 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hey, hello. How are you doing? Gordo the Techs out here. Welcome to yet another exciting and educational episode of Hibachi Talk. I got my good old buddy, Rick's the Fundmeister. How are you, sir? Hey, Gordo. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. We have no guests this week because we're going to bring our expertise to the table on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. One of my favorite subjects, we've done many a show on this. We did one last week, as a matter of fact, with insurance and what was happening in that space. I've done Blockchain 101. I've done things on mining and masternodes. When we continued to talk, I've been fortunate enough to be asked to present around town, Bankers Association. Actually, a very famous university. Yeah, university. I've been asked to talk to there. I got that. But I got a rotary. I'm talking to rotary. That's kind of fun. I got a common thread that's happening in all of these. When I go to the universities and I go to the groups, organizations like the Harvard Club and all these, I ask the first question is, raise your hand if any of you own cryptocurrencies. That's all I ask. At the university's student level, do you think anyone raises their hand? Yeah, I would. Especially at the student level. Yeah. And I say right now, I've noticed it's probably about 25 to 30% raise their hand. That know of it and have it. Now, when I go to the other organizations like the Harvard Club, rotary, bankers, groups and so on, and I ask the same question, out of all of those, and I've done many, how many do you think have raised their hands that they have it? They're aware of it, but have it. I'm going to stay away from a number, but not all that many. How about zero? Okay. Which is a shock for me. It's really shocking for me that they're still in the traditional level. There's still an avoidance of it. And to me, we go back to, we talked last week, the disruptive technology known as the blockchain. And this is equivalent to the internet when it started years ago, and you and I were instantly involved with it. And how there's still this group that have got their head bearing the sand on it. I mean, it could even go back further than that when the United States, I'm thinking of this, first became a country, it wasn't until, I don't know how many years, quite a number of years when there was one unified federal currency, the states, and even smaller groups, maybe cities or counties, smaller governmental groups had their own currency. Yeah. So that's a great point. Yeah. And now we're having sort of that same thing happening because there are more than one crypto currencies that you can go out there and purchase on. And conduct some form of business using those things. And again, we're coming back to the underlying technology behind it. And we'll just mention it. It's the blockchain. And that's the disruptive technology. And I'm going to say it over and over again. The blockchain is the one piece that does it. And so we, you and I had such fun with this word today. So here we go again. I'm going to help just define the blockchain again so people can understand it, right? Unfortunately, we're using words that I had to go look up on the dictionary. Blockchain is a shared immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. A shared immutable ledger. Immutable. Immutable. Immutable ledger. The key words means it cannot be changed. There you go. You can add to it, but you cannot change it. Yeah. So when the transaction has been authenticated on this ledger in the blockchain, it cannot be changed. Yeah. I sell you a piece of real estate. I sell you a Bitcoin. I sell you, I transfer a medical record, whatever an insurance policy. Yeah. You just start going down the list of things that you can do. That immutable record cannot be changed. And it's the certifiable truth. There you go. Yes. And it is certified when, that's exactly what happens. It is certified as you own this many Bitcoins. Or you, this is your insurance policy. Yes. And these are insured on it. Yes. This is your estate. I'm just adding things that people need to start thinking about where we can be using this. Easy for you to say. No, I don't. The real estate agents tell me that the real estate transactions, 40% of the documents that are down at the Bureau of Conveyances have errors in them. Yeah. Are wrong. And if they were on the blockchain, the immutable, I love that word, word of the day, the immutable transaction would authenticate and not cause all those errors. And you have to buy it. Title insurance. Which then also is another racket. Yeah. Because of all the mistakes that are in the other piece. Yeah. So we've got that. And then there's other foundations that you'll hear where it's like hyper ledger and things in those spaces. And those are kind of like your intranet. So remember we have intranet. Exactly. The worldwide. Right. And then you've got your own companies have your own intranet where you do things. And you'll hear things like hyper ledger projects and things like this. So just trying to get people to kind of start to equate this to things that they are somewhat familiar with. Yeah. And it's, yeah, things that you can kind of get your hands around and keep to yourself. Right. So let's talk about, you know, so what we've done is we've done some research to look and see, okay, what's happening in this blockchain space? You know, is this just like some people say it's a scam. It's not going to be here. I heard all these stories with the internet and the worldwide web and things like that. But so IBM have got a billion dollars. They have put a billion dollars, which doesn't sound like that much money. Right. Yeah. Not for IBM. Not for IBM, but they're investing a billion dollars into the blockchain technologies. And they have 63 blockchain clients working on 400 different blockchain related projects. Now think of what these could be. Yeah. And, you know, some of it that's really interesting is that they're thinking that blockchain, and we've talked about this before, but blockchain for our medical records. Right. And that would be from essentially start with our birth certificate. Right. And following us all the way through. Your first vaccination. Exactly. Yes. So your first vaccination to everything that happened all the way through. And no matter what state and or country you go to, that blockchain record follows you. Exactly. Because it would be available if I needed to, if I moved from Hawaii to California or Tennessee or to a different country. Right. It would be available for my, my physicians, my healthcare providers, an emergency room. You know, have I, what is, what is my history? Right. It's immutable. Yeah. Immutable. Configure. No, it's configurable. There's a word about currency that. It'll come to you. It'll come to you. Yeah. It'll come back to you. You can't copy it. Yeah. Incorrectly. Yeah. You cannot, you cannot. You can't counterfeit it. You can't counterfeit it. Yeah. You can't counterfeit it. You cannot counterfeit it at all. So, so it's interesting. And I did a little research in some of the companies that IBM is working with. And they, there's, if you dig more, you'll find more. But I think Walmart was, is an interesting one. So there, Walmart looking at blockchain from ground to table of food. So vegetables, like potatoes. Yeah. From the seeds all the way to, it ends up on your table. What happened to that particular product from that beginning to the end? Because you know, they did a recall in lettuce last week. Yeah. Yeah. I was saying the same thing. How long is it to take them to track all that down? But if it was on the blockchain, they could have pinpointed it. Exactly. Within a very short period of time. Exactly. And they'd know who has that, you know, which, which, or which retail seller has that. Exactly. And if they need to, as you say, recall it, here it is. I can get it. Is it in Hawaii? No. But, you know, where is it? Yeah. So instead of pulling all of it back, which is what's happened, you know, the reaction is you got to pull all of it back. You would know that, oh, okay, through the blockchain and doing the analytics, it's in this location, this location. We have to pull these back instead of us disposing of, you know, this is a huge amount of food that could feed the population. It's the populations of the world. So I think that's kind of an interesting, so IBM are playing in that space. So Microsoft are in this space too. And Bill Gates, if you go on YouTube, you see Bill Gates talk about blockchain and cryptocurrencies a lot. And Microsoft has said that they're going to prove the naysayers wrong when it comes to blockchain. And I actually think Bill Gates thinks he's going to prove the naysayers wrong when it comes to a form of currency, because he created a currency to donate to third world countries and those that have less spending power. Exactly. They are announcing that a foundation for storing and processing digital identity data. So now you think, okay, wait a minute. If I use blockchain for my driver's license, right? Yeah. My passport. Passport. That's what I was thinking. Right. So now we start using these kinds of things to verify voter registration. Exactly. Yeah. All of those kinds of things that can be done through the blockchain. And pulling all of those pieces together. Yeah. This is state of the art early beginning times of what's going on. They're also looking at, they being Microsoft as adding it to the part of their cloud offering, securing their cloud offerings. Yeah. So this is going to be interesting. They're Azure Stack with Office 365 and all the products they've got in there, incorporating it into those pieces. And I would think that, you know, certainly I'm going to go back just a wee bit here, you know, where we talked about who I am in blockchain to identify who I am so that if I go and cross one border to, you know, and travel and go to another border, those sorts of things. Well, what are the other things that, you know, we can use that for moving ourselves around and what is the history that I have or other things that perhaps I own or move, you know, through. Your vehicles, your housing, your stock portfolio, all of these things. Think what you can do in the legal industry is setting up trusts. Yeah. Right? And all of these happen in those spaces. Yeah. Even how I get onto the internet and who I am on the internet, you know, could be very or could make it much more difficult for me as a hacker to come in and get into one, you know, into my computer. Securing your space. Yeah. Exactly. Securing my space. Exactly. So let's jump to the next one because I picked the name. So. There's Apple. So, okay. So I looked, so I said, okay, what's Apple? What do you think what's Apple? And when I found interesting, there's a lot of stuff happening with all of them, but Apple has applied for a U.S. patent at the trademark office that indicates it is creating a system for certifying timestamps using blockchain technology. Timestamps. So now I'm just thinking, okay, then they're applying for a patent on timestamps. What could it possibly be? I look at my phone. I go like, what, what could it be related to? And I don't know. And I do the patent office and pull down the patent and read it and see what it's related to. But timestamps. Now, I think a timestamp is when I check in and out of work. Yeah. Well, maybe when I check in and out of the airport. Well, we didn't know we're talking big brother here. We're tracking everywhere we go. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. I mean, that starts to talk a little bit about, you know, tracking where my phone is and that, that's how, how people would track me. Where you are on your phone and so on. In times that you say, say to your wife, I was not at the last night and she goes, oh, contrary to what I mean. Yeah. I noticed that you were there between this time and this time and $36.57. Right. I could see your transaction, too, or one that hit. Yeah. Well, I can't see it. Remember the case, maybe. That kind of gets us to maybe a little bit about the cryptocurrency and. Hold that thought. I know where you're going. Hold that thought because we're going to talk about this in the second half. So we're not even through the first half, so we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Google and we're going to talk about some unique things that we found that is happening in this blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Go to the tech center, break the funds. Funds. Fundmeister. Fundmeister. We'll be back in a minute after we pay some bills. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Match Day is no ordinary day. The pitch, hallowed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff. MLS clubs and our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your Match Day experience. If you drink, never drive. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science, where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and the light of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great. It's all entertaining. It's all educational. So I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. Hey, hello. Gordo the tech star here. Welcome to Yibachi Talk, break the funds meister. Why do we keep saying funds meister? Just one fund. Fund meister. You just have one fund. You don't have multiple funds. You have lots of fun. I'm going to call you the fund meister. Anyway, we're talking about cryptocurrencies and blockchain and the disruptive nature of that blockchain and what's happening and so on. And last time we left off in the first half, we talked about Apple, IBM, Microsoft. So you can't not talk about Google, Alphabet. I mean, there are another larger companies that have a lot of money. Google. Alphabet. I mean, there are another large tech company and what are they doing in this space? So they're supposedly developing its own distributed digital editor that third parties can use to post and verify transactions. So what does that mean? What does that mean? Does that mean I can use it for transactions at the restaurant? Transactions at a bank? So what does that mean? You know, they're sitting on a boatload of money. It could be transactions on distribution of goods and services? Yeah. And I think that's sort of where we go because we think blockchain now for monetary transactions. But there are lots of other transactions that people and organizations have. I think what happens with shipping. Shipping, receiving, all of those things. You know, the plans, they're probably using it within their cloud offering platform. So now, okay, wait. Google has cloud offering. Microsoft has cloud offering. Amazon Web Services has cloud offerings. IBM has cloud offerings. So they've seen something in blockchain that they can use to set them apart from their other major competitors. And maybe it's the security. You know, people are saying, oh, you know, is how secure is it? Well, maybe it's the security of a transaction to and from the cloud. That's a good. And here's. It's a very good point because it's encrypted both ways. Yeah. And I just, even yesterday, I was in a meeting with someone that said, well, I hope we're not putting this in the cloud. And I went, you know, it's a particular, it was a payroll application. And I said, it already is in the cloud. The company is subscribed to a cloud. Do you think they have servers and computers in their offices that are running it? No. It's in the cloud. So I mean, so don't give me this. Oh, I got to keep out of my servers so I can hug them down the hall. You're already not there. But how do I secure those transactions? How do I ensure that was that payroll record is correct from the beginning to the end? Right. So cool stuff. You know, this is probably going to be an inappropriate comment. But if the federal government actually had, you know, blockchain on all of their transactions. How about the tax return? Yeah, on the tax returns, on perhaps when we, an unnamed secretary of state moved a record from point A to point B. Yes. If that, you know, and was that secure? And all of the transactions that happened from the side of it, or the news media. Theoretical things like that would have been okay. How's this? The news media must use blockchain technology to report all news, which means it has to be authenticated and real. And here's. And not perceived. Right. And news says, oh, I've had two independent confirmations. Blockchain them. Blockchain them. And they'll go, blockchain, it works. It goes two, six, 16, 60, 600. All authenticated transactions. And we don't have to listen to the news media just giving their opinion on their perceived what's happening on something. 24-hour news was a great idea, but now we turn it into 24-hour soap opera. And if, you know, if the blockchain was authenticated, you for the first one and me for the second one, we'd know that would have been fake news. I'm remembering the one time when the news media, the Chinese airplane that, did you hear the story? Chinese airplane that got into an accident and someone sent them a press release. It was fake. It named all the people that were involved in it. And it was, it was like, it was like, it was, I said, the name of the pilot that came in when the plane crash was one too low. And they actually read it and had to come back and apologize. But they want to be the first to come out. Okay, so anyway, the other thing that's happening in the space is Amazon, not Amazon, Google is acquiring a bunch of companies that are specialized in the blockchain. So they're buying up a bunch of small companies and they've got the money. So anyway, so I want to, you know, we've got a few more minutes and I'm going to go down some of the kind of space in the past 30 days. And so, and I always get asked, you know, where we are at the price of Bitcoin. As a matter of fact, when I walked in the studio today, some of them were asking me, so I just go down. So, you know, what's happened in the Bitcoin space in the past seven days, Bitcoin has gone up about 10% in seven days. Not too bad. Ethereum's up 18. Ripple's up 13. Bitcoin cash is up 46%. That's an interesting number that you're thinking of that side. And then Dash and Stellar Lumens, they're up also. So it's been interesting to see what's happened in that particular area. Talk just a bit or a definition of Bitcoin cash. So when, okay, Bitcoin, when Bitcoin first came out and it grew and got better and better, and I'm going to really simplify this. Yeah. The length of the transaction, the time to process the transaction, if I indicated on the ledger, started to get longer and longer and longer. So what happened was called a fork. So there was a decision made to split. It's like a split, right? And Bitcoin cash was the result of that split. So if you owned one Bitcoin and they did the split, the Bitcoin cash also gave you one Bitcoin cash. But it wasn't necessarily at the same value of Bitcoin. Okay. But it would enable the transactions to get processed faster because they've got some changes in the underlying technology to make it run and work faster. I got you. And now so, but what happens when cash spins off is that others look at it and say, well, maybe I'd rather use Bitcoin cash for my business enterprise. Business transactions. Rather than Bitcoin itself and so you start getting growth in innovation and so on. I think the thing that's happening with Bitcoin cash is a lot of discussion in the retail space about whether that should be the transaction processing and blockchain technology that's used. It's essentially you can use Bitcoin today for Starbucks, but maybe it's kind of like, I guess when the car when our credit cards came with the little square thing in it. Chip. I mean the chip started to take a long, long time and now it's much faster so maybe it's Bitcoin moving to Bitcoin chip if you will for the daily transactions. So that's what happened when the Bitcoin cash came out and then the Bitcoin Gold came out after that. That's another one. So there's a lot of things that are happening in this space because it's new and what's happening. Price changes is what's happening there so the Winklevoss twins I've always wanted to say this so the Winklevoss twins are investment twins very much in the market they do a lot in the Bitcoin space and so on they've actually to make sure that they can authenticate and verify that they've got a solid foundation for all their exchanges. They brought in NASDAQ to do an overview of what's happening there to check them out so that's kind of a their goal is to reassure the reliability of their technology with their investors so they're bringing in the outside people as well another company is Power Ledger of Australia Power Ledger of Australia is partnering with Japan Consai Electric Power Company to develop a peer-to-peer blockchain based virtual power plants. Yeah, wrap your head around this puppy so you've got a blockchain based peer-to-peer power grid so I start thinking micro grids little small grids that are set off in various areas and you can authenticate who the members are you can authenticate who the consumers are and you have access power you can use it for mining of Bitcoin to also then offset your costs use and finally solar, wind whatever add those pieces to the blockchain so you know that this kilowatts were produced 90% was produced by this kind of energy versus coal or nuclear or whatever so the whole interesting concept of happening in this whole electric space is yeah it's going to move forward but the interesting thing is here's a major utility in Japan who is now embracing blockchain and Bitcoin they're embracing blockchain I don't know if they're embracing Bitcoin but they may come out and say I can pay my bill with Bitcoin that'd be kind of neat I would love to do that okay so now a negative the CEO of PayPal has said that Bitcoin is a scam so and he's come out and said he believes it's all a scam it's going to be a bubble it's going to burst and whatever it's interesting I think he has a bias because of what could happen to PayPal as a result of blockchain and Bitcoin technology that he may have to embrace Bitcoin he may have a form of currency exactly this is the one the bunny ranch brothel in Nevada now accepts Bitcoin as a form of payment they have seven brothels and so again have not been there I'm just doing my research how do you know there are seven it's from the internet it has to be the truth the bunny ranch brothel is now accepting Bitcoin as a form of transaction so now I'm just going to stay with my cup of coffee from Starbucks this so I'll go back and just say and we got less than a minute now but I'll go back and say what grew the internet the world wide web were two things pornography and money gambling was the thing and then pornography was the thing when the internet would grow at the fastest so here we go I mean I can see it coming now you can use your cryptocurrencies to purchase whatever you want to purchase or whatever you can to legally purchase and the pornography side online this is going to need some policing this is definitely going to need some policing I think the feds might get involved so that's kind of like we should leave it at that one we'll leave it on the upside so to speak there's other things like Amazon I didn't talk about Amazon they said they got no interest I don't agree I think they're hiding I wouldn't be surprised they're hiding stuff and I think the fed may have some ideas and we'll talk about Fedcoin in the future we got a bunch of other shows hey Rick thanks a lot man I get a headache doing these cause it's just so cerebral but watch these shows start to learn about blockchain start to get an understanding have a conversation at the dinner table with your kids with the family and so on and do some research on the web it's fascinating stuff maybe leave the bunny ranch out of the family doing the conversation good idea this show might not make it to a level now but I'll let that Ricardo the tech star, Rick the funds thanks again for watching when Hibachi talks the world listens like we said end of show 1, 2, 3 and how are you doing?