 Hey, it's great to be with you. My name is Christopher Schroeder. I've been a tech entrepreneur, active venture investor, and now focusing on a great deal on startups and innovation and emerging markets and around the globe. I wrote recently the book, Startup Rising, The Entrepreneurial Revolution, Remaking the Middle East. And I am very pleased to welcome you today to just tech connect program, Blockchain, the next big thing for your startups. Now, we're all still in the earliest days of what is this massively distributed, transparent, secure capabilities and what it will all mean. As the next billion human beings come online to software and to smart devices, often in places that don't have great banking, difficult safely to move money, opaque, not great transparency, not a lot of accountability and security, I don't have any doubt that we're going to see leapfrog applications from this amazing capabilities in Bitcoin and blockchain that are coming and are transmitting value pretty much everywhere on the planet. For the next 45 minutes, we're going to have an extraordinary discussion with some who are leading this charge. And I can't be more excited to introduce them. Ola Doudan is the co-founder and CEO of the Fintech Enterprise Bit Oasis. It's the leading Bitcoin enterprise in the Middle East and soon more, based out of Dubai. She, however, is based or from Jordanian. And she's one of the leading voices among the startups seen more broadly across the entire Arab world today. Mindy Lingham is a great pioneer in this space. Among other things, he was the founder of GIFT, the mobile GIFT card and mobile wallet startup. And now he's running Civic, which is a platform allowing all sorts of authentication. You don't need a username, no password, no third party authentication, no physical hardware token. It's all secure in the blockchain. By the way, a must read on everything blockchain and the issues we're going to talk today is his blog, which is called For the Love of Bitcoin. I can't recommend it enough. Brian Bellendorf is the executive director of Hyperledger Project, a global open source collaborative effort created to advance cross industry blockchain technologies. It's an amazing group of representation based under the Linux Foundation. It's got leaders from finance, banking, the internet of things, supply chain manufacturing, and technology more broadly. Brian is something of a legend. He was one of the real primary developers of the Apache web server, which is the most popular web browser in the world. And he has been one of the leaders of the Apache Software Foundation. He also serves on the board of the Mozilla Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has been the CTO of the World Economic Forum. He himself is an active investor in the very things we're talking about. Please join our discussion by sending us your questions and comments through the chat roll on the right side of your screen, also through Twitter at hashtag just tech connect, one word. Now, when we wait for your questions, let's get started. And I'd love, Brian, to start with you. And I wonder if I could get you just a right set us here, that people use terms in a lot of different ways in these new days, certainly in Washington, even people throw out blockchain and Bitcoin like it's the same thing. How should we think about each? And why does this matter? I think the term blockchain used to refer to something very specific as a data structure. But now, just like the term the internet used to mean a certain kind of networking technology and came to mean really more of an ecosystem, the term blockchain has really come to refer to two things. One is the concept of a distributed ledger, a system of record that a set of organizations of any different size can share and have as a common database without meeting somebody in the center that everyone has to trust and then built on top of that a set of smart contracts to basically automate a lot of the business processes and business relationships that you have in the commercial sector. Cryptocurrencies are one application of blockchain technology and they are a fantastic one. I mean, we're here talking about blockchain technology today because of Bitcoin, because of Ethereum and they've really charted the path towards showing how at a global scale, you can have a public ledger that records this information and a currency that can span global boundaries and that's really amazing. But there are a lot of other applications for this as well from tracking flows of illicit goods and supply chains to implementing systems for the secure sharing of medical records to all sorts of tough challenges that otherwise having to depend upon a central server, a central provider, a central cloud is insufficient. Instead, we have now this distributed technology that helps solve a lot of really thorny problems. If I'm a new startup anywhere in the world today, why do I care right now? I've got access to ledgers, I've got access to moving money somewhat. Why does this matter to us right now? This is how we're going to reinvent a lot of the major systems of the world. I mean, the world runs on accounting, the world runs on money, right? And it was the invention of double entry accounting in the 14th century. Some say as far back as the 9th century that really led to the world of international trade allowed us to do business with each other and trust each other without having to worry that one side or the other was going to run away with the money before delivering the goods, right? In the internet and network settings, we hadn't really solved this until we'd figured out how to build these systems, these blockchain, these distributed ledger systems that could reinforce a lot of the rules at a technical level that otherwise we'd have to worry about at a social level. And so this is how the banking sector will be reinvented. This is how major supply chains will be reinvented. This is how just the major systems of the world will be reinvented. And so it's important to understand that, just as it was important to understand how the internet was changing things in the mid to late 90s. Hyperledger is this amazing collaboration. Can you talk a little bit about what is the jet fuel that you think a collaboration across many industries and sectors can help to really make this move? Well, in the early days of the web, it was open source that helped establish these common standards for HTTP and HTML and this alphabet soup of different technologies that because they were open standards and open source implemented, were accessible to anybody, right? And so we've learned this lesson now. And now with this reinvention going on, people understand if we work together on the plumbing, if we work together on the common components for building distributed ledgers and smart contracts, and on top of that, we build additional things for cryptocurrencies, for healthcare records, for other things. Maybe we can get to someplace interesting much faster and much more, it's much more of the whole industry moving towards a common point of place. So that's what we're doing at Hyperledger. It's an open source project. We've got big companies, small companies, a quarter of our members are based in China. I mean, it's a really global effort and it's all based on the principle of building something in common and sharing that code. And how's the plumbing going? How do you compare where we are to a year or two ago? Oh, to a year or two ago, we're much further along. I mean, we have real proofs of concept, real pilots running a couple of production instances now of these kind of permissioned distributed ledgers, and that's very different. And one can't dispute, you know, in the Ethereum world and in the Bitcoin world, there's a lot of activity going on there as well that is actually production use. Hey Vinny, it's great to be enthusiastic about this and the progress that's being made. I know early on you were quite a skeptic, and I wonder if you could just share what's changed you, like what has turned you? Well, when you said early on skeptic, 2009 and 10, when I first heard about Bitcoin, I was a bit skeptical on a number of fronts, but, you know, and to be fair, it went through a lot of technical, you know, mishaps and issues in the early days, but none really since 2011, I would say. I've been pretty stable since then. I got into it really, I was watching 2012 where the price spiked to 30 bucks, and it came down to a dollar, and then there was a real resurgence after that in early 2013. That's where I really got into it. You know, at the time I was running a company which I started called GIFT. It's a mobile GIFT card platform which was acquired by First Aid Corporation. And one of the problems we had was, you know, fake credit cards on the internet being used by GIFT cards and, you know, effectively draining stolen funds from those credit cards. And so we had a big problem with credit card fraud. We had to resolve. And we started accepting Bitcoin because, you know, irreversible transactions, guaranteed payments to merchants, et cetera. It was a huge success for us. And so we built on that. And, you know, my passion and love of Bitcoin grew, and I started my next company trying to build identity on the blockchain. And so that's my sort of background in Bitcoin, and it was since I've been pretty avid supporter of it. So you mentioned in passing and what you're doing with the identity verification is tied to this in a ways that some people still are obsessed that this is somehow not secure. Mt. Gox, which was this company that was a place where people put millions of their money in it, and effectively in its structure, and then it got hacked and millions of dollars were lost. And a lot of people are still thinking about that even though it was years ago. Now with Civic, you've really thought about these issues. Where are we today on security? And how do you think Civic is helping along with this? So that's, I mean, on the Mt. Gox thing, Mt. Gox was effectively like a bank. And when a bank is robbed, it doesn't mean the golds work less. So that's essentially what happened. It didn't change the value of the Bitcoins, the fact that it was stolen. You know, when it comes to Civic, we're using the existing protocols and platforms and algorithms that Bitcoin uses. So a Shart 256 is still uncrackable even by quantum computers today. It may change in the future, but that's a pretty secure hashing algorithm. And we're able to leverage that to build, you know, encryption, which is more secure than anything out there today and secured by millions of computers, which secure the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain. And so, you know, we're comfortable that this is, we've had a lot of technical support and testing of this technology. It's secure. I mean, we've recently announced that the collaboration with Intel we're putting it down onto the chips. They've got Intel SGX software guide extensions, which allows us to store data at a chip level, which makes it even more secure and impervious to hacking, malware, et cetera, to a large degree. So, yeah, I think this is the, for us, it's a distributed PKI infrastructure play, public key infrastructure we're using with the Bitcoin blockchain as this global distributed ledger where public keys are effectively available to everyone. But if you have private keys, you can prove that you have ownership of certain pieces of data. And that way you can prove your identity. So our vision and goal is to give everyone in the world the digital ID that they can use when they are traveling, hopefully, passports, driver's licenses, and accessing websites, well, any stage company, but we've got some big ambitions. And it is a big ambition, but I think at an important time in our history over, I do love your blog. It's aptly named for the love of Bitcoin. But you've said there- It's www.beginning.com. That's the, for the other bitcoins, my last post, which has been very well received. It is amazing. And in that post, in fact, another post that you've said often, that you believe Bitcoin is the Bitcoin market, is really the only true global free market economy in the world today. That's a big statement. Also, what do you mean when you say that? Well, so it's really hard to manipulate Bitcoin as a commodity and asset because it's widely distributed to millions of people. It's hard to get unlocked supply. So gold is different. I'll give a real-world example. As the price of gold rises, it makes marginal mines more profitable. So there's a mine that couldn't operate at less than $1,800. So the gold price rose to $1,800. These mines would now be able to take gold out of the earth. So supply increases. With Bitcoin, that doesn't happen. As the price rises, supply is fixed. It's 12 and a half new coins every 10 minutes. That's what the miners are able to produce. The price will go to $10,000 tomorrow. You're not gonna get more supply out of the system. But with other commodities, there are ways of extracting gold and potentially even from asteroids and meteors and other space objects. But Bitcoin is really truly fixed in terms of its long-term supply. Ola, it's just wonderful to talk to you here. I believe as I touched on before, we're gonna see astounding innovation in Bitcoin but in blockchain in growth markets because as you know and have lived, these are often unbanked, literally unbanked, not just poorly banked. When there are banks that are costly, transparency and therefore fraud can be an issue. So in a way, it's almost a perfect definition of application for something that can be the Bitcoin and then blockchain platform. I wonder if you could share with folks what you're seeing specifically in the Middle East and why you form bit oasis and why it's growing so rapidly right now. Definitely, yeah. I mean, I think in the past couple of years, definitely seen a lot of different startups in different growth markets across the world, building on Bitcoin blockchain and serving new customer bases unlocking different use cases from lending, your credit to B2B payments to remittances, et cetera. I mean, for us in bit oasis and the reason why we do what we do is because we fundamentally believe that blockchain, specifically open blockchains, Bitcoin being the biggest today will change the way we transact when it comes to money and financial services. But in order to enable people to transact using blockchain and going back to your point on banking, on bank, I think there's sort of different building blocks that need to be built or put in place before we're able to extend that technology to those new user bases that today don't have access or sufficient access to financial services. I think the main point or the main focus is building infrastructure there. When I say infrastructure on user adoption, I mean exchanges, secure wallets, building liquidity specifically in growth markets, which has sort of been happening in 2016. We definitely see that happening in 2017 as well. And then opening up that infrastructure layer through APIs to build a second layer on top of that, which is specifically user applications that users would find it much easier to use than what you have today, which is somewhat complicated exchanges to use and wallets. There's definitely more sort of infrastructure work to be done on the protocol level and development. You see different layers being built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is definitely also important to have to enable different kinds of transactions and instant transactions on the blockchain. So we see a lot of interesting infrastructure work being happening in growth markets, but also on the protocol level. But when it comes to bitaways, it says our focus today is infrastructure. There's obviously a big gap when it comes to making it easy for people to use digital currencies in our markets. So that's why we have built our own wallets, network of exchanges. Today is present across the Gulf countries, but we look at our market as emerging markets in general. Being based in Dubai helps us to connect to different growth markets, be it India, other parts of the Middle East, Africa, other parts of Southeast Asia as well. So in terms of where we are, I think in sort of adoption of the Middle East has definitely been interesting. We've crossed 15 million USD of exchange volume per month this month. We see a great adoption in markets like the UAE. So we know where we are today. A lot of adoption in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, in Morocco. Also in connecting to other markets like the Philippines and India, specifically for B2B payments and peer-to-peer payments. So that's been very interesting to see. Very recently what we started seeing in the past three months, once we opened up our APIs for people to build other applications on top of that, that we've seen startups from Philippines, from India, from parts of Africa already connecting to our infrastructure to enable cross-border payments. We see other tech startups in our own market as well, experimenting and building different financial applications or fintech applications, where they typically probably relied on exchange houses to process those transactions. They're resorting now to use the Bitcoin blockchain as an alternative payment network or an alternative payment protocol to enable and unlock those use cases. So that's been definitely interesting to see in 2017 and 2016. I think what we're going to be seeing as well in the next few years is more momentum and more work being done on the Bitcoin blockchain. In terms of startups and developers building different applications to extend that technology to different user bases. Well, we're getting a bunch of questions, which I'm going to turn to in a second. And please, I welcome as many questions if you all can share with us overall. But in concrete terms, if you were to advise right now a startup, and every startup out there has got a lot of friction, they've got a lot of things to wrestling, they want to be focused. And if a startup came to you and said, I want to start using blockchain for my ledger, I want to start using it to be able to move money, what are the best use cases and what would you say to an entrepreneur when she comes to you and says, I'm early but I want to start using it now? Do you say, let's wait a while? Do you say now is the time and why? And how could they use BitOasis most effectively in particular? And it really depends on what the use case they want to focus on. As a platform, what we have today, the best suited user applications that we support is specifically on payments and fintech applications. I would say as we see liquidity growing in growth markets, the number one application that is emerging and surfacing at scale is cross-border payments, whether we're talking, remittance peer-to-peer transactions, or we're talking about business to business or SMEs, cross-border payments for their own businesses. We definitely see an uptick in payroll as well, services and payments for contractors and freelancers as well. We see people enabling other smaller merchants to accept payments using Bitcoin as well. And specifically here, I'm talking about our market as UAE and connecting to other growth markets and other continents. Obviously, I realize the adoption is very different in each geography. The way I look at blockchain is similar to the internet. The internet is very different in India and Indonesia and the Middle East, in Cuba and in the US. There are different people using the internet for different needs. So it really depends on the geography that you're in and the user need that you identify. When it comes to payments, ask us as an exchange and if you're focused on the Middle East and its connections to Asia and Africa, we'd be sort of the ideal platform to build or experiment in new applications. So we're getting some wonderful questions. I'm gonna read them out to you guys and we can start the conversation a little bit more broadly. Boris asked, I wanna found a startup that's gonna build a community of green entrepreneurs. He wants to provide technology and mentorship to farmers in particular. The question is, can blockchain help him collaborate with people abroad like this? I know Brian, do you have any thoughts for him? Providing a way to track the buying and selling of goods in the marketplace. Helping those participants in the marketplace build a history of their transactions so that it becomes easier for them to apply for financing, for example. These are all the kinds of things that a distributed ledger can provide and it doesn't have to be tied into Bitcoin. That's the interesting thing, right? But it does mean pulling together an ecosystem, finding a network where there is this need to record these transactions, to share these transactions, to provide visibility amongst those participants. There is, there are a couple of companies out there. There's one called Bancu in Sub-Saharan Africa that is providing building blockchain infrastructure for farmers in rural parts of emerging markets in that area. And there's some really compelling stories coming out of there. But yeah, it's not magic pixie dust. And it is something where it is more of an integration story now. And it's hard to, it's not like a WordPress blog or setting up a website where, you know, it's something that can be done at the scale of one. There's really no such thing as a blockchain of one. And so it does require kind of trying to understand and speak to a marketplace at once and understand the need of a marketplace, especially to avoid creating, you know, a central actor in that marketplace. Fantastic. Solima has asked, I think social entrepreneurship is the future. And we can get to a debate about whether, you know, any great entrepreneur is also having social impact. But I don't have any doubt that she's asking specifically about enterprises that may not be hyper growth, hyper capitalist kind of outcomes, but they're really solving major problems on the ground, not unlike our previous asker. You know, Vinny, do you have a sense in particular if I'm a social entrepreneur and I want to benefit from blockchain and the problems I'm looking to solve? Any lens that I should look at this differently? Yeah. So I think my take on social entrepreneurship and blockchain is that blockchain is a very nascent technology. We're very early stage. And there's a lot of developing needs to happen in the next three to five years in particular. It's a critical time for us. In maybe seven years' time, we get to the point where it's a lot more cheaper and accessible for entrepreneurs to use over the counter solutions. I think three years is probably, three to five years is probably the right time frame. For example, there are services like I think Brian mentioned a few, but Chronicle and IPFS is another one. And these are services that social entrepreneurs can really use to make a difference cheaply because the R&D works are really being done. The problem with social entrepreneurship is by definition, it's not capitalistic in nature. So being able to raise large amounts of capital to do R&D and technology development, it's kind of in conflict with what the organization is trying to do. It's trying to be impactful and that because it's not directly focus on generating investor returns necessarily, it makes it very hard for them to invest in technology. So social entrepreneurs should be consumers of developed technologies. And so guys, for example, we think about the world today, 10 years ago, putting up a website was expensive and high developers, now you can do it yourself for five bucks a month, even for free on some websites. And so they're the ones benefiting from that sort of technology because on the cheap, they can get things done and they can make an impact on the ground. When it comes to blockchain tech, I mean, Brian can test this as well. I'm sure that this is expensive stuff. This is hiring cryptographers, expensive developers to build great technologies and when these technologies reach scale and more mass adoption, that's when they can be leveraged for social entrepreneurs. So my instinct is that it's not something I would recommend social entrepreneurs get into in terms of tech development, but companies who have both solutions on top of blockchain and Bitcoin, like for example, Civic, I mean, we have free digital ideas for people. So that's something which, we spend millions of dollars developing so that the world can get free. I don't recommend that social entrepreneurs invest in R&D, but I think they should consume the outputs of it to make improvements in the society. Ola, do you have a different view on that? Is that a curiosity? I do actually agree with Vinny. Running a fintech startup and looking at some of the challenges that you face, running a for-profit organization where you already have investors backing you, you have runway, et cetera. I mean, that's, I think, some of the challenges that social entrepreneurs won't be able to take on in the beginning. There's definitely a social impact angle to building new payment products when it comes to financial inclusion, but I think those are best packaged under a for-profit or under a for-profit enterprise where you're able to build a sustainable business model out of that for continuity and sustainability. There's definitely an element of hiring developers that really understand the technology. Keep in mind that there are actually a handful of developers that really understand blockchain technology and can build on that across the world. They tend to be also harder to identify. From our part, what we're trying to make it, for people who wanna build on blockchain technologies, that we build the tools to make it easier for them. So, you know, rather than you going out there and building wallets on your own, we're gonna open up the APIs for you so you can build those or use those wallets without necessarily building wallets. I think the more people start building products and then opening those up with APIs for people to integrate on top of, it's gonna become much easier for people to consume or to build applications or interfaces for the blockchain technology rather than actually building blocks themselves. You know, a lot of people have asked the question, which is a follow-on. I mean, we're all pretty upbeat here in this conversation, but several people have asked with Carolina from Chile ask, which is, okay, things are getting better, but what are the risks of using blockchain in our businesses today? If I'm a startup, what risks am I taking on if I've established that I wanna engage in it overall? If each of you just give two or three sentences of the risks that people should be thinking about, and maybe a quick second of how to ameliorate that risk. Oh, I've got you on screen. In all the progress we're making, what are the risks today and how should they be thinking about those risks? Now, one thing to keep in mind is that we're still early days when it comes to open blockchains or public blockchains. Definitely, there are lots of traction on private blockchains and prize applications and also public blockchains been in production since 2009, 2010. So obviously, there's been a lot of momentum and a lot of adoption there, but once you start looking at things at scale and comparing it to other markets, we're definitely still early days there. So we have a lot of people asking us, can we build remittance applications on top of blockchain? Is there enough liquidity and there's enough infrastructure put in place to enable those applications? The fact is that the liquidity is still low and the market is still in early days. There's definitely a lot of work to be done when it comes to building the right product and the right security as well when it comes to Wallace and exchanges that you wanna use. Specifically, you're talking about the area that we operate in. I'm sure that Vinny and Brian have a different take as well given that they are operating in different parts of the industry. But when it comes to payments and it comes to building on top of Bitcoin, I think things to look at is that, which providers you're building on top of, the security of that, the security of the application that you're building specifically if you're facilitating payments and also a look at liquidity. Would you be able to really support the application that you're looking into given the liquidity today in growth markets specifically? Brian and Vinny, just a couple of sentences. What would cautions do you feel today? I think there's, I agree with some of the previous points about there being some, not enough developers in this space. We certainly plan to roll out training and certification processes over the next year that will hopefully help grow that to not just a couple hundred developers you might have today, but thousands to hundreds of thousands. But I also think the technology landscape today is not something that's beyond, I mean, frankly, to start using these infrastructures, these platforms, the kinds of things that a hungry, mid-level computer science student at a decent university can start to comprehend. The types who are hungry to learn new things, the types who might be willing to dive into this. I mean, it's a little rough around the edges if you're resistant to learning new things, but we see a lot of people picking up the code from Hyperledger, from Ethereum as well. Ethereum is really good at beginner developer docs. And we also just launched something called Composer at Hyperledger, which is like a development environment for building business networks. So you really don't have to get into the underlying plumbing to understand how to build things, these things. Then this is still pretty young, but it's not esoteric, it's not, you don't have to be an advanced cryptographer to get started on this. And I do think it's something, I mean, half of our members are startups. So I don't think it's beyond the realm of a startup social impact focused or not to start to think about, how do I pull together a small team, get them to be knowledgeable in this space and keep them engaged. Don't hire a bunch of contractors, you're gonna walk away as soon as they finish the first version of your product. Build a relationship, and I think that's the key. Vinny, in the early days of the internet, people were afraid, people didn't want to put their credit card in e-commerce transitions. That's true in a lot of markets today. What should we, is this just a timing issue or do you think that there's anything we ought to be watching out for? Well, I mean, I think that when it comes to blockchain technologies, and it's not consumer-friendly yet. Everyone will agree that it's still a ways off from the average consumer being able to use it. My mom uses Facebook, but when she's able to use any type of Bitcoin technology, then I'll believe it's mainstream, because that's the sort of mainstream audience, which I think, maybe they never want to be using it. Maybe it's blockchain technologies while they're being back-end servers like TCP IP or something on those lines where it all happens in the background. I mean, I do agree with Brian that there's no harm in having a few people work on building the tech, but really heavy R&D development, I think is something which I think is best left to tech startups more than social entrepreneurs. But yeah, I think it's, my opinion is that Bitcoin, blockchain, all this stuff is very nascent, it's very new, it's definitely early adopter community. It's not going even close to mainstream yet. There's probably a few million people worldwide that are actually adept at being able to do stuff in this space and that's a very small fraction of the world. I still meet developers all the time that have no idea about Bitcoin, blockchain, they're working in big corporates, they're doing application development, et cetera. So it's early days in my opinion. So the jury's still out. I don't think it's a fear thing. I just think that there aren't enough use cases that have brought those into the fore where it becomes imperative for people to adopt it. Just yet, they are rising, I mean the products out there which I think are pretty impressive and in the next year or two or three we'll start seeing mainstream adoption of those products. It may not be in a way that we envision, but it's gonna happen. With that said Vinny, I'll stick with you if you don't mind because a gist group in Warsaw asks as we think about blockchain or Bitcoin, are there places that are really better suited now? Ola touched on FinTechs before, but are there particular types of startups that you think really are gonna be moving much more quickly here and are really gonna have something to gain from doing so as a first mover? So startups are able to leverage blockchain to reinvent certain industries I think are gonna be interesting. I mean I've seen startups working in legal using blockchain or smart contracts for legal. One space I'm actually very excited about is distributed computing. So being able to use blockchain technologies for things like distributed storage. If you think about storage today, one of the most interesting areas is how much available storage there is on machines around the world, but yet we still use big data centers to house and run CDNs and content delivery networks, et cetera. And there's a chemical IPFS, I'm actually investing in them, they're launching something called Filecoin, but basically it gives people the ability to share part portion of their hard drives and create effectively, just thinking of massive distributed servers around the world, you compare that to billions of devices that have excess capacity storage that can store files that are encrypted and offer this to the public and actually earn tokens or coins from that. It's a revolutionary way of thinking about distributed computing. So these are things I think are interesting which people will be able to leverage very shortly using blockchain type technologies. And yeah, so I think that distributed computing is the real forefront. The more we can get to a point where we don't have large nodes and data centers and we have just like the cloud on steroids where you just have this global billions of devices all connected or contributing to one big computing system where resources become ultra cheap, you can drive the cost of storage down 90% from where it is today, which is kind of scary when you think about it. Greg, we're getting so many questions. I want to keep everybody tight here if we could overall. This is an interesting one because it's kind of a cultural ramification certainly in the Middle East but Africa as well. Evan has asked, how can blockchain interact with Huala specifically in the Middle East? This informal kind of value transfer system based on honor and networks that are done with money brokers. I mean, is there a Huala of the future that can be done, do you think with Bitcoin or how do some of these cultural norms of how people are moving money and value today might really leapfrog or jump into these markets? Yes, possibly. If you look at Huala or think of Huala, it's basically an alternative money transfer network that is independent of the banking system or traditional banking. I think what you're seeing with Bitcoin is that it's providing an alternative global payment network that is completely digital and that people will use to move money around and for cross-border payments, specifically on money applications without obviously having brick and mortar infrastructure that you see today with banks, which is specifically why banks aren't able to extend their services further for people who are underbanked or not or actually unbanked as well. So you could think of Bitcoin blockchain filling a use case similar to that. I think the application that you will see in Bitcoin extends money transfers as well. That's one application, but you'll definitely see other Fintech and financial services applications that will be built once the infrastructure is sufficiently in place. I think other open financial services applications that we are interested in, Biduaces is being built on Ethereum as well. So that's another cryptocurrency or open blockchain that we have on our exchange and have started seeing people already experimenting with that and building different applications with that. Obviously it's still in experimental mode and it's still early days, but I think open blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum extend beyond money transfer applications. I think the money transfer application has been the one where we're seeing most of the traction and adoption, but it's sort of the first application and I think there will be a lot more in the next three to five years, specifically in financial services. This is actually an interesting point, Brian. It relates to the question we've gotten repeatedly here, which again, I think is a very understandable confusion these early days, which is really how blockchain and Bitcoin really relate to each other. Again, even in this conversation, we sometimes have been using them back and forward and I wonder if I can just get a couple of sentences, Brian, out of you just to help people really navigate kind of the difference between blockchain and Bitcoin and how they relate. I think it's important to understand, Bitcoin is a currency. It's an application of blockchain technology. Ethereum is another currency that's an application of blockchain technology and there are exchanges you can go on and find that there are hundreds of these currencies, these crypto currencies, which is actually nothing new. We've had hundreds of alternative currencies in the world for a long time. I mean, in some ways it's new and that it's entirely digital and a lot of it is based on this concept of proof of work, which is a really interesting way to do these things at internet scale, but it's a world of many chains out there that is arriving of many different blockchains. We should be talking about rather than the blockchain, this blockchain here for Bitcoin, this blockchain here for Ethereum, and what will likely be thousands, if not millions of permissioned blockchains that exist for specific markets or for specific government applications or use cases or for insurance or for healthcare. And we'll use other technologies to weave these chains together, but we don't all need to be believers in one currency or believers in one organization because that's not really how the world works. The world is a very, is a multi-governed type of system and we will find ways using blockchain technology to automate and systematize and make accountable and auditable a lot of the existing systems of the world, but it'll be a complex space because the world is complex. Give a very quick example sort of before and after and take a healthcare application of something that we do now and that would be alleviated by having an open free ledger by which people could share personal health records or other things. Maybe one very quick way so people can really understand before and after with this. Sure, so there are systems out there to maintain in the United States directories of providers, right? Basically doctors and the credentials they receive from different organizations and where they practice, what hospitals they practice at, what clinics they practice at. These provider directories today require companies that are specialized in collecting this data centrally and then redistributing it out, kind of like the old encyclopedia business model, right? Or the Lexus-Nexus business model. And doctors are required to maintain their listings and make sure they're up to date, et cetera. So there are a couple of companies looking at replacing this kind of broken overly centralized system with a distributed ledger where doctors and universities and the hospitals and clinics they practice at would all be able to publish into a common ledger who the doctors are, what their certifications are and where they practice and keep that up to date so that we're all synchronized and this doesn't require a currency to make work. This is something where the value is indigenous out of the provision of this service, right? So lots of examples like this where there are these use cases where decentralized but coordinated information sharing is a value in its own right. Vinny, a few people have asked also just to get a core understanding. So if you were talking to your grandmother right now even, can you explain just briefly how mining works? They really just kind of want to understand what a miner is and what it means to mine. So mining is a really bad term but it's one that's been used in stock. So you're not actually mining. Think about it as you're using computing power to solve very, very difficult mathematical problems. And the first computer to solve the problem wins a reward that reward equals and the Bitcoin world right now, 12 and a half coins and the difficulty of the mathematical problem is adjusted based upon the computing power of the network. So the problem is solved roughly every 10 minutes. It could be solved in one minute, it could be solved in 20 but on average is 10 minutes because the level of difficulty and the more computers that join the network the more difficult this puzzle becomes. And the point is it's in order to earn the reward you have to show that you worked on the puzzle and you solved it and because everyone's competing to solve the puzzle and his reward and the reward is worth money because you can trade the bitcoins for cash. It winds up being something which is a fair way of arriving at proof of work, so to speak. And because you need computing resources in order to perform the calculation. So yeah, mining is kind of like a, it's a bad term. It's more like problem solving but mining just kind of was what was called and it's kind of stuck. Very helpful in all. Vivian from Brazil and a bunch of other viewers in Venezuela are asking about governments and all this and particularly in emerging economies. How are they dealing with Bitcoin as a global currency? What kind of resistances or what kind of embracing is there? And if an entrepreneur wants to work with government to deal with Bitcoin, Ola, what does that all mean? What do you run into or what is the opportunity there? Yeah, I mean, obviously you can't paint all jurisdictions with one brush. I think different governments are looking at the technology in different ways. I can speak a bit more about where we're based or other jurisdictions that we've looked at. Regulators or governments tend to have a, or adopting sort of a wait and see approach. Others have been perhaps a lot more aggressive into either regulating or looking into the technology. I mean, if your question is about, what, how you should tackle regulation or governments when it comes to launching a startup on Bitcoin, or if you're looking at a heavily regulated industry. I mean, start with the product, build a product, launch it, validate your concept, make sure obviously that you still understand the legal environment and the regulations so you don't actually fall into or make any mistakes. But at the same time, it's similar to any other entrepreneurial venture. You have to start so you can start engaging with the regulators and the government. There's no other way to do it. You can't just go out there, ask for permission and wait for permission to start doing your startup or launching your product. From our own experience here in UAE, so when we first started, obviously, we talked to different regulators and you do what people advise you to do. You talk to lawyers and you figure out the legal environment and that's all good to do. You got to do your homework and make sure that you're not doing something wrong. But at the end of the day, no one is gonna tell you this is what you are allowed to do and that's what you're not allowed to do. You just go ahead, build it, launch it and then as you grow, make sure that you build very strong relationships with different stakeholders in your jurisdiction or in your market. That is equally required once you scale as well and once you grow to other markets. But on the flip side, I think you also see other governments embracing blockchain technology and being more sort of open to that. Dubai is one jurisdiction where they've launched the Dubai Blockchain Council, which further translated into prototypes that have been adopted now by the Dubai Future Foundation and they're really looking very closely at blockchain technology. I think IBM is one of the ones that are heavily involved in those projects as well. So it's an amazing, Dubai is an amazing model obviously that I think other countries can learn from. Yeah, you've got jurisdictions that are looking at the regulatory part. You've got other jurisdictions looking at prototypes and what does this technology mean in terms of value creation for both public sector and the private sector. But if you're an entrepreneur thinking about an idea, building a product on blockchain and you're worried about how the regulated market, the only way is just to launch and validate your concept and then break the stakeholders as you go. So we have time, we've got so many questions but we've got time really for one more. And Vinny, since you were originally from South Africa, I'm gonna turn to you because it's a question actually from Liberia, but asking a continental wide question which is how rapidly can blockchain really affect the African continent? In the end, is the real sort of high pole in this tent internet availability and without it is that a problem? So I wonder if you could give a lens and I'm gonna do a quick lightning round to wrap us up right afterwards. So if you have a brief view from an African perspective, Vinny, I'd be love to hear it. It's a very difficult question to answer. It's especially in a minute or two. I think that blockchain is definitely gonna help make a difference in Africa, it already is. Money transfers is obviously one way. There are some concerns with Bitcoin in particular for Africa and some of the reasons because obviously rising price of Bitcoin is pushing the fees up, so it's making it really impractical for Africans to use Bitcoin right now. At least not for small transfers or reasonably small transfers, maybe for large transfers. When it comes to offline, there are some, again, there's some developers in the tech community which could prohibit it from working in offline manner as well. So there are some concerns around Bitcoin particularly. I think other blockchain technologies may emerge to take the African market. Bitcoin may fall behind in Africa for many reasons, but that's a concern I have. But yeah, I think it's again, it's a complex question. Will the technology improve the way Africa functions? Absolutely, but it's gonna take time. Yeah, I don't think there's any question, but the trend is a good one, I think overall. Well, I'm wondering, this is an amazing conversation. I could keep you guys forever and looking forward to following up and I can't thank the folks around the world who've asked such great questions overall, but I'm gonna do a final lightning round with you question and literally one sentence I want from each of you, which is what are we gonna be talking about if we gather here five years from now and there's one prediction you wanna make about what we're gonna be saying about blockchain and Bitcoin, what would that be? Brian, you wanna lead us off? I'd say many of the major government services that are provided to citizens from land title to driver's licenses to other things will be blockchain based and will be stunts that we didn't do it sooner. Vinny? I would say that we will be hopefully living in a world where we can see the end of physical possible and physical IDs and I think that blockchain could provide us with that opportunity. Folo, wrap us up. Well, for my side, financial services enabled by blockchain will be wondering why we were paying all those fees waiting for days to move money around. The idea will seem very ridiculous. Well, you guys are amazing. You truly are pioneers of this. I'm sorry that we've run out of time for the day but I can't thank you guys enough for being here. I wanna thank deeply all of the viewing groups from around the world that were helpful to us here. We've got youth labs in Greece and just innovation hub in Kenya. We have a watch party in Warsaw city and cohosh throughout the embassy of Warsaw, North American Cultural Institute in Jalisco, American Corner, Cultural Institute of Guadalajara, US Embassy Havana in Cuba. I mean, really it's an amazing thing and we will all collaboratively as a community making these things and this future happen in powerful ways. A final thanks of course to GIST and to the TechConnect webinar series which I think has been incredibly impactful and it's just been a pleasure to be with you all. Thank you.