 You are watching The Daily Decrypt. Viva La Currency Competition! I am your host, Amanda B. Johnson, and today's episode is brought to you by Xmo. A blockchain is a ledger which continually updates its own accounting. For blockchains which have tokens on their network, say, bitcoins or ether, the accounting function is to be able to tell how many exactly of those tokens exist at any given time and who owns them, or rather, which address owns them. This is accounting at its finest. Why? Well, because it's open source, so anybody can verify that the numbers add up anywhere at any time. But open source is just one type of business model. There are many businesses in this world which use a closed source accounting model. And by closed source, I mean that you cannot, in any meaningful way, verify the accounting practices of that business. This isn't necessarily nefarious. The Daily Decrypt has a closed source business model. You can't verify the Daily Decrypt's accounting because there's no Daily Decrypt blockchain, savvy? And in the same way, you cannot actually verify the accounting of people who own vaults for, say, gold and silver. What is the meaning of all of this babble? Well, in the crypto sphere, some business models have cropped up in which people who claim to own vaults have begun issuing receipts, cryptographic tokens, which they claim represent holdings of gold or silver in those vaults. And of course, this comes with fees to the token holders because vaults and armed guards and surveillance systems definitely don't come free. Holding a crypto token, which is allegedly backed by a gram of gold, seems like a grand idea at the outset, but it's totally not. The precious metal property alleged to be held in any of these vaults at any given time is not actually verifiable to anybody anywhere at any time. One of these companies could easily, easily hold less in reserves than they have out there in tokens. And unless all of their token holders cashed in for their gold all at the same time, nobody would know this. And actually, this is a proven business model that many of us aren't fond of. It's called banking. That's what a bank does. Now, there is nothing wrong with cryptocurrency and there is nothing wrong with businesses which store your gold for you in exchange for money. But it must be recognized that these two things operate on completely different business models. One has open source accounting by nature and the other has closed source accounting by nature. And the two simply do not mix. And if you try to mix the two as a token holder of one of these enterprises, at the end of the day, you're only going to end up paying more in fees, banking fees. And you take on the risk that your gold might not be there at the end of the day. The beauty of open source accounting, which is to say cryptocurrencies running on blockchains, is that it totally removes the need for you to trust that some vault holder, some banker is actually holding the wealth for you that he claims he is. Closed source vaults have a purpose, but not within open source systems. Today's episode is brought to you by Xmo.com, a cryptocurrency and fiat platform which recently added the trading pairs Dash Bitcoin and Dash US Dollar. Xmo services are globally accessible and have been in operation since 2013. You can check them out for yourself. Tell them a sent you at Xmo.com. Well, that's all for me folks. Now you can get back to your three martini lunch and I'll get back to mine. Have a good day. If only there were a way that one person could send digital gold to another person in a peer-to-peer sort of fashion, you might call it. In other words, if only gold came with its own payment network. Welcome to cryptocurrency, my friends. It's going to take over the world.