 Hello everyone and welcome to the 2 o'clock to 2.30pm session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments too at OpenSimCC with the hashtag pound O-S-C-C-17. This session we are happy to introduce a terrific session called the launch of public beta grid phone service, providing secure avatar to avatar communications between platforms, first between Second Life and OpenSim, then High Fidelity, Unity 3D and Decentraland. Our speaker today is Mike Laurie. Mike Laurie is CEO of Galactic Systems Incorporated, creator of the grid phone. Mike has a long record in virtual reality as one of the top developers in Second Life over a decade ago and has been a vocal advocate for individual liberty and reality and the metaverse for even longer. He now teaches scripting and blender in Kitely and is an active merchant on the Kitely marketplace. Welcome all, let's begin the session. Thank you. Thank you everybody for coming. Some of you may remember this unsavory character here. That was me in Second Life circa 2007. It was AintLiver Brodigan and we started off like a lot of people in Second Life with spare change and that sort of thing. And grew rather rapidly and eventually became a good sized estate and we developed the first virtual stock exchanges. We were involved in building the capital markets in Second Life and financed a lot of other virtual businesses that other people wanted to raise capital for which included, among other things, central grid. And at the same time we were always pretty well strident in standing up for individual rights because a lot of us got into Second Life with the whole, it's your world sort of mantra. And when things started to change, some people left, some people pushed back and I was one of the people that pushed back. And just that's kind of my history. A lot of people that know my history in Second Life don't know much about me before Second Life. And so for instance, to cover some of that, in the 90s I was with a think tank in California called the Extraping Institute, which is a futurist organization that helped spawn a lot of the ideas around what we now call the transhumanist movement. Everything from AI and cryonics to augmented intelligence to longevity, so on and so forth. And in a lot of the discussions that we had, we were looking at a lot of the early digital currencies in the 90s like DigiCash and so forth. And they always seemed to fall into one of two traps. They would fall into the fiat trap, which was they would over-issue the currency just to pay their bills and destroy the value of their depositors' deposits. And the other trap was they would try to back it, their digital currency with gold and silver and the government would come along and say, well, we think maybe somebody might be using your currency to launder money or abet terrorism or drug smuggling. So we're going to take your gold and silver just for safekeeping. And we realized that having metal sitting around was a point-source security risk. So we started thinking about how to mathematically replicate the macroeconomic behavior of gold and silver money. And so I worked with Nick Zabo, Hal Finney, Ralph Merkel, Wei Dai and so forth. And at that time, it was all very much just thought experiment and just bringing ideas together like proof of work, like a public ledger and enabling the merger of these technologies to solve a lot of the problems with early digital currencies. And that was published in a couple essays between 1998 and 2005 under the title BitGold. And so a lot of the ideas seem familiar from what people know now as Bitcoin, because there are a lot of players that are common. After the 2005 era, I wasn't making any money at this. And so I decided I was going to go off into virtual worlds and make my money selling imaginary land to people. And so those guys kept working at it. And so that's my experience in digital currency. And so in that interim, I worked on this political project called the Free State Project, which is to recruit a lot of libertarians to all move to one state to help minimize the state government and be an experimental laboratory for liberty. And we chose New Hampshire, which happens to be where I'm from. And so a lot of people have me to blame for that. And so and in that time, I also worked in eminent domain reform after the Kilo versus a New London decision in the Supreme Court that a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum thought was really an unjust decision. And so we first proposed eminent domaining the homes of Supreme Court justices in order to get the politicians I rated the idea. And then I authored a state constitutional amendment here in New Hampshire that restricted eminent domain to only government owned and operated projects. And that wound up getting past the statewide vote by 86%. So that's now in our state constitution. And so most of the states in the U.S. now have some level of stricter rules about eminent domain than the Kilo decision specified. And while the rest I just tend to refer to as slave states. But the so that's you know, some of my background in technology and in politics and so forth. So when things went bad for me in my relationship with Lynn and lab, you know, it was a tough time, you know, going through the whole legal battle. But coming out of it, I wanted to build a better virtual world, a better red verse. And so first, we wanted to build a new virtual world. But the capital requirements are just so crazy that it became impossible. And so I took your office, I mentioned earlier, and wrote a book and then joined Kitely to work on cover artwork for the novel. And wanted to talk to friends that were still in Second Life and couldn't. So we created the grid phone because a lot of the chat bridge and Simlink scripts that have been around for a long time. So that, you know, the idea of talking between grids and platforms isn't new. But they always seem to be very clunky, they would break a lot. And part of it was because of the way the scripts function in creating temporary URLs to exchange HTTP calls as the script, the scripters here would understand would break a lot. And they wouldn't work if you're teleporting Sim to Sim. And so we developed a much more robust system, and we call it grid phone. And so the, you know, we first thought about it from a communication standpoint. And at the time, I was trying to run a remotely what we called SL exit or the open Sim Embassy in Second Life. And that really wasn't getting a whole lot of traction. And so I thought, you know, people say that the fax machine helped to tear down the Soviet Union. And let me get to that next. And so the idea was that if the fax machine, which was used by samas.networks to spread around truth to people in the Soviet Union, then something like the grid phone could help open up communications channels between people in Second Life and an open Sim and other platforms, and to lead to a more open metaverse. And so that was, you know, a lot of the motivation between starting this. And so, you know, we were looking at, you know, what is the systemic problem with why is open Sim nowhere near as big in terms of users as Second Life is, why has adoption of VR kind of stalled for a number of years. And looking at it, it really, from my perspective, I believe that the problem is the Waldgarden business model, where companies ignore Metcalf's law of network effects, and they just try to get people stuck in their own network to milk for every dollar, and not let them really, you know, communicate outside without other applications. And so, you know, in the, the Waldgarden business model originated with the cyber promotions versus AOL case in the early 90s. Before that, the law of the land was Marsh versus Alabama, which said that you do not lose your constitutional rights when you're in a company-owned town. And then AOL came along, and they had problems with spammers, and they banned the spammers, which had been taking up about half of the message resources in AOL. And so when they got banned, they sued under Marsh versus Alabama, and the court said that AOL bulletin boards are not enough like a real life community to justify protection under Marsh versus Alabama. And so, you know, we would agree that a bulletin board is not like real life, but at the same time, I would argue that VR is a lot more like real life than like a bulletin board. And I think that the more time that people spend in VR and AR and mixed reality in the future, that it's going to be a lot more important that people retain their rights, even when they're in company-owned networks. And so giving people back certain areas of control is going to be essential for that. And the first of those is obviously communication, your ability to talk across the walls, to talk to who you want, where you want, when you want, and to not be in danger of having your account deleted by some game god, just because you say the wrong thing or talk to the wrong person. So as I mentioned, you know, fax machines were used by the Soviet Union to tear down the iron curtain and so forth. On the right here, we have an example of one of these called Samas.Newsletters that were used. And so there's four key areas for tearing down these walls. One is communication, which the grid phone provides. And the three others are money and property and identity. And we talked a bit about money earlier. You know, we want to have, number one, the ability to choose what money we want to use. We want to be able to trust that the money is going to be good. It's not going to be taken by some entity. It's going to retain its value. It's going to be a useful medium of exchange. And at the same time, you want to be able to protect your property, whether you're a content creator, you want to be able to trust that the work you create is protected, no matter where it's used. So whether it's used in Second Life or OpenSim or Unity 3D, you should be able to trust that your content, your rights to your intellectual property are going to be protected. And at the same time, a user wants value for what they're purchasing. You know, if you're charging a lot because you're in a limited market like Second Life, people are more prone to copy your stuff if they think they're paying too much for it, and they want to think they should be able to use it in other places. But if you can trust that your content is going to be protected in wider choice of networks, then you could afford to offer your goods for sale for a lower price. Users can say that's a better value proposition, and they're less prone to copy body. And Fourthly is identity. You want to be able to take back control of your identity from the world gardens. You don't want to have it erased just because you annoyed the wrong person, or maybe your grid shuts down, and all your stuff is there and your identity is there. And if the grid owner doesn't allow you to take an IAR out here in OpenSim, or if you say the wrong thing in Second Life or whatever. And so you want to be able to exist as a digital identity without having to rely on the goodwill of whoever the owner is of the platform you're using. So as I mentioned, the fact machine helped take down the USSR. And this was very crucial to building the dissident movement as well, because they couldn't really tap into fax communications. They couldn't tell just from listening to a fax communication, whether it was a legitimate document, or it was a Samozdat newsletter being spammed out. So if you can do that, then you can escape the controls of whoever's running your community. These sort of problems are clearly a prop a problem area that is best solved with blockchains. Because they're decentralized and distributed, everybody has a copy of the public ledger. They can authenticate the transactions. And so no, they're encrypted. So the transactions actually can be authenticated by people who are mining the blockchain without them actually knowing what those transactions are, just because of the mathematics of cryptography. This is a very interesting area of math. And just take my word for it, it's possible. It happens all the time with block with Bitcoin, other. Now, if you have your identity on a blockchain, because the blockchain is an immutable record, that means nobody can I erase your identity, nobody, no game God, no grid owner, you know, they can't take away you away from you. And so because of that, there are a number of use cases for blockchains in VR, there's avatar identity, there's 3d content licenses, you can we can have a group system that works not just within one grid, but across the hyper grid and even across many platforms. You can have dispute resolution where if you have a dispute with say a grid owner or a group owner or a landowner, you can have due process in the virtual environment without having all the expense and time and everything that of a real world court system. So it becomes a lot easier to resolve differences. And that would potentially lead to a reduction in in griefing problems and things of that sort. The fourth of course is land ownership. If I come to Avocon, or if I go to DigiWorlds, I love you know, DigiWorlds is my second favorite grid. And as a lot of people know, I teach Blender over there at the Metaverse University. And I would love as a Kitely avatar to be able to own land over there to have a sandbox to provide more room for more students. But I can't the way things are now. And beyond that, any data functions within OpenSim or other VR platforms that are asynchronous, meaning it's not important for rendering your immediate immersive experience, that all can go into blockchain transactions to reduce the load on the simulation server. So here is the grid phone. It's moving beyond the chat bridge scripts of 10 years ago. It allows you to talk avatar to avatar on any platform we can provide service to. It's portable from region to region and grid to grid. So wearing your grid phone as a HUD, you can teleport around your grid. You can you can teleport across the hyper grid and maintain your conversations that you're doing with anybody on any other platform. And at the same time, we've built it to be like a virtual smartphone. So not only is it communications that's a media screen that allows you to access any number of applications that will be on our app store will be providing an SDK so developers can create apps. We want Globit to have an app on our app store. We want Kitely marketplace to have an app on our app store. You know, anybody that's got ideas for apps, we want you participating in what we're doing. And at the same time, 3D content, you want to be able to sell 3D content, not just within OpenSim, not just within Second Life, but 3D content that can be ported to any platform we can provide service to if you're able to provide that cross platform functionality. And finally, cryptocurrency exchange, all of these functions, other than the communication are backed by our Galacticoing blockchain as smart contracts for the 3D content licenses for identity and the other smart contracts that we're developing. And you'll be able to trade Galacticoings through the grid phone or through our website for real world currencies for other game currencies that allow us to do that, of course. And we'll be providing full fins and compliance with the regulatory systems to make sure that all of that is treated above board and legally. Yes, it is, Andrew. It's a big issue and it's something that we're working very hard on. Hey, Mike, did you see the question from Kayakar on what scripting language are grid phone apps written in? Oh, we're doing things with a lot of Node.js. And but we can have apps that can be delivered to your grid phone to function in world as LSL and OSL scripts and apps that can function just on the grid phone media screen and they stay resident on the servers. And so those will be JavaScript. Thank you, Mike. And I'd like to, there was one more question and then we're going to wrap. Beth asks, what's on your shirt? Oh, what's on my shirt? That was actually one of the first things I ever made in Second Life. I had built, I was a huge fan of the novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson, and I was an editor of his Quicksilver MetaWeb Wiki before I got into Second Life. And so when I came in, I built the Black Sun Club that was featured in the novel Snow Crash. And this was a t-shirt I made. So this is the the logo for the Black Sun Club. Great. And one last question. Are the grid phone servers in intermediate? That's from Frank Ruloff. Intermediate in the grid phone servers, we're maintaining those with our company, we're going to be doing something where the Galacticoin blockchain, we're going to be putting out to be a public, basically a distributed autonomous organization, so that nobody can control it. And so we want the community to participate. We want grid owners to become master node operators and so forth. And so you know, there's different types of servers for the Galacticoin, it's a distributed network for grid phone, we're having a cluster that's tightly controlled so we can minimum people chatting and communicating. Thank you, Mike. And thank you for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 2 30 in this keynote region and it's called fueling innovation virtual worlds in research.