 Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Global Cloud in Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. So welcome to the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. I'm about to hand you over to John Furrier, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media and executive editor at theCUBE. He's about to do a fireside chat with Alan Matthew. I'll let him introduce them to you as well. He's also involved in a major blockchain project himself, so he's gonna get into that with those guys as well. So, and tomorrow we start at nine. In the meantime, enjoy the evening, enjoy the food, enjoy the chat, and I'll let you go. Okay, hello, thank you, really appreciate it. Thanks everyone for being part of this panel, fireside chat, I wanna make it loose, but high impact for you guys, I know having some cocktails with good time. If there's any questions during the end, we're happy to pass the mic around, but we wanna have a conversation, kind of like we always do down in the lobby bar, just talking about crypto and cloud. We end up talking about cloud computing and crypto a lot because those are two areas that are kind of converging and the purpose of this event. So we really wanted to share some thoughts around those two massively growing markets. One is already growing, it's continuing to be great, the cloud and blockchain certainly is changing everything. So these are two important topics, we wanna flesh them out. Albergio is the serial entrepreneur founder of Digital Bits. He's founded companies both in cloud and blockchain, so he brings a great perspective, and Matt Rosak, leading crypto investor, entrepreneur and advocate, well known in the crypto space, going way back. I think he would give a couple of bitcoins to some very famous people early on, we'll get into that a little bit later. So guys, thanks for being part of the panel and fireside. For first question is, we know how big the money is. I mean the money in crypto is flowing around the world in cloud computing, we've seen specifically, and certainly in the coverage now with Amazon success, Amazon web services, and Microsoft and others, trillions of dollars being disrupted in the traditional kind of the enterprise and data center area, and blockchain is doing that too. So we wanna get into that. But first before we get into it, I want you guys to take a minute to explain for the folks, just to set the context, the kinds of projects you're working on now, Al, you have Digital Bits, and Matt, you're investing and you're inviting a lot of interesting token dynamics. So let's take a minute, I'll start. Thanks, John. Can everybody hear me? Okay, all right, perfect. Well, thanks for that lovely intro. Yeah, so my name is Al Bergio. I'm founded a few companies, as John mentioned. Before the cloud, there was the internet, and so it started for me in the late 90s in the e-commerce era, but more recently, I pioneered what's known as Interconnection 2.0, and I did that with a company called Console, and it was, for those that may know, PCCW, recently was acquired by PCCW, and with that, we disrupted the way networks at the core of the internet connected together. More recently, I founded the Digital Bits project, and now the Digital Bits blockchain network, and with that, you can kind of think of that as the trading and transaction layer for the points economy and other digital assets. And you can do a lot of interesting things with that, and it's really about bringing blockchain to the masses. Matt, what are you working on? So, Matthew Ozak, co-founder and chairman of Block. Block is an enterprise software company. We do two things. The premise is the tokenization of things. We think the money, identity, new layers of the internet are going to be tokenized, and so we go to market in two ways. One is through Block Enterprise, and these are all the software layers you need to connect to tokenized networks, so I think a wallet, a node, a router, et cetera. And then on Block Labs, we build and partner with some of the leading tokenized networks and applications, so we build a connective tissue, and then we actually build these new networks. I started this space as an investor over five, six years ago investing in some of the best entrepreneurs and technologists in the space, built a great network, but I love building companies, and so my co-founder and I, Jeff Garzik, built Block two and a half years ago. And then lastly, also serve as chairman of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, so if you believe in these new tokenized money layers, identity layers, et cetera, regulation comes into play, certainly today from an institutional adoption level, and so if you care about this space, you need to spend time to kind of help that dialogue improve. This technology moves way faster than folks in DC and elsewhere, so. And the project that we're working on, Silicon Angles, we've tokenized our media platform and we're opening it up to a token model and to kind of change the game, and so all three of us have projects. We want to put those in context. We build everything on Amazon web services, so we have a view of the cloud. We also cover it. The cloud computing market is booming. We see that Amazon's web services numbers continue to power the earnings for Amazon as a company, obviously Apple's trillion dollar valuation, those are clear case studies, but blockchain potentially could disrupt it all. And Al, I want to get your thoughts because even today in the news and Microsoft Azure, which is their big cloud provider, announced blockchain as a service. And folks that are in either the data center business or in cloud know the shift that's happening in the IT world, but no one's really connected the dots on where blockchain intersects and also is it an opportunity for the cloud guys and what's the landscape look like? So what's your thoughts on that and how are they connected? What does it mean? How does a cloud company maintain their relevance and competitiveness with blockchain? Well, just pointing on the fact that today we had that news with Microsoft and the Azure cloud and their support and evangelism for blockchain. You know, a company, I think it's very important that this isn't an ICO, two kids in a garage saying that they're doing something in blockchain. This is a massive multi-billion dollar company. And they, in making a decision like that, it's not trivial. It's many, many departments, a lot of resources before such a thing as an ounce. So that's a, not only is it validation, but it's a leading indicator as to this trend that this is clearly something that's important in a lot of people. If you're not paying attention, you need to be paying attention, including if you're in the cloud industry because many companies obviously do compete with Microsoft and AWS. So it may be still early, but it's not that early. It's in light of the news that we saw today. With that, I would say that a lot of parallels, I like to kind of, if I was an infrastructure provider, I'd look at this from the standpoint of the emergence of Linux when it first came on the scene. What was important for companies like Red Hat to be successful, they had competition at the time. And you had shortages of Linux, let's say engineers and what have you. And so a company like Red Hat built a business around that. And they did that by, and how they kind of surfaced and validated themselves to the enterprise of that era was partnering with hardware companies. So it was Intel, IBM, and then Dell, HP, and they all followed. And then all of a sudden, which version of Linux you wanna use, it's Red Hat and who you're paying for that support, you're paying Red Hat. And then they had their hockey stick moment. Today, it's not about hardware companies per se, it's about the cloud, right? So the cloud is the new hardware per se and many enterprises obviously are looking at cloud computing companies and cloud computing providers, infrastructure providers as the company that they need to support them with the infrastructure that they use. Sorry, the technologies that they use, right? Because they're not necessarily supporting these things and making sure that they're always on within the basement of that enterprise, they're depending, they're outsourcing to depending on these managed IT providers. And so it's very important that whatever technologies they're using in the lab that ultimately their infrastructure partners are able to support the implementation, the integration, the ongoing support of these technologies. So if you think of blockchain like an operating system or a database technology or whatever you wanna call it, it's important that you're able to really identify these key trends and be able to support your customer and what they're gonna need. And ultimately for them, they can't have a clog in their digital supply chain, right? And so it's clearly emerging, Microsoft is validating that today, clearly they have the data that they're seeing from their existing enterprise customers and they don't wanna lose them. But I remember when Cloud came out, you and I have talked about this before many times, Al, that it wasn't easy to use. I remember when Amazon Web Services came out, they, it was just basically, it was hard to, you know, command line, basically you had to use it. So it became easier now, it's so easy and consumable. Blockchain, similar growing pains, but we don't wanna judge it too early with the opportunity that it has. It's gonna get easier in your thoughts. And that's the scale as well by the way Amazon had large scale. So Blockchain has to scale and be easier, your thoughts. Another kind of way to think of it is to not necessarily think of cloud computing, but the evolution of the internet went, you know, in internet 1.0, we went through this dial-up modem era, things are very raw back then. Great visions we had in the future. Like it's gonna be amazing for video one day, but, you know, not during the dial-up modem era. And it eventually, it eventually happened. And user interface has improved and tool sets improved and so forth. Fast forward to today, we have all of that innovation to leverage. So things will move a lot faster with Blockchain. It did start very raw, but it's moving much faster than anything we've seen definitely in the 90s and in the last decade. So that's just, you know, it's a matter of moments, not years. And I think Al brings up a great point on leverage because Amazon has leveraged its infrastructure to a point where it's larger than Google, Azure, and IBM's public cloud combined. And so you got massive leverage there. And so when these big cloud providers provide this Blockchain as a service, it is instrumented and built on top of their existing infrastructure, not necessarily on Blockchain infrastructure. So it's an interesting dynamic where they're putting it on top of existing infrastructure that's there. But what's being built right now is a decentralized Amazon web services. So you have every layer of Amazon being reimagined, and incentivized. So you have distributed compute, and access, and storage, and database. And so what will be interesting to see is that given this massive opportunity, will Amazon and some of these other incumbent cloud providers become the provisioning networks of the future of all this new decentralized resources that get, you know, again, if you want storage, you have to start having smarts to say if I'm gonna go to C or Filecoin or Genaro or StoreJ, compute, et cetera. You have to start being a provisioning layer on top of that to kind of, you know, make that Blockchain essentially work. So it'll be interesting to see the transition because today the lightweight version is to say, yeah, I have a Blockchain as a service strategy, and that's like, well done, and check the box. Now the question is how far in this new world will they go down, and as it gets more decentralized, as universities and governments, corporations, plug their access utility into these networks to see how that changes. That is much bigger than the Amazon of today. I think that's an interesting point. I wanna just drill down on that, if you don't mind, because I think that's a fundamental observation that every layer is gonna be decentralized. The questions I think I'm asking, I'm seeing is, what hasn't all worked together? And then what's the priorities? And the old model was easy. Gotta get the infrastructure, gotta get the servers, and you work your way up to the top of the stack. What cloud brings also is that a software developer could whip up an application, maybe a D app on a test network, and go viral, and next thing you know, they have a great opportunity, and then they gotta build down. So the question is, what are you seeing in terms of priorities on stacks, portions of the stack that are being decentralized and tokenized? You see it patterns, trend, and as an investor, is there a hotter area than others? How do you look at that? Well, I think it's in motion right now. Like I said, every layer of AWS is getting thought through on how to create these digital cooperators. I have access storage. I'm gonna contribute it to this network, and I'm gonna get paid in tokens when a user uses that storage network and pays for it in those native tokens. And so that, coupled with all the other layers, is happening from a user perspective, we may not want to be going to pick a database provider, a storage, a compute, et cetera. We're likely going to say, I want a provisioning layer and provision this and execute this, much like if we, you know, there'll be new provisioning layers for moving money. I don't care if it routes through Lightning or Litecoin or Doge or whatever, as long as the value gets across the pond or the app gets provisioned appropriately based on time, security and cost and whatever other tendons are important, then that's all I care about. But given the depth and the market for all that, I think it'll be interesting to see how these are developed with the provisioning layers. And I would think Amazon or Azure, the future of that is more provisioning than actually going and doing all that at the end of the day. That's great. I want to get your thoughts, guys, on innovation. My good friend Andy Kessler would have opted in today's Wall Street Journal around an article around the US government getting involved in this Twitter, Facebook, the big platforms in terms of how they're handling their media. But it brings up a good point that with more regulation, there's less innovation. You mentioned some things outside the United States. This is a global cloud. Clouds operate globally with regions. It's a global fabric. Startups are really hot in this area. So how do you view the ecosystem of startups in terms of being innovative, the things happening that you think that are good and things that aren't good? I see regulation. I'm not a big fan of the government getting involved in managing startup ecosystems. But blockchain has a lot of alpha entrepreneurs jumping in. You look at all the top ventures, the legit ventures. They're all alpha entrepreneurs, multi-time serial entrepreneurs. They see the opportunity and they go for it. Is the startup environment good? Is there enough innovation opportunities here? Your thoughts on the opportunity to be innovative? Yeah, Al and I were just talking about this before the panel here. And we're talking about our travels in Asia. And when we go there, it is 10, 100 acts of energy and get-it factor and capital and the markets are just wildly more vibrant than going to some of the typical pockets here in San Fran and New York, it's in North America. And so it's interesting to see that when you heat map the world, what's really happening. People are always saying, oh, this FinTech or InsureTech or whatever tech is going to make a dent in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. This technology, this new frontier is definitely going to do that. I think some of that will get put into more focus based on regulation and there's two things that will happen. There's obviously a lot of whipper snapper countries that are promoting a safe place to innovate with crypto. I think Malta, Gibraltar, Barbados, et cetera. And there will be- You're just getting into the mix now. Yeah, I mean, so there'll be no shortage of that. And so, and obviously this ecosystem outpaces the pace of regulation. And then we'll see like the US doing something or other fast followers to try and catch up and say, hey, we're gonna do the cryptocurrency act of 2022. Binders get free power, tax-free crypto trading, just to try and play catch up because it's kind of hard in the last year or 18 months of seeing this ecosystem go from this groundswell to this now institutional discussion and how do you back end the banking, the custody, all these form factors that are still relatively absent. And so, we're right in the middle of it. It's a whole new way. You gotta follow the money, right, Al? You know, I talked about this. Capital markets, entrepreneurs need to raise money and that's a good thing. You need to get capital to do stuff. Yeah, this is a new phenomenon that the world has never experienced before. It's awesomeness when it comes to capital formation. And without capital formation, there is no innovation, right? So, the fact that more capital could be raised, it's the ultimate crowd sourcing. In such an efficient period of time, capital being able, the ability to track capital from various different corners of the world and deploy that capital to try to fuel innovation, of course, not all startups would have you succeed, but that was true yesterday, right? And 90% of startups fail, but they all were given some meaningful amounts of checks and people were employed and innovation was tried. And every once in a while, something emerges that's amazing. If you can do that faster, right? We have the opportunity to produce more and more innovation. And of course, with something so new as cryptocurrencies and things like ICOs and what have you, people may kind of refer to it as the Wild West. It's not, it's an evolution. And you have- It's still the Wild West, but you gotta- Well, it is, but we're getting better at it, right? As a world, this isn't the Silicon Valley community getting better at venture capital or some other part of the United States or Canada getting better at venture capital. This is the world as a whole getting better at capital formation. Yeah, that's a great point. A new way of capital formation. I want to just get an observation on that. I moved to Silicon Valley 20 years ago and I love it there for venture capital and doing startups is the best place in the world. And I've seen people try to replicate Silicon Valley. We're the Silicon Valley of Canada. We're the Silicon Valley of the East or Europe. And it's always been hard to replicate because it was a venture model. And you needed venture capitalists, you needed money, you needed community, the culture of failure and starting over and just getting back on the horse kind of thing. Crypto is the first time that I've seen the replica of that Silicon Valley dynamic in a new way because the money's flowing and there's community involved in crypto. Crypto has a big community aspect to it. You guys see that as well. I mean, I'm seeing outside the United States a lot of activity. Is that something that you're seeing? The first time we saw, well, last time we saw everybody trying to replicate Silicon Valley was the first internet. There was Silicon Swamp, there was Silicon Alley, there was Silicon This, and every city was a Silicon version of something. And then the capital evaporated. We had a mass correction happen. What wasn't being disrupted was value exchange. And so this has been created now. It is now possible for this to happen. And it's happening. We're seeing amazing things as Matt said in Asia. It's a truly awesome force. If anybody has an opportunity to go, they should go. It's unbelievable to experience it and it really opens your eyes. Matt, you've lived through a lot of investments during those dot-com days and through history now. You've seen a lot of different things. Your observations of the current state of the capital formation, startup landscapes, the global ecosystem around crypto and how it's different from say venture or classic rolling up companies and those kinds of things. Yeah, you hear a lot of this. It were in a bubble, speculative, et cetera. And I think when you look back at history of infrastructure, whether it's railroads, telephony, internet, and now crypto and blockchain, it's interesting, like if you said it would take this amount of money to innovate and come out the other end of the internet with this kind of infrastructure, with these kind of applications, with these kinds of lessons learned, nobody would sign up for that number, right? It needs this fear and greed and all the effervescence of markets to kind of come out the other end and have innovation. I think we're going through a very similar dynamic here with crypto and blockchain where everything's getting tokenized, everything's getting decentralized. Although we're talking about fundamental things like money. It's not like we're talking about pet food and women's shoes and airline tickets. We are talking about money, identity, things that will enable like other curves to really come into focus like internet of things and the kind of compounding of intersections if when some of these things get right is pretty extraordinary. And so, but I like what Al said in terms of capital formation and that friction to get from idea to capital to building, it's getting compressed. Yes, there will be edge cases of people taking advantage of that, but at the other end of this flow will be some amazing innovation. What do you guys think about the, if you had to be pushed to one answer the question with one answer of what is the high order bit of why blockchain is so important? I mean, for me, I see it from my standpoint, I'll just start. I see it making inefficient things more efficient for any use case that's being reimagined, which is everything from IOT or whatever. Efficiency is a big thing, at least I see that. What do you guys see as a high order bit in terms of the one thing that you say blockchain really impacts the world in terms of impact, financial, et cetera? Well, I think with decentralization and all these things that we're seeing it's kind of even the playing field. It's allowing for participation where parts of the world were unable to participate. I mean, it's doing a whole lot of things in that area. And that's truly awesome to really grow the economy, grow the global market and the number of participants in that market in all areas. I mean, that's the ultimate trend of what's happening here. Yeah, you're up for an agent. Absolutely. I think there's two things. There's this blockchain dialogue and then there's this crypto decentralization, tokenization dialogue. And on the blockchain side, you have lots of companies engaging in a blockchain and trying to figure out how it applies to their business and hear everything from McKinsey and Goldman saying financial services will save $100 billion in operating expenses by applying blockchain technology. And that's great. That is probably low in terms of what they'll save. It to me is just not the point of the technology. I think that when you kind of distill that down to say, hey, for a group of folks to use this technology as a shared services thing to lower OPEX at trading and settlement and decrease that, that is great. That is a step stone to creating these tokenized economies, these digital cooperatives. Meaning you contribute something and then you get something back and it's measured in the value of this token. It's like a barometric kind of value of how healthy that ecosystem is. And so regulated public enterprises and you see consortiums around insurance and financial services and banking, that is all fantastic and that gets them in the pool, gets them exercising on what blockchain is, what it is and how they apply it. But at the end of the day for them it's cost reduction. The minute there's growth or IP or disruption on table, they're all going back to their boardrooms to say, hey, let's do this, this or that. But if there's a way, my favorite class in college was industrial organization. Sounds weird, but it was. To kind of told you how to dissect an industry, what makes them competitive, who the market leaders are and then if you overlay blockchain networks with tokens, with incentives, interesting things could happen, right? And so that future is gonna be really interesting to see how market leaders think about how to tokenize their network, how to say, no, I don't wanna own this whole industrial network, I have to engage with some other participants and make sure everybody is incentivized to climb on board. So that I think is going to be more of the interesting part than just blockchainifying a workflow. Let's just quickly drill down on that. Token economics, what you're getting to, so let's assume blockchain just happens, is evolution of technology, just assume for a second it's gonna happen in a big way, is private, public, hybrid chains, what all that good stuff happening. But the token economics is where the business value starts to be extracted. So the question for you is how do you describe that to someone, how to look for, what are the key elements of token economics, when does it matter, when is it in play, and how should they be thinking about it? Yeah, I mean, token economic design and getting a flywheel going to create a network and network effects is really important. You could have great technology, but Al could be a better marketer and he gets tokens adopted better and his network will do better because he was better able to get people to adopt and market a particular layer application. And so it's really important to think about how you get that flywheel going, how you get that kindling going on a particularly new ecosystem and get users adoption and growth. That is really hard to do these days because some people don't even know what Bitcoin is, let alone to say I'm gonna tokenize this layer and every time you contribute, every time you take an action, you're gonna get rewarded for it and you're gonna share in the value of this network. Can you give a good example of what's happened today? You can point to it, that's a great example of token economics. Well, you see, I mean, the most basic one is shared file storage, right? You know, it's like the FileQuency genero model where you contribute the unused storage in your laptop or your university data center or corporate data center and you say I'm gonna contribute this and when it's used, I get these tokens and at the end of the day or week or year you see what these tokens are worth and was that worth your contribution and so as these markets develop and as utility develops, we'll see what that holds. Al, you got an example you can share? Yeah, digital bits is a good use case, actually. I'm not gonna use digital bits, just to be neutral. This is one that Matt will know very well, definitely better than I, but the simpler something is, the easier it is for people to understand and it's like, oh, that makes sense. Binance is one that's very simple. It's a payment token. If you pay with some other currency, you pay price X if you pay in the next few years with their token, you'll get the service at a discount and in addition to that, they're using percentage of profits. I think it's every quarter to buy back up to ultimately up to 50% of token's are in circulation. So it's driving value and driving return in essence to if I can use that word. So for a user, it's simple to understand for someone that likes to speculate, it's easy for someone to understand in terms of how the whole model works, right? So it's not some insanely complicated mathematical equation that we can, yes, we can trust the math. And so in some cases, some adoption is gonna just be adopt, you know, will attract participants based on simplicity. In other cases, the math is important and people will care about that. So, you know, not all things are necessarily equal and not necessarily one method is right, but there are some simple examples out there that have proven to be successful. That's awesome. One last question before we open it up, if anyone has any questions, if anyone has any questions, they wanna come up, grab the microphone and ask three of us for anything on your mind. While you're thinking about that, I'll get the final question for these guys is, a lot of people ask me, hey, I wanna be in the right side of history. What side of the street should I be on when the reality comes down that decentralization, blockchain, token economics, decentralized applications becomes the norm and that reimagining actually happens. I don't wanna be on the wrong side of history. What should I be doing? How should I be thinking differently? Who should I be following? What should I be paying attention to? How do you answer that question? I think, and the basic level, you know, turn off your phone, lock your door and study this technology for a day. It's the best advice I could give to buy some crypto. Once you kinda have crypto on your phone and your wallet, something changes in your brain. I think you just feel like- You share the prices every day. Yeah, yeah, you lose a lot of sleep. And then after that, you know, I think you start engaging in this space in a very different way. So I think starting small, starting basic is an important tenant. And then what's amazing about this space is it attracts the best and brightest out of industry and law and government and technology and you name it. And I'm always fascinated with the people that show up and they're like, yeah, I've been a 20-year veteran in this space and I wanna get into blockchain. It just attracts some of the best and brightest. And I think we're gonna see a lot of experience coming into the space. This has been a, you know, what I'd say, a bottoms-up groundswell of crypto and blockchain and the evolution of the space. And I think we're starting to see more, some more mature folks come into the space to add some history and perspective and be helping to build out of this and the build out of these networks. I think the kind of intersection of both is gonna be very healthy for the space. Al, your thoughts? I definitely agree with Matt, you know, definitely to lock yourself up and just try to absorb information. You have, everyone has access to the internet. There's plenty of information. If you don't like to read, go watch a few YouTube videos and just people explaining this stuff. It's really fascinating. There's various different use cases and so forth. You definitely have to buy some. And, you know, whether it's $5 worth, just go through the whole experience of being able to trade something of value that, you know, a few years ago didn't exist and to be able to trade it for something else of value is a pretty phenomenal experience. Then try to go buy something with it. It's even more of a fascinating experience that you just bought something that used, again, something that didn't exist a few years ago. But what I would add to that as well, it's you really have to get out there. If you keep surrounding yourself with people saying, oh, this is whatever, it's crazy, it's for criminals and all that fun stuff, you're gonna be last place. And so coming to conferences, obviously, a future conference can be a lot of interesting, great people and that consistent experience, you'll learn something every time. You know, at the end of the day, I remember, I'm sure all three of us remember with the birth of the internet, there was many people that would say, you know, the internet thing, it's crap, it's for kids, you know. And we had first movers, we had the willing followers and then the unwilling followed. You don't want to end up being- The unwilling followers. Yeah, the unwilling, yeah. All right, does anyone have any questions that I'd like to ask? Okay, come on up. We're recording, so I want to get it on film. So I have two questions. The first one is for you, Al. Two years ago, I interviewed with IIX before it was console and I want to know why you didn't hire me. No, I'm kidding, that's a joke. Actually, I thought each of you brought up some good points minus you, Al. But I'm just kidding. But what I really wanted to ask you guys is, so you talk a lot about the tokenized economy and kind of the roadmap and the things to get there. You talk about settlement layer, right? Fiat to crypto settlement layer, your identity protocols, your dApps, XYZ, right? The whole Web 3.0 stack, I want each of you, or I want at least input from both of you, or all of you, what are the hurdles to getting to a full adoption of a Web 3.0 stack and make a bold prediction on the timing before we have a full Web 3.0 stack that we use every day? That is a awesome question, actually. Timelines, being in technology, being an adventurer, you could be right and you could be off by three, five, seven, 10 years and be so wrong, right? And then at your retirement dinner, you could say, hey, I was right, but timing wasn't great. So this is really hard technology in terms of building systems that are distributed, creating the economic models, the incentive models. It takes a lot to go right and the intersection of all this. But it's not a question of like, is this happening? No, this is happening. This is like, it's in motion. The timelines are gonna be a little lucid. I'm way more pragmatic. I was one of the early guys in the early internet and everything was gonna be dot com and awesome and fantastic and but the timelines were a little lucid then, right? It's like, when was... People were thinking of today's Amazon was gonna be the 2005 Amazon. It's like, that took about another decade to kind of get there, right? And people could easily just buy stuff and a drone or a UPS guy would just deliver it. And so similar things apply today and at the same time, we all have a super computer in our pocket and so it's a lot different. At the same time, we're dealing with trusted mediums, right? The medium of money, the medium of identity, the all these different things. There are things that if I say, hey, download Instagram and let's share cat pictures or whatever, it's not a big deal. Our trust is really low for that. Let's do it. For money, it's a different mental state. It's a different dynamic, especially if you're an individual, a government or an enterprise, you go through a whole different adoption curve on that. So it is at grand scale, it is five to 10 years, right? In any meaningful way. And so we still have a lot of work to do. My answer to that question is a good one because your question was a good one. My answer is a little bit weird because it's multi-generational. The first generational pivot was when the internet was born, it was because of standards, right? The government had investments. The OSI model, Open Systems Interconnect, actually never happened, the seven layers didn't get standardized. Only the few key ones did. That created a lot of great things. And then when the web came out, that was very interesting protocol development there, the TCPIP stuff, I mean HTTP stuff. I don't see the standardization happening because cloud flipped the stack model upside down because Amazon, these guys, let the software developers drive the value. It used to be the infrastructure drove the value of what software could do. Then software became so proliferated that that drove the value of the infrastructure. So the whole cloud computing equation is making the infrastructure programmable for the first time, not the other way around. So the cloud phenomenon is all about software driving the value and that's happening. So it's interesting because with blockchain you can almost do levels of services in a cloud-like way with crypto, I mean with blockchain and token economics and have a partial stack. So I think that this whole web 3.0 might be something that no one's ever seen before. So that's kind of my answer. I don't really know if that's gonna be right or not, but just looking at the future connecting the dots is probably not gonna look like what we've seen before. And the clouds and indicators is probably gonna be some weird looking stack where certain sections are working and then evolution might fill in the other one. So I mean, that's my take. But standards will play a role. Someone, the communities will have to get involved around certain things. And I think that that's a timeless concept. And what's the timing? Oh, timing. I think it's gonna be pretty quick. I think if you look at the years it took for internet and then the web, everything's being compressed down. So I think it's gonna be much shorter if it was 20 year cycle in the past that gets shortened down to 15 with the internet and then this could be five years. So five to 10 years, that could be the impact in my mind. I mean, the question that I always ask is, what year will banks no longer be involved in anything? Is that 20 years or 10 years? Exactly, so follow the money. So I would say that in terms of trying to keep your finger on the pulse with things and how you kind of things, see things evolve, things are definitely moving a lot faster. In the past, you would probably say seven to 10. I'm not sure if I would say five, sorry, five to 10. It definitely feels to me that it's five max so we can start to see some of these key things that fall into place. So. What was the first question? Why did you hire me? Oh, no, no, no, no. We've mapped it for? Sorry. I have a question, this is Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE. And I want to pick up on something John, you just said and Matt, you were talking about Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, it's not about them saving hundreds of millions of dollars, it's really about them transforming businesses. So, and John, you just asked the question about banks. I want to actually get your answer to this. Will traditional banks in your opinion lose control of payment systems? Notwithstanding your bias. Yeah, I am definitely biased on this. But I mean, I've been in front of the C-suite of banks, credit card companies, et cetera. And I said, in about a decade, the center of what you do and how you make money is going to be zero. And because there will be networks and ways to transmit money that'll be by far cheaper or will be subsidized by other networks, meaning, and those networks are Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, whatever networks that are out there that are engaging in collaboration and commerce and everything else, they will give away payments as just a courtesy, like people give away messaging or email or something, as a courtesy to that network and will harden that network and it'll be built and based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, so they don't have to necessarily worry about how to kind of settle payments. But these new networks will start to encroach on banks. The banks are not worried about other banks today. The banks should be worried about these new networks that are being developed. How many people still have a home phone line? Yeah. That was elegant, Alibaba. I mean, there's a generation of people that still like going to banks. They'll keep them in business for a while. But I think that comes to an end. I mean, I think that when we covered a lot of the big data market when it started, the argument was mobile will kill the banks' outlets. And now with ATMs, there's more banking branches than ever before. So I think the service piece is interesting. And also, if you look at even the cloud basis, software-to-service SaaS space a decade, decade and a half ago, you would ask SAP, Oracle, what have you, what's your cloud strategy? And they'd be like, cloud, that's just more efficient delivery model, not interested. 90-some billion dollars of M&A later, SAP, Oracle, et cetera, are cloud companies, right? And so if banks kind of get into that same mode to say, well, yeah, we need to play catch-up and buy digital currency exchanges and multi-currency wallets and some of this infrastructure and plumbing to be relevant in the next world, that would be interesting. But I think technology companies have as much an advantage to do that as financial services companies. So it'd be interesting to see who kind of goes into that, it goes into the crypto ecosystem to make that their own. It's interesting that I was, we were talking before we came on, and the OSS market operational support systems is booming and that's traditionally been these big operational outsourced companies would manage big projects. But if you look at in the first half of 2018, it's been a 20 million, greater than 20 billion dollar commercial exits of companies through private equity emergency networks, IPOs around OSS. And that's where we see operational things happening. CoreOS, Al fresco, MuleSoft, Pivotal, and Public, Magneto, GitHub, TreasureData, Fastly Elastic Data Stacks, they're all in the pipeline. These are all companies that aren't cloud. They're like running stuff in cloud. So this could be a tell sign that potentially the blockchain operating market is gonna be potentially a big one. Yeah, and then even look at Bitmain, the world's largest miner in crypto. So they did it about a billion dollars in profit last year, they did about a billion dollars in profit just in the first quarter going public, just raised a billion dollars last month at a reportedly 50 to 70 billion dollar valuation in Hong Kong in the next month. And the amount of money they'll raise will eclipse what Facebook raised. And so I think the institutional, the hardware, the cloud computing, the whole ecosystem starts to resonate and think about this space a lot differently. And we need these milestones. We need these, whether they're role models or data points to kind of like think about how this is gonna affect your business and what you do tomorrow morning. Any more questions from the crowd audience? Okay, great. Well, thanks for attending. Appreciate you guys watching and listening. And guys, thanks for the conversation, cloud and blockchain convergence collision course or is it gonna happen nicely, Al? What do you... I think it's gonna be a convergence. I don't see it necessary as a collision course. And a lot of money to be made on this opportunity these days than cloud convergence with blockchain. Yeah, no, I concur with Al. I think there's gonna be convergence. I think as the most smarter players will engage and figure out their models in this new crypto and tokenized era. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it. Give you guys a round of applause. Thank you very much. Thank you.