 Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE Live coverage here in Toronto for the untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference, two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We were just singing here in theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, my coach Dave Vellante, Tony Ling, CUBE alumni with Culture, and we have James McDowell, Head of Strategy at Sentinel. He's also a PGA professional golf professional and a boxer extraordinaire. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us, yes! We had some fun here before we came and came on. Super exciting, even though the market's kind of in a downward trough and about to do its normal cycle in crypto, tons of energy, the culture's changing, there's a real energy around focusing on high quality builders, high quality individuals. Absolutely. This is a real dynamic. Projects for good, projects for profit, there's great engineering going on. What could be better? For sure, and we've been through the trough so many times. We've gotten to the certain point that now I just kind of like, I'm like, well, I mean, we're here again. You know what I mean? And now it's time for we figure out right now who's really in it to win it and who's just playing the game. Tony, you know what I love about you? You've got great energy, great aura, you've got great culture. You've been around, you've seen it early, you've been involved in a lot of the iterations of the industry that's just now growing to be a baby and it's growing up into its elementary school years. Yeah. What's your take on this? I know you do a lot of retreats in self-reflection. What's the industry? Where's it come from? Where is it now? How do you feel about what's happening? So I've been in blockchain since 2011 and from a price perspective, there's actually a science fiction story that came out on Reddit in 2014 or 13 by someone named Luca underscore Magnata. And it's called, I am from the future and I am here to stop you from what you are doing. And in this science fiction story, he outlines this pricing curve that basically shows for the first five years of Bitcoin's existence. If no other market factors happen, no outside influence, no qualitative influence, the first five years, 10X every year. Second five years, every other year, 10X every other year. And what's crazy is that if we wouldn't have had Mt. Gox and some of these other events, like Bitcoin was only supposed to go to 10K last year, but it's a 20K at double. So if we wouldn't have had those external events, that pattern would have actually unfolded. So what's really easy and simple to remember about Bitcoin is that it has a scarce supply. I think that's the easiest way to put any of this. And so this is just a period of time, the market overextended itself and it shouldn't have gone realistically past 10K, it doubled. So yeah, I mean, that's to be expected, right? To be expected. And it's still unknown in my opinion. I looked at, I did an exercise about six months ago with my friend. We looked at the NASDAQ during the pre-bubble days and we looked at the expansion of the NASDAQ. And that's just a small scale relative to global crypto. It's actually in line with some of the expansion we've seen in other financial markets. So I kind of think it's good to have a little curation going on culling out some of the dead wood, bringing in the better projects. This is kind of the reality now. I mean, RIP good times. Well, you know, Bradley Rodder yesterday at the Cloud and Blockchain Conference posited that he wasn't talking about Bitcoin, he was talking about Ether. He said there's just too many damn coins and every ICO is, most ICOs anyway, tied to Ethereum. Yeah. Buy it? Well, I mean, and you can take this one too, but yeah, I mean, what I see is there has to be a decoupling at some point, right? There has to be some sort of decoupling. At the moment, everything is very correlated. And yeah, I think as time goes on, you will see it's like survival of the fittest, right? So you've got a lot of blockchains and you've got a lot of tokens on Ethereum that want to come off Ethereum. It's survival of the fittest. I feel like, yeah, the best ones will prevail and the ones that aren't trusted or aren't secure. So you talked about who's in it to win it. What do you look for in the contenders versus the pretenders? What are the attributes that you as kind of deep experts in this field look toward the winners? Well, ICOs right now are kind of like a candy that you love coming out with a new flavor. It's like everyone's like, oh yeah, like remember this candy, gotta buy it now, but at the end of the day, it's pretty much the same candy. It's just like a little different sweetener. And so we will experience obviously a market correction, oh yeah, for sure. But I think what's really beautiful about this is it's actually enabling creative potential. Jobs of the future are not going to be, oh, I know how to do C++. Now I have a job forever. It's going to be about reinvention and that is the real economy of the future. And blockchains a huge enabler for that. And new markets are opening up, too. So it's not just the reinvention, which I agree. Reimagining the reinvention, and new markets, Artej was on earlier saying on his 80 day tour of 10 countries, new markets are exploding. That's just a new market, it's re-changing. So it's not your grandfather's venture capital model, it's over the valley, or New York or London. It's completely global. There are many, many reasons to tokenize the world. And the thing that stands out to me is when you look at tokenizing securities, the fact that this opens up the free market to everyone. These things can be traded 24 seven, 365 from anywhere in the world. Traditionally, if you want to buy stocks, Wall Street's open for less time than it's closed. And so it just opens up the free market to everyone all over the world. And to me, that's probably sure. And to me, that's probably sure. You're a professional golfer. Some of you use a golf analogy, I have to, because I love golf. I love golf, you're a golfer. Excellent golfer, not a pro, but he could be if he played for it. What's your handicap? I don't keep score. No, he's really good, I play with him many times. And he never plays. He plays like, well, once or twice a year. How many times a year? Consistently, he shoots good score. I'm an awesome player, it's a little bit of hockey in me, but obviously with Happy Gilmore, we're gonna get it going on. Okay, let's use golf metaphor. Okay, so the world that we know that's the centralized, governed, world banks, big corporations that are being decentralized, consider them like the wooden shafts and the old clubs. Now, all of a sudden, graphite shafts, new club heads, new technology. The game doesn't really change fundamentally, but it changes the performance. Do you buy that? Is that a good analogy? Totally, it's a perfect analogy, you know, when you go to the golf clubs and you've got the older members and they don't buy it, they say that the performance doesn't increase with the new technology, but really, we know that it's done. It'll stodge members. And it comes down to that people are naturally averse to change. People don't really like change. Something that they don't quite understand, they naturally dismiss. If they don't want to delve in, they'll dismiss it. And everyone here today is going down this rabbit hole, but there's a hell of a lot of people out there that, you know, I don't really get it, I don't want to get it, but so, and they'll dismiss it. And they'll even talk it down if it threatens them. Let's hope that the game changes though. I mean, come on, like if you look at the current distribution over time, we've moved from tribalized to, you know, kings and queens to nation states. Let's hope that we actually enable a redistribution of wealth. I want to see Blockchain create the Garden of Eden. Not say, okay, well this is, because what we're experiencing now is basically same incentives, slightly less bad people. And I feel that if we really use new technology as an opportunity for change, change is going to happen. And if we make the integration of new technology about experiencing compassion in action as a humanity, when we change human perception, human behavior, your understanding of your own limitations, when we enable real freedom, not just the illusion of freedom as money. Well Gabriel on the bed was on yesterday, which he's with Ben, he's done an amazing work. What he's doing to transform the Caribbean islands with exchange, changing a society. They're digitally connected, almost 100% penetration of mobile. Yet, they can access some basic services of society. This is now a new game changer. And you're taking an integrative approach to how you interact with people, and it's part of your persona. Maybe I'm pushing the golf analogy too much here, but- No, bring it, bring it. Okay, so I'm watching the end of the PGA this week, and they're interviewing Tiger Woods, he's back and he comes to check it. And they're interviewing him and he wants to be on the Ryder Cup team. Now if you've observed him on the Ryder Cup, not great, this is a team sport, right? The Euros always kill the Americans when the superstar is on, right? And it's sort of the same thing that you're saying, it's the, they get the haves and the have-nots, it's a team sport, and it's community driven. Yeah, yeah. Tiger increases viewings, like you wouldn't believe, you know, oh, Tiger's playing, everyone tunes in. Which is great for the sport. Yeah, and I think- And bad for the Americans because they always lose when he plays. Yeah, I know, I know. I think it would be, you know, why not put him in the team? Because it's good for the game, it's good for viewings, it gets people more engaged. Tiger's been humble too. He knows, he's been humble. He's the world bank. But you know that your things are a lock if you play, right? That's what I'm saying. You're biased, James. Yeah. Tiger's the world bank, you want him involved, but you don't want him dominating. Yeah. All right, so guys, let's take it back, let's do reality. You guys are working together on a project we were talking, you guys, what are you guys working on? Talk about the projects you guys are involved in. Definitely. My core focus right now, what James and I do together is we take these skills we've learned integrally through my life as a performing artist and in his previous life, and also career life as a professional athlete, and we really take what we've learned through these dynamic industries and use our knowledge and our network to help entrepreneurs who are driven with integrity and a pure heart to be a success. And so it's really what we do together is we just really help people. And that's what we do both for fun and for enjoyment. And what I'm working on personally, James is the head of strategy at a company called Sentinel. And I'll let him get into that. What I'm working on personally is global citizenship, and my company culture is actually focused on something really integral to blockchain, which is capitalizing the market share on the tradition, the transition out of nation states and into community-oriented governance models. So we have one layer that's open source, for free, for the world, forever, to own your agreements and to own your identity as a self-sovereign individual stewarded by your community to give everyone more context on each other. And then our for-profit business is basically Facebook connects people to their friends. Culture connects people to communities and connects communities to dapps that are services and economies basically. And we build that whole ecosystem. So that's really what I'm up to at culture. And then James and I have our own venture together. And James is also head of strategy at Sentinel. Yep. What do you work with that? So Sentinel is an interoperable network layer for distributed resources. So let me break that down. What blockchain technology allows is for you to monetize excess resources, like excess bandwidth, excess GPU or CPU power. And so our first working product is a decentralized VPN. So you know what a VPN is? Yep, sure. Okay? So the Sentinel DVPM is distributed. So what that allows you to do, for example, is you could monetize your excess bandwidth by hosting a node that people can connect to. And the beauty of the decentralized VPN is that it's provable. So all the code is open source and there's proof that the data is actually being kept private, it's encrypted. And there's no centralized body or company that can be shut down or forced to give up data or paid for data. It's distributed, so it's fair and it's secure. So, yeah, there's a lot of big companies in the crypto space that are very concerned with data privacy and they may not trust central VPN, traditional centralized VPN. And you get paid, so if you host your own node, you get paid, it's a marketplace. So anyone in the world can set up their own node, run their own node, help other people obscure their traffic if they don't want, like, for example, GDPR. If you don't want every website that you visit to monitor literally everything you do, you might want to consider using a VPN for the sake of preserving your own personal privacy and the integrity of your data, which you own, and rightfully should actually own the monetization value of. So anyone in the world, you can have a cube node and you guys can pay, people could pay $5, your whole network can use it. So I can sell my XX compute capacity network bandwidth. Exactly. The storage too, we're not touching that. Storage, I mean, it's essentially down the line. So it's a marketplace for distributed resources, that's sent to now. The first working product is the DVPN, and down the line, yeah, we're going to come up with much more. So others could actually plug into that platform. Yeah, so you want to do a live stream in China, I can pop on a VPN. There it is, run Google apps on China through VPN because you can't run Google on. Yes, we know. As we know, we can stream in China, let's just use Google. Cool. All right guys, well thanks so much for coming on, appreciate Tom and Jerry, great to see you. Yes! Very inspirational. I think there's a lot of missions ribbon, cultural change coming very fast. This next generation coming up is going to be the stewards of making the change happen. It's our job to set the table and get these services out there, congratulations. Okay, cube coverage here live in Toronto at the untraceable Blockchain Futures Conference two days. It's the cube wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay with us. Day one's continuing. The best guests, the most important people, bringing the great Blockchain crypto world together here in Toronto. We'll be right back.