 So, Matt, today we're reviewing Blockchain Basics, a non-technical introduction in 25 steps by Daniel Drescher. Only 25 steps? Yes, 25 quick and easy steps to blockchain expertise. Now, the blockchain has kind of dulled in the popular consciousness. It's not quite as hot as it used to be, but we're still involved. Yeah, we're absolutely still on the blockchain here at Random Talkers. And I think for good reason, one of the things this book points out is that the blockchain is just a new technology to share information. It is not so much directly about Bitcoin or Ethereum, the cryptocurrencies you may have heard of, and it has a lot more universal applications. And an important thing to keep in mind here is we are very much in the early days of the blockchain. You can kind of compare this to the 1990s of the internet whereby we had the internet and we had websites, but we really didn't have great e-commerce applications. We haven't really evolved all of the different things we would come to later on. And I kind of think blockchain is there right now. Right. I think the early internet comparison is very apt where we're just kind of starting to figure out the commercial possibilities that might be driven by the blockchain. Now, in terms of the format of this segment, we're going to kind of talk through the description that Daniel gave of the blockchain in the book to kind of give you a really solid grounding of what the blockchain actually is. After that, we're going to talk about exploits. Basically, the way you might take advantage of a blockchain and turn it to your own ends essentially. And then finally, we're going to talk about the commercial projects and the ones we think might be the most viable. Now, time to introduce the show. This is Random Talkers. The voice you hear right now is Adam. The other voice is Matt. And this is a program where we discuss how technology is shaping the future for better and worse. We are available on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, really. And we'd love to hear from you, so make sure to leave a comment. Yeah, unfortunately, Adam, I don't believe the show is available on the blockchain yet, but we are absolutely working on that. Now, let's talk through how the blockchain works. So at the very highest level, the blockchain is simply a record keeping device. It's a ledger, and it's a way that we can verify and record transactions between different parties. Right. When I was kind of reading this part, it doesn't sound especially impressive. If you think back about the history of civilizations, we've been keeping ledges for millennia essentially, you know, keeping track of how much grain we have in our silos. This isn't really a new concept, the idea of recording transactions or ownership. What makes a blockchain cool? What makes a blockchain special? You know, why people are so excited about the blockchain is the idea that you can now have a ledger of transactions that doesn't require a central authority to be kept and to be verified. Instead, you can basically do this all through a network, which in the case of a blockchain is really a network of computers who are kind of working together through a system of rules and mechanisms that we'll get into a little bit, to basically verify the transactions that are being kept in the ledger and actually get rewarded for basically maintaining the blockchain and growing the blockchain. Yeah, it should be said this network of distributed sharing is not new at all. In fact, one of the first applications that saw widespread use would be Napster. So Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing software that allowed you to share potentially copyrighted music with your friends. And how this worked is you would provide one file to be shared, someone else would download it, and then the availability of that file could grow exponentially as everyone on the network obtained a copy and were able to share pieces of that file with someone else. But there are some differences between Napster, say, in the blockchain. You know, beyond the fact that Napster was sort of shut down by the government. One of them is that the blockchain is really about kind of keeping track of ownership rather than, say, doing something like file sharing. And the way the blockchain keeps track of ownership of items is through basically just locking a transaction history. So let's say, you know, we have a Bitcoin on the blockchain and we want to know who owns what. Well, by looking at the history of the transactions that are recorded in this ledger, we can basically say that, you know, I transferred, say, five Bitcoin to Matt two weeks ago. Matt then transferred two Bitcoin to someone else a week ago. And from that, you can basically infer Matt's ownership of Bitcoin by looking at the transactions that have kind of flown into him versus the ones that he's given away to other people. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Adam. It is not simply a inventory of who owns what at a given point in time, but a full transaction history of everything that has happened. And because of this, you can reconstruct from that history who should be owning what. Now, some of our listeners may be wondering, how is this different than a database? And to be really clear, one of the things that database would require here would be a central authority. There would have to be some group that owned and maintained this history for this to work. However, the really cool part about the blockchain is that there's no central authority. So the way this works is that all of these transactions are being stored as we've talked about and to unlock the transactions or rather to unlock the ability to write a new transaction, you have to solve a math puzzle. Yes, who wouldn't be excited about doing math puzzles all day? And now we're kind of getting into the stage of talking about the blockchain where we're getting into mining. I'm sure you've heard about this, you know, the amazing power consumption of Bitcoin in the blockchain. And the reason there's so much power being consumed is because all the nodes in the network are working on these very difficult math problems. Let's say on a typical day, you know, in a network, there's a lot of transactions that we want to store in our ledger. Let's say we have a busy marketplace and a lot of commerce is going on. To store these transactions, we need to create a new block on the blockchain. The blockchain is composed of blocks, which are essentially sequentially ordered. You can go from block A to block B to block C back in time and see all these transactions that are recorded on these blocks. You know, a block might say contain a day's worth of transactions. When we're trying to record this day's worth of transactions, in order to have the right to do so, a node has to solve a very difficult math problem. The reason we have this very difficult math problem is to stop fraudulent transactions from being written out extremely quickly. The idea is that it slows the process down and that is very much intentional. When one of the nodes in the network manages to solve a math problem, they are given the right to write out a block with a bunch of transaction data in it, and they're rewarded for doing so by earning tokens or, you know, Bitcoin, as most people would really think of it. And once they've done so, you know, the other nodes are able to actually check their work. If the work is correct, the reward is given out, the block is written, and we've recorded, say, another day's worth of transactions in our blockchain ledger that will now be there forever and be added onto in future days. Right. So these nodes are competing to see who will be able to write the authoritative version of the transaction history the fastest and the first one to finish wins. Now you may be wondering, how do we verify that these transactions are correct? And this is where cryptography comes in. So without this, I would easily be able to say that all of Adam's transactions should have gone to me and I'll steal all of his cryptocurrency. But unfortunately, I can't do that. And the reason is again, I'm using this version of cryptography, which is encrypting information on both ends. So where is a public key and a private key? And the way these work in concert is basically we both can decrypt a shared message, but I can verify that Adam's encryption indeed came from Adam. And he's the only one who can encrypt his own transaction history because the keys would not work together if it was someone else who tried to write that transaction. Yes. And I think the key thing that I kind of took away, no pun intended, from this section is that the private key is of absolute importance. And if you lose your private key or you give out your private key somehow, you are absolutely screwed and someone with that information can basically report transactions on your behalf, you know, transfer your Bitcoin to someone else. And the entire security of the system from an individual user's point of view depends on their private key being kept secure and definitely not forgetting what your private key is too. Now, one slight issue of a distributed system that we haven't really got to yet is that the messages of a node descending between each other can arrive out of order or maybe not arrive at all, you could have bad actors. And because of this, you could end up with several different versions of the blockchain being written at one time. If we think about the blockchain as kind of a tree, we could have branches whereby one block has one particular set of transactions and another might have a slightly different history, perhaps, you know, they've been misreported or there's been some sort of mistake along the way. And in order to kind of have your authoritative ledger of transactions over time, you need to find a way to basically reconcile these differences and come up with the one true blockchain. So one of the challenges here is we have to decide which version of the blockchain is true. And the way that we can do this in a network setting is through distributed consensus. The idea being that if most of the nodes in the network agree that something has happened, then it indeed is true and has happened. And one of the ways we can look at what trees or what branches of these trees seem to be true is through the compute power needed to calculate them. So a really quick shortcut we use is by saying if a particular branch requires more compute power, it is indeed longer. It has more transaction history. And therefore it is the most complete version of the blockchain. And because of this, it becomes very difficult to defraud the blockchain. Now it's not impossible if you had a large number of nodes out there who were agreeing that something that was false was indeed true, then it could happen. But the reality is this is very costly because of course as the blockchain grows, you have to calculate farther and farther back. And so in general, we would not expect these attacks to occur. Right. So like you said, the blockchain isn't unbeatable, but it's very, very difficult to beat it. The blockchain generally relies on something that's kind of known as the honest majority. And if you can see that we had enough compute power to sort of overwhelm that, you could record fraudulent transactions, but in a widely dispersed and really powerful blockchain network, this is going to quickly become very difficult and very expensive to do. Now, we congratulate you for listening this far in the episode. You're basically a certified blockchain expert at this point, you're ready to bring out your own ICO and cash in. And to kind of recap the general concepts we really want to kind of take away, all the blockchain is really at its heart is a ledger of transactions. We often think of these transactions as being Bitcoin transactions, but, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. It could be transferring, you know, say, whole ownership records in a particular state. It could be all kinds of things that are being recorded in this blockchain, but all you really have to know is that it's distributed, it's verifiable, we use cryptography to make sure the transactions are correct. And as public, anyone can read these transactions on the blockchain. It's part of what makes it secure and allows us to record from without needing a central authority to do so. So you have to say, Adam, so far the blockchain feels pretty unbeatable. You can record any transaction in this system in a distributed manner, and there's no honorous central authority to get in your way. So for example, it could be something so trivial as what you've had for breakfast for the entire year or something very serious with lots of real world value, like a financial transaction. Now there are some negatives to the blockchain as well, or some potential vulnerability, shall we say. And the first is one we've touched on earlier, the idea of this 51% attack or really this attack on the ability to reach a consensus. So what does this mean? Well, if 51% of the nodes of a distributed network agree on something to be true, that is going to be the authoritative record. It doesn't mean that it's necessarily true, it just means if the majority agrees on it, it becomes the truth. And so that opens us up to potential vulnerability whereby if we had a supercomputer, we could have the supercomputer solve lots of these blocks and come to a conclusion that represented 51% of the system, which was indeed false. Yeah, I think a lot of the fraud on the blockchain is really about kind of a computing arms race, if you will. Whereby, you know, you're computing to solve the math problems that are going to let you write the next block, knowing that whoever basically constructs the longest chain in the blockchain, that chain is going to be given precedence and kind of seen as the authoritative version of the chain. And so if you can summon enough compute power to somehow instill your fraudulent transactions into the blockchain forever, well, now you've kind of won the fraud has succeeded. And if you're able to do that by spending less than you're able to gain from transactions, well, now you have a significant business opportunity. There are other ways, though, to kind of reach consensus. It doesn't always have to be about who has done the most work and created the longest chain that way. Some systems, for example, could use to say which nodes have the most tokens accumulated. So like we kind of mentioned earlier, once you've created a new block, you've done the math problems to create the block, you're rewarded with tokens, which are bitcoins in the most common example. And you could say that the nodes you have the most tokens are kind of the most experienced nodes are the earliest nodes are likely to be good nodes and they should basically have more say into what kind of the authoritative version of the blockchain is. And so, you know, for some principles, you could say that they should be given greater voting rights and that's how you should be able to reach consensus. So it doesn't necessarily always have to be about proof of work in order to decide what's your authoritative version. Yeah, and we should mention one of the reasons today that a 51 percent attack is relatively rare. I don't know of any major instances of this is mostly because it takes a lot of energy. This is using real world resources to compute these long chains. So for example, you may have to spend a hundred thousand dollars in energy or even opportunity cost to get ten thousand dollars stolen. So it really doesn't work out in the math today, but it brings up the second point we want to talk about, which is that the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are really eating up lots and lots of energy today. I think there's been reports out there that somehow this represents the energy consumption of entire countries in Europe at this point. And really, you know, there's this other side which says this is not something that is really generating any value. It's just all of these computers working tirelessly, burning up actual coal, admitting, you know, real world carbon into the atmosphere simply to solve math problems. Right. This is kind of a trade off of using a distributed system versus a centralized authority for your ledger. You know, if you are in a situation where the parties involved in transactions are very trustworthy, you may maybe you're just creating something within a particular company, for example. Well, you don't necessarily need this blockchain because it's going to be taking an awful lot of energy that could be better used elsewhere. And so the blockchain is really in some ways for sort of niche cases where you have a large number of untrustworthy parties, a large number of transactions that are not necessarily easy verified. And then there's value in working all these math problems, you know, making it very, very difficult to record transactions. But if you don't have that, you know, maybe you shouldn't use a blockchain. Now, one of the other issues that also comes up is the idea of the dependence of the blockchain on private keys. We kind of mentioned that private keys are necessary as part of cryptography to essentially verify the transactions are going into the blockchain. And the issue you have is that if you lose your private key or your private key is stolen, you are in major, major trouble. And for a lot of kind of, you know, non-technical people or people who just kind of introduced to a blockchain, it's kind of a scary proposition to be so dependent on one particular thing in terms of security. Yeah, you've seen some rather ridiculous news stories lately of people who have gone to hypnotists trying to remember the key or the password to get their private key back so they can retrieve all of their lost Bitcoin from, you know, 2011 or whatever it may be, which is now obviously worth lots of money. And it's a great point, which is that, you know, today we think about how many people have their, you know, air quotes, accounts hacked, which is simply they've, you know, been a little bit lax around their security. And it makes you wonder like how viable is this sort of private key architecture where we expect people to keep these things secure. And the other thing, you know, is inherent to the blockchain is that once a transaction has been recorded, it's very difficult, if not impossible to change, meaning if someone's key is stolen and their money is transferred away, you can't simply reverse that transaction out. And that's kind of the downside to not having a central authority. There is no FDIC to step in on your behalf and, you know, take care of things. So, you know, really this is kind of the flip side to the situation whereby if we get rid of a central authority, yes, we do get some, you know, nice reduction in fees, but there is no overseer to protect the system. And even in other instances where, you know, you can imagine something like the stock market trying to use a blockchain. Well, in that case, let's think about the most recent flash crash, which had to have the transactions reversed in a blockchain world that simply would not be possible. And I think the final thing we should talk about, Adam, is this idea that the blockchain is really not built for speed. It is, it is slow and it is slow on purpose. Yes, if worrying about private keys was sort of a security concern, I would say the slowness of a blockchain is more of a convenience concern. In the, if you are trying to verify your transaction, record your transaction in this blockchain ledger, you might be waiting a while for it to get processed, you know, the math problems have to be solved in order for the next block to be written of the blockchain and for your transaction to hopefully be recorded in that block. And if, for example, your transaction is recorded in a branch that does not become the kind of true branch of a blockchain, prove a distributed consensus system, you might have to wait a while after that to get your transaction finally recorded. So from the point of view of convenience, you know, the blockchain is slow. It is not being able to just, you know, transfer money between, you know, checking accounts or using Venmo or something like that. Yeah, we should say, though, that these are all solvable issues. I mean, we've given you some of the solutions. Now, there are other ones that become slightly more difficult to deal with. For example, if we talked about how could we start protecting private keys? Well, perhaps you could buy insurance or something like this to protect your transactions. But of course, who would you buy that insurance from but a central authority, which in many ways defeats the purpose of this system in the first place. That said, I think both Adam and I would agree that, you know, these things can be solved. It's just a matter of time before we can get some good solutions going for this. But we should also talk now on the other side about what the blockchain is good for. I want to be really clear and the author is as well that the blockchain is, you know, really just a technology which can apply to lots of different things that require that transaction ledger. We usually think of the blockchain as cryptocurrency. But again, that is simply one application, albeit the most obvious. Yes, it's a ledger that can record anything you want. And that doesn't have to necessarily be financial of a financial sort of the most obvious application. In particular, I think kind of a quintessential example of a blockchain use case is cross country money transfers. You want to send money, say from India to the United States or anywhere across the world. And you don't right now have a particularly easy, cheap, you know, affordable, quick way of doing so. But if you have Bitcoin and you're able to use the blockchain to verify transactions, you can essentially transfer Bitcoin to anyone who's using that blockchain. And you don't have the sort of restrictions that we have right now of the currency transfers. So one of the reasons that finance is so ripe for this kind of disruption is exactly what you said, Adam, which is to transfer money from India to the United States, it's going to hit a untold number of different financial institutions and banks, maybe let's say five in total. And all of these are going to collect a small fee. Well, by having a direct person to person transfer and then paying a small fee to the blockchain to do this transfer, you can save a lot of money. So there's all kinds of industries out there that require all these little fees along the way. And I think all of these are a potential target for blockchain disruption. Yeah, I mean, the author kind of talks about this in the book, Daniel Drescher, when he talks about disintermediation as being kind of one of the key benefits of the blockchain and that essentially solves trust problems that have traditionally been solved by using middlemen. So let's say, you know, I want to lend you money and give you a small time loan as a borrower. Traditionally, it would be difficult to do that and kind of a peer to peer way without some kind of organizing framework, organizing middleman to basically coordinate these transactions, you know, write up the agreements, you know, make sure everything works correctly. But with the blockchain, you could conceivably transfer the money in a verifiable way, whereby the conditions of a transfer are sort of laid out on the blockchain for everyone to see and understand. And for that reason, you wouldn't necessarily need a middleman, which I think has to be somewhat concerning in the long run for a lot of kind of financial services type companies. And, you know, another example of this kind of in the realm of finance is also just to talk about insurance, whereby, you know, insurance is a pretty simple concept where you're just looking to pull risk. And conceivably, all of this could be handled on the blockchain without needing, you know, the overhead of a massive insurance company because people could simply specify, you know, the terms of the insurance, the transfers required of the insurance, the payouts that are incurred if there is, you know, an event that requires them. And all this wouldn't necessarily need a mega corporation to handle. Although again, this is kind of a speculative application that we haven't really arrived at yet. So finance is the most obvious application of the blockchain today. But there's actually another technology that I personally find even more compelling. And this is the idea of a smart contract. So for those of you who may have been following crypto currencies, you will probably be well aware that the currency Ethereum is kind of built around this idea of a smart contract. In fact, you can do, you know, smart contracts in Ethereum today. And so what is a smart contract? Well, a smart contract is the idea that we could have a transaction that is set up in the system by some code and executes automatically. And so this contract can be over absolutely anything. It could be over the transfer of property. It could be over a simple bet you were placing and really just allows a ton of flexibility in terms of executing a transaction. Now that said, it doesn't get you out of the part of contracts that most people hate, which is the negotiation. So you still have to have this contract set up in advance. But the cool part is it kind of removes all the middleman anyone sees ever bought a house knows that, you know, you have untold number of lawyers and different mortgage brokers and whatnot in the room at the time. And this kind of says you don't need that. You can just simply have this contract that's backed by Ethereum or other cryptocurrency that's out there and it'll execute automatically. No need for all that overhead. Yes, smart contracts are really a crucial term to have in your kind of blockchain buzzword vocabulary. You know, you want to make sure you're dropping out whatever you're talking about the blockchain. And I do think that interesting in the sense that they kind of broaden the definition of what is a transaction on this blockchain ledger we've been describing. You know, it doesn't have to just be a Bitcoin transfer. It can't actually be something more complex like you were talking about that, you know, when you're buying a home, you know, dealing with a mortgage that kind of thing. But for me, you know, it's difficult to see how much this really takes out of the pain of these transactions, because like you mentioned, you still have to negotiate the contract. They're still very much dependent in many cases on say a legal entity to judge the validity of contracts are occurring, you know, in the real world and determining things that may not be apparently obvious to, you know, the blockchain itself. And so for that reason, I think smart contracts are very interesting, but it's unclear to me exactly how much of an application they're going to have in the future. Yeah, I think you could argue that the term contract is a little bit deceiving. In fact, they can be more modular in that they're almost just smart functions, if you will. One of the interesting ideas here as well is that these contracts can be, you know, open of course, they're on the blockchain, anyone can see them. So perhaps you can have three way and four way transactions made today that wouldn't be possible because you would need to get so many different parties involved. Well, the blockchain can solve this all together as one network problem. Absolutely. And when we kind of think about other applications of the blockchain, you start to also get into kind of the corporate realm, I would say. And this is the point where I think we should sort of make the distinction between the different levels of access available to people in the blockchain or nodes in the blockchain, users of the blockchain. Because the kind of stereotypical traditional, the most sort of commonly discussed blockchain is really one of, say, four types of blockchain. And it's a public permissionless blockchain. And what that means is that anyone who joins the network as a node can first of all read the transactions of the blockchain. They can look and they can say, you know, they can look at the blockchain history and they can see that say, you know, Adam transferred five Bitcoin to Matt back in the day before they became really valuable and he's regretting that right now. And they can also, for example, write to the blockchain. They can complete these math puzzles that we've talked about in order to give you the right to to write the next block and to claim the reward for doing so. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Because if it is, you know, you run into a lot of privacy concerns of the blockchain. If you're thinking about a blockchain in a corporate sense, you don't necessarily want the entire world to be able to see everything that is written in this ledger. And for that reason, there are actually blockchains whereby nodes are restricted in terms of who can write to a blockchain and who can read from the blockchain. So you have public versus private blockchains which are based on read access. And you have permission versus permission less blockchains which are based on on write access. And for that reason, when you can combine these, it's two by two, you actually end up with these four different combinations of blockchain that can be used. And for a lot of the private kind of corporate applications, you're looking at these closed off blockchains as perhaps being a little bit more appropriate. So I'm going to have to pose the question that all the blockchain critics out there say, which is, isn't a private blockchain just simply an inefficient database? It might be, but I don't think you're going to get to the top of hacker news by discussing your new database. You know, you kind of have to have that blockchain component. I get what people are saying with that, that it's basically a database. I can also see instances where you would have a blockchain that is a little bit different. One example, for instance, is being brought up right now is the use cases of blockchain within the shipping industry whereby different shipping companies could essentially collaborate on a blockchain that is used to track the shipment of freight across the world, be it by boat, by plane, truck, what have you. And a blockchain system could be really good for verifying these types of transactions. And in this situation, you would want a blockchain that was closed off to the participants within the shipping industry as in only they can read and write on it versus everyone else being able to use it. And so that, I think, is a collaborative application of the blockchain where you do have these trust issues, if you have these different shipping companies who are needing to collaborate together. But you also want some element of privacy in the only select group who are actually able to use this blockchain. Yeah, I think one of the really strong benefits is this idea that you can incentivize some sort of network effect by having a token out there that different participants can interact with. So for example, one of the big things I was thinking about lately is this idea of last mile delivery. So in the case of UPS, they know that really one of their highest costs is getting that package from the distribution center to your house. So one easy application of the blockchain would be, well, instead of having UPS or FedEx do this delivery, we'll simply have a network out there where people can say that they'll deliver this and perhaps maybe they live by the distribution center or perhaps they live by the final destination of the package and they'll simply pick it up from the blockchain, record it in the transaction and receive some small payment in the form of tokens from UPS for doing this and it's a net win for all participants involved. I think the idea of tokens as incentivizing network effects is really crucial on this what a lot of people we talk to are enthusiastic about when it comes to the future of Bitcoin and the blockchain, essentially. This idea that if you're starting a product or a platform that depends on network effects, you have a classic issue of how on earth do I get people to buy into this platform when no one's using it and a lot of the value is derived from everyone using it and one way to get around this traditionally has been by pouring billions of venture capital money into it. If you look like PayPal, for example, they basically paid people to use their service in order to try and build this network effect. But another way to do it would be to reward people through earning tokens that only really become valuable once the platform has reached a critical mass and people actually believe in the tokens and if you give out more tokens to people who are kind of working on the blockchain or platform earlier, now you can start to see how this whole system might be a really good way to build the network effects but a lot of internet companies really need. So with that said, Adam, I was just curious, I mentioned shipping and logistics. Do you see any of the current incumbent companies, particularly those in the tech space that you would say are vulnerable to blockchain disruption? I think it's an interesting question and one that I do not have a great answer for. When I think about kind of what the blockchain is good for, it's basically establishing trust in a marketplace where traditionally you needed a strong centralized authority and it's for establishing trust in a situation where maybe you have a power of network effects involved. And so if you can look at an industry where maybe the incumbent is extremely unpopular but they still have kind of a monopoly and it's very trust based, well then you could see an area for disruption. So Uber is an obvious one, for example, right sharing, those kind of transactions and information sharing could be done through smart contracts on a blockchain. I would also say something like the credit reporting industry. Companies like Experian and Equifax who A, are not very popular, B are extremely powerful, could potentially be supported if you could just put, you know, the information that's required to create your credit report on the blockchain and have it be verified that way. Well then do you really need this kind of central power that's collecting all this information and monetizing it from you? Matt, do you think we're going to kind of see successful commercial applications in a blockchain arriving anytime soon, say in the next couple of years or do you think this is something where 10 years from now it might be seen as more of a transformative technology? Yeah, I personally think we're closer to something like 10 years away than we are in the next couple of years. I do think that this transformative company probably starts in the next couple of years. It's just going to have somewhat of a, you know, long ramp cycle to get there. I see this as the kind of thing which you can, you know, if you can look at a problem and say, if we could just get everyone on board to doing this thing tomorrow, it would be great for everyone. Well, the cool thing about the blockchain and we mentioned in the idea of, you know, tokenizing this network effect or using the token to create this network effect is that you can kind of do that with the blockchain. You can sort of flip a switch. And, you know, if people are properly aligned and believe in the particular token that is being exchanged, you can create this tomorrow. In the example of transportation, one of the reasons I say transportation as potentially being a industry that gets disrupted is that this is, you know, this has been an opportunity for years, but you have a immense amount of capital that is required to start any of these companies. Do you have to be able to expand large portions of not only the US, maybe even the entire globe and... Yeah, you need all those ridiculous, expensive data scientists on the payroll, you know, to keep your business going. Exactly, right? And so I think, you know, when you think about something like this last model delivery I talked about earlier, well, one of the reasons it's viable now, in my opinion, is because before, there's no way you would have gotten everyone on board to this idea or even the capital needed to centralize this in a single database or something like that. Yeah, all these kinds of companies that are trying to kind of mobilize people to complete small tasks, you know, like tasks, grab it, what have you. You know, they have a very difficult time getting off a ground, gaining traction because you don't have that level of ownership that the early adopters would really want to be invested in the network. One thing I would say, you know, in response to kind of our blue sky thinking on blockchain and, you know, all these kind of grand visions of what the blockchain could become is that incumbents are often very good at holding on to what they have. I think if a blockchain really became a threat to a monopolist, you know, like a credit card company or credit reporting agency, you would see them kind of pursue a lot of legal avenues, for example, to kind of hold on to their power. And, you know, even if you look at the original example of the peer-to-peer network we brought up earlier of Napster, I mean, that was one where the incumbents really mobilized to kind of protect themselves. And, you know, even though they're not as profitable, perhaps as they used to be, the record companies are still around. You know, they're still making money. They're still kind of adding value by nurturing artists, helping them with touring, merchandising, what have you in the real world. And it's been difficult for this kind of peer-to-peer vision to display some completely. And I think it'll be interesting to see which monopolists are able to kind of hold on to their power as a blockchain grows versus those that are unable to deal with kind of a changing tide and actually get disrupted completely. Yeah, maybe with all these folks out there reading Clayton Christensen books, we are now aware that disruption can come from below and perhaps they will be able to step in front of the impending wave of blockchain technology that could potentially put them out of business. Yes, we're gonna record two takes. One where I call blockchain a sustaining technology. One where I call it a disruptive technology. And I will substitute in the appropriate take in the years to come once it becomes evidence which one is which. In any case, we hope you have enjoyed our discussion of the blockchain. Make sure to chime in in the comments if you kind of have any views on the future of blockchain, any applications we didn't think of, anything we really missed in the discussion, we'd love to hear from you. But this has been Random Talkers. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you next time.