 We're going to get started in like two minutes. Fantastic, thanks so much. Just let me turn the livestream on. Sure, go right ahead. So while it does this up, I just want to give you a clue. So how many people here are on board? OK, nice. All right, so we've got a good mix. And how many of you are programming or working like an actual program? OK, nice. Fantastic. And then just business, business. OK, also fantastic. So we should have a good length of time to go forward. So today, if I pull up the program real quick, we should have four or five talks, one that's happening about pregnancy. I'm seeing for a short period of time while we introduce some other topics. We're going to be looking at the schedule here. Yes. Yeah, actually, do you want to run through the schedule? Sorry? You lost it. Do you want to run through the schedule quick? Do you? I just have to hook up one more thing. Oh, we're hooking up one more thing. Let me just pull it up very quickly. Actually, let me ask Bob one question. So I know you're just going to be kind of seeing a little bit. So I'd like to be able to kind of give you a tour of back and forth. What's the thing you're most excited about in 2018, where we're working much now in this space? Like, what's kind of getting you guys kind of get it up around, I don't know, smart contracts? If it's a new blockchain to do with things similar to Ethereum and distributed computation, what's exciting you guys right now? Yeah, argumentator is so much that it's exciting. That's the biggest problem in this whole space right now. So a bit of background on the back of the CIO, he's not a lawyer, but I always say I'm sort of the third force in the world. I have been a bit of a farmer in my current 20-plus years. So he's going to offer a lot of work on it. So we have an investor in research and search for technologies in the next year on this blockchain. Blockchain is kind of going to the scene, like it did a lot of new scenes in the last year and really got us to be gotten a number from an overcoat. The reason we have three investors is that we're heavily invested in the blockchain. The reason for that is that we have a green market and we have a green market in this process. So I'm just going to follow along with the practice and practice. And as I have come here, I have set up a CIO or CIO and I'm going to go towards the future. And so what we're trying to do here is to get our lawyers' privacy breaches to think and orient it towards the future so that we can as early as anybody understand what legal issues we're going to leverage, help our clients to participate in those legal issues. And then, yes, at some point, there's going to be disputes and we're going to be involved in helping to untangle these disputes. The notion of smart doctor programming, what that means is legally universal context, is absolutely a key emphasis for us. We're spending as much time with Dustin. So we're starting to have good, fun conversations. Maybe clients, one has a board of lawyers, might change the situation. Combination between the two things. Test 1-2. Test 1-2. So that's a key priority. And I guess the last one is just really kind of experimenting with clients to try and discern where the intersection is between the law and the law. And one of the reasons we believe that is important to you very early in the conversation is very nature of blockchain is intertwined with so many legal issues. One last story. Very early in our research, I had a good fortune putting lots of terrific conversations with some major lawyers in the blockchain space. And for one, I was intrigued with how compelling your quick programming request. Could we move you right here and, Mike, yeah? Yeah. Did you tell everybody I didn't know I was on the agenda until I walked in? Bob didn't know he was on the agenda. So I'm with him. And Bob's a ringer. And so just to pick up a little bit from where Chris opened up. The reason why we asked Bob to come today is because he's CIO of one of the largest law firms in the world, I think, in the United States, certainly. And one of the real leaders in adoption of technology, including blockchain and identity-related technologies, but really the whole gambit, is to get the sense that you're starting to uncover here of what is interesting, what is important about this technology from the perspective of the law, from the vantage point of a law firm and the legal profession. And then the follow-up question is going to be, and why does that matter to everybody else here? People that are small businesses, people that can fit their families and in our civic life, what does it mean to us when the law begins to transform, even as banking and finance and aeronautics, so many industries have already successfully transitioned to a digital age? Like their documents are records, they're data now. The legal profession, I think people like Bob at the forefront is beginning to make that transformation. There's going to be a lot of downstream implications, and we're starting to explore those this weekend across the world in the computational law and blockchain festivals. So that's just a little bit of context setting. And now that you're mic'ed up, can you pretend as though nothing you said before was ever heard? I have that feeling a lot. I have the knowledge of the lawyers. So I was talking about the earliest conversations with some of the folks who are the thought leaders and where blockchain will go. And it was just so intriguing to hear them recognize that a meaningful engagement from the legal community is an important aspect of blockchain achieving its ultimate potential, whether it's in the identity space, whether it's in supply chains. All of those emerging capabilities have legal issues associated with them. And so my focus has been on trying to inspire my law firm to believe in that and then be compelled to engage in it. We do have what we call a blockchain at scale team. We have about 1,000 lawyers. And out of 1,000 lawyers, there are 60 that are engaged in our blockchain team. And the goal is to have a broad cross-section of lawyers in various areas of the law, everything from real estate to health care, of course privacy, and it runs the gamut. And so then the idea is to get them immersed in the world as possible so that they can issue spot early and at a minimum help clients, help corporate clients avoid bad decisions and bad outcomes. And as you might imagine, there's a whole lot of conversation in the way right now with respect to the SEC's recent actions and comments and progressions testimony on ICOs. FTC just came out with some similar pronouncements in the last few days. And so the ability to get the legal ecosystem engaged in a way where they can have positive contributions to help find the right balance point to have all these technologies, to have blockchain technology achieve what it's capable of from a technology standpoint, but also be able to apply with all the right regulations that help to protect the innocent, if you will. And in the case of the SEC, innocent investors. So that's a lot right there. And so could I ask you another table setting question? I got a very free email one day from Bob. That's every email. But this particular one was to sort of heads up that Baker-Hossetler was aligning with others in the law to create an alliance related to identity and blockchain. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? Still is for early formation. But it's the same first. It's kind of a targeted toward identity. And the notion of self sovereign identity in particular. And again, to bring the legal ecosystem to bear early on in conversations so that the lawyers can be an enabling force instead of a disabling force or oil in the gears instead of sand in the gears. Whatever itchy metaphor you want to use. So the thing I find interesting having spent, what, 27 years in the legal industry from a technology adoption standpoint is that the legal industry at large, and I can speak mostly from my law firm, they feel something this is different. That the emergence of blockchain has all sorts of possibilities and all sorts of new and intriguing interactions with, not collisions with, different areas of law. And so the legal ecosystem is compelled more than I've ever seen, at least on the private firm side, to engage in this conversation and to understand it. So much so that it's actually kind of, it's overwhelmed me in terms of trying to assimilate. And I think that everybody has their opinions on lawyers. I happen to be a fan. I've been around them a long time. But I think that is a new phenomenon, at least in my estimation, as opposed to kind of watching and waiting, seeing what clients wrestle with and deal with, and then helping them sometimes unwind and clean up a mess. The legal ecosystem I'm exposed to is compelled to engage early. Yes, right here. And so one question from the crowd. But I want to finish the table setting first. So why do you, I'll speak a little bit too. Why might this, what Bob just said, is very important to your partner or associate at Baker-Hostettler? Because you're transforming the practice there and the forefront of that. It's how you practice law and the position, the marked position of the firm. And the portfolio of client offerings. And it's certainly important for operations. Why might this be important to clients? Why might it be important to business in general? Why might it be important to the society? So if you think about the position, this is a somewhat unusual conversation at MIT where we don't have a law school. But we certainly deal with technology and we deal with, you could say, cutting edge technologies all the time across the whole span of technologies and across the whole span of sectors of the economy and parts of society that these technologies impact. In this case, the law has many ramifications for how everything else happens. And so when you're setting up a business, if you're a person and you're paying your taxes, if you've experienced bankruptcy, if there's been a product that's been returned, if you've received a legal notice, if you are making a contract, you know, in addition on your house, if you're getting refinancing, if you're on and on almost everything that we touch has a legal dimension to it. And in many parts of the economy, I've noticed, especially as other sectors transition to fully digital methods and workflows, things are going in a speed of thought with an app and with services. And then you come to the legal part and it slows down. There's paper, there's longer periods of review. It may not be connected to the inputs and the outputs of the rest of the flows in the housing industry. Gil can talk to us about a little bit in every area. And so, you know, perhaps, and so we think we feel at law.mit.edu for sure. And then in Sloan School and in CSAIL, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT and really across the institute that number one is important for the law to catch up for the legal profession and for legislators and for regulators to create the right rules and to have the right processes and flows and practices. But it's also, it's not merely important to catch up where there's also an opportunity as the law is in the act of becoming digital, to transition to a digital footing to engineer the law, the MIT way, such that it has been deliberately designed to not merely transition from paper to PDF, perhaps, but also to look at opportunities for business process, re-engineering, and for new ways to deploy the service of law as a service and in all the dimensions of that meeting. So the reason we're convening today, partly in the reason why we're thrilled to have Bob who's so many innovators here and he's participating across the world, by the way. We've got some middle notes that are having this conversation right now around the globe and will be for the rest of this weekend under the umbrella of legal hackers, also known as the best organization ever, to engage creatively and with design thinking on the what, like what Bob is trying to do, what is transforming, the how is it transforming, and then to some extent, you could almost say why, like you could say can we identify what's a priority, what are some pitfalls, what are some opportunities, we can analyze ideas or flow of ideas around for how we could transform small business formation, how could we transform filing things with government, how could we transform understanding what your legal obligations are, how can you transform the process of managing a dispute? Do you have to go to court? Are there opportunities to use identity and automated processes to identify and resolve disputes much faster? Or in fact, avoid the disputes altogether or some cluster of disputes because we've now had the opportunity to redesign the processes and build the wisdom of law in. And so these are some of the ways in which this could be relevant to the client base in society. I think one of the other fascinating possibilities is we all have different perspectives on different regulatory bodies and the purpose they serve, but they are what they are. So we know that we have to work within those regulatory bodies. So whether it's the SEC, FTC, or so on, the fact is they too are in their own way some more functional than others. Intrigued with this technology as a way that helps them provide their protective services, I'll call them, in a way that's much more efficient, transparent, and all of that. And so one of the reasons I keep coming back to the likes of MIT and other academia is in the hope that there's influence from a policymaking standpoint, a regulatory standpoint, so that the very nature of blockchain could help regulators do what they have to do to protect the innocent in addition to all the other business capabilities. And then last comment I'll piggybacking off what you just said is that's really fun conversations with a, I'll leave his name out, venture capitalists in New York around the notion of building blockchain tools that are specifically oriented towards the gig economy. And so building tools that are purpose-built to help that solo player who that generates the majority of jobs in America there's some really interesting possibilities that again, blockchain enables to be able to bring really affordable, terrific tools that might help protect their legal rights in addition to big companies. Yep, and that to me sounds like unleashing the potential of innovation, so great. So with that, don't go anywhere, but I think that that's had a lot of questions and some ideas, and we started with you. So I had just a quick question on how you presented rather terms and perspective on the difference between open source and like the open blockchain, the public blockchain versus the private blockchains that are, are you promoting, are you talking about innovation and the work of the law? Are we talking about private blockchains and how they're facilitated and how they're bringing all around those private technologies or are we talking about public blockchain, you know, exists again, that you can't even transfer. Right. It's all of the above. We represent a lot of corporations and corporations have perspectives on private versus public and so we have to, as the lawyers representing their legal issues we have to be agnostic as it relates to those technologies and we have to understand the pros and cons of each. And actually just to make sure people could hear the question related to this public blockchains, private blockchains, permissions, permissionless in many flavors of this and so that was the context for those that might not have heard. Thanks. So we have to present it in an agnostic way and we have to present it so that we talk about what are the common traits and then what are the unique traits of public versus private subscriber blockchain and present the reality that it is very, very early days and so the notion of picking a winner is not something we're going to spend a lot of time on anytime soon I think. I'm sorry. Can I expand a little? Then Brian. And so one way to look at it from a winning term that corrupt I think in timely inquiry around for purposes of how we can engage this weekend is what are the activities and capabilities of the different implementations of the technology and how good of a match are those for different legal use cases and different sets of business requirements. So it's not making a winner for sure but maybe like proportionally kind of connecting the capabilities and the attributes let's say of these different technologies to the right sets of business needs and to some extent to weaken them a little bit so that because of the box they may not support and reflect the business context or the precise sequence of things so the right players, work clothes, all that kind of stuff so we have an opportunity here to get a little creative we've got plenty of whiteboards that's one thing that we really invest in around here and so we'll have an opportunity to start to unpack some of this mysterious sounding technology and then have real conversations around right size and fitting it and then even starting to wrap the prototype through the weekend to see where the big wins could be. Brian. I just want to ask if you could give some examples of how each of the products see some area of what you're currently working on It could be HIPAA, it could be and when you say involved you're talking about kind of the if you will the classical breach or you're talking about the future with digital identity what is the future privacy faced with what are some examples So the question is examples of breach of privacy and how does that play out in the context of this renaissance of technology and the law Yeah, the honest answer is I don't know yet but we help companies who have been breached in terms of how do they comply with all the regulations around notification notification So the notion is where is digital where is self-sovereign identity going to take the world as it relates to hopefully eliminating more and more breaches altogether Exactly. What the legal obligations are in terms of reporting and notification and again I'm not a lawyer so could we begin to cite what that process is So that's the canonical answer now I'm going to throw some Molotov cocktails and then you are next sir Is it Sam? So looking east not too far east we see Europe East has an Asian soundtrack and there is a major legal reform I would call it in the process being born right now called GDPR General Privacy General help me out here Data Privacy Regulation and among other Article 15 which I know some of the breakout groups are going to be doing a deeper dive in it does something I don't have my profit we have social physics we have some books here for good contributors later but one of them I imagine I'm holding social physics in my hand right now and we think a lot about personal data as a new asset class but it's something very valuable and something that right now we don't really have legal frameworks quite yet to make the most of it and there's some privacy and other hitches with the use and access of personal data now people are surprised frequently to discover what's occurred with their personal data with permissions on apps and then we have other issues with data breaches as you were getting into Brian Article 15 is interesting because it provides it provides a very well specified right for people who have personal data in other systems to request a copy of their data so latent within that there's a lot of economic implications first of all being able to go around and collect your data so you yourself can get a copy of it do analytics on it get some benefit of it but also there's an identity sort of question just below the words of Article 15 which some of us are going to be exploring and that's could we combine some of the identity capabilities of blockchain where perhaps people could have a blockchain based address that they could be found at and that they could authenticate a key pair from as a mechanism to use the method of requesting data well if they could then one of the secondary implications of that is a company might have an easier way to even know who to notify and not to provide the notice to the wrong person not to inadvertently provide personal sensitive information to the wrong people but can actually unleash faster and more accurate and more secure and more beneficial workflows and design patterns for breach notice but also for the flow of this new asset class personal data some say is the oil of the new economy and once we find ways to align the initial owners and people with rights such as the data subject as well as others that may have done value added to it making it in some way everything from public health to knowing where to build roads to being able by consent to do marketing to people and everything and so much more perhaps there's ways that we can transform the process of data breach counsel to companies and help the engineer systems to let people have notice of breach or to reach out for other services such as giving them a copy of the personal data when everything's operating well isn't there a flip side issue on the right to be forgotten there's a flip side issue on the right to be forgotten there's actually a lot of we should probably have a session just go through like the 20 best of articles of GDDR there's a lot of good and there's a stuff on analytics and decision making and automated decision making algorithmic decision making interesting and large beneficial ideas we've got Sam I I would if I were a lawyer if I were a smaller group and I didn't have a mic I might give opinions but that's what we're going to that was already touched on this notion of the individuals right to their information self-sovereign identity part of this is part of what I do for my law firms to again help my lawyers understand where this might go so that we can help our clients figure it out right so when you think about a new world that has a trust framework that's enabled through the blockchain that creates its own at least potential ecosystem around if I as an individual want to engage with whatever problems I buy some stuff from I should have the choice of how much they know about me right I think we all appreciate that and depending on what I decide to say about it there might even be some kind of micro compensation associated with that so that's cool for the individual I think we all want that but there's also a dimension of if I am the example I always give is I bank with the same bank that bank knows an awful lot and they should because I trust them to do all sorts of things in this blockchain-enabled self-sovereign digital identity there might be there I hope are times where I want to do a transaction and I want my bank to attest to a claim and I want it to just happen that bank that knows a lot about me if they attest to a claim to a car dealership that I'm sitting in my digital wallet ready to buy a car that bank has provided service to me and to that car dealership so in a digital identity kind of token-driven economy that bank ought to be compensated for that value they offered when you start thinking in those terms in a legal context around if you will digital risk and privacy all of a sudden you have a whole new way that lawyers can help all sorts of companies refactor how they view privacy risk and actually turn it into potentially a business opportunity that helps them deliver real value it's not exploitative at all that's real value because of the nature of the banking that I do with that bank I hope that made sense to continue from microtransactions loading and discovering and addressing of the different parties to data such as loading in space and fair value exchange free people, free markets that's some of the possibilities that could be unlocked with this technology when the law supports and reflects the kind of framework spot I'm talking about good stuff can you say your name? from a good perspective what do you guys ask that you're blockchain what are the defining factors like blockchain or to kind of rephrase it if I'm developing a software I understand how a lot of other software called blockchain works how do I what need to you about my software for me to be able to say that I guess the answer I give there is not to be slipped but I'm not sure what I mean by that is they have to understand how these different systems are architected and what the implications are whether you're focused on the distributed ledger nature or whether you're focused on the consensus approach and or algorithm associated with consensus they have to understand all that and then translate that into how that might represent their legal risk or represent new ways to refactor legal risk but lawyers kind of aligning unless I'm missing the point of your question lawyers aligning whether something is truly blockchain or something else I'm not sure is where we're going to play if that makes sense a couple of things emerging that's why it is now so thanks Chris and everybody that all our emissaries to the sixth floor make this beautiful silence possible so right now the chamber of digital commerce is one of many trade associations that has sprung up really around blockchain primarily they've got a taxonomy working group that I've participated in that will be publishing soon and another more refined take on the definition of blockchain distributed ledger some of the other kind of core terminology that's springing up there's a lot of there's a debate but there's a lot of also dialogue of people that are struggling with the boundaries of the definitions and I'd say it's unsettled now in my experience there's several other organizations NIST Institute of Standards and Technology Standard Setting Arm for the US government and they're very keyed into international technology standards organizations ITU and others have their definitions a little bit narrower and more enterprise labored and public sector scoped by my two cents from a primarily technical but somewhat legal and business vantage point and I always started with where blockchain started that's the distributed ledger underlying bitcoin and some of the things I look for if somebody shows me a technology and I ask myself is that a blockchain technology it's the back of my head I might be looking for first of all the use of hash algorithms kind of a hash tree it's a merkle tree that will cluster entries to a log or transactions onto a block you could say by that definition not quite because it's sort of this it's a running log and it doesn't cluster into blocks per se kind of here's how you might look at it that way beyond you'll have to help me here with some of the details of the get protocol at least on my desktop in a command line if I've made several commits and then I push them at once and they kind of all show up in a chunk or if I do a pull request it changes several things in a certain way several things are kind of entered into the get log thing at once but that's not real that part of its variance what's not a variance is the use of hash and cryptography public key cryptography are similar the structure in a blockchain is to block them and then to validate each block through some method of some consensus or other method welcome and then to take the hash of each of those blocks and to roll it forward into the next ones is characteristic and then also to have some way to have entries that relate to multiple parties seems to also be very characteristic with the get protocol you've got the developer or whomever that's making it commit with these I think the reason it's more ledger like or multi-party transaction log like is that there's some kind of interaction that happens and that is one of the lines basically or one of the entries onto each of those blocks so this is some of the things I look for when I think about the nature of a blockchain implementation of these technologies but really the boundaries are blurry and I think that the definitions themselves are evolving right now as implementations are thinking about it evolves why don't we do a couple more I see Christian Smith was here is here oh there he is he's eclipsed so I want to pose a question who here who here has is not a lawyer perhaps or you're not here primarily lawyer something up you have some kind of idea that you want to engage in when we get all teams and the rapid prototyping the breakout groups the hacking teams what is an idea of someone who want to explore while they're here show of hands like Bill, Brian, what was your name again Denal yeah of course alright so what I know from your awesome showing at start of weekend can you just we just hit like 10 or 15 seconds on what your ideas are so we can start to see the space actually come on up here you're free to go hi everyone the primary idea that got me here is the idea of a 5 chain I participated in the tech week and then the idea that we did as a group was a 5 chain and what it is basically a 5 chain we want to present a product where someone who wants to organize a party send invitation to a decentralized application to the invitees and the person as a result would add 5 of their favorite songs and when they show up at that party there is an algorithm that will play that favorite song for example if I want to listen to jamming by Bob Morley as soon as I enter the room I will recognize that I am here and then when my music is ready to be played I will receive a notification and when that music is playing I am kind of obligated to go on the floor and jam to that song and whoever is here like the way I jam to the music or if they like the selection will be able to send tokens to me and those tokens later on will be able to use them to purchase something at the bar, buy someone another drink and send myself off to satisfy the party and as a result the next person do the same thing and so on and so forth for the party that's the idea of the blockchain and it's for right now it will be completely crammed in my head I don't even understand the blockchainization of it so I'm here to learn more from you guys thank you again for inviting me you're welcome this is a product that needs to be born 5 of Brian I want the iPad to crash okay so this is just kind of half a thought through just since I've been sitting here but not nearly as entertaining as Denaldi's idea but so there was an article in New York about 5, 6, 7 years ago about how New York city was losing a lot of revenue because there's certain tax requirements that are triggered by how much you help many nights of the year you occupy your apartment and so there's a lot of the bonus right now is on the occupant to correctly register how often they're in residence in their apartment and so they have a big incentive then to incorrectly report their residence and so then pay less tax and so the idea would be is it possible to build an app based on where your phone is directly register how often you spend the night in your apartment but in a way that preserves privacy in sort of obvious ways that doesn't tell you that doesn't reveal to everyone in the blockchain where you spend every night that might be awkward but satisfies the tax requirements so that the city gets the correct amount of money because they're losing a significant amount of money apparently through this kind of fraud while preserving people's privacy rights so location, identity resource allocation the truth is tax base you like schools, you like roads Brian do you have one Mike great thank you dozer so raise your hand if you have no plans to ever live in a refugee camp no plans at all excellent anyone who's in a refugee camp right now no one plans on it no plans to live in a war zone we don't plan to have our house burned down we don't plan to have climate change a little warming kick us out of our home we had a student in a blockchain class the last hurricane we had a wire fell on her house and burned it and now she's living in a hotel for the next three months she didn't plan on that but when you end up in a refugee camp to add insult to injury is you lost your identity you can't get out of that camp because if I say hi I'm Michael McCarthy they don't even know that if I say I'm actually at New York University and I teach at Harvard Extension school well maybe I made that up they don't know that if I say I have some Bitcoin and a Visa card and some money at Vanguard I can pay for my own plans to get out of here they don't know that either so what I want to be able to do is when people only have literally the shirt on their back they're identified in a refugee camp and whether that's identifying them through a fingerprint or a retina scan or DNA or even the formation of their gear or how they walk that's actually an identifier as well I want to be able to identify people and then link it to their important documents for a certificate high school diploma for example the hurricane that we had in Puerto Rico the United States did not do a very good job of cleaning that up a lot of Puerto Rican teachers moved to Florida the problem is they didn't have their teacher certificates and these are teachers who have lived worked 15, 20 years as teachers they're now teachers age because as they can't get as a certification the documentation that they really are they've had to start over so I want to be able to link people's identity to all of their documentation so they can get out of those camps faster and get back to their lives and there's a lot of challenges but one of the most difficult is that diploma really real who's going to certify that and how are you going to verify who I am something that's inexpensive like retina scans are expensive so what's a cheap way to identify people so there's a couple of problems a lot of challenges but I think if we could come up with an inexpensive solution that solution for refugee camps would cross lots of industries and I want to start with refugees because they're the toughest example I can get it's such a timely and important project in case I forget Mike on a little later today and also tomorrow we have people coming from U-Port which is a blockchain based identity provider and we've got, oh you're here come on up man we've met before person has at work with blockchain one day you know, load the attention to the room with the late track going looking at could you just introduce yourself and just a few words on U-Port so people know what it is starting with Michael but everyone should know and this is just like lightning hey everyone my name is Kames as introduced I'm with U-Port which is a spoke on consensus we are focused on self sovereign identity solutions so we've created smart contracts we've created requests from decentralized applications to your smart phone and your QR codes and we're rolling out with a bunch of developer tools that allow you to basically spin up self sovereign identity systems within a couple of minutes you can register DAPS you can have a command line tool to create and deploy smart contracts to a local blockchain coming out with just a ton of stuff that you can use to test self sovereign decentralized identity on the blockchain and some other things they've made a really terrific 20 minute video you can just watch them right through how to do all the setup and so thank you for doing that and thank you for coming also I think you can find on the page a similar demo by Brian and Drew from Thompson Reuters who showed block one block one ID which is more business facing and so with that some terrific technologies for those who are interested in not exploring identity and blockchain okay who else Bill or anyone else is anyone ever planned to live in a place was in the bill I have a problem I have a problem so I did the two minute video using 5 front this is 25 years ago this month well I work at a conference called the consumer revolution in real estate people are still talking about the consumer revolution it's not here but the people in this room I change that how might they change that this was a story in the New York Times about tech giants knowing more about your house hunt than you do is there a way we can create a whole minority that allows you to want to tell these real estate portals but what we intend to have is we want to put out these new co-living situations thanks for not okay each of us has certain things we want to communicate about ourselves what keywords would you use to describe yourself so there's this giant impact the implications are enormous 32 trillion dollar industry in the US alone 217 trillion worldwide it's time for revolution I'm looking to you to create it thanks Bill if you think about it we'll just grab that for you the nature of the industry is centered on the seller and the broker for the seller running all over creation are you a buyer what if the people with the money who are looking to buy the new technology and these new technologies such as through blockchain to notify the world that I'm a person like a single family dwelling with five miles of elementary school and us and such that could transform the entire market and now the markets are based on supply and demand and Bill, your demand so thank you anyone else have ideas notions? come on up one of the founding members of SOBA welcome thank you so with I need to have an abstraction is how can a smart contract and the DAW meet in the middle right now when we speak about U-Port or consensus those are for the protocol labs the type of coding shop where they are developing the core technology that is underlying blockchain they're basically writing the rules and they're writing the rules with their attorney or whatever but how could you actually have a specific type of contract and you create a smart contract that is the equivalent that could be used across the board in many use cases as presented today I'm really interested to see how an attorney and a coder can come together and say here's a contract that actually is legally binding in the real world and in the actual way the transactions are happening between IOTs or between a person and a piece of hardware robots are people too integration of smart contracts and technical methods for transactions and transactional agreement with legal contracts which is an agreement that the law will enforce so important so timely and so fun to hack are there any other ideas? come on up you look like we need hi my name is Matt I'm interested in using blockchain and smart contracts to potentially add a layer to the federal legislative process so giving citizens a little bit more to maybe create policy in the day so that we can actually bring bills to congress and potentially even force them onto the forms that make the legislative process is who actually decides what that's going on so perhaps going on in a format that we have citizens that would be pushing the policies and actually have them be actionable by the law so whatever it would take to do that hack it so luckily it might take a revolution luckily we've already had one we did win and now we can do that in this representative for public that we have can we pause the technology to support the reflect the system of law that we have where we do and should be listening very much to the people through the mechanisms that we have but the mechanisms now are fraught so perhaps there's ways to optimize and refactor the very means of governance with technology so you're barking up the right tree and I'm glad that once you did your stint in DC and everything we spit out the other side of that that you came out continuing with hope and a real vigor to try to make things better so hack with him anybody that wants to make things better okay so let's get ready for the next thing it says check the connection so before we go to the main course presentation today to really stimulate thinking and to educate let me just ask does anybody have any kind of logistical or other kind of questions or is there anything like one thing I should just say is the bathrooms over here we have this room through the rest of the day and behind the glass so after the next talk we'll have an opportunity to do some more break to do a little bit of breakout discussions but any logistics or other types of questions I'm part of this three and I have 29 minutes left so I'm going to have to move it to the bathroom so maybe she'll go right now and rush back in 29 minutes maybe wait until it's almost done what's the wisdom of the crowd feed the meter right now they won't allow me to do it I have an answer I can't okay Mr. Popper can you consult on this please oh there is we have a garage on Ames Street I think that's still working anybody know there's a garage on the corner Ames Street this way two blocks okay I apologize on behalf of all people in Media Lab for the difficulty with parking around here okay so I want to introduce now my friend and a colleague and kind of like the person that I look up to in a lot of ways when it comes to technology and what I want to know what a good way to have something is and to develop something and to form a team to create open-source software that matters and a very, very deep thinker on identity technologies started something called Anvil who here sort of OOF2 or OpenID Connect these are the core technologies by which we identify ourselves and grant authorization to access an application or a data resource these are the this is the technology and the standard under the hood that makes a lot of things work right now in the web the next one of the great open-source and enterprise great implementations of that was Anvil which our speaker pioneered in a team and it's getting too awkward on having said his name Christian Smith is her next speaker and Christian had I think a very exhilarating run for an MIT and has recently transcended MIT to create a start-up of his own to really give form to his ideas and to I think a very crisp and beneficial concept of how to apply these identity especially in personal data technologies called Stranger Labs and so I've asked Christian if he would provoke thinking and shed a little bit of light on these topics and so I wonder I think we can mic you up, but can you assist us in the mic-ing of the Christian? Yeah, maybe come here I don't know Let's work Oh, there's one built in You're gonna run the slides Okay, so this is behind you for a little bit so if you go too far away the iPad will crash to the floor Alright, I'm gonna say stay over here Is this good? I think that is good Alright, so with that I give you Christian Smith Daza asked me to be provocative here and I suspect somebody might hate me by the time this talk is over because maybe I went a little overboard as evidenced by the title Is this better? Does that work? Oh, it's for the I'll just hold it up here This is hastily thrown together talk so I'm gonna rely on my notes a little bit for lack of eye contact People come to a place like this MIT or Stanford to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity and it's appropriate that this event is taking place here because these really are some of these problems in this computational law and identity stuff and so we're here to collaborate on that and there are a few reasons that this is happening right now One of them is network devices are pretty much pervasive in most developed countries at this point Network devices are capable of cryptography specifically You probably have one on your wrist let me fill out a smartwatch Okay, just a few but pretty soon this stuff is gonna be in our clothes there are people here at MIT putting this stuff into fabric which is kind of crazy and so just like the internet, the World Wide Web opportunities for us to connect in ways we could never imagine before pervasive cryptography offers us a chance to be more authentic in how we interact and distributed ledgers promise better ways to transact across borders and in very complex ways There's no question that all of this has the power to dramatically change the world around us but there are some serious risks that come with these new possibilities particularly when it comes to identity, privacy, safety security and trust Everyone taking part in especially the sovereign legal identity challenge has an important part to play in helping define the way that these technologies are going to reshape our lives and it's critical that we exercise good judgment here The history of identity technology in particular is littered with failed projects specs that led to nowhere epic security breaches and much, much worse things and in a great many of these cases there were highly talented and educated and skilled people that put forth remarkable efforts but it's a lot easier to break things than it is to secure them and it's a lot easier to imagine than it is to execute well and it's also impossible to accurately predict all the effects that an idea will have in practice so we need to think a little bit forward on unintended consequences especially when it comes to any application of cryptography we have to be really diligent and responsible about what we put into the world so before you guys kick off your projects and start hacking I want to ask you to challenge some of your assumptions because there's something very wrong with the way everyone's thinking about blockchain and identity slightly oh next slide so blockchains don't solve identity this is a fallacy of reverse causation blockchains require identity they don't provide it blockchains use public key cryptography for authenticating transactions we've had this technology for decades RSA was published in 1976 an elliptic curve has been used cryptographically since 1985 everyone with an internet connection uses this stuff every day usually without even knowing it's there identity more specifically authentication is a killer app for digital signatures based on asymmetric cryptography cryptography based identity makes blockchain possible not the other way around but to be fair after evident decentralized logs can solve a few problems in identity too the thing is blockchain probably shouldn't be front and center in the conversation about identity it's a supporting actor so let's stop thinking about blockchain as a solution to identity blockchains also don't solve trust the novel thing about blockchain is that each party writing to their copy of the ledger and anyone of the others to keep all the copies of the ledger accurate open public ledgers is a multi-party algorithm called a consensus protocol and the consensus protocol prevents bad information from being recorded onto the ledger and keeps all the copies in sync with cryptocurrencies in particular this prevents anyone from spending the same money twice that's what the purpose of that is so the point of what people call it is to prevent an untrusted or adversarial party from interfering with the records so it can be open and anyone can write to them but bad information doesn't get recorded but the consensus algorithms that provide this property of Byzantine fault tolerance don't solve all the risks of doing business blockchain can't solve human nature it doesn't make other people somehow automatically trustworthy you can have perfectly accurate records of fraud trust is an emotion it serves as a heuristic for an assessment of risk and our tolerance for it in a specific situation and if a blockchain creates that emotion for you that's fantastic do you mean to me this guy? so let's let's think that blockchain is when an act makes a comeback as an aside trust may not be the right thing to think about when we're designing the systems this is another reversal of causation the right things to think about are security goals, identifying risks and threats, mitigating them auditing accountability, legal compliance security is probably a big one of course when you solve those things trust is the result trust and trust will be the result that's like so blockchains don't solve privacy either a blockchain doesn't make your dad drive it the most popular and widely used ledgers are public they're made for transparency and authenticity and integrity of transactions not for keeping secrets as soon as you record any personally identifying information on a public ledger you've compromised your privacy just one example of this even without writing personal information onto a blockchain if you use Bitcoin to pay for things on the web the person you buy from can correlate that to your browser cookies potential problems with privacy there if there's anything you want to keep secret don't publish it on a public ledger it should be obvious but a lot of people are claiming that things are otherwise so the answer that people usually have is to say we've encrypted the data and encrypting the data doesn't solve the problem it creates a new and very difficult key management problem when you encrypt something you use a key in order to decrypt it you or the person you want to share it with needs to have the corresponding decryption key if you want more than one party to be able to decrypt it you have two bad options share the key with multiple parties this is about as insecure as sharing passwords kind of defeats the purpose the other option is to encrypt the data with different keys for each recipient but a ledger is kind of a terrible communication bus and it's kind of a terrible database like you probably don't want to put this thing on there once let alone many many many times and it's worth noting that every time you encrypt it and make it available publicly you make it easier for crypto analysts to crack the cipher the second reason encryption doesn't necessarily save you is that you tend to be predicated among computational inefficiencies reversing them by brute force an algorithm that's considered safe today it's unlikely to be safe in the future depending on how far you look down the road so in a way encryptions are raised against Moore's law and in addition to that there are always people trying to crack algorithms and sometimes they actually succeeded that so if you want to keep a secret you probably shouldn't like put it in a public place encrypt it or not are this you want to kill me eyes okay good okay cool so okay next slide doing this one decentralization is not a silver bullet a lot of people talk about decentralization right now it's a very big topic if you want to wise up on it I strongly recommend reading this paper because it presents a very balanced point of view it's a literature review it has a couple hundred references it reviews a lot of prior part so there are a lot of projects where people have tried to do things in in privacy and with decentralization before and it is tricky stuff so it's really helpful to know what people have tried to do before the gist of it is that decentralization doesn't solve all of the problems it also creates some new ones that are equally troublesome and in any decentralized system you're going to end up with certain nodes in the network that take on a concentration of work, responsibility and power it's inevitable the degree and type of decentralization that's appropriate doesn't vary but there are tradeoffs required and good judgment is required too so here's something that surprises a lot of people blockchain isn't completely decentralized this is from Vitalik he wrote a post a little while ago called the meaning of decentralization and in this post he points out the reasons you want decentralization like fault tolerance, attack resistance collusion resistance it distinguishes between types of decentralization like political decentralization architectural and logical decentralization it turns out that bitcoin and ethereum are actually logically centralized you can't run a valid mining node without a full copy of ledger this is more like federation and full decentralization in a lot of ways how many people do you know we're going to run a full copy of ethereum on their android that's kind of infeasible at the moment so decentralized systems they have their own problems some of them are actually solved with centralization so the questions for people working on decentralized identity systems are which parts of the system are we going to group together and which parts are we going to push to the edges I think in a lot of cases what we want is more decentralization not total decentralization slide so identity is probably not a cryptocurrency problem what the hell does it actually buy an identity token anyways what are you going to do with that if you use the token are you giving away control of it when you spend it if you're just using it for some kind of off chain reference what's the point of having it there that's not decentralized it's actually kind of the opposite where's the double spend problem are you limiting how many people can know your identity at one time I haven't heard good answers to these things on why we should use them this is really meant to be provocative so take some of it with a grain of salt but think about it yeah so I think we have a lot of information on the way that authorization is used in the conversation is an attribute of identity and a lot of the token is an identity token that you're sending but it's not a cryptocurrency token it's not a unit of value that you're exchanging it's something you can use over and over and over again so this slide is sort of like why we use a dollar bill for identity instead of a driver's license okay thanks good question this is a question people should just ask themselves can you prove anything in the world if everything about you is transactionalized like maybe some things maybe not others we need to think about this because they're far reaching consequences and once we're dependent on something that gets deployed it's going to be very very hard to undo it to back out of it so okay so the next slide so we hear a lot about self-sovereign identity over the past few years and there's a sovereign legal identity challenge here at the event and the idea of self-sovereign identity is that you're the ruler of your digital identity not a government, not Facebook, not Google Christopher Allen wrote a very intriguing blog post a few years ago called the path to self-sovereign identity this is a great read and he outlines 10 business users must have an independent existence users must control their identities users must have access to their own data systems and algorithms must be transparent identities must be long-lived at least as long-lived as the user wants information and services about identity must be transportable identities should be as widely usable as possible users must agree to the use of their identity so this is a consent thing disclosure of claims must be minimized claims is another term for attributes the rights of users must be protected and this is fantastic this actually resembles GDDR quite a bit I think in spirit trying to get at with self-sovereign identity is really good and I'm all for the idea having more personal control over how others identify and use my personal data the total user really doesn't lend itself toward keeping with an independent existence and I think this is where ideas and principles of law need to come into play we have a great start in thinking about the needs of personal control over identity and data now we need to connect digital identity with legal identity we need to find good ways to do this but let's bring this back to blockchain the efforts toward self-sovereign identity seem to have gained the most traction in blockchain identity circles and we've seen there's some questionable reasoning there so how tokens fit into this idea of self-sovereignty other than raising money for someone else everybody's doing an ICO what does this do for you as a user as a person with a legal identity what does this do for you there's also a tremendous amount of work being done on the idea of verifiable claims and certificates of various kinds and there's some hope we'll have there between folks working on self-sovereign identity and ones working on claims question, think about this one is it really self-sovereign if you need someone else to issue it before you can use it that's kind of the whole point of self-sovereign identity just be aware of that when you're looking at stuff about verifiable claims identity can be kind of a distraction it's historically it's been a distraction because we almost always need to deal with it as part of some multi-user project there's a dangerous complexity in the service and the sign-in form is actually the least of it a lot of people, their first encounter with identity in a project, they want to reduce it down to you're logging into a website so that's where we get into trouble is trivializing this because it's complicated and our goal is really to do something else there's a very strong tendency to cut corners until it's kind of bizarre misframing of identity as a killer app for blockchain no one really cared about identity until it bit them in the ass and when it bites hard enough one of two things usually happens we put band-aids on bullet holes or we pivot and become identity nerds this subject is deep and seductive rapid and once you go down there you're not going to come back in the same way identity isn't really a problem statement it isn't a solution to a problem it isn't a technology the term means different things in different people and it's super vague and that's not helpful when you're trying to create a system let alone a secure system so when you talk about identity it might get really helpful sometimes to break it down into other problems like authentication, authorization access control, accountability transparency, qualification consent, privacy these are a little bit more concrete and I found it's helpful to think in terms other than identity itself where things get kind of mushy and intangible so there's a side effect to being distracted with identity for people that take the blue pill and we tend to start thinking in very abstract and generalized terms that don't relate well to any real person with an actual need that can be solved with the technology and there's a nice term for this that I picked up at IETF last year around this time someone stood after a spec was presented and said I call sparkly unicorns which I think is great it pretty much describes the trends we can get into when we're connected this can be connected for real it's a great courage to hear some of you talk about projects and talk about real people in a more concrete you can get talking to real people out of the game the better your results is going to be so I want to give you guys a two minute primer on information security not cryptography cryptography so there are a handful of things you need to know to reason about anything related to information security and that includes blockchain first one is information security goals you can reduce almost in any goal in security down to one of three things confidentiality, integrity and authenticity there are a few primitive techniques that we have for this in cryptography there are ciphers, hashes and signatures these can be created using different algorithms each of which have tradeoffs and then there's the idea of symmetric versus asymmetric keys with a symmetric key use the same key for two complementary operations use the same keys with asymmetric key pairs you use different keys one of them is public and one is private private one is on yourself and you get a public one away so with cryptographic signatures you use the private key to sign something that you can verify with ciphers or in cryptata you would sign with the public key for someone who would be the one that could decrypt it with your private key so we have goals and we have methods but we need to put them together and that's what threat models are for learning how to think in threat models is good this tells us what kind of problems we need to mitigate what are we using these ciphers and hashes and signatures for and to make the requirements really understandable we also bring things in Alice and Bob stories so if you google Alice and Bob and click on the Wikipedia link you'll find a great cast of characters described there there's Trudy the intruder and Eve the eavesdropper and so using these common characters can really help us quickly understand and get to the root cause of some problems and frame up a solution and once we know the specific threats that we're going to defend ourselves from and how we think we want to do it we start designing a protocol a protocol is a multi-party algorithm that's all it is it's a process that more than one person takes part in so we're often designing protocols whether we realize it or not if you want things to be secure it's a good idea to realize it there's nothing incredibly magical about this there's some hairy math but you can understand at a high level without the math the devil's in the details if this stuff isn't perfect it doesn't work at all so it's easy to go out and be an armchair cryptographer and it's easy to break things it's very hard to design and implement secure operative systems to hold up more time if you don't understand anything that I just said go out and learn it because you're not going to get very far evaluating and blockchain applications for real world uses without that stuff it's hard to know if things are feasible or if they would be secure or roughly in big terms without understanding that much sure what do you need or what's this let's go around so almost done go to the next slide this is where I tell you not to try this at home it's not a subject that you want to move fast and break things with it's not to say that we don't like radical experimentation it's really important to go out and try out lots of different ideas but the devil really is in the details we need to think about this stuff carefully we can take our time but you shouldn't be driven by better height short term profit motives and zero sum gaming slide because then this is what will happen yeah and really just the next couple of slides yeah there you go we should do that and then I guess this is the part where I wish you good luck defending things and say I have a question about the policy I trust you to say if you're unsafe and have a fight and I don't speak in general I trust you that's actually one of the problems with the definition of trust okay so Ryan was saying that that trust is more like policy and I think the problem with the word trust is that people are very overloaded and people use it to mean different things so there's a distinction you'll hear some people talk about a distinction between trust and trustworthiness and policy is also really important thing you can have a policy where you decide to trust someone and make that decision it's kind of a whether it's an emotion or not the idea that trust is a heuristic is still there the process you went through to establish trust once you've created a policy that involves someone specific you don't have to go through all the steps to recreate that again so trust is kind of a shortcut for not having to rethink through why are you going to allow something to happen or not does that make any sense so this is a classic of blockchain technology a lot bitcoin and ethereum it has some distinct capabilities do you see I think you just very aptly and appropriately towards this awesome and broad and stinking thinking do you see in your exploration is any useful or potentially beneficial technology capabilities from blockchain technology absolutely absolutely I think some of the most interesting capabilities of ledgers distributed ledgers in particular come with being able to disseminate information so everybody has a copy of it and you know that it's accurate and it's real there are some kinds of information you want to do this with and other kinds that you don't in identity specifically where I think it's useful disseminating keys of people that have a lot of trust so you're kind of using them as a trust anchor so you know where to go get those things and also for revocations very efficient way to hand out revocations so if someone issues a credential or a verifiable claim or a certificate and you want to revoke that it's kind of hard to you either have to know everyone you gave it to and contact them one on one or you have to write in a place that everyone's going to look for it so blockchains are pretty good at that and there's potentially some valid smart contracts stuff there I think it's important that we think about the transactional quality and the exchange of money and the tokenizing of identity and so I kind of called it out there's some really kind of questionable stuff out there but in general I think it is blockchains are very, very useful I'm stunned a little bit if you're speaking of thinking of the structure and the reality of how it turned out I can use some trust anchors how do you do that a server certificate that's trusted by a browser so that a user doesn't get the terrifying message this is an untrusted endpoint that we don't know it used to be quite a game with a browser company it had to pay tens of thousands of dollars or more although you get the root certificate of the CA just into the browser so this chokepoint of disseminating certificates and public cryptography backed identities of trust bank or bank local government or the MSR and then the small businesses that we don't yet know about awaited so having a public accessible verifiable way to get those out on its own it could be worth the price totally game changing yeah I mean if you go look in your browsers now you can see certificates that are in there that your browser will trust any of these parties who have issued an SSL or TLS certificate and one kind of attack to poison the certificates that are in your browser so a blockchain is really a good way of communicating those things rotation of those keys and so on and second question in the city's nature of transactionalism in every part of our identity and that we have people that have trust bank accounts of white it has been obviously a best venture I think what's scary about that is that we don't know what they are yet entirely you could try to predict some but it's hard to know when you put this together with other things built on top of it what the effects of that are going to be it could be a little chaotic so other do you feel like with the type of protocol there's more control which actually feels better I think you can do that in a fully decentralized way where you have the credentials I know that face the face of bullhorn what I was going to say my interpretation could blockchain be useful for the circumstance when you want to use what we call selective disclosure for example at a hub you want to let the pilots know that you are over 21 but not necessarily all the rest of the information on driver's license so you can accomplish that in a peer to peer way let's say we had a mobile app for that I could NFC tap the bouncer's phone or do a QR code and share this stuff even if we didn't have network available so there's no need to have some logically centralized place where everybody writes all of that information to be necessary can you just shout it out so let me ask you two questions one do you want everyone else's do you want a copy of everyone else's claims do you want everyone else to have yours you can back up yours you can have them on different devices you can have backups of them you can store them in different places so so there are uses for hashing things and putting them on the blockchain but I question whether that's actually needed here if you had some if the bouncer had the public keys of the issuers like the DMV for 50 states for example they'd be able to verify a selective disclosure from your driver's license claim for example and that can happen without needing that to be recorded anywhere one good reason to record stuff on the ledgers is the time proof of the time that something happened so if that's an important part of the use case then maybe yes yeah information security principles the basic stuff the thing I went through I should have had more details in the slides on this but there's like a handful of things to know about and I personally especially because I built systems I try to reason from the bottom up with that stuff just because if you don't you tend to it's easy to create vulnerabilities with laws is that helpful is there a simple answer to that probably not sorry not for me I think I've made your state changes you can think of a blockchain as a managing state trying to software that model right optimistically do all the competition off the blockchain so they aren't a state change but really you want to be recording that that's about for my perspective I'm asking myself should I build on the blockchain instead of can you just like shout it out um maybe that's something yeah yeah that's a big one I mean like bitcoin right there's bitcoin and bitcoin cash one of the three is like bitcoin cash basically says we should make a lot more transactions per block but then it requires a lot of nodes all across the world to verify that and it can take away for a little person being able to verify their nodes and if you put more transactions on one block you tend to centralize to that so I think it's about how we can actually we want to build these blocks and how we want to ensure that the block changes no actually my friend Cornell did you guys should check that out he does new web comics every Tuesday but they're awesome so Christian's raising the bar of power point again discussion groups and can you uh do you have to rush or can you stay a little longer okay so um thanks Christian good stuff so before we uh so now that we've kind of got some level setting and we're thinking starting to think about the relevant topics um what we're going to do is break into two or three smaller groups and in TMA you're about to be on the spot um and uh yep there's a limbo there you go um and so I'm gonna call on a couple of people that have got um uploaded some topics that they're um that they're right in the middle of that they're you know knowledgeable about and they can speak on that I know folks want to want to talk about so um I want to first of all just get a quick show of hands especially people that I don't already know is um is any who here filled out a form on the form or if we talked to have I talked to the things that you're giving a talk a quick show of hands we're like I'm expecting to give a talk okay good all right so tomorrow that some of those people will be here um so um who here wants to talk about a particular topic okay I know you've got one and what topic do you want to talk about um a small group identity okay perfect so um so we have Christian for a little while longer so one we'll have one breakup group going further and deeper into identity um and then there's a second breakup group that's going to talk about a very interesting um new trade association that's forming as a result of um some big wins in Wyoming um with legislative reforms with respect to blockchain and uh Tammy was right in the middle of all that in um in Wyoming and could you just tell people a little bit about what the the topic is and also just what happened in Wyoming and then um and then at that point um we'll probably do a quick show of hands who's interested in talking about that who's interested in going deeper in identity and um based on size some people go into this little room some people stay in this room and that's how it's going to go okay so what happened in Wyoming and what's about to happen in next TMA I have I think um so last week in Wyoming five blockchain bills passed and the most groundbreaking bill was House Bill 70 so this bill Wyoming would be the first state ever to define cryptocurrencies as their own asset class so that's huge right because the SEC monitors securities and the CFTC monitors commodities and Wyoming saying utility tokens don't fall into either category in fact their own asset class fall under their own regulations and rules so I was in Wyoming helping lobby and get these bills passed with the Wyoming blockchain coalition as well you're engaging on public matters I do not believe you're a lobbyist we're working together to support these bills but and there's also a group that was formed prior to all of this called the digital asset trade association so where the very first action oriented self regulatory group in this space and the goal is to not only help direct legislation on a federal level but also on a statewide level because we've seen states when they issue laws often times will influence how federal legislation ends up going so our next focus is helping Colorado get a bunch of blockchain bills passed we've seen in international states like Arizona Nevada and Washington to build off of Wyoming's momentum so there's a lot of interest in this space right now and self-regulation at SEC talked a lot about wanting our industry to self-regulate as a way to help prevent fraudsters and also to help support the ecosystem as we develop so yeah that's like we had a very high level basis and then we can talk more about self-regulation and what that really means in the breakout group awesome okay can you tell me when this is can people see this okay so that's fantastic right now okay this is great so I'm not going to discuss it but some people are going to be going over to maybe fall or or we'll go down and see if we can have it somewhere so yeah it's a little level but it's a great group and tomorrow that's not tomorrow tomorrow at 10 o'clock doors open at Ambridge Innovation Center in the Venture Cafe at one Broadway it's a really great space very good for cooperation lots of breakout rooms and the half of our starts at 1pm and Chris Mondley who's here in the workshop and we'll be able to hear more about security and identity and people are going to be talking about security and all kinds of great stuff tomorrow and perhaps best of all people with project ideas refugees and some of the others that we've heard today we'll be able to bring in the team so you can select a team and jump onto a project and start to break some stuff okay and so we can get some support on how to implement viewports although the tutorial is terrific and then so we have the on-call concessions with the hacking and then we'll have some report outs around 5 and thanks again to Council Reuters Labs and Brian will even have pizza which is known to be the platinum food source for hacking so with that we'll show hands I guess we'll learn more and talk about state legislator things and this data which is digital asset trade association digital asset trade association okay and who wants to go deeper or further into the realm of identity okay I'm going to suggest that the identity folks go into this room over here and the data people let's see identity people are in the room and then look for the character okay here we go oh and I'll open open open open open open open open open open open open open open open open open open open And then also, the actual organization, and then from there we can kind of, when I talk to you, start talking about what separation really means, all of you guys, you know, like So you can see we have our cowboy hats. I'm going to explain that. Okay, so I will answer your question in a second. And then I'll answer this question first. So when a token is used as a traditional security, what that means is that you are buying this token on the assumption that the token will appreciate in value. So it's an investment. Just like you would buy a stock of a company or you would buy a bond, right? You expect this asset to appreciate and you want to be able to trade it. There's no, you don't use it for anything except for the investment. A utility token is different in that you use it as the mechanism to participate on a platform. So my favorite example that I like to use is this file sharing blockchain called SIA coin. The SIA network allows people to share files and you use a SIA token to be able to participate on that network. So SIA's value actually is not very high because it's not meant to be a speculatory instrument. You literally use it as a way to enable yourself access into the network. So that's not like on a high level. What a utility token versus a security token, like what the differences are. Does that explain making it kind of clear? Yeah. I mean, potentially you could have a platform where that would be the case, right? The utility token would just be the gas to allow you access into that network and you could go and then buy a security. But I mean, yeah, but I mean, right. So right now to be clear from a tax purpose standpoint, utility tokens and security tokens are still absolutely the same. You have to record every single time that you switch ownership or switch wallets of tokens. So it's like these laws are amazing and they're groundbreaking, but they don't change the reality that from a federal level in terms of reporting to that IRS, you still have to record all changes of utility and security tokens. And also these laws do not trump federal legislation. The reason why this is significant is because right now there is no regulation on cryptocurrencies. So the SEC can still go out and get laws passed that can contradict what the states say. But I like to use the example of what's been happening in states for cannabis legalization, right? It's still illegal on a federal level, but states have been making decisions on how they want to treat things like cannabis and cryptocurrencies. And we're hoping, you know, just like people in the cannabis industry are hoping that what states decide will ultimately influence how the federal regulation moves. There's no guarantee, right? So what Jeff Sessions is doing right now in terms of trying to roll back guidance on cannabis. So there's reason why Wyoming is special. The whole genesis for how this happened was this woman named Caitlin Long, who was a director at Morgan Stanley and was one of the first people in the corporate space who really started believing in the technology and kind of brought it to the forefront of Fortune 100 companies wanted to donate Bitcoin to the University of Wyoming. And because of this exemption, right? The Wyoming Money Transmitter Act did not allow her to give the money, the Bitcoins to the University of Wyoming. It was like this whole arduous process of like having to convert her Bitcoin into cash and then donating it. So because of that, she kind of got this group of people together to create the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition and started talking to officials at the University as well as in the Senate to kind of see like, what can we do to make this state at least a participant in this versioning economy, right? Like we have this brand new industry and people in Wyoming cannot participate. So the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition kind of came out of that experience. And Wyoming, interestingly enough, has a citizen Senate. So all these folks here, they only are legislators for 20 days out of the year. So they get together to go and get all their budgets passed, pass any laws they want to pass. And so this gentleman here, Tyler and Senator Ogden, they kind of helped put together with Caitlin and a bunch of folks at Consensus and a couple of other law firms. They put together a draft of these five bills and started getting people in the state to buy into it. And Wyoming is really special because it's the first state that legalized or created LLCs. There's very strict privacy laws. There's a very libertarian oriented state. And funny enough, there had been talks before about Wyoming creating their own currency. Before the whole cryptocurrency, Mania, because they were worried about what would happen to the U.S. dollar, should anything happen to the federal government. So, like, yeah, that's kind of what happened. Yeah. Because of the Wyoming Money and Transmitter Act until last week, it was illegal to, you couldn't, a company like Coinbase could not operate in Wyoming. You couldn't have a wallet in Wyoming. You could open your own wallet if you wanted to, right? But that takes, you have to then manage all your keys on your own in this whole process. Companies like Coinbase could not operate in Wyoming until last week when these bills passed. And that's why the University of Wyoming could not take the Bitcoin. So now they could if they, you know, open a multi-sig wallet and kind of had that whole system set up. So, those are the bills. Okay. So, yeah. It should be a 401C3. It's a traditional university, yeah. 501C3, sorry. So, yeah, so data is just one organization. We're different just because of the action-oriented nature of this group. But what we're trying, yeah, you guys can read all the strips here first. So the thing is, you know, there's undeniably fraud and scams that are happening on an epidemic level in the crypto space. Like that's undeniable. And that's a problem because the technology is real. There are real benefits, you know, and we don't want what's happening from the fraudsters to inhibit the development of our industry. So the SEC kind of hinted that they wanted our space to self-regulate. And that's kind of what wide data got created. There's actually most of the founding members here at the steering committee. So we have this really awesome group of people who are, we're looking for executive director right now. And if you guys know of any amazing lawyers, let me know. We're trying to put together a team of lawyers on a retainer to help fight against the fraud in this space. But yeah, so we have a, you know, a bunch of the members of our steering committee have extensive knowledge in terms of like helping with lobbying and creating policy on Capitol Hill in the United Nations. And the whole point is to kind of letting the industry speak for itself to direct policy. Because we don't want to see this new technology being hindered by regulation that pops up because of fear of the technology, because you don't understand it, right? Blockchain is complicated. It's really hard to explain in one conversation to someone what blockchain truly is and what it's truly capable of. And so you can imagine busy policymakers who don't really know much about the technology. They don't have time to understand it and then going and making like decisions without, you know, fully understanding the implications of what they're doing and how they're hindering the growth of the technology in the field. I like, I think Joey Ito said this, maybe you're wrong, don't quote me, but he equated where blockchain is right now to the development of IPFS. So right now we're developing the protocol level of blockchain. So we're not going to call blockchain blockchain in five years, 10 years in well. And so knowing this, we need to have a sandbox for these companies that actually have good intentions to experiment and develop on. And so data wants to be a proponent to kind of help enable this. Are there any questions or like, how do you guys feel about self regulation? Yeah, we'll go back. Yes. Okay, so I'm not the person to speak on this. I'll just give you what I know on a brief level. So the gentleman named Paul quickly and he was he was also in Wyoming helping with what we're doing with the bills here. But Colorado has been discussing also passing through several blockchain bills that would kind of kind of offer the same thing right like offer more clear definitions on what a utility versus security token is give more guidance in terms of what the industry should look like in terms of like for company because like one of the biggest problems right now is that companies are domiciling outside the United States because they're worried about what's going to happen with SEC and like the CFTC. And so Colorado wants to be like Wyoming where at least entrepreneurs can have some semblance of security by like at least knowing where the state stands in terms of viewing their business and their tokens. Wyoming, yeah. I mean, but the thing is it's like, states do have in terms of properties states have a lot of say and how they treat property. Right. And that's the thing. Right. Like if the SEC goes and says all tokens are securities, then yeah, like it won't really matter. But to have states start giving guidance on how they view crypto currencies, because the thing is, if you look at what a crypto currency is, what a utility token is not well like an investment token is. It's not it's not a security and it's not a commodity. It's what you use it as a way to gain access to the platform. And so, but so, so Wyoming, so Wyoming differentiates right, it says there are security tokens and utility tokens. And that's important. Like, because you're right, like if someone said you can make the argument that a lot of ICOs these days are true security tokens. And that's fair. They, a lot of ICOs are doing their offering structured very similar to an IPO, right, because they have to go through registering their tokens as securities, go through the entire process with the lawyers, with the bankers, etc. And you don't with the utility token, you still have to go through that process right now, but to have guidance on like the differentiating factor. That's, that's huge. Like, it's because a utility token is a completely different asset class. And we haven't seen it before. So, I don't think so. I think that the major issues that people are dealing with are securities law and tax law. Neither ways are really in the same sense. It's true that there are, you know, we're all excited about the sort of pure crypto open source community. That's not what people are selling either. But a utility token isn't a security. It's, it's, it's, I keep on saying I sound very repetitive, but it is a different asset class. Digital assets like a crypto currency, they're not, they're not an investment vehicle. There are ICOs and tokens that are investments, and then they would be classified as a security token. And in that case, they would fall under all security laws. But I think that there are, and I don't know if you're hearing. Yeah, I'm just pointing out a practical matter, running over to Wyoming and saying, hey, I'm going to split hairs about whether I sold this. It seems like a thin layer of protection. So it's, so it's not. Protection actually is, and you answered my question, which is. It's not protection. With regard to property law, they can clarify that. Well, and then so also one of the bills that was passed was the series LLC law. So Delaware already has a series LLC law, but you have a mother LLC with child LLCs. And what that does is it makes KYL and KYC and AML a lot more simpler for token issuances, because if all of your buyers has a Wyoming LLC or any LLC, but Wyoming has a lot more privacy protection. For you, it's very difficult to pierce the veiled between the registered agent and the actual principle of that LLC. So that's just that, you know, that's just like one potential solution for the whole identity accountability issue of, you know, you don't want. But that's, but that's the thing that's it's anonymous because you, you want some anonymity, right? In terms of like you yourself purchasing the token, but that's because I don't. I mean, on a blockchain, when you're buying things, you don't the LLC, you can tie it back to the owner relatively easily. And it's like, if you the anonymity part with LLC is just saying, this makes it a lot easier from a company standpoint to know that they're selling to real individuals or like a real entity. And not what we see happening right now, which is like, people argue like, okay, blockchain are being used as money laundering vehicles. Well, if you have an LLC during the purchasing, at least there's some, some sort of checks and balance there. It's not, it's not like a full solution. And what's happening, Wyoming is literally just the first step, right? We're having this discussion because no one, we don't have a solution yet. We're just trying to make things better. You talked about how you're selling to. Yeah. It seems immediately they can go to Wyoming and then they won't do their selling to. So which they will know. So the principle that you should know who you're selling to. And that's why I'm arguing for the LLC is because at least the companies know the entity and the identity of who they're selling their tokens to. And it's like, you were kind of reciprocated protection, right? The company knows. So why do you need an LLC? So this is my own personal opinion. Don't take it with a grain of salt. I think that ICOs have a lot of potential are incredible because I'm not an accredited investor, right? I don't have enough money to be an accredited investor. So I can't participate in IPOs. And that's a problem. And so I, as someone who's going to buy into an ICO with an LLC, at least I can, I can help these companies comply with the spirit of, of why we have accredited investors like as a policy, right? We don't want people to purchase things that they're not like that they don't have a right to invest in, which is really stupid. But, but I do believe in the importance of verify identity and like AML and KYC are not bad policies, right? But it's just a vehicle, right? Like this is just like one piece of the puzzle. It's not, it's not a blanket solution. I'm not saying like every company should go and do an LLC. I'm just saying from the standpoint of companies having a drama outside the United States to do their ICOs instead of having an option of coming to the States, coming to Wyoming. And it's probably going to be other states now. Arizona two weeks ago introduced a bunch of blockchain bills to their legislation as well. So we'll see what happens with those bills. But this is happening in more states than just Wyoming. And that's why it's significant. It's like Wyoming is just one state. And that's important. But this is a movement that's happening. We're seeing Nevada wanted to talk about potentially having reciprocity of the blockchain bills with between Wyoming and Nevada. So it's, this is happening on a national level. No one's saying that. Okay. Yeah. You said it's like a thin layer of protection. Well, compared to nothing at all, I would say that's like a big, that's still a big difference. It's a first step. I have a thin layer of skin, but it's, you know, it's pretty good. You don't build Roman one day, you know, take one, one week at a time. Yeah. The baby steps are going to the vacation of the world. It's very difficult to. Yeah. So a Wyoming LLC can. Yeah. And, and it's not, it's not a way to evade it. Like when I say pierce a bill, it's just this, with an LLC, it's very easy to like skirt around the whole like, like, how do I say this? If the intent of an LLC is a way to protect the principle of that LLC, right? It's a limited liability company. But so with the LLC, you're not anonymously purchasing all the property. Like you can do whatever an LLC tradition is. You can buy property. You can run all your expenses and revenues through that LLC. It does. It's not changed the nature of an LLC at all. It's just, it's just a vehicle to go and do all of your like blockchain. It's so what one way that it's easier. Well, and this isn't like this isn't a the only way. But one, one way that one reason why LLC is beneficial is because right now it's easier as an individual to run all to run everything through like another and like entity like through an LLC because you can keep track of all your transactions. Like you can do all on your own right with your own wallets. We use companies like Coinbase because it just makes life a little bit easier. You can technically have all your own wallets and have a hardware wallet and like write down all of your like private keys, like do your own key management, etc. And it's just like a lot of work. And so with an LLC is just one way for an individual to more easily manage like what they're doing in the crypto space. But and like I have a lot of friends in the space and that's kind of the recommended way of managing your crypto and like it's just an easy way to just keep things in order. But it doesn't do it doesn't offer. Yeah. Well, from a tax point of view, the IRS doesn't care whether it's in your LLC or your single member or it's you. Yeah, of course. But the IRS, but the IRS also, you know, right now the regulation or the guidance is you have to track every single exchange from wallet to wallet. So if I'm just going to just I'm just trying to like convert it to Bitcoin. I have to record that transaction. I have to mark the. Yeah. And also and that's something like nobody does that. So that gets back to your point, which is the real reason that people have a lot of crypto that they haven't tracked any of the transactions. And they don't really know how they're going to come out from under that. So they're looking for ways to spend or borrow crypto that don't force them into the position of going to the IRS and working it all out, which they'll have to do eventually. I mean, legitimate companies are doing that, though. They are tracking, you know, like in their their. This is why data was created like a lot of commerce company like she and her CEO Ken Brooks meta X right there. They are working with tax lawyers and tax accountants and the and the problem is that there's not any real guidance right there's this whole constant called airdrop tokens right company will go and put tokens into their employees wallets and and it's like there's no definitive way to to know which like which tax methods like, you know, we have FIFO and life. All right. Sorry, let me get into into the weeds, but like there's no guidance on which which mechanism to use in terms of tracking tokens from like an IRS standpoint. So I think that companies in the crypto space have to take their companies getting triple tax for something that they should not be triple tax for because there's no guidance and they're trying to follow the word of the law. And so this is why they have they have to record the price when the token gets issued. And in a lot of watching companies when they go and do their token sales, they'll have a lockup period. So the token will appreciate while it's in the lockup period and then the token will then have a smart contract that execute so that the ether that's used to convert it back into their regular token. Like that transaction gets also taxed because the ethers price then when it becomes that like, I think they have like their tokens called at token, I might be wrong but when that happens they get tax on that transaction as well because technically on the IRS standpoint that is also a token exchange right the ether became at token. And then when the token then gets out of lockup period to you then get tax on the token getting dropped into like the new like the new wallet out of the out of the lockup wallet. That's three times like that's three taxable events which technically shouldn't like that shouldn't be the case right they should they should be able to choose one or the other, whether they get tax on the creation of the token, or from when the token gets dropped into their like gets out of the lockup period. And that's not like there's no guidance on that so they have to take the most extreme route. They're paying millions in taxes because they don't want to get screwed by the IRS. And so this is why what's happening in Wyoming is significant because the federal government isn't the IRS guidance was issued five years ago. That's ridiculous. There's so much that has happened in the crypto state since then. This is why we need groups to help steer the direction of the industry and make help direct regulation and give guidance because no one else does it people like us who want to see this technology actually make a difference in the world like we need to be proponents on a policy level as well because governments have the ability to you know, stifle innovation and I don't think people want to do that but that can sometimes be the result of inaction. So data was created as a piece of it, but we need people like you guys to want to be involved, ask questions, be interested, be skeptical, right? But it sounds like data has a specific position. So maybe if you explain some positions. Yeah, I'm going to pull up the slide. Did I answer your question or Brian? For money laundering. Well, so that's the thing like if if a company for individual registers an LLC and LLC can still get subpoenaed, right? And the veil disappears if a company gets if an LLC gets subpoenaed, the registered agent has to disclose all the principles information. That's better than an account being in the Cayman Islands when we can't really do that as easily. I say that this is a win in terms of my regulations standpoint. Yeah, you can use it. What were those things? What were the things? Like, first of all, instead of putting your money like a coin base, you put it in a nice state and they were managing your money and they were saying you keep it for 15 days you will get this much. If you keep it for 60 days you get this much and those guys disappear. What they were doing, that was an ICO or what was that? I don't think that's an ICO. Basically a blockchain policy. Yeah, so that's a Ponzi scheme. I wouldn't call it an ICO then it's a Ponzi scheme. So a lot of these ICOs are stamps. But they're not ICOs. Yeah. There's the ICO that are based on currency on coins kind of. Which are things like Ethereum. Ethereum is a coin. It has a real value because it makes the Ethereum system work and you can't get the virtual machine that you could to work without the actual coin itself. So there is like a real intrinsic value. And then you have now all the depths because you can create your own token which is not a coin. The token has no value whatsoever. The token is the same thing as something that can be an issue in a multiplayer online game. World of Worldcraft that you can actually buy tons of shit with dollars. You can then exchange on the action in that can give you a certain advantage over you as an adversary. So within the ecosystem of World of Warcraft there is an economy that has developed. That's intrinsic to the World of Warcraft. And no one needs to regulate that. There's no regulation required. And most of the ICO that they've come out of that scanning in order to get that smell are the ones who are based on those ecosystem idea of economy. But which are not real underlying currency coin that made the actual code itself work. So you don't need to adapt. You don't need Ethereum. You don't need, for example, I have an ICO which was a Civic which is an identity ICO. And that ICO, the coin itself, is no real value. It lives on top of I can't mine it. I can't do it. I can't do it with my corporate BSR ocean. And that one true value comes into the coin where the actual real value is in the technology and functioning with that coin. That's how you can really distinguish where the real value is. So far we've talked about four potential categories, right? Sort of pure open source, particular cryptocurrencies. Utility tokens like Ether or Ether is great. I mean, it's gas. Utility tokens that are, you know, more directly per single product and then scans, right? No, I'm not saying that anything falls into those categories. But I'm just wondering whether Digital Asset Trade Association or Protect Itself would sort of classify and say, well, these are the guys we care about. Everybody else here on your own. Digital Asset Trade Association's goal, like large medical, is just to help regulate the industry in space against frosters and potting these scans, right? Because I wouldn't call a company that puts out like a landing page that says, buy our token. Here's our wallet. We're doing an ICO. We guarantee 20% returns on your investment. That's not an ICO. They don't have any technology. They're just, they're literally just scammers. And scammers have existed across many different industries, across many different generations. And like, that's not an ICO. That's not a blockchain company. Yeah, sorry. You were trying to say something for a while. Yeah, so one clarifying question I had was about the Wyoming LLC laws and LLC regulations. The privacy laws existed always. The series LLC was part of the blockchain bills package, the five bills. But yeah, Wyoming LLC has existed and also the privacy laws have existed prior to this. And you used another way to special advantage because of the U.S. So does the International Trade Association model qualify? So if the ultimate goal is to create kind of a trustee, a use case for ICOs. Yeah. Is data going to publish it all? So I'm speaking for myself at this point because I had, you know, the data is still getting fully like getting created. Like we launched last week or earlier this week, but so this is like off script. You know, this is what I think or what I'm just a discussion. I think that is one of the goals, right? Call bullshit on bad actors in the space and to potentially put out literature that would give examples of good ICOs. What a good actor would look like. Principles that a company should follow if they want to be considered like a good player in the space. Yeah, exactly. And also like the difference is also being an action arm, right? Going and not only doing the kind of filtering the shit that kind of falls up to the top. But the but also going and working with legislators to help create the regulatory environment that would also help do that. So like doing from both sides, like regularly within, but then also looking at real regulation in terms of laws and policy. Will replace or something to adjudicate like this is a scan, this isn't a scan. That could be kind of subjective. I know this is like this part of the self-governance that this was talking about. So is it to say you put out a rating or you put out a list of the things you think are credible. Yeah. Or you put a list of things you think are not credible. Is that kind of like a sense of these self-regulation? I don't know. That's to be determined. There are like indicators, like a lot of what happens. Well, actually, this is very relevant to what David's actually one of his projects that he's working on. But there are signals that you can find in telegram chats, right? That will indicate usually whether a company is fraud and also just by just in the white paper itself. There are certain signals that can indicate that companies more likely to be a fraud, right? Like it's not like a real, a true blockchain use case and it's not going to amount to anything. So I think that that hasn't been like, we haven't like ridden anything or this hasn't been created yet, but that would probably be one mechanism to go and find scams and frauds in the space. And then also using what's happening in telegram channels with people. People are already kind of doing it right, calling out bad actors. But it's just not happening in a very public way where someone who's not involved in the space would be able to have access to information. Because you have to go out, knowledge, information exists out there. But one of the most amazing things is our ability to be able to go and find it and that's the barrier here, right? And so you should actually talk a little bit about your ICO scam tomorrow. Okay, well stay tuned because his project is very relevant and it's a way for people to go and more easily report bad actors. Yeah. And there's like a lot of other associations that come out. Data is different because of the action arm of data. But there are other, I think Dazza mentioned a couple of what he was talking to you Bob about different regulatory groups that have sprung up that will kind of help define principles, help set standards. I mean, we need them. Like we want, we want people to care about this. Since I do securities, I still secure the blockchain. What's immediately on this is that it doesn't actually help to have a global regulation as you focus. It's a global market that's actually what's interesting about it. So what do you view as sort of the global approach? We're talking to people globally. Like we had Alana was just in Brussels two weeks ago to talk in a policy makers because this is we're focusing on Washington, but also Europe. We have people, this is going to be an international like movement because the blockchain isn't country agnostic, right? We, it's a blockchain is country agnostic. Sorry. But yeah, so it's going to be on a global scale working with governments globally. And you know what, this is actually why I think my argument for why blockchain is relevant when a technology is taken seriously by global government. That's when you know that things are starting to get serious at Davos this year, right? World leaders were coming to crypto HQ to learn more about what blockchain is. And there were skeptics obviously, right? People who don't believe into technology. But just the fact that they're giving us the time of day to come and learn more about it says something. And I think that this is why the time is right now to help direct policy to support this movement. Are you ever concerned that these kinds of policies and like I generally agree with the point where it starts to fly in the face with what we're trying to do here? Like if it's going to be taxed and regulated and all these other things and we're trying to do this in a global network, obviously it's a huge challenge. Yeah. Are we almost barking up the wrong tree and trying and thinking of it in the sense of how do we regulate it? Or how do we allow access to it versus how do we regulate it? Well, the thing is, is that regulation is going to happen whether we like it or not. It's already happening. We have heads of different agencies arguing about what cryptocurrencies are, right? The CFTC just recently some federal judge ruled that cryptocurrencies can now be seen as commodities. So they fall under the jurisdiction of the CFTC. Okay. Well, the SEC has seen that there's securities. So which one is it? And this is how... Actually, I think that point is pretty modern. But they are arriving... But they're saying that they're the same... But they're looking at the same thing and calling them two different names. Yeah, that was something that they've seen for a point of jurisdiction. But actually if you look at any given issue, they don't. It's pretty clear. I agree with this. I think that there is... I think that there is confusion in determining it, though. Because where we're trying to figure out, is it token money? Is it security? Is it a commodity? Is it property? Like that hasn't been defined yet. So... And I think that... Actually, I think that's true. That's what's happening. And honestly, I think that you're entitled to your opinion too, right? Like, all of this is new. There's no one answer. There's no one correct answer. And that's what's so interesting about what's going on right now. Is that we're defining this. We're in the beginning stages of creating the definitions and directing what's going to be happening. So, you know, you might feel like... I might... Like, what I think might not end up being the reality, right? Like, when regulations come out and as the industry matures, the future is not written in stone, and we don't know what's going to happen. And that's why, at least I'm right now, involved in these initiatives to help figure it out. Because when people tell me, oh, like, the feds have it all figured out. Like, no, no, they don't. I have friends. So, our data was talking to... Speaking to the SEC, and the SEC does not fully... They're not fully clear about how they want to view cryptos right now. And this is... You know, these are people who are speaking to members of that agency. So it's not like, you know, we're not making enough saying, oh, we're just speculating, and like, we're actually talking to these different agencies, getting people on the ground to figure out, like, what some people's heads and, like, how they're viewing this industry. Right, but the direction is very clear the last month. The U.S. says if you sell it as a customer, it's a security. And they put a lot of rules on it. The Europeans have gone the way they've known it. When this ICO thing is really helping you start in the company, they're moving to legalize it. In fact, they have a different legal framework. If it's not a stock or bond, it's not regulated. So, the U.S. and in Europe have diverged in very clear ways over the last couple of months. Happening. You know, focusing on it, what's the motivation? You have a certain motivation, a certain thing that you think should be creating passions, right? And I think we're going to end up sort of where people want to end up. You know, is the U.S. motivation different from the European motivation? There's started community needs more help. Maybe there are motivations that have to do with the difference in rules. I mean, it already has very, very stark differences. So, are you saying that at some point, just from geopolitical point of view? No. I think they could be diverged from context. Consider China, right? You know, they said that this was too Scandinavian. People were mining out their cloud-computing subsidies to my business. China is still heavily, heavily, heavily involved in crypto too, right? They are. It's at high risk. It is high risk, but China has also shut down ICOs, exchanges, etc., many, many times over the last five years. And so I think China, it's very interesting. It's a very centralized government, obviously. Most governments are centralized, but they're particularly centralized. And they're just able to kind of like put a pause on it, but still enable things to kind of happen within the country where people, you know, Chinese investors are still investing in cryptos. They go through different means to go and do it. And I think that looking at what's happening in Japan and Korea, governments are, governments are, yeah, you're right. They're taking different views on cryptocurrencies and making policy decisions. But looking at what happened in Korea, I think they changed their policy views a couple of times. The point is, these governments can diverge over long periods of time because they have different goals. The goal of China and the Chinese government is to control cross-border with capital flows, which is what blockchain is encouraged. They're going to always be fighting against that. The goal in Europe is to recover a start-up economy that they feel is going to use to Asian-American. So they can get that, but ICOs, they're going to do it. The goal in the United States is to enforce their securities laws consistently. It's pretty clear that I agree with the SEC. Almost every ICO is sold as an investment in a common-sex way. If you were going to apply the rules consistently, you'd have to treat those as a security. So because they have different goals, they're probably going to end up in different places. There have been ICOs here that have been issued as a utility token. I'll actually think that that's not true. I think that's a very self-serving statement. The ICOs that are real cryptocurrencies are the ones that fork a real cryptocurrency. Why is that when they just fork? Because they're not selling the thing to invest in software. That's an investment. When you fork, you have two other chains now, though. When you fork a cryptocurrency, both chains still continue to live. That's not an ICO then. So you take that argument that doesn't pertain to an investment. Well, it's not an investment because that's something... If you go out and sell your coin and you say, look, I'm pre-selling this coin, I'm going to invest your money. I'm going to make this thing that's really valuable. You can split me into all you want. It's like saying a stock split is an IPO. No, it's not. So a fork, I just think... You didn't listen to what I said, which is a fork is not an ICO. Yeah, it's not. But if you sell tokens to get money to build software, that's clearly an investment. You can argue about whether it should be regulated than what it is because it's regulated in stupid ways. But it's so obvious, right? And people try to do it a lot. I agree with the fact that there are token issuances that are securities. We'll go back to your list of, like, what $80 million worth of tokens to pay for their software. Who is this? Oh, friends. Yeah, I mean, these guys... MetaX did a true utility token issuance. But they're going to go back down probably... I don't know, like, in the U.S., everything's seen as a security because of the SEC. Right, but I'm just pointing out that it is a security. You sell something as an investment. And the idea is you're going to take that money, make something that... So this is why this is really cool, is that we're having this argument right now, right? And it's great, like, this is what should be happening. People should be asking questions and questioning. But obviously, I don't agree, right? I think that utility tokens are a different asset class. And we'll see who... And, you know, that's the beauty of the future. We'll see what ends up happening. Perhaps the U.S. government is going to say, you know what? This is our stance. We're going to pass federal regulation that's going to say, cryptocurrencies are securities. No questions asked. This is the way it has to be. And maybe they won't discern the difference. Why? It's a security. But I've never not said that. But that's not true. I don't know about WACS. I know MetaX did not do that. So it's like... I don't know MetaX, but I know WACS. And I'm certain of WACS. But I never said that WACS did it... You know, that they didn't do a security token. I don't have any comments about WACS. I'm just saying that there are security tokens that were issued and utility tokens, and they are different. And like, I don't know. I think that... I was just curious if the SAF changes at all? No. SAF doesn't protect you. SAF was something that Cooley wrote a white paper where they had introduced the SAFs, which had already been... The idea came from a different law firm or different paper. SAF is fine, but it does not protect a company that's doing an ICO from regulation. Yeah. But it's compliant. It's not compliant. You're not compliant. You're not compliant. Yeah. If you... Well, no, I mean, you can use a SAF framework, but it's not saying that you're compliant with regulations though, right? And that's the problem with SAFs. People think that if they follow SAFs, they're protected and they're not. To this gentleman's point, in the United States, the safest route is still to go, the traditional register your tokens as securities route, and then you follow the IPO route. That's the safest way. You're guaranteed that at least to not piss anyone off on a federal level. And data is not saying to not think about that. We're saying, let's try to change it so that we don't... That doesn't have to be the model because that doesn't make sense for companies that are doing utility token issuances. Yeah. If someone were interested to find out more about the Wyoming legislation, do you have any resources available? Yeah. So we have right now, we just have a landing page for digital asset to your association. But it's digitalasset.org. And then the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition has a really great site that has more information about the bills that got passed in Wyoming. And also, there's a bunch of articles like on Coindesk and Cointelegraph that go more into detail on the bills. So lots of info. And you guys always email me. I'm happy to answer more questions. As things get more developed, there'll be a lot more information for me to be able to spread out to people, like, to disseminate. You have to go through the entire process. I have... Yeah, I'm qualified. Or the next step would be Reggae Plus. But I wouldn't recommend that because there's no screen. We're going to sell a lot. Sell them in this private land market globally. The U.S. has to be ready for you right now. And then we'll develop over the next year the exchanges so that we can go and do more to the public disclosure and do what Spotify did with the solution for our public distribution. So, because we're going to need to move larger pressure because we're not talking about selling shit to those markets and these kinds of things. Yeah, well, there's an element of like protectionism. And that... I don't think they're going to give that up. So, right now, you can sell your own issue which is the way that most of these VCs, I don't have to have a broken deal. I can sell my own issue. There are some no-action letters like I've been pointing to that one. So, they can sell these Reggae securities under the crowdfunding exemptions. So, you can go to crowdfunding where it's a bit hot. What I'm doing is I'm putting in a significant broken deal which there's an advantage to that because they have access to entities and institutional investors that we build a portal and run KLC. And that's what's spread. The U.S. is not the only country that says that to sell a security you have to go for a broken deal. Probably half the jurisdictions that have that rule and their broken dealers are pre-influential. So, I think you're going to end up making a deal with them. That's my theory, but if you do make a deal with them there are some advantages for working through broken dealers. So, not only is your compliance a lot easier but they know a lot of institutional investors. That's a pretty big advantage. And they can also provide street name services. So, the thing you were talking about with LLC is sort of hiding who the person is. A lot of hiding, but yeah. Okay. Okay. Someone buys shares from the German broker. You're not going to send their name to the issuer registry. But you've been saying your name and then communicate with that shareholder the way you're coming or supposed to communicate with that shareholder. So, that's a system that we're building a registry system that can be at harm's lane. It's your street name and that's the advantage you might get when you're going through broken deals. So, are you going to call security? No, I'm a guy. I've invested in pure utility tokens. But, you know, I got a little peeve that so many people were saying, hey, we don't have to comply with security laws. Wouldn't you like to just indicate the registry will allow you to run private exchange offers? The people are saying that the majority of ICOs are securities. I think that, like, we're on the same side and say, like, most of the offerings right now are traditional securities. They should be traditional securities. It's more like, there are the exemptions to that rule, though. There should be verbiage in policies or something out there that gives a distinction to tokens that do not fall in that category. Even if it right now is a very small basket. So, let me just read to you the description of the meta-ex. So, it's a million dollars worth of tokens. Use of proceeds will go through the advancement of product development, general ministry of duties, business development, marketing, consulting, legal. So, that token, but the ad token is used, like, if you look at the registry that so, meta-ex, the company that owns or runs ad chain, which has the ad token and so, that token is used as a way to curate the, like, the ad registry for ad chain. Yeah, but if you really look at how this works, that's a terrible way to do it, right? Because you're asking people to buy to stake. I think ad token is a staking system. You're asking people to hold these stakes and something that's very volatile. In fact, it was deliberately designed to be volatile because as more people use it, you want the price to go up. You could, alternatively, sell an action security, div it in out the ad token, right? And not put that pressure on the ad token to appreciate and actually create a much more stable ad token. Have you seen, have you looked into SCIACoin? I have looked into SCIACoin. I think what SCIACoin did is actually pretty good. Yeah, and SCIAC, SCIAC is the example that I use that often, the most, actually, as an example of, like, the best example of a utility token, right? Because you don't make money off of SCIACoin. SCIACoin are not worth that much money. That's the whole point. They're literally used as a mechanism to operate on the SCIAC network. And then you buy a SCIAC fund if you want to make money off of the transactions on the SCIAC network. So a SCIAC fund, there's only a certain unlimited number and those are true investments because you're buying it with the expectation that people are going to use a SCIAC network and you're going to make money through that fund. So these are the kinds of securities we're creating where you sold the securities support the burden of investment. But they are, but the fund... But they didn't actually have this mechanism. So now they're stuck with the SCIACoin thing that wasn't sold as a security. But they didn't, so SCIACs do... I mean, they're doing their token sale traditional security route, right? Because they don't want to like... They already sold this stuff. They're doing a second offer. They're doing a second offer, right? They did a good job because you can actually go for a point, right? You can dividend that to utility token but you can also royalty back. So for the way SCIAC works is that you can use a utility token. Now, when David came out and said look, I don't want this to fluctuate in price because basically you use it to buy a long-term cloud storage and you want to know what the price is of the cloud storage over a year or two that you're going to hold the file. When he came out and said I don't want to fluctuate in price, people come to this point. I know a lot of hedges that just don't... But that doesn't speak to the asset itself. It speaks to the ecosystem in which people are buying it, right? A lot of people are in the crypto space. This is ingenious of you to say because every single person on this board that went out and sold a token, the reason they were able to get the money is because their buyers thought the token would go up in price. So for you to say that that's just a side effect and not designed in is kind of not true. But that's... But you're looking at the future of the industry, right? Like, yeah, with anything that's new people... Of course everyone raised money because that's human nature. We put money into things like some sort of value exchange. People are willing to put more money in when they think that it's a new industry that they see value. Or maybe they're just kind of riding the hype, like train going along with what's going on in the space. That's not being disingenuous when I say, you know, SIA is a true utility token. The way that that mechanism works is a new asset class because that doesn't speak to how the first wave of companies you know, the first wave of companies get their funding. They're two separate issues. Well, it becomes one issue if you say, oh, I'm going to sell you this token and I'm not designing the fact that it's supposed to go up in price. That's just a side effect of human nature. At that point, you're not... We might as well be truthful and then figure out what the right regulation is. Well, I think that what she's saying is that things are going to change over time. It's the wild west right now. We're coming to the end of the wild west period maybe. Hopefully. Aboveboard.ai I just wanted to... I mean, that's why I've been looking into all these things. I'm hoping to do sessions on SAP replacement. Thank God. We're trying to figure out what SAP and also arbitration. So if you sell someone security, let's say you sell grandma and she loses it, dies and is lost, you still owe shares to the estate, right? You can't just say, I got my shares back because you lost your key. So that's another issue. We have an opportunity for people to do little presentations. So if you have some... You can present as well too if you have something. Be cool. I mean, like we had... So this is what's really interesting, right? We have here R-O-Q-U-E R-R-E. But like, look at what happened, right? We have... We had someone who had a digital identity blockchain company here, right? And then Christian's view is total opposite, kind of like how you and I are like, you know, we have different views. And it's cool because Christian can be right about certain things and wrong about certain things and the gentlemen kind of, I wanted to mention, because it's really largest exchanges where people are trading ICOs with Poloniacs. They were recently bought by Circle which is in turn called, say, Goldman Sachs thing. And someone leaked an SEC slide that pretty much said like Poloniacs would be on the chopping block were it not for a broker dealer picking them up because then they can kind of pick up the pieces and then clean up some of those things. It was basically something saying about holding tokens for other people and I thought I could have right it wrong. I think it was in one of the early ones. Yeah, it was part of my... Oh, okay. So I'm just curious how that may go into like how broker dealers... Is that in turn to repurchase the payment for the payment to limit the payment? How does that, for people to know more about this process how does that fit in with the broker dealer process? Does that make it like because they're not purchasing tokens to sell to people? How might that work? Is it by asking the same question? Well that's just so that it's not long. Okay. That's what that means. Okay, so it's not saying that you can redistribute it. So if I sell you a token and you give me a dollar it's a long it's not really this other thing. It's the issuer about the purchase. That's where I got the money. Like this is what this legislation says, right? So you can't if you don't satisfy any one of these three conditions you are considered a security token. So a lot of the examples that you provided, right? If the token is marketed as an opportunity that I mean let's super weigh these things because what these things do is they kind of secure the truth. And if we were selling an investment opportunity and we gave it real security rights then you get more rights. And then also it has to be exchangeable for goods or services. So it's not so like with the example Elon gave right he purchased civic tokens you can't exchange civic right now or anything like you it's not possible. So in that situation that's a pure security token. No questions asked. No pure security. But Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a it's the it's a money platform. Bitcoin doesn't try to be anything else except for digital digital money, right? That's what Bitcoin's play is. That's not what a lot of other blockchain users are seeing that they're doing. So you can't because it's acting as a civic it's kind of the same. People it's like equated to like a festival ticket right like a carnival ticket is not money because you can only use a carnival to get into the carnival and to access the rights of the carnival. That's what utility token does. It allows you to go to the carnival and go ride the rides. You can't use a utility token to go and buy a pair of shoes or like get coffee. Someone could theoretically go and like sell their carnival ticket to somebody for fiat courtesy, but like that's on them. That's not the carnival company saying like our tickets are like a proxy for USD. It's theoretically exchangeable. I mean people wouldn't buy it if it wasn't exchangeable. So why not just because this is because this is like a two minute warning. We're wrapping up. But that's the thing like you're calling it alive, but I think that that's not fair or in the spirit of innovation because this is everything's getting developed still like okay maybe if you look at like right now at this very moment you can say okay everything that you're saying could potentially be considered applicable, but what I'm talking I'm talking about the future that I see for this technology. I'm not talking about it's very current use case because right now to the truth is that all blockchain companies are most of them they're not scalable, but you can't do anything that they're saying that they can do right. There are utility cases where you can actually exchange it for something, but the real vision for the technology has not been realized and it's not a reality right now. So but rather than speaking in terms of like what it can't do I like to think about what are the possibilities what can we accomplish with it and like where do we want the technology to really go to and so I think that I don't know like I don't think it is a lie to say that there are utility tokens and that is the mechanism for exchange. Yeah that answers your questions and hopefully we have a lot more questions and keep on like looking into it and researching and making your own you know judgment calls Honestly a lot of your skeptics don't like to say you need it I'm not skeptical I'm just observing what's true I'm not skeptical about the potential I'm just seeing people are lying about it What are you? I don't know obviously you're telling me that you're calling me a liar I'm not agreeing with that but I think that that like I see that as a deep perspective and I think to say that lying like lying is indicating that you know like the reality of the situation when the truth is and the truth that nobody knows and that's a difference it's like what is it that people don't know I mean what I see is people are trying to fit something that has a purpose right into a regulatory framework that doesn't allow it and you know it obscures the truth so why is it quite why is treating the asset lying, why is that not it's lying if you say look it's not marketed as an investment it's not going to be used to you so what is your interest to the whole product because what you're saying about treating everything to security that's a lie because cryptocurrency is not a security we look at technology and the mechanisms in a token economy but it's not it doesn't fall into any of the boxes it's not a security it's not a commodity but like how do you what would you call it then because we need it I think what you're trying to do is you're trying to say it shouldn't be regulated the fact is a lot of times it is a security you could say that but it shouldn't be regulated in the same way because we have this really great way like those two things could both be true we instead were sort of seeing a couple things that might not be true but I think there were two things like if I in the middle of things that that person could be able to it's that what you're saying that the potential solution to the problem but I'll open up if you only want but that could be which is very controversial the masses don't want to invest in the same way they want to invest so it's not a question I just do the conservative exactly you could really argue that one there's arguments on both sides the main argument for the REGD for the investor restriction is that what you give up when you don't have a public company is you're not providing very much information so in theory you should only be selling to investors who can protect themselves so that it's a good argument on the other hand the idea that hey you're not allowed to buy this security it's only for rich people it sounds pretty horrible too when you say that they're both good arguments so with these technologies as a way of urban space you know who's you know who's really the ruler and the cooker takes it away so it's very that's actually another because you're going to see it's easy to do the LLC but I don't reason why I don't think so because right now if you have a wallet people have to get their bank accounts shut like they wouldn't that happen to people the same way if you see what's on your bank account well at least it's not your personal at least you have your personal account to make the music I have been to there's no asset for their involvement there's a problem I think sometimes in this new market place there's virtually no technology and not when we have fear you know not having access to basic things like I'm not going to say that but we pay a lot of things to it and still not have access to that I don't want that should be a hindering a hindering like living back before trying now I see what you mean by it's all because that's obviously a workaround for the bank it wasn't a problem with the LLC or you but these are all workaround problems some of them are long-term solutions to the issue that's like they're just baby steps into figuring it all out right but the figuring it all out would be a lot easier if you sort of look really closely at the truth but the truth is so subjective that's what people say that's right if you look at what's actually what's happening at the moment it's very hesitant to think about the fact that cultural and culture-economic implications to the country's diversity and then also here it is when my dad he survived and it's just the cultural in China it's the result of your life whether it's or not I think you have a lot of people believe that that's the truth it's kind of a different one based off of the the message but this is but I'm making a different point I'm making a point that all of us together know that we're not suddenly in an investment it's something that we're doing for legal reasons so let's separate the things from the things there that are not in our diversity see what I'm saying why didn't you say that because you know what I'm saying we're we're we're we're we're we're were we're we're ... ... ... it's Even though you're a moderator, you're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it. You're just going to throw yourself out of it.