We have this idea of money as something neutral, something that is kind of, it's just this universal thing that we deal with and we evaluate everything else in terms of money. It's kind of our feedback loop that allows us to learn how to act better, how to behave better because we measure it in money. But really, if you really want to think about this in a more, let's say nuanced way, you should think about it as targeted, something targeted. And if you don't know what the currency itself is targeted for, then somebody else does and they are the beneficiary and you're the sucker. So right now, the problem is that it's managed by states. States do have their own interests in mind through inflation. The average citizen loses their value of the currency that they do hold. And so the whole system is set up, targeted towards transferring value from member to side. So I'm sure most of you are familiar with libertarian and Austrian economics. And so that is a base understanding. Now, currencies should always have a kind of goal in mind. What are you trying to achieve? Is this something that achieves something specific for a community? Is it something you want for the community to grow as well with? Does it achieve something where it might not even be financial? I can give an example of a community currency, for example, that was non-financial nature, but had incredible impact. Let me interrupt you. I'm seeing a duality here. You're talking about Austrian economics, which is basically a very organic way of economics, a very bottom up approach. But at the same time, you're talking about a goal that the currency has. What's the problem here? Well, if you're designing a currency with a specific goal, that sounds to me like you're trying to control what's going to happen, right? Well, it depends who does the designing and who accepts it. If you're talking about a government where they're inspected by force, asking you or actually requiring you to use it to pay your taxes and to accept it as legal tender, then you don't have a choice about using it. You do have. You can try to avoid using money, but it's really hard to do that. Targeted currencies and community currencies are a subject that has been growing in interest for years. We're basically a community which can be defined any which way. It usually is a local community. I can do local council or a local even citizen effort or a club that decides to try to instantiate the values they hold in a specific symbolic framework, which can be a digital or physical object or a combination of those two to achieve the effort, to value the build dynamics inside that system and maybe for it to grow. So there is the Bristol Pound, there is local monies in Germany and other countries, etc. But I don't want to get bogged down in this, so there is definitely the way to target currencies. I just want to make the point. Go ahead. I do have a question, another question on the whole proof of state thing. I mean if you look trying to encourage people to participate by giving them an interest on their holdings. On the other hand if you have such a currency in place as a global currency that would be used, let's say in a hypothetical world where crypto has overtaken fiat and we are working with such a system. How do we get the problem that people become very adverse to spending and essentially hog money because that means it will make them more instead of pumping back into the economy? I'm not going to argue that point because it's not a point I'm making. I'm just explaining to you how currencies can work that are not monies or that can fulfill the function of money. What you're talking about is basically the problem of deflation on problem. It's made to be a devil in Keynesian economics because it seems to make the money not flow, but this is exactly the problem that community currencies solve because they instantiate local economies that actually transfer value between participants in a network that exists based on existing relationships so existing business ties in a local economy. Today in the globalized world can actually be a community that doesn't even have to be locally arranged but arranged about any specific thing like a sharing community of information or it can be a social network or whatever. But I just want to make the last point that if we want to transition to a truly cryptocurrency based economy and we want it to be used virtually everywhere what we need to do is we need to make it as easy to use as possible even to the point where people who use it are not even aware that they're using a cryptocurrency. So the problem that I have with a lot of the crypto community is that they have these utopian visions where everybody has their wallet on their phone and has 10 different wallets for 10 different currencies and this techno can I finish the point this techno utopian we need to make simple applications that obscure the technical workings behind it and are just easy to use it's as easy to use as sending an email that's one point. I completely agree with that. One of the things that I'm thinking about with cryptocurrency we need some sort of application or some sort of system that basically Apple buys cryptocurrency it needs to become idiot proof you know Yes, we'll see who achieves that but it's not something we can really make a point about. Just the thing I wanted to finish it with is that we need to build strong local economies around existing communities communities that have shared values that are trying to achieve certain goals and then how we achieve the universal application of cryptocurrencies is making them easily translatable or switchable between those different community based currencies that's what will actually get us going there because these global approaches they don't have existing communities they don't have an ability to actually form a community that has form a governance mechanism for achieving certain goals it's trying to achieve and so it isn't actually a community I even think that Bitcoin itself is not a community because it doesn't have formal ways of influencing the network to change governance but anyways that's all I wanted to say and I think we want to take some questions from the audience now All right Yes, so these are certainly important discussions to have and I did want to fit in some audience questions and Damien feel free to also weigh in on them so Lucas de Moveo writes in an interview on London Real Andreas Antonopoulos mentioned that one of the secondary effects of blockchain technology is that it can allow for ownership of capital without personhood for instance, machines as vendors, operators and business owners and of course this relates to the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization that doesn't have to have management that doesn't have to have people continually speaking its policies and can have say self executing contracts so Lucas asks how do you think this will affect our understanding of artificial intelligence even if it is narrow AI would anyone like to weigh in on that? Yeah, I mean that's a really interesting topic because this is only just the beginning I mean we're not even it's insane just me thinking about the future that's where the internet of things come into play and that's where the hyper chain is going to be an interesting interesting topic because machine the machine and totally autonomous transactions for example your refrigerator being able to order food when it runs out or taxis paying for another services lots of venues could be had in this space and as far as going forward in the future it's kind of like we're going to be looking at an economy of choice everything is going to be decentralized it's no longer a particular currency so basically everything will revolve around the particular individual of what they want to participate in but in terms of the of machine the machine I think that we're going to see an increase of that like for the blockchain technology or even other cryptos even with the hyper chain for example you'll be able to monitor your health through the system you'll be able to let's say monitor your house keeping your information in terms of your health records anything is possible and that's really the nice thing about games, videos anything you can really think of I'd like to weigh in on this specifically regarding our understanding of AI what you've seen lately is that AI is each year is capable of performing more and more tasks that humans are also capable to do of course it's first started with AI beating people at chess and eventually beating humans at the game of Go which is one of the most complex board games in existence and what I've noticed the past year is that applications of AI are targeted to become a bit more human such as using AI to control the movements of a robot in order to make them move more human like and I think that the same concept can also be found in application of AI within the blockchain technology and especially when it comes to ownership of capital and such that AI will become significant players on those markets and that's from the outside the distinguish how can I say this the difference between AI and artificial intelligence and normal humans the difference will not be that big anymore so the division between those two will sort of become a gray area so I think that is what will change our understanding of AI that they're not to be considered just machines or just algorithms anymore but just as humans can be large players on the market and even on the economic market thank you Lawrence, now Damien what are your thoughts? Yes, well I sadly have to leave you above now and as we see technologies evolve we also see cryptocurrency evolving with them such as technologies in computer science and related issues and well basically it's a very exciting time to be alive the future isn't what it used to be and I would say I'm very thankful for your insights I'm looking forward to seeing the next thing on crypto emerge I've learned a lot today I'm interested about what's going to happen with Hashgraph and Holochain I will definitely stay in touch with everyone and I hope you have a good final part of the debate after this Alright, thank you Damien and we appreciate it having you as well it is unfortunate that you have to leave early but I will take it from here and we will continue with audience questions Moritz, before we move on to the next question do you have any thoughts about how AI might be connected to future applications of blockchain technology or agent-centric computing or any successors to blockchain technology Sure I actually think that the notion of AI becoming an agent of its own is a delusion I think that the current understanding of AI as this kind of alive being is something that we where we apply the concept of God technology that cannot sustain itself outside of a context of human technology and us keeping that stuff alive I think it's also based on understanding a faulty understanding of how intelligence actually works because if you look at how intelligence works and how the debate has been progressing is that the idea of go-fi or good old fashioned AI as the idea where you build a model then you execute an action and then you see what happens that's kind of the idea of AI that most people use is wrong and is a faulty understanding of intelligence. The actual way that intelligence works is as an embodied process and Rodney Brooks actually in the 70s talked about this already back then and I think it should have worked its way by now through the artificial intelligence community or even the transhumanist community and understanding that intelligence works by subsuming individual modules that do very specific tasks into a hierarchy where feedback loops between the individual modules make it work together and where the sensing and the response happens at very short time scales through the networking of these different architectural different modules and one more context that kind of gives better understanding of this is that the AI model that we use today or most of us use today is based on this idea of absolute truth or of an absolute view on data if you understand where actually AI currently is coming from and where the machine learning revolution that we're seeing is coming from it's from the client server based model of the internet where we've been able to amass lots and lots of data on servers that can then be mined and analyzed and kind of learned from build up models and then analyze other things that seem to be like that that's where our current understanding of AI comes from Yes, go ahead That is not totally through the current bleeding edge applications of AI are not based on just artificial intelligence or let me just call them by their names A&Ns, they are not just trained on specific data sets that you feed into them and train them or to mimic the same results that data sets ought to train them to produce I understand that deep learning algorithms that they are they can learn by themselves, they don't need training data, I understand that this is something that is developed and that's happening I'm more talking about and it's a good point, you're making a good point I'm more talking about that AI, the current understanding at least as far as I understand is coming from this rationalistic assumption that there is an absolute truth or an absolute view on reality and that that can be modeled and learned from and then to have this compounding effect of intelligence feeding on itself to become ever smarter and it's kind of the singularity idea that is so popular among people like you like myself because it gives us this thing to look forward to but I think it comes from a wrong notion of how intelligence works and if you actually look towards nature and how intelligence works in nature it's an embodied process, it's a process that takes advantage of individual modules like in a body there's no CEO cell there's no cell that kind of learns the model then tells all the other cells how to do things it's a assumption architecture that uses individual co-hearing units of agency at lower levels to build up ever higher levels of agency on top and so that's how it's happening with AI right now as well what we're doing right now is we're building AI as a cognitive extension of our own minds and also of our collective minds to have faster and faster feedback loops to assist us in navigating reality but they will not become I don't think at least that they will become this separate thing that can sustain itself outside of us at least not until very far into the future I'm pretty convinced actually that we'll see something like that happen and I'm not specifically talking about the full realization of general artificial intelligence but certainly some form of actual human-like intelligence to emerge in the next 2 to 5 years maximum I'm pretty convinced based on every development that I've seen in the past few years because obviously every AI researcher has also acknowledged the problems with AI itself trying to mimic intelligence without it actually being a form of intelligence so they're doing their best $1000 if that's the case so this is a $1000 alright I can give you my no problem I think as far as AI a lot of the current technology that we have I mean it's still a long ways before we have completely autonomous AI because currently a lot of the technology is out there a lot of things out there lack sensors and I think as more sensors continue to be developed and more is added on to machines then you have machines that become aware once we get to that point then more information is shared between those machines and obviously that will continue to grow in functionality just like for example you have an ant a single ant doesn't really do anything particularly interesting but once you have a whole army of ants or colony of ants they begin to do they're able to execute complex operations and I think at this stage we're at the single ant stage I think over time we'll continue to see the complex in operation continue to multiply and go ahead that is a bit how I will see the emergence of the first actually truly intelligent AI to emerge and then I'm specifically talking about the whole concept of emergence where a lot of small entities which are not that intelligent on their own or that all have their own simplistic tasks when they work together following certain rules then the behavior that emerges from that system as a whole is a lot more intelligent than just the sum of all those parts apart and I think the same concept can also be applied to artificial intelligence and that is why I find it to be I personally expect some application of that to be developed in the next two to five years yes this is indeed quite an interesting discussion and I would recommend for all of the panelists as well as all of those watching the discussion to explore the US transhumanist parties discussion panel on artificial intelligence which took place in January of 2017 as well as the subsequent panel on AI and automation at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in July of 2017 because a lot of these issues were explored in those panels as well including the question of artificial general intelligence and could there be an AI that transcends domain specific tasks that can jump across domains and learn multiple kinds of skills like driving a car and playing chess and discussing philosophy with you in a manner that appears to be plausible like you were conversing about it amongst yourselves so this is definitely a fascinating subject and one that we could certainly discuss for hours longer I wanted to address a few other questions while we have time in the panel Lilliam Carlson asks do you think the implementation of a crypto UBI a universal basic income is possible or would be efficient and I think this is an important question to address because the US transhumanist party does support a universal unconditional basic income as part of its platform and one of the promises that cryptocurrencies pose is that this UBI does not need to be governmental in nature it could be agreed upon by a sufficiently large community that people who participate within it or perhaps as many people as possible should have some sort of income floor to facilitate a decent standard of living how feasible do you think that is in the nearer term and if it is feasible what would be the best way to achieve it that's actually a very interesting topic of mine not in particular not specifically towards some basic income but I always tend to think of things in terms of resource where do those resources come from because you have to have it has come from somewhere to begin with and I think that's one of the issues that a lot of people don't really tackle to start with when they say basic income so I'd rather think of it rather than basic income to think of it as a resource based interesting so how would that differ in terms of the basis for deriving the resource income and allocating it to people well I think the important part is it's really just getting over that mental hump to start with just for people to wrap their head around a resource based economy where let's say for example no income is needed to start with let's say food production currently we have to go to the store we have to exchange a form of income or currency for another currency which is food what if all of that was eliminated everything the entire economy was based on what resources are actually available and how do people have access to those resources whether it's books whether it's vehicles so you really have to change the whole concept of exchanging one currency for another so it's just like a different concept that is really hard for people to wrap their head around and I think a lot of the problems that we face today are a problem with the way that we think in terms of is this possible is this feasible well the technology exists today but the problem is are we as a society willing to go forward and create this type of economy and I think that is one of the major stopping points of realizing this type of future because realistically if you have resources out there and if no one was specifically just saying hey I want to make a lot of money and I'm going to acquire all of these resources well what if that wasn't a problem anymore and instead of people trying to hoard resources you have a internet system that is non-bias let's say that is rule base machine base where there is no individual that decides to say hey this particular group has access to this or that particular group has access to that where you have an economy where as a whole everybody works together in terms of assessing how much resources do we have applied and a lot of the mechanism in terms of production is done through machines this is interesting this is interesting because ultimately the reason for money the reason for any sort of allocation of resources to begin with is that resources are scarce at least many of them are if they are not scarce for instance on planet earth there is no need for a system of currency to decide who gets what or any other sort of governance mechanism people can just breathe for free likewise in a lot of places drinking water is like that email is like that now so it doesn't have to be a raw resource of nature potentially technology can advance to the point where it is sufficiently inexpensive to produce that it could be made available without requiring a monetary payment a lot of information on the internet is like that even art and music in digital format is often given away for free this panel recording is given away for free nobody has to pay money in order to listen to it so it seems to me that the technological capabilities and the material resources that support a particular good or service are ultimately what determine how readily it can be allocated the question is do we have systems in place monetary systems or otherwise that can then allocate those goods or services without introducing additional frictions or incentive problems of their own so I'll open it up to Moritz and Lawrence to discuss this further and give any of their thoughts about universal basic income whether cryptocurrencies or other related technologies can be used to facilitate it well I can add a bit more but I'm not quite sure if that will involve cryptocurrencies but regarding basic income as a whole I think that we should start at another point where we're talking about not basic income but let's say a basic provision of food for everyone in the world like solving the actual problem of hunger I think that is one of the things that can actually be accomplished in a relatively short time span for example let's see let's look about how food is grown currently you have farmers, you have machines a lot of all those things have already been automated but not everything and if you also look at 3D printers there are 3D printers that are basically able to automate themselves they can print the parts that they are comprised of the only thing that's lacking is a robot that is able to assemble those parts together if such a robot is also able to be 3D printed then you have a fully self replicating system in place if you extend that to also have the capabilities to produce whether they be small or large it doesn't really matter because they are self replicating if you have self replicating harvesting machines then you can fully automate the process of harvesting so I see it pretty viable in the near future to have the entire food production sector to be fully automated I think that will be one of the biggest steps towards basic a universal basic income thank you Lawrence now Moritz do you have any thoughts to add to this particular conversation I do so for one I am not a believer in the universal basic income for the simple reason that I find it to be a dangerous game in the sense that it takes skin in the game away from the lowest level or from the highest or from the level where the agency is at and kind of gives the government or whatever other system this provides this universal basic income a level of control over the people who receive it that I wouldn't want anybody to have if everybody gets food from a single source or from a specific source then they are beholden to that source and whatever it wants if it takes away that income again I would rather have a decentralized and actually distributed provisioning of food in the way or income in the way that people actually exchange value for value and that's been going on forever we just need to find better ways to actually sustain everybody and have people basically adopt better governance systems, better technology and better social better culture basically to be able to do that not have children that's actually not a good idea to do so have children when it is so there are so many other considerations here then just oh we have resources and we just need to distribute them better to take into account now if you were to actually try to implement something like this I would recommend trying to do it on a small scale and then seeing it grow and then if you're able to do that great for you go ahead and do it but I'm not sure it's great to introduce it on a large scale especially since it hasn't been proven to work without fault at small scales before it has merited some interesting results but it hasn't been clear cut either way that being said at the current moment we already have basic income it's just split across different services at least in the US you have food stamps you have social security you have many different systems that are providing a sort of basic income unfortunately the bureaucratic cost of that is so high that the large bulk of the money is not actually going towards the people who are requesting and requiring it but rather to the bureaucracy that is making it work so I would be in favor of kind of streamlining that I'm not sure it would look like a universal basic income basically what we need is better accounting at all levels accounting for how value flows throughout entire system and that can only be achieved by one making people better educated better able to assess value both the one that they receive and the one that they give to others and to act better in a sense and we need to be very mindful of whose skin is in the game whenever something like this gets instituted and that it should not be taken away from the lowest levels so I'm sure that most of you are familiar with Taleb and that if you have a central distribution of anything when that system fails you have huge catastrophe and so I would rather see every single small system fail before it gets large rather than have a catastrophe on our hands that we can't resolve in a good way so that's my thoughts I just wanted to add that I did that I just proposed or the scenario if you want to call it that necessarily designed to be a centralized system it could just as well be a decentralized system because obviously that's far less prone to fail from my understanding the way that you described it and maybe even with some modifications it wouldn't work in the sense that you were saying that it's a self-replicating system but you need to have the resources to build those robots out of robots you're not building robots out of robots you're building robots out of robots plus the raw materials that are required to make additional robots and so that flow of resource has to also be generated and sustained over time and for that you need humans to make it flow towards those ends like there's a whole lot of other infrastructure that is being left out in kind of what you're doing is you're combining just the idea of self-replicating robots and then trying to apply it everywhere but it doesn't work like that in my understanding of how value and resources flow through our entire ecology of interrelated parts and the marginal incentives that are necessary to actually sustain that entire infrastructure for the individual agents in the system to actually do the work that is necessary to sustain it I'm fully aware that there are a lot of sub-problems that also need to be tackled and sorted for something like that would even be remotely viable I was just talking about what I thought would be if use of an old basic income would be something in the future that this would be one of the easiest way to get to some point such a point but I'm more than aware that there are at least 50 other problems that need to be solved we do our field work that's possible I do remember one more thing I wanted to add which is that there is one system that I'm pretty confident has some merit that is Johan Nigren's tax seams I'm not sure whether you've heard of it he actually wrote for I think was the institute of exponential technologies or something like that I'm sure you've heard of that before they are pretty prolific online it's called tax seams in the sense it's a combination of taxation and memes and what it's about is basically having pathways of value transfer in an economy be kind of taxed at every transaction through basically like a replicating algorithm that says ok for this transaction a small part of it is going towards this kind of tool that gets distributed to all of the people or to the people who require it so it's a kind of decentralized non-central system of taxation where there's no force behind it but rather opt in businesses or other kind of players to say ok I want to be a part of the system I will support the system and so it's based on marginal incentives for people to basically gain status from doing so and that's I think what has some viable what has some merit I think that's a very interesting concept I'm not that big of a proponent of taxes in general but if anything it sounds like a better concept than centrally regulated form of taxation as it currently stands yes and this again would be quite a fascinating discussion to continue I am even thinking at some point of hosting a US transhumanist party discussion panel on universal basic income I think some of the cautions you expressed Moritz are appropriate I recall during the late Roman Empire in order to curry favor with the urban populace in Italy Roman emperors and various generals would engage in the policy of essentially bread and circuses giving away free food to the masses and treating them to lavish spectacles in exchange for support but that could only last for as long as the resource base was there outside of Italy to produce that food, ship it to Rome and distribute it there and once the Roman Empire began having problems because it was overextended and being chipped away at its edges the ability to provide that food became less reliable the masses rioted over through a succession of emperors eventually the whole system collapsed and people fled in mass from the cities back to a more agricultural feudal kind of lifestyle and certainly we wouldn't want to have these kinds of failure points on the other hand if it can be done in a decentralized fashion without putting any entity in an extremely powerful position to be the arbiter of the fates of the recipients I think that would be promising now in terms of how it is being implemented right now it is not through a top-down scheme there are various pilot projects by smaller national governments for instance in Finland or certain localities provincial governments in other countries I believe some Canadian jurisdictions are trying it why Combinator in the Bay Area is trying a small scale UBI experiment I think it's going to have several thousand recipients so probably de facto we're going to have multiple pilot projects each with a fairly small reach but there would be data from them and an improved understanding derived from essentially the results so with regard to our panel it was interesting because I thought we would have plenty to discuss over the course of two hours and it feels to me that we are kind of only beginning to scratch the surface of some of these issues but nonetheless I recognize that we are past the two-hour mark so I wanted to give each of you the option to offer closing statements and those closing statements can relate to anything that has been said thus far or any of the questions or comments that you see in the YouTube chat and hopefully again this is not the end of the discussion this is just the beginning and in other venues and other ways these conversations can continue so Lawrence let's hear your closing statement well I think the fact that as you mentioned that we probably barely scratch the surface during this two-hour talk perfectly reflects the potential that blockchain technology has I mean two hours are it's just not enough time to have a decent discussion on the whole topic of blockchain technology because it's just so so big so yeah do I have any for closing remarks on that part I don't think so I would suggest that we follow up with another panel discussion within the coming time to perhaps narrow the discussion down to a specific sub problem within the blockchain technology or one specific technology that we want to discuss about because blockchain as a whole is just sometimes a bit too big of a topic to tackle just at once yes and I would certainly be open to another panel if we can perhaps after this conversation formulate some potential areas of focus and invite some other panelists too to participate at a later date that would be great so Chanta what are your closing remarks well it's I'm very excited about going forward in terms of because currently we live in a centralized economy or centralized authority and going forward in the future what we're seeing or seeing right now at least in the crypto space a lot of things are being decentralized and that's very exciting because it's going to become a economy of choice rather than being pigeon-holed into a single economy that you have to participate in and I think that's very exciting and I think it's going to be a great opportunity to utilize everything and one of the things that I've been working on in the past is I spent two years working on food production in a room where I was growing fish, fruits, vegetables in-house for two years doing research and development into as well and it is very possible and very efficient and I think being able to do that plus the crypto that opens up a lot of doors for people and hopefully we see a lot more people getting involved absolutely I think these technologies would benefit greatly from more widespread participation one of the themes that I have observed throughout this conversation is the need for a community of adopters and users of any technology because ultimately currency as a medium of exchange requires people to use it as would any other functionalities for instance with regard to smart contracts you need people to engage in smart contracts you need people as participants in any economic transaction so how to build communities around these technologies and how to ensure that the best technologies are going to be the ones that have the strongest communities behind them will certainly be important challenges for the future so Moritz what are your closing remarks for this panel basically I would just like to recommend to everybody who was interested in the topics and the subjects that I have breached to go to my Facebook page you can add me happy to have more conversation I also just recently actually yesterday a night uploaded a talk that I gave at a meetup on exactly that kind of subject titled a short history of computing and its next paradigm agent centric architectures and in it I go more into how these technologies actually work what they can achieve etc and yeah I think that's basically it if you want to get in touch with me also to have more conversation do go to my own website moritzpeering.com and please check out the idea of tech scenes you can google it unfortunately I'm unable to post links into the chat on YouTube so you have to do it yourself and yeah I'm available for more questions more conversation and do hope this gets repeated sometime soon excellent thank you very much and I am going to work to create an archived version of the chat so that it will also be accessible after the panel this recording will remain available on the YouTube link and furthermore it will be posted to the US transhumanist party website thank you to all three of you Chanta Lawrence and moritz for sharing your insights today also thank you to Damian Zivkovich who unfortunately could not stay with us for the conclusion of the panel but nonetheless whose participation we have appreciated I think the breadth of comments offered today are indicative of the extent to which blockchain technologies and their successors are affecting economies financial transactions everyday life and stand to do so increasingly in the near future and as we continue to monitor this area we will on the one hand focus on specific subtopics of conversation on the other hand we should keep a lookout for emerging developments that may surprise us and may revolutionize this field even further so with that thank you very much to our panelists thank you very much to our audience I hope you all have a good day and we look forward to further discussions