 So yes, I I'm most of my time these days is spent in BotChainLabs.nz myself and my colleague Paul over here co-founded this and Our mission is to empower organizations to great decentralized solutions with global impact So imagine if I give you an apple you I want to give you an apple you live on my streets I don't quite trust you. You've got a funny haircut. You come home late at night But I want to give you this apple so I walk up to you. I hand it to you We went through a value transfer exchange Didn't need anybody else to help us now. Let's imagine if I want to give you a digital apple a little bit harder So I might take a picture of that apple. I might attach it to an email and send it to you But who has the digital apple because I might have taken six copies of it and send to six of my friends You might done the same thing It's become a lot harder when you when you're talking digital assets So this is known as the double spending problem and something that has been taxing some of the smartest computer brains for for decades and essentially Nobody could really solve this problem the double spending problem. And so kind of the work around Is is Harold so Harold also lives on our street just down the road sort of the earth kind of a guy I've known him for years. You've known him for years. We both trust him So we are going to ask Harold to keep a ledger a list of who owns digital apples in our street So when I give you my digital apple me and you we both go to Harold and say can you keep this ledger up to date? Around who owns digital apples cool fine Now the we need to trust Harold when it's trust Harold to lock his house up at night when it's trust Harold not to Lose the list or corrupt it or not back it up We need we hope he doesn't come back drunk and use it as a toilet paper We hope he doesn't go senile We hope he doesn't sell that information to Bob up the street because Bob could use that information around digital apples For some other purpose that we don't know about so we're putting a lot of trust in Harold Now that is essentially how our entire global commerce system has been built on that work around because we couldn't work out a way to solve the double spending problem and Okay, what's what's the problem with that? Well, there's a few problems with that the internet globalization has has meant that those Intermediate intermediary companies the Haralds the banks the the financial institutions the entire global economy Ubers Facebook's Google's all these guys they become too powerful. They become monopolies. We've hit the boundaries They control our data. They control us. We've become the product and it's led to a very fragile and dangerous ecosystem so an interesting thing happened around eight years ago a person under the pseudonyms Toshi Nakamoto released some white paper and some source code and He she or they I'm gonna call him a he just because it's easiest He sold the double spending problem. Okay. He brought together some clever technologies All of them kind of existed before but he brought them together in a very clever way that nobody had thought of and and solve the double spending problem And so he created this form of digital cash that he called Bitcoin and but Bitcoin was the first example of this of a blockchain and really the clever bit was the blockchain infrastructure that he built underneath that So Bitcoin was the first blockchain out there So how does the blockchain work? The blockchain is the is a really exciting bit of of Toshi's invention And you kind of don't really need to know the details of of the blockchain Just like you don't need to know the details the plumbing around email or Browser, but there are some really important things that that you do need you do need to understand about it And so the blockchain is like Harold's ledger It's like a long list of spreadsheets, but it's a very long spreadsheet a very long list in the case of Bitcoin So the Satoshi's first transaction is at the bottom of this this list and a transaction that I might do with you today Appears will appear on that top of that list So anybody who has a full copy of that ledger that long spreadsheet knows the complete state of the system and knows exactly Who owes what's Bitcoin at any point in time? So but this ledger the blockchain ledger is different from Harold's ledger or from our bank's ledger So on the left hand side here, we've got I'll cut the current systems our banks Uber Facebook any centralized system any centralized database database with lots of security Around the edge to stop the bad people getting in on the right hand side We've got the blockchain Decentralized models so it's a peer-to-peer system so each node on the network has a copy of the database and this database is Essentially copied out to every other node and in the case of Bitcoin, we've got about 30,000 nodes out there so each node has a copy and It's it's not restrictive anybody can become a node You don't need to be special you you can go home tonight and download the software and become a node get a copy of that database It's transparent And it's decentralized so the system is constantly trying to update synchronize each node the network Make sure they all have the same copy of truth So that decentralization of information gives it some two really key and unique properties that we've never had before Number one. It's not controlled by anybody. So the people behind open public open-source blockchains like Bitcoin The developers if they want to release a new version, they can't just do it They've got to they can propose a new solution They've got to convince the community the nodes and network to upgrade their servers and if most people don't it won't go It won't happen. So it's driven by the community. It's not and it's transparent The second thing is that the decentralization the crypt the cryptography the maths Means that it's essentially unstoppable Unhackable immutable so when you put information into this database think about it because you've got say 30,000 computers To take it down to get rid of that database. You have to take down every single computer 30,000 computers all around the world so a very hard thing to do And also you can't hack into it because you'd have to hack into It turns out at least 51% of these the nose at the same time to change that information And there's a lot of people who would love to hack into it It's got a market capitalization of 93 billion dollars. I think as of today So it gives this this these these really unique these really unique features So another another way to think about the blockchain is a database. It's so secure It can be made public completely different from most of our databases which are closed and controlled systems with lots of security around the edge So a cryptocurrency is a currency that's controlled by an international community driven by international community driven laws of transparent open mathematics And not by the laws of people in government not by the laws of people in government So soon after Bitcoin turned up bunch of people realize hey this immutable unstoppable Unhackable database could be used for other things in fact anything that has got has value to humanity a vote Title deep transfer if you don't quite trust your government to manage that A marriage certificate a birth anything that's important and perhaps we don't want one individual government to own and control or one individual corporation to control their information So, uh, yeah, it's a whole bunch of projects started up and are continuing to continuing to do that The next story in the blockchain the next chapter in the blockchain story is something called ethereum And a guy called a 19 year old guy called Vitalik who we brought over in may to new zealand He decided that hey this this this database this decentralized database concept Is kind of cool, but wouldn't it be great if we could write complex business rules and we could Decentralize those as well. So we could could we create this code this decentralized code execution engine? And that's exactly what he did So he he created a new blockchain called ethereum again open source community driven And it went live sort of a year or two ago And and again has changed the game and this is where the term smart contracts comes Which is slightly confusing terms it may not be smart and it may not be a contract in a legal sense But essentially a self executing Set of business rules that if you and I agree on those rules We put them on the blockchain. They will execute as programmed and it's again It's a bit of a mind-blowing sort of concept, but if I can use the example of gambling So let's say I want to build a gambling website today. I might With the traditional technologies I'll create a website and I'll have a database and some business rules I might have a virtual dice that you throw But you probably wouldn't use my gambling website because you wouldn't trust me You you'd be worried that I would be skewing the odds so you wouldn't win as often as you should So but let's imagine I could create a gambling website using blockchain technology using smart contracts Where that the rules of what happened when you threw that virtual dice Were transparent. They were immutable. I couldn't change them Even if I wanted to after I published them and that is exactly what's happening So people are creating gambling websites provably fair websites To do that. So what it does it changes the trust relationship You don't need to trust me. You're trusting the protocol Okay, and if you take that gambling example, and if you apply it to the whole of the rest of the comma system You can start to see the implications of this world. So we've got this new trust protocol That's uh, that is potential. It has got the potential to to change the way our systems work banking without banks Taxi without uber airbnb without airbnb social media without facebook That's that's the potential here So it turns out the one of the first sort of killer apps of this second generation Ethereum based botchains is capital raising ico and you may have heard of an ico initial coin offering And essentially what ico's do is is give give us a way to democratize capital raising And and it's an incredible thing that's really sprung up only after over the last few months But essentially what happens is and we've been involved in about 15 of them Essentially what happens is you create and anybody can do this You create a tokenized asset and a token is sits in this weird space between a currency A a share in a company and a fuel for the ecosystem that you're trying to build So and that's one of the problems at the moment the regulators the lawmakers can't get their head around. What is it? So they're they're working on that at the moment without too much success But essentially you you you you create this token and then you go And you create a vision a white paper and you get all the hype and then you say to people Hey, if you like my idea buy my token swap your existing digital currency your ether or your bitcoin for my token And you raise money by that like that and then you list your token on exchanges And it becomes a tradable commodity and takes market value and either goes up or down And yeah, so Some of the figures, you know some of the mats of money So the ones with stars the ones we've been involved in helping them But you know incredible so first blood of sports gaming platform 5 5.5 millions us in 10 minutes Status status. I am so that there's a key. We're an Aussie guy So we work with them they raise 100 million million us in three hours almost brought the ethereum blockchain to a stand still You know small teams that they're based in zoog now And then we get into the platform plays eos tezos, you know getting sort of a quarter of a billion Dollars raised in in very short amounts of time. So incredible figures. And this has really happened taken off in the last few months And you know getting great headlines. I think that that that now two billion now raised and surpassing other forms of capital raising So changing the game The other way to think of this whole world is in layers. So we've got the internet protocol which turned up Around 20 years ago and and disrupted a whole lot of business because it allowed us to move information across the globe at near Zero cost We now have this blockchain trust protocol this this mechanism to allow untrusted parties to interact without a trusted third party But what the blockchain doesn't do out of the box is to allow Groups of people to to work towards common shared goals organizations or community driven projects So we need something else we need something on top of the the the blockchain protocol And this is what a lot of these icos are doing. They're raising money for daos decentralized autonomous organizations So these are organizations, but different from traditional organizations in that the rules The governance isn't controlled by small groups of of people behind boardroom doors They're in open transparent sets of rules on the blockchain in smart contracts And generally these fall into a few groups Reputation some sort of unit of measure that reflects The the degree of alignment of an individual within a group of peers It may be some sort of value distribution some sort of unit that may be issued When a person with reputation contributes something to the system We have voting systems so people again It may be weighted towards people with higher reputation system can vote and influence the direction of the organization But ultimately organizations that can have evolutionary purpose And and can but also can support deviations from from that thinking That's what we've seen in the crypto world is that if there's disagreement with the community The the chain can fork it can break into two and you have two things and people go off in different directions That's a healthy part for an ecosystem So So let's imagine a few examples of some stuff that's going on So you pour let's imagine a system that gives you self sovereign identity a way for us to take control of our own identity That's that's being built. We've we build a prototype for di a to illustrate that A a social network which didn't Require us to give over all our information to some centralized profit-driven entity like facebook or twitter So have a look at the status i am white paper that that's part of their mission Decentralizing power So peer-to-peer power so So creators of power and and and consumers can trade on a peer-to-peer basis They're based in perth. They raised 33 million bar ico last month Light alchemist so this was a conversation that happened the last new frontiers Between a group of us And that's now the papers the white paper is now being written. So this the concept is connecting Home grows local grows of food with with people who want to cook food And with people who want to eat meals and with kids on e-bikes Around the middle so really exciting vision to sort of disrupt that the current food distribution system And data commons. So again there's a conversation with james mansell who he was here yesterday So at breakfast on that last new frontiers. So james was the lead author for this report This is really about moving data out of the silos within governments and and society into the data commons And really interesting report and the blockchain sort of lends itself perfectly to that world So really I think that the the challenge or the opportunity here is to put New Zealand at the center of this stuff We are seeing a new economy being born Let's use so a bunch of us is about sort of 10 of us who've been working for many years In this space to try and lay the foundations We've run two successful conferences last one in may when we brought vitalik and andreos and 20 other people The top people in the world to Auckland We've got We've got yeah in the last in the last six months. So blockchain labs. We've helped 12 organizations raised over 200 million dollars around the globe via icos We've got active meet-up groups in Wellington, Auckland We've got companies like brave new coin and centrality doing great things from New Zealand And we're working with yosef to try and lobby central government to try and Create some sensible legislation so that we attract some of this innovation to New Zealand because there's a huge opportunity We've got a new exchange about to launch Stevens here from the co from das it so that that's going to make it a lot easier for mum and dad In you know who wants to play in this space and perhaps put some money into bitcoin and that sort of thing So so I think we've got a huge opportunity So and yeah, I'd love to speak for lady after the president presented before me within governments And see see what we can do. Thank you