 Thank you, Maya. Thank you very much, Maya. And do I turn this one off? There. OK. And thank you, Maya. And also, Michael and Berek and Patrick, for bringing all of us together. It's just been a remarkable day and a half so far. And there have been just some terrific conversations and wonderful introductions happening as people get to know each other and their work disciplinary boundaries. This was Imogen Heap singing her song, Tiny Little Human, which I'm going to talk about near the end of the talk. But let me get my little presentation up. Does that look right? OK. As Maya said, I've been doing some work recently on new technologies of money and payment. And in the talk today, what I thought I would do was bring some very new research that I've been working on just in the past few months on the Bitcoin phenomenon. And some of you have heard of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. I actually have become very interested in what's happening as it is shifting out of the realm of money and currency and into the realm of accounting and property. And that's what I'm going to try to convey some of today. And I will give you a little bit of a primer on Bitcoin so you understand the basic system and can then understand how it's now being used to do things with property. And Imogen Heap becomes a key player in that discussion. But to begin, I want to open up just by reviewing some very basic points in the anthropology and sociology of money via the work of Viviana Zelizer, because it was through this money conversation around Bitcoin that got me into it in the first place and understanding some of the basics of how we think about money outside of economics will help explain the system that I'll be trying to describe later on as we get into the talk. Now, you'll remember that Viviana Zelizer argues that money is socially differentiated and that that differentiation is affected through earmarking. This is one of her key points. And earmarking is really nothing more than a kind of accounting. And in her book, The Social Meaning of Money, Zelizer begins by talking about these incredibly evocative stories of mid-20th century housewives who exploited a system that she and other sociologists called tin can accounting. This is not a tin can, but a Coke bottle, but you get the idea. This is in the Philippines where a housewife is storing money, sequestering it, earmarking it for special purposes in a Coke bottle up in the roof rafters where she can't access it. Listen to one such housewife in the United States at mid-century. This is from some of the sociological literature that Zelizer drew upon in her book. Here's a quote from the housewife. I have a silly little system. Whenever my husband gets paid, I take away so much money from my grocery money and put it in a kitchen drawer. Then I take all the rest and put it into a tin can. If we can pay a bill in person, we take cash out of the can. Now, whatever's left over in the tin by the time of the next payday, we transfer into the bank account to pay our future bills. Such stories led Zelizer to excavate how money, presumed to be purely fungible, gets parceled out into distinct bundles and set to specific uses that open a window into social worlds of meaning and relationality that crucially are created by this kind of informal accounting. Lacking other easy means of keeping track of their money and expenditures, the housewives that the sociologists were studying at mid-century found ways materially to segregate and visualize their financial standing and to make saving and purchasing decisions. Their accounts, physically manifested in tin cans, envelopes, or china pictures were also a material demonstration of their relationships and values. Other researchers later, building on Zelizer and citing similar studies, were able to prove experimentally how people deploy funds and other resources based on implicit and explicit labeling schemes. That research, however, generally aimed to show how such labeling led to misallocations, that it was all kind of irrational decision making instead of underscoring money social meanings. The primary sources on such forms of so-called mental accounting also documented that the practice often falls down because, among other things, as some of the researchers wrote, people have a tendency to cheat a little. I think the authors in the mental accounting literature got something wrong that Zelizer got right. Tin can accounting was a form of physically differentiating monies, not so much mentally. It was a socio-material practice that embodied social meanings. The aim was not merely to control spending, but to give a visceral account, not a mental account. This is an account that you can feel the heft of in your hand. You not only see it and think about it, but you kind of feel it and have a visceral response to it. An account that women could literally weigh in their hands to help them assess their current status and their future spending. This quality of constraint, the need to deal with the tendency to cheat, the rendering of non-fungible, otherwise liquid currency, all of these features that Zelizer was discussing with this tin can accounting and the social meanings of money prefigure in some important respects the Bitcoin system and its own social relations and meanings, as I'll talk about now. Now, I'm not sure what the next slide is. Okay, that's good. Bitcoin is the brainchild of an anonymous programmer or programmers who penned a white paper under the name Satoshi Nakamoto on the design of a digital currency that was released over the internet in 2008. The system that they created used a combination of two existing ideas to create a digital means for exchanging value that shares many of the attributes of physical banknotes, chief among them anonymity, irrevocability, and the inability to double spend, which means that I can't duplicate my digital money by cutting and pasting and then have all of a sudden double the money I had before. And that last quality is crucial in digital environments where duplication like that is very easy. Satoshi, whoever he or they or she was and other cryptocurrency advocates also desired a system that would not depend on any central point of control. This commitment to decentralization derives both from a skepticism or hostility to states and banks as well as a transformation of the internet's distributed network structure into a kind of ideology, taking the distributed nature of the internet and kind of making it ideological. And I said it derives on two, relies on two existing systems. One is a distributed database that contains a ledger of all transactions. That database is called the blockchain. I'll explain how it works in a second. The second is a protocol for verifying transactions in that ledger by way of a computationally difficult competition among all the peers involved in the network. This is called a proof of work. The technical details are challenging but the concept is pretty straightforward. This is a distributed system so it's not centralized or decentralized in the way that we think of the internet where there are still key nodes that then connect everybody. Rather it's a distributed system where this is I'm now speaking out of in theory not how it's really unfolded but in theory every single node in the network participates to the same degree in the system. And it's based on a ledger and just think for a minute about what money is. Money, Minsky and Keynes and that whole line of people who according to Bill Maurer are essentially correct on money say that money is basically a two-sided ledger sheet operation. Money is what is in the Wells Fargo ledger book back in the vault, back in the day. Recording credits and debits. You don't need any kind of token or anything to have money go, you just need to have this kind of ledger of debits and credits. What Bitcoin has basically done is instead of having these ledgers in think old time bank vaults where you literally had the books back in the bank instead of having that or instead of having something like you have today where there are centralized accounts stored electronically in bank servers that are all connected to each other usually and have some connection to a central bank. Instead of that kind of central control of the ledger what you do is you use the infrastructure of the internet to replicate the ledger everywhere. So the ledger exists on every single node in the network. And what you do is any time anyone makes a transaction they basically send a signal to that network saying I am making this transaction now. The network then goes to work in this computation game basically which is essentially a kind of computationally intensive lottery to verify the transaction. When the transaction is verified a block is said to be completed. This is why it's called a block chain. Essentially a page in the ledger has been updated is verified by participating nodes in the network and then that update goes everywhere all at once. Okay, oops, I didn't wanna do that yet. So if I wanna send Bitcoin from my account to another person's account the protocol distributes my request to the entire network which in turn requires that I authorize the transaction with a kind of password. Importantly if I lose my password there's no way for me ever to reclaim my Bitcoin ever again. It gets locked up in the blockchain in this ledger forever. It's, people would say it's burned. So just think about this for a minute with reference to existing kind of ledger, paper ledger based technologies. There's no coin here. There's no token. There's just accounting. In this kind of system there's no central authority maintaining that accounting. Whoops, I'm sort of stuck on something there. Everybody's doing it all at once, all together. The database containing this distributed ledger is sort of sustained through a kind of competition and consensus. Competition to be the first one to verify the transaction and then consensus once it's distributed to the entire network and everyone confirms it. This is the basic of the Bitcoin system. It's basically a digital money of account almost exactly like the clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia that so exercised on Maynard Keynes, if you'll recall, except instead of being recorded baked on bricks or being recorded like my Wells Fargo ledger on paper documents it lives in a distributed ledger. Now that's Bitcoin. Let me kind of step into its sort of social context and corporate context now because this thing that began essentially as an experiment in money very quickly evolved into an experiment in accounting and accounting for property. When I attended a payments industry conference in 2013, Bitcoin proponents surreptitiously affixed stickers and handmade signs to tables and displays in the exhibit hall. People associated with Bitcoin, this is in 2013, were vocally espousing anti-government, anti-fiat currency, anti-federal reserve views. At the next year's meeting of the exact same conference, however, the exhibit hall was graced with professional looking corporate displays. I don't have a picture unfortunately, but they were staffed with hired female models, promoting new Bitcoin startups. And one such startup in 2014 announced its sponsorship of the American football bowl, the St. Petersburg Bowl, which was renamed the St. Petersburg Bitcoin Bowl. Football aside, Bitcoin had entered the world of big business. Bitcoin related venture capital funding approached a billion in 2015, actually surpassed a billion in 2015. In 2014 it was around 300 million. But it's the blockchain, it's that distributed database, not the currency that's holding appeal outside of Silicon Valley and in the halls of Wall Street and as we'll see in some of the creative industries. And this is because of the blockchain's essential nature as a database, as a distributed ledger that exists everywhere. So the blockchain is a very special kind of ledger. As I said, it exists everywhere in the network. There's no one central repository where it lives or one central records keeper. And just keep in mind those old ledger books in the back of the bank or in the vault. Or since we're thinking about property, think about the cadastral maps and the cadastral registry kept in the central land titling office. Now imagine a flood or a fire. There goes all your records, right? There goes your accounting. With the blockchain, this risk of loss is miniscule if non-existent because every node in the network has a copy of the whole ledger all the time. And the system is designed so that nodes in the network are continuously updating and synchronizing the ledgers. Now go back to that bank ledger book. Imagine a bad actor, someone who through malice, fraud, error or stupidity makes an incorrect entry. There might be audits, there might be reconciliation of accounts, but the effort to locate the discrepancy may be costly and time-consuming. A core feature of the blockchain as a distributed ledger is that it's public. Every node in the network can see it. In fact, anyone in the world can see it. You don't need to be participating in the system since it's also posted online in real time. Although it's public, the identities of the transacting parties are concealed by the protocols that govern their passwords and addresses. The transacting parties don't need to know each other, they don't need to trust each other in order to do business because you've got this process of transaction verification through distributed consensus, which ultimately militates against fraud. At least against fraud once the transaction has entered into the blockchain and been verified. And one interesting thing, you probably have heard a lot of the news stories about big frauds or scandals involving Bitcoin. What's interesting is almost all actually, to date, all of those have happened outside the system. Someone does something bad and then enters a transaction into the blockchain where it gets verified and then is there. All the defrauding is happening outside and generally quite conventional sort of Ponzi scheme type stuff or money laundering or purchasing illicit goods and then hiding the transaction in the blockchain. Fraud can also take place in a very, very mundane way where I can just steal your password and then make off with all your money. And many people who are involved in Bitcoin because of the threat of the theft of their password, keep them, I think this is hilarious, keep them on little pieces of paper in their wallets, because they don't want anyone to hack into their system and get it and then steal all their Bitcoin. The other super easy fraud, and this is sort of behind a lot of the more publicized, like Mt. Gox and stuff, cases are, I can just ask you, I can say, I'm a Bitcoin exchange, I'll sell you Bitcoin, give me your credit card number and then you give me your credit card number and I go have fun with that and don't ever send you any Bitcoin. But again, that's not sort of a vulnerability of the system as such, it's all happening external to it. Now, because of all of these scandals, however, because of the highly publicized criminal cases that have involved Bitcoin, a lot of the people that I've talked to in the payments industry and who are trying to devise new things to do with the blockchain say that the quote unquote brand of Bitcoin is tainted, too tainted by these scandals and criminal investigations and prosecutions to gain any traction in mainstream places. And so people will say, before you go talk to your CEO about using the blockchain to do anything, do a search and replace and replace the word Bitcoin with blockchain everywhere in your presentation or everywhere in your documents. This record-keeping quality of the Bitcoin system is attracting a great deal of interest among more established financial industry actors in the wholesale financial services industry and elsewhere. Essentially, people see this as a way to facilitate and especially speed up interbank clearance and settlement as well as equities and derivative trading. Why this interest, and I'll give you an example of how they do this in a second, but why the interest in the blockchain? It's for these reasons up here. It's basically immutable. Once something is entered into it, no one can go back and change the old entries without everyone seeing that they've done so. And any change that you make once a transaction has been verified, anything that you, any change you make to prior transactions has to be agreed to by the consensus of the nodes in the network. And so it probably wouldn't work anyway, even if you tried. And people talk about there being forks in the blockchain. Imagine again, the blockchain is a bunch of pages of a distributed ledger and you might get a point where there's a disagreement among the folks participating and you get a little fork and a side chain developing. That can only go so far, right? Unless everyone in the system says, yeah, yeah, that one is true, not the other one. And then they all glom onto that one. So what you get is a verifiable, time-stamped record of transactions. You get a persistent record of transactions because of its distributed nature, even if some of the nodes go dark, even if the power goes out, even if a bunch of people just kind of stop participating, as long as there's enough people participating to keep it going, the thing lasts. And it's a kind of historical chronicle that can't be easily or unilaterally altered. Again, because the participating nodes are continuously synchronizing their copies of the database. So at a conference sponsored by the American Banker Trade Magazine in July 2015, Blythe Masters, formerly of JPMorgan Chase, and at the time the CEO of a new blockchain-related startup, declared that the blockchain would solve the problem of settlement latency. That is, the amount of time it takes assets like equities, changing hands to clear. This is admittedly an obscure area, an area that has to do with the infrastructures of post-trade processing. But the benefits are faster settlement times, which means the ability to make money on otherwise latent assets awaiting clearance, as well as resiliency and more importantly, resistance to cyber attack that blockchain-based systems display due to their distributed nature. She and others at this conference, formally and informally in the corridors, expressed the view that these sorts of systems could speed up trading, reduce settlement latency, and also reduce back office operations costs. Quote, you can fire your IT department, unquote, said one to me informally. Masters herself put it more diplomatically. She said, you will have no more reconciliation costs, and then she said, you have to live in the world of financial services to understand the profound implications of that statement, unquote. Of course, you can't fire your IT department because you need to set up and maintain a system like this and these systems are difficult systems to develop. But again, this sort of distributed ledger technology is offering basically a kind of promise of automaticity without labor that earlier technologies like the assembly line in the computer itself offered a reduction of labor through automaticity. As a ledger though, the blockchain promises still more and this is where it gets interesting for thinking about property. It offers the potential to be able to account for everything since anything can be entered into it, not just Bitcoin transactions. In a seminar at the UC Irvine School of Law in 2013, I was outlining the basics of the blockchain much as I've done here when a law professor with expertise in housing finance had an epiphany. And he said, if mortgage notes had been entered into something like a blockchain, the mortgage settlement mess after the financial crisis of 2008 would not have happened. After all, one of the main problems in addressing the crisis was determining ownership of mortgage paper. Mutual distrust, operational inefficiencies and outright malfeasance among lenders prevented information sharing. And as people said, no one knew who was holding the note. No one knew who was holding the mortgage paper to then figure out what to do after the mortgage crisis and in the mortgage settlement. Two years later, from that conversation at this American Banker Conference, said one participant exactly the same thing, quote, I can't help but wonder if things would have played out differently with the financial crisis if things like liens were in the blockchain. So a funny thing is happening here on the way to what people are calling the distributed ledger space, as some are referring to this area of potential business opportunity. While leaving aside Bitcoin the currency, people are discovering that ledgers are really good for managing and manipulating other things of value. In rediscovering accounts, they're potentially rediscovering money of account. And some are getting there by some very zealosarian processes of sequestering and earmarking. This in turn has implications for how they imagine and enact property claims. And that's a whole huge mess of stuff that I just said. What I wanna do in what follows is take up three recent experiments using blockchain technology to illustrate what I'm talking about here. So the first one is the Bitcoin ring. Quote, don't store your value in a rock, store it in a block, unquote. So reads the website of the Bitcoin ring and it's btcring.com. The brainchild of Sebastian Neumeyer and MIT engineering PhD, it offers the ability to create a Bitcoin-based novelty item. A ring, like those, those are mine, links to a Bitcoin address. The Bitcoin ring provides that basically what Sebastian has done is he's provided the code necessary to design a three-dimensional ring that points to a Bitcoin address. I can create a Bitcoin address specifically for the purpose of making this ring. I then use the code that Seb has provided to create a file that I can send to a 3D printer. The printed ring contains a QR code, which you can kind of see, you can kind of see it on there, a little 3D QR code that I can scan with my phone that will tell me how much Bitcoin is stored in that address, okay? And it's, you know, for your loved one. So while tongue-in-cheek or maybe not, the Bitcoin ring project neatly encapsulates a number of assumptions. Love can be expressed in monetary value. The wedding ring is a special kind of sequestered value, right, Zelozer. Yet as the website and several accompanying online videos demonstrate hilariously, and you should watch them, actual diamond rings can be lost. If lost, their value is lost too. Also, a ring might look pretty, but could be fake. Again, this is illustrated in the videos that Sebastian has made. Or further, the diamond might have been the product of exploitative practices in the conflict zone. As one woman actor says in one of the Bitcoin rings videos, as she hurls the ring back at her hapless suitor, I don't want blood on my hands. So now the thing with this is this basically points to the kind of public record, the public database, so you can see how much Bitcoin is there. But who's got the password? How do you deal with the private key that you hold in your wallet on a piece of paper to access that value? Well, as with all matters of the heart, this can be negotiated. One of Sebastian's recommendations is that you split the private key between the two partners so that the value that's sequestered in the blockchain can't be spent without the consent and participation of each. And here's where this gets really interesting, very quickly. He says the Bitcoin ring provides a means of restricting fungibility, his words. And he reflected in an interview with me on an extreme way, you could restrict fungibility. Instead of splitting the private key, and he means really taking the password on a piece of paper and ripping it in half, right? And one partner gets one part, the other part gets the other part. Instead of doing that, he said you could just burn it, send the Bitcoin to a burn address, which means an address that nobody has the private key to. And he said it's like throwing money in the fire. But you have this thing that represents this value that's a lot of value, but that nobody can access. Now, Zellizer has taught us not automatically to recoil from the apparent monetization of persons and relations that always seem to attend capitalism and things like this, but instead to inquire into the social and cultural bases of economic action. Some online commentary on this project is critical of the idea that you can put a price on love. Others say that only an isolated geek with little understanding of actual human relationships would find this appealing. But what's most interesting about this to me is the way that it's relying on the blockchain to sequester earmarked value and the use of the blockchain to create a permanent record of a relationship. And Neumeyer is explicit on this point. He says, blockchain systems have the ability to show proof of existence, right? It's all about showing proof of existence of this value without having to rely on a third party to do it for you, right? There's no notary. There's no Wells Fargo ledger book. And it allows you to show proof of existence without a third party to warrant it while also restricting the fungibility of otherwise convertible value. It creates a special money, basically. And specific techniques like burning the address can ensure its perpetual sequestration. The Bitcoin ring site, Sebastian Neumeyer, also explicitly reminds visitors to its website of the political economy of actual wedding rings. And this is a rather prominent political statement in the stuff that he is doing. And on the website he writes, support Bitcoin mining, not diamond mining. Absent, verifiable and unalterable tracking and certification system from the mine to the jewelry store. There's no way to guarantee that a diamond was ethically produced and distributed. So while at some level, a kind of novelty toy, kind of a joke, the Bitcoin ring occupies that same family of phenomena as tin can budgeting, but also pointing toward the fundamental political value of accounting and of accounting for value. And Neumeyer said himself that he sees this as a form of social commentary, raising awareness of the monetary basis of many personal relationships, as well as conflict diamonds. Now, my second example actually has to do exactly with conflict diamonds. A very early stage startup, Everledger, is trying to do something about conflict diamonds. It's a London-based company that uses a Bitcoin blockchain to identify and track diamonds. The idea behind the company is to gather data on diamonds from insurance companies, law enforcement, and diamond producers to create a digital fingerprint for each diamond, for every diamond in the world, and store it in the blockchain. This eliminates the problem of conflicting means and standards of diamond documentation and certification in theory. You could have a digital fingerprint with enough data in it to identify a diamond, and the record of it in the blockchain can identify its changes in ownership. The founder, Leanne Kemp, whose background includes both the insurance industry and the jewelry business, imagines expanding beyond diamonds to other high-value items. And this is from a report about this project. Quote, it's starting with diamonds, with a view to expanding into all sorts of luxury goods, high-end watches, designer handbags, fine art. So basically high-value items whose provenance might otherwise be reliant on paper certificates and receipts that can easily be lost or tampered with. Here, the blockchain could be used to demonstrate the proof of existence, as Neumeier might say, of a relatively non-fungible object of wealth, and thereby provide a chain of proof of ownership or of provenance. For Everledger, the business is really all about the insurance industry, but it also wants to take on trading fraud and conflict diamonds. It wants to do so by using the blockchain to record not just proof of existence of a diamond, but a host of data on the individual diamond itself with enough detail to be able to identify a diamond of suspicious origin that might come on the market. And Kemp says, if you have a five-carat diamond, not only do we capture the serial number that's inscribed on the stone, but most diamonds can be described with four Cs, the cut, the clarity, and so on. We've taken not only those four Cs, we take 40 other metadata points that make up the diamond, all the angles and the cuts and the pavilions and all of the crown. We take all of that, as well as the serial number and the four Cs, and we put all of it in the blockchain. So, say a large diamond is stolen and cut into smaller gems. If all of that data had been recorded in the blockchain, Everledger would permit identification of those smaller gems and their association with the original item. So if Neumeyer's Bitcoin ring restricts fungibility of otherwise convertible value, creating the equivalent of a precious stone, Everledger provides the way to account for non-fungible things or better, a way to enforce their non-fungibility, to be able to specify forever this diamond as distinct from that one, okay? So that's Everledger. The last thing that I'll talk about before I come to a conclusion is Image and Heap. And I didn't write any of this out because I think that it's easier for me just to try to explain it. Maybe I won't be able to do so, though. And Image and Heap was the one singing Tiny Little Human when you entered the room. Image and Heap is working with some developers on a concept called Ujo Music. And you've got a little blurb off the website here. Essentially what she's trying to do is come up with a blockchain-based way for the people who make creative content of whatever kind to be able to set up a system of what people that I interview are calling sharing with rights, okay? Sharing with rights. Recognizing that digital content is easily copied and also recognizing that a lot of contemporary creative activity involves stealing people's stuff, right? And remixing it and cutting things and pasting them together and putting new productions out there. Heap is trying to create a system with her programmer pals here that will allow for, in this case, the creators of music to put music out there in the world This is where it gets really weird, okay? But put music in the world with every little component of that music tied to whoever created it in such a way that when the thing gets shared, the rights that those individual producers, those individual creators have associated with their piece of the production can somehow be recognized, either just with recognition or with a micropayment. Now, every little piece of the music, like what does this mean? Oh, so well, first of all, it's not just every little piece of the music, it's every person. So here are the people, I don't know if you can really see this. Yeah, you can see it. Here are the people who are involved in making that song that you just heard. There's David Horwich, Simon Minchell. Florence Scout Heap Labor, it says percussion, that's actually her new baby who I guess is rattling a rattle, like in the baby rattle. Simon Hayworth, the mastering engineer, and that's pretty much it, and then her herself. So there's the network of people. Each one of them had a specific role in making this thing. What she has done, and here's the other artists involved in the making of this piece of music, they've worked out what they're calling a payment split, who gets what percent of the payout based on their contribution of what? Creative labor to the making of the song. This is all spelled out in advance. So she's always gonna get 91.25%, but violin one is gonna get 1.25%, violin two is gonna get 1.25%, and so on, and so on. What you can do is go online and you can purchase for your use and for your remixing all those little bits, right? You can purchase all the vocals or the bass. You can actually go in and take only pieces of it if you want to. You can download the whole thing for 45 bucks for non-commercial use or 1.500 for commercial use, granted 50% of the rights in the newly created recording, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And so that's how this works, and this is all done in a blockchain, okay? So the blockchain is being used to identify ownership of creative content that goes into, that has been mixed into the making of this song, and then is used for anybody who wants to, you could do it, to buy whatever piece you want. I just wanna have that little riff of that violin that at time, like two minutes and 10 seconds for the three seconds, you can buy it, and then whoever that person is gets a micropayment proportionate to their share as previously defined here, there, right? Again, sharing with rights. Here, it's not based on the Bitcoin blockchain, it's based on another one, but the Ethereum blockchain, if anybody cares, I'll tell you why in a second, but here you can see the public record of all of the transactions, so we can see the, where it says payee ID, that's the public address, the sort of username of someone who has gone in and downloaded the whole song. So here, right here, oh, I can't scroll down because I took a screenshot, sorry. If you go, you'll see it's mostly download, download, download, download, and somebody bought one of the stems and download, download, download, somebody bought one of the stems. The idea here is that what this would allow you to do is to take any kind of digital object, right, allow you to put it out there, not in the public domain at all, right, but put it out there into some new kind of domain of sharing that then allows little transactions to ripple out through the chain of people and entities that created this piece of digital content as bits and pieces of it are being used by other people in their own creative activity. So, to me, what's compelling about this stuff is the way that the blockchain provides a kind of alternative account quite literally in the form of this distributed ledger. And what's interesting to me too is that it provides this alternative account by constraining fungibility. What's going on here is everything in the blockchain is always being linked to its prior history and if you take the image in heap example to its prior chain of ownership. You could go back through this database and track at least the public address of who's taking what bit of the song, how whoever is getting paid for it and on and on and on through the whole chain. All of that history is always there and each contains the history of all of its transactions along the way. What's interesting to me thinking back to Zelizer is your constraining fungibility and allowing fungibility at the same time, right? Your everything is always already earmarked. Everything always already is bound with its prior property claim. But this system then lets you also trade it. So again, as my informants put it talking about this experiment, you get sharing with rights. Unlike tin can accounting, however, it's pretty hard to cheat. And again, there can be all sorts of fraud outside of it but once you're in this world, it's hard to cheat. Hence, Everledger using the blockchain to create provenance for diamonds to prevent their illicit trade or the concealment of their origins or Bitcoin rings used to record and solidify a relationship with a split private key or a burn. Now think back to the kind of money land which is where I come from. Monetary theorist Jeff Ingham could argue in 2001 that the ability of money to be laundered proved his case that the social meanings of money that Zelizer talked about were secondary basically to the state animating the money of account and he wrote, the state does not inquire into the meaning of money or differentiate between dirty or clean money in the payment of taxes. With this kind of system, whether it's dirty or clean is always embedded in its record of transactions forever. Anything placed here is there for as long as the participating nodes keep up the system. One of my colleagues in Informance says everything, the records will all be there until people get bored, right? Until people who are maintaining the system or computers that are maintaining the system decide and that that was fun, we're done now. And then one by one, the nodes go dark until you have nobody doing transaction verification anymore. But as long as you have people doing it, you have entries in a ledger that can never be separated from their history. You have ongoing records of ownership. You have pasts that endure into the future. It may not be surprising to you to know that there's a company seeking to use a system very similar to what Heap has developed for land registration in Honduras. And then if you just wanna play that out in your mind of where that goes, it goes exactly to where you think it might go, right? Toward people getting title and what happens when you get title, well then some other person comes along and says, hey, I'll buy your title and pretty soon you don't have any land anymore. But Heap, I think, is doing something pretty interesting. She's taking these qualities of the blockchain to create a new kind of market. My productions in this market are never really alienated even when they're incorporated into someone else's. My property and my claim endures. I continue to be recognized or compensated. I retain ownership of my little piece of Imogen Heap's song. Even if I share it. And the history of property claims is there for all to see. Now, there's some contradictions here that are really, really interesting to think about and we can talk about maybe some more, but it's sort of, I think that these kinds of systems are opening up the universe of non-fungible things, paradoxically allowing them to become more easily liquidated by making them more permanent, more indissoluble, by having them keep their history with them forever, having this record be public, then also allows them to be traded without that chain of prior ownership being lost. And this is Blythe Master's point about the potential of this technology to reduce settlement latency. If we have a better way and a faster way to track ownership of equities or mortgage paper or diamonds or whatever, we can trade more quickly and easily, and to reduce the amount of time a non-fungible asset just sits idle. That's not my phrase. We always have proof of existence. We don't have to chase a paper trail that may have been intentionally obfuscated. It's very difficult to alter these records. In a way, these kinds of systems carry forward tin can accounting because they allow special monies and special properties and the moral and social boundaries around different items of worth. Imogen Heap's experiment may be food for thought at this conference insofar as sharing with rights is a very curious animal to lay alongside private property, commoning access and the kind of non-exclusionary rights like McPherson or Nicholas Blomley yesterday that allow human capacities to flourish. And she and her team are certainly imagining that this provides for a way to creativity in the digital age to flourish. Thanks.