 Miro asks, in IoT, the Internet of Things, it is important to make sure that the things we are connected to... are the ones we want to connect. Do you think blockchain can help in solving IoT security issues? Do you know of any IoT solution using blockchain to enforce security? I am quite skeptical when it comes to blockchain being used for security of IoT. I think one of the interesting ideas that we have explored is the possibility of using proof-of-work... to identify IoT devices that have to do a bit of work to talk to you. In terms of using blockchain to help solve IoT security issues, I am not quite sure what the benefits are... and how it is any different than using a local database. I am not quite sure what the benefit of putting this information on the blockchain is. There may be some benefits. You may be able to use a publicly centralized blockchain... in order to log information from IoT devices in a way that maintains that information... so that it can't be changed in the future, so you effectively use an immutability benefit from blockchains. A lot of people use the term blockchain to refer to a database that also does digital signatures, PKI. I think it is important to understand that the purpose of a blockchain is more than PKI. We have had PKI for 25 years. There is nothing new there, and it is not particularly interesting... to take a PKI database and make it public, unless you do something with it. For example, build a decentralized consensus system so that you can have immutability. What problem are you solving in that particular case? What are the problems in IoT security that you solve? A lot of people are trying to mash these two terms together, IoT and blockchain. They are trying to mash other terms together and take X plus blockchain and pretend that this is something new... that X couldn't do on its own without blockchain. I am very skeptical. When it comes to IoT, the security challenges are very big. The joke in security settings goes, the S in IoT stands for security. Of course, there is no S in IoT, so that tells you a bit about how that is handled. I am not sure if blockchains are the solution here. Tom asks, regarding solar energy trading on the blockchain, what would be the benefit of using a unique ERC-20 token versus just using Ether for buying and selling power? That is a great question. I don't know what the benefits might be. Other than Ether is produced by mining on the Ethereum network. Whereas, if you have an ERC-20 token related to solar energy, perhaps you can mine or mint or issue that token in response to people generating energy. They can earn that token directly when producing energy. The only way you can measure how much energy someone is producing in order to issue them a token... is to buy and use that energy by someone else, someone else buying and using that energy. In that case, they could just pay an Ether. Again, not all things need tokens. You should be suspicious when you see any application that automatically goes to a token. Not many things need utility tokens. Utility tokens have a number of limitations. A lot of the projects that are selecting to use a token, in order to fundraise more so because they need a utility token... to operate their application. This is exactly the right kind of question to ask, Tom. When it comes to alternative uses of the blockchain, we should all be asking, Do you really need a blockchain for this? Which part of open, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, decentralized... are you using from a blockchain? If you don't care that the system is open, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, decentralized, etc., then you don't need a blockchain. What do you need a token for? What part of a token's functions are you using that requires a token? Why do you need a utility token? Why can't you just use Ether? Why can't you just use something else? The answer when it comes to tokens is, is there something in the operation of the token that requires a smart contract... in order to monitor or adjust or control the usage of that token based on some rules that are interesting to that token? And there are some cases where that's the case, absolutely. But those are fairly rare. A lot of the time, the token is just an excuse to fundraise and you should be very skeptical of those things. This is Yuno from the Seoul Bitcoin Meetup. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. My question is, recently I've seen the presentation on the YouTube, the killer app in blockchain will be a strong market. What will it be? The killer app in blockchain technology will be a security market, I mean. A securities market, yeah. Was this one of my videos or just some other videos? Okay, very good. So, it means that the blockchain technology will dominate the strong market in 10 years. So, what do you think about the idea of that? I think it's very specific, and I try not to make specific predictions. So, the trick about making predictions is being vague, either about the outcome or the timeline. That's how you could be successful. It's a bit like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If I make a prediction, I can tell you what will happen, but not when. Or I can tell you when it will happen, but not exactly what, but not both at the same time. Because if I say both at the same time, then I'll be wrong, 90% of the time, probably. Or maybe not, in 10 years. So, I think markets are one of the most important applications for blockchains. Blockchains create markets, they create free and open markets for the participants. Blockchains are markets, blockchains operate as markets, blockchains operate using markets in order to calibrate various parameters. So, for example, there is a market for mining, there is a market for the difficulty calculation... and proof-of-work that is a dynamic marketplace where people make decisions every day as to whether they are profitable. There are currency markets within the crypto space. All of these markets exist because of blockchains. So, markets are a critical application of blockchain technology. Blockchains will create better, more fair, more transparent, more open markets wherever markets are needed. Interestingly enough, that also means in places where markets are needed, but not wanted. So, for example, and I'll say this, and some of you are going to be shocked and upset, drug markets. Why? Because drug markets are markets. Drug markets are markets, and markets require two things in order to happen. Does anybody know what these are? This is like a test now, it's a quiz part of the presentation. Anyone? Supply? Demand. Great. If you have supply and if you have demand, what happens next? A market happens. It doesn't matter if you try to stop it, a market will happen. I could create a market right now by creating supply and someone in this room having demand for what I supply. Markets emerge. Markets are just behavior. That's all they are. They are human behavior. So, markets emerge. They emerge around things we want, equities, and also around things we want, but we really shouldn't, like drugs or ice cream or other things that are bad for us. Smoking, cigarettes, whatever. So, markets emerge. Blockchains will create markets. The interesting thing about blockchains is they will create open, free, transparent, public, borderless, censorship-resistant markets, even if people want to stop them. Unstoppable markets. That's going to cause some problems. Now, it's also going to mean that stock markets are eventually going to, in many cases, operate on blockchains. Not all of them. Not forever. How many people have used a fax machine in the last year? Okay, let me rephrase that question. How many of you are Americans? Yeah, I still had to use a fax machine last year. This is 35 years into the development of the internet. Fax machines still exist. I had to use a fax machine. Okay, I'm lying. I didn't use a fax machine. I used a website where I uploaded a PDF, and they had a fax machine that sent it to the government agency... that insisted on receiving a fax from me. So I basically cheated and sent them a PDF over somebody else's fax. But the point is, no technology ever goes away. I'm sure there's a park somewhere in Seoul... where if you really, really want to, you can go for a ride on a horse, right? Not because you need to, but because they're still around. So the idea that all stock markets are going to be blockchains, and there won't be other types of... stock markets that will still exist, that's ridiculous. It won't be. We're still going to have the markets that you see today. We're still going to have tuna markets like they have in Japan, where people are bidding... on the floor for an actual piece of tuna. These still exist. Tradition is powerful. But I think stock markets are one of the applications that we're going to see sooner rather than later. And the reason is very simple. If you can make a more efficient, more transparent, open public system... then a lot of money can be made with that. So I think it's likely. It's not very interesting to me. It's not the most interesting application of blockchains. Marcel asks, what do you think about blockchain for transport and logistics projects, such as those being done by IBM and MERSC? Can we track items from, say, a farm to a supermarket? What are the challenges that need to be addressed? What is the point of using permissioned ledgers or permissioned blockchains for doing supply chains? This is something we've heard a lot about. There are a number of companies, mostly IBM, leading in terms of logistics... and using permissioned ledgers to do logistics. I'm not convinced yet of the viability of these projects... because I'm not quite sure what problems they're solving. I think the primary idea here is to use a blockchain in order to have a common standard and implementation... of a database between multiple partners who have competing interests. In that case, you have a permissioned ledger that's federated, where you have various participants in the logistics and supply chain... being able to control the security and validation of entries in that supply chain. Is this better than simply having a centralized facility that has a database? It's better in terms of it's less centralized, it's more decentralized, you have a federated group of people. It doesn't provide immutability in the way that an open public blockchain would. There's the fundamental problem of trying to reconcile what exists in the real world versus what exists on the blockchain. One of the reasons that cryptocurrencies are secure is because the values of how much Bitcoin, Ether, Monero, or you own... are controlled by the consensus rules. If somebody writes an entry to the blockchain that says, 100 eggs left the factory today, there's no way for the consensus rules to validate whether 100 eggs left the factory, the eggs don't live on the blockchain. You have to rely on trusting the parties that entered that information, or a series of other parties that are doing some kind of audit or oversight to validate that information. It's a very different security model than the security model of an open public blockchain. Does that have a good application? Does it solve real problems in the logistics industry? Does it create a novel and disruptive use case for blockchains that is better than replicated database with digital signatures? It's hard to answer those questions. We'll have to see whether IBM is able to make something of this. I'm very skeptical of these types of projects. So far, they haven't really delivered much in terms of utility, but we never know. We'll see how it goes. Isan asks, what do you think of using blockchain for securing vehicular communications? The question I would ask for any of these, what do you think of doing X with blockchain, is which components of an open public blockchain, which feature or capability of an open public blockchain, are you using? And remember, a blockchain is not a PKI. This is not a digital signature technology. We already have PKI, we already have digital signatures. Blockchains give you decentralization that enable open, public, neutral, censorship-resistant, and borderless operations between parties that don't trust each other. So, which part of that solves a problem in vehicular communication? Maybe simply by providing an open public standard that everybody can use that's independent of the car company. But the only way you would get any benefit out of that is if it was a completely open ledger that was public, not a private ledger. If it's a private ledger, then it's very difficult to see what benefits would approve from using such a complicated technology to communicate between vehicles. There are much easier and simpler technologies. Traditional cryptography, digital signatures, message integrity with hashes and fingerprints, can be used. These are all parts of a blockchain, but they're not a blockchain. These were things that were invented long before a blockchain. Not everything needs a blockchain, just because something can use digital signatures, hashes, or a PKI. Does that mean it needs a blockchain? Are there any convincing examples of identity management on blockchains that you know of? Identity is a very difficult problem to solve. The problem has a lot to do with everything other than blockchains. Again, I'm not convinced that there are solutions, especially today, for doing identity on blockchains. The primary problem is that you can't verify the identity of someone using the consensus algorithm within a blockchain. If you're not verifying that, then someone has to verify the truth before an identity is recorded. Depending on how you do that, you either end up with effectively a centralized database that maybe exists with an open standard and is accessible by everyone, but is controlled by a single entity. This is the same problem that people are trying to solve with oracles in Ethereum, which is, how do you trust this third party oracle of identity that the information is correct? If you compromise the mechanism by which the information is recorded on the blockchain, then the blockchain records in a mutable fashion a lie that cannot be validated by consensus, and that is propagated to everyone who uses it. You haven't really gained anything. Again, which part of open borderless, censorship-resistant, neutral, and decentralized do you gain? By adding a blockchain to the problem of identity management, it's not a database for PKI. There are some potential advantages to permissioned ledgers, if those permissioned ledgers create a common standard that requires less trust in a centralized party for the collaboration of a few federated members, of a consortium or competitors within an industry. There may be some advantages to that, essentially more as an open-source, open-standard mechanism for coordinating information across parties that don't trust each other. But again, tying things that are not part of the blockchain, doing things that are not intrinsic to the blockchain, like cryptocurrencies, and trying to control, assess, and verify stuff that is not on the blockchain, people, products, logistics, votes, etc., that happen in the real world, requires you to trust, whoever puts that information into the blockchain, which simply moves the problem one step away from the consensus algorithm. Again, you have to have some reason for doing that. Otherwise, what you end up with is a database that has a better pitch deck for venture capitalists because it has the word blockchain, but doesn't actually have any real use case for a blockchain. My name is Jeff McDonald. I'm the co-founder of the NIMM Foundation. Hi, Jeff. I, first of all, sincerely want to thank you for your service, making the world a better place. Thank you. You've done a great job. I've never heard someone call it service, but okay. It is. It is. You... I really appreciate it. Thank you. No, seriously. Do you believe that Bitcoin has a place to someday offer an open, borderless, censorship-resistant form of identity? Identity is very, very tricky, because identity isn't a singular thing. Identity is a fractal. It's a multi-dimensional fractal. Depending on which aspect of human identity you look at, you can separate one aspect of it. If you look at it very closely, you notice that it's actually composed of other smaller aspects of identity. If you look at each one of those, they're composed of other smaller and all the way down to infinity. Identity in itself is a very, very tricky thing. Also, identity is not a thing. It's a social construct, very much like money, but with some very important nuances. I think it's premature to be dealing with identity right now, and I think that a lot of the projects that are attempting to deal with identity today are dangerous. Part of the reason they're dangerous is because they're applying a mechanistic view of human behavior. Meaning, if you do X today, then you are 66.3% likely to do Y tomorrow. When you apply that to humans, it creates a very difficult situation. One, the machines never forget, which means that every mistake you make between the ages of 11 and 15 will follow you for the rest of your life. What did you do that was really stupid before you were 15? Everything. So did I. I do not want to even think about the things I did before I was 15 years old, many of which could have landed me in jail, and certainly none of which I would want people to be reading at my funeral. On December 3rd, 1986, look at what Andreas did. No, please forget about that. Forgetting is a very important part of the social compact. Without forgetting, society creates a situation where there is no forgiveness. Without forgiveness, you remove the possibility of change from people. If you assume that people don't change, then you create an environment where people can't change. We have a word for that. It's called fascism. I don't want that kind of situation. Machine identity is dangerous. It's not unsolvable. It's not impossible to find useful applications. We have to be very careful. I'm a strong believer that when you're operating in the domain of technology, as technologists we have a very important obligation to study, understand, and consider ethics in the work we do. Without ethics, technology is dangerous. When it comes to identity or any other social construct, which is about human behavior, ethics becomes very important to consider. These technologies will, if you allow them, start changing the way society works, start changing the way humans work, and have deep-reaching implications. There are some experiments going on at the moment in China with a system called Sesame, which is a social credit score. According to recent reports, it has now prevented 26 million people from traveling using public transportation. Their political and social behavior has earned them a low enough score that they've been banned. That's dangerous. It's only getting worse. Those are the kinds of things we don't want to do with technology. Shabib asks, how can you see blockchain be used for voting and election processes? I think it's still very early for implementation of voting or election processes using blockchain technology. There are a number of reasons why it's too early. One of them is that this technology is still early stage, poorly understood, and not many people have access to this technology. It's already a problem in many developed economies that voting is done with electronic machines. Most people don't know how to operate and are inscrutable and can't be audited properly. That creates more opportunities for voting fraud within the election, as well as lost votes. We see this happening quite a lot in developed economies. In order to use blockchain for voting and election processes, you have to think about a couple of different things. Would a blockchain that is being used for elections be decentralized? If it's not decentralized, what are the benefits of using a blockchain versus a simple database? One of the advantages is perhaps the ability to inspect and audit digital signatures. The problem with that is that it makes it very difficult to maintain the privacy anonymity of your vote. If it is decentralized, which platform do you run it on? Which government would trust a decentralized blockchain to run its elections on? It's hard to see at this point in time. Finally, the general idea of moving voting to more digital systems causes problems, especially in countries... where not many people have access to this technology. I think what we are going to see is voting and election processes used for smaller organizational units. Not national elections, but instead a shareholder election with a company. Voting for decisions in the governance of a decentralized autonomous organization, a DAO, or smart contract voting on a very specific topic. I think we will see a lot of that happening more and more. Gradually, we will see those types of voting techniques being used for larger and larger organizational entities. As people build confidence that the system can be neutral and deliver some benefits over traditional voting systems. Maybe sometime in the very far future, we will see that being implemented for national elections. Mammo asks, we have lots of tokens, most of which are just white papers and not yet fully executed. When do you think these ideas can reach the implementation stage? Many of them will never reach the implementation stage. We have to start thinking differently in this new world of tokens, where everyone can create a token. We have to think differently about the value and use cases around these tokens. Everybody has a blog. When are these blogs going to start doing serious journalism? Well, not all blogs are going to be doing serious journalism. Just because everybody can create a blog, many of them are bad. Just because everybody can create a token, everybody has created a token. Many of them are just white papers, an ERC-20 implementation, and nothing more. Don't expect any of these things to develop in any way other than just the original idea. Ideas are cheap. Being able to produce new ideas is something people who understand the space... and are thinking about these problems can generate ten ideas a day. The real catch comes when people try to execute these ideas and turn them into real products or services. That is where things get more difficult. If somebody comes to you and says, I have a fantastic idea for something new in the blockchain space, that idea is worth nothing. These white papers are worth nothing without any kind of implementation behind them. That is okay. You have to accept that in a space where anybody can create something very cheap or free, then you don't really need to consider what they have created seriously.