 So my name is Ed Tang. I'm one of the co-founders at DigiNutal Labs. We're a small design and dev studio that we focus on making social good mobile apps and web apps. So that's what I do in a nutshell. And we are here today for me to give you a quick intro to crypto currencies. I'm not gonna make any assumptions about the level of information or knowledge that the group has. So I'm just gonna try to keep this as simple as possible is gonna be a lot of like techno jargon and stuff. I'm just gonna try to make this all simple to understand. But I will look at the Q&A stuff. So I may answer questions as I go, but we'll say most of them to the end like you said. So crypto currencies, what's all the fuss? It's all over the news right now, right? And you hear people are getting rich by the minute buying crypto currencies. But aside from all the crazy speculative talks and news around getting rich and whatnot, there's also an underlying technology that's really important to talk about and to understand crypto currencies themselves are not the technology. They are run by something called the blockchain, which I will explain as we go through this talk. You're also gonna notice this just hodl it meme. For people who don't know, hodl is simply a misspelling of hold. Somebody tweeted a while back to hold their crypto because it's going up in value. You miss type hold type hodl and now it's becoming a thing because the internet does that. So if you hear people saying just hodl it or hodl it, that means hold your crypto. So that means, so what's all the fuss? Cryptocurrency is basically the centralized cryptographic currency. If you're not familiar with those terms where I think the central, what is all this stuff? So cryptocurrency is built upon some three major pillars. There are some minor pillars, but the three major ones are that there's no central authority, meaning that no one government or country or financial institution can control the currency. It's completely decentralized. So to kind of give you an example, why that's important, imagine like during a depression or a recession where there's like a run on banks, then the banks all of a sudden decide just cut you off from your money. You can't take anymore out of the ATMs. That can happen under central authority or governments can devalue their currency in order to try to increase exports economically. Governments do those kind of things, inflation deflation. With cryptocurrency, none of this stuff can happen. These shenanigans can't happen because no central authority can manipulate the currency that way. So that's a beautiful thing. There's full transparency with all the transactions going on through the crypto community. Again, like take banks for example, if I wanted to call them up and ask them, hey, there's something kind of weird going on with the transaction in my account. There's two things going on here. I have to trust that the bank is gonna give, tell it to me straight of what's going on. And I also have to trust that their servers and all their data is true. That it hasn't been hacked, that it's completely secure. Now we know that hacks can happen. They don't happen as often with the bank industry, but they do happen. And tellers and people who work at banks do make mistakes. Human error comes into play. And sometimes they may not tell you the whole story. So with cryptocurrencies, the transactions on the blockchain are fully transparent to the public. And that's a beautiful thing too. And third, if not most important, is that crypto as a currency is available to everybody. It's a secure global accessible financial system. This is really important in places where people don't have easy access to banks, for example, even here in America, we're a rich nation, but even here there are some people who don't have easy access to banks. For instance, if you're living paycheck to paycheck and you almost have zero balance in your bank account every month, but the bank requires a minimum balance. So there's like a fee that they deduct out of your account. All of a sudden you're looking at negative balances every month, which can curb penalties. And these things can kind of bloom out of control. And so people won't open a bank account because of that. Or if like in another country, let's say you're a refugee and the government will recognize you're a citizen, so you're not allowed to get identification and without identification, you can't open a bank account, therefore you cannot participate in the financial system. You're just in this weird catch 22. You don't have these kind of blockages with cryptocurrency, everybody and anyone has access. And that is also another beautiful thing. So because of these pillars, it's a decentralized system. And what that is is just saying that it's a distributed system without one single authority. So kind of imagine like again with a banking example, like with my bank Chase, which I use for other purposes, all the data resides on their servers, their backend servers, it's all kind of one single house but with cryptocurrencies, the entire transaction ledger is on every single different computer that is participating in the system. And we're talking about thousands upon thousands of computers around the world. No single one computer can dictate what's happening with the crypto system. So it's distributed and it's decentralized. And there's so many benefits around that and we'll get into that as we go. So that's the decentralized part of it. The cryptographic part of it is the underlying technology that runs cryptocurrency. And you may have heard this in the news, it's called the blockchain. The blockchain was created by a person or a group of persons called Satoshi Nakamoto. To this day, we do not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, who or whom they are. It might probably remain a mystery till the end of time unless they decide to help themselves. But the mystery is kind of beside the point, it doesn't matter. Satoshi Nakamoto created a white paper on blockchain in 2008, then in 2009, the very first implementation of blockchain occurred. So it's been around for about 12 years now. Still a very, very new technology. So what in the world is blockchain? Blockchain is essentially a chain of encrypted data. The way this works is think of blocks of data that are essentially chained together and it's called the blockchain, pretty simple. The way it fundamentally works is, I'll give you an example. Let's say you have the first block that's ever created. Maybe that is just a company that has a project and they're issuing cryptocurrency. So they create the very first block, the Genesis block. Now, what happens is there are these things called hashes. Hashes are basically just a totally long, random string of numbers. And let's say the first three of those numbers are applied to this first block, the Genesis block. Now let's say somebody buys a coin. That transaction is gonna be recorded in another block. And that block needs to be attached to the original block so that they're chained together and secure and kept historically forever. In order to chain that block together, you would verify with the original block that first that the hash is correct, the three numbers that it has, let's say one, two, three in this example. And then the second block gets added to this chain, picks up that one, two, three hash and then adds three additional numbers, say four, five, six in this example. And then if you wanna add a third block, the third block would check the second block and say, does the second block have a one, two, three? And then you go to the first block. It's the first block, one, two, three. If everything matches and then the third block gets added to the chain, third block takes on one, two, three, four, five, six and adds three more numbers, seven, eight, nine. And this just goes on forever and ever until you hit the maximum number of blocks that are given in any particular system. So for example, Bitcoin, which is built on its own blockchain, there are other coins that are built on their own block chains. For Bitcoin, there's 21 million allowed blocks on their block chains, which is they estimate the run out of blocks somewhere in 2040, the year 2040. So we have long ways to go before we run out of blocks. So that's the easy answer to how blockchain works, but there's a little bit more to it. You don't just add blocks because if you do it just based on the hash numbers, it can still be hacked. You can falsify hash numbers and then start creating these branches that look like the real blockchain but aren't and then you start abusing the system. So what happens is, is that there's an additional step called proof of work. Proof of work, imagine every time you want to create or attach a block to the blockchain, there is a mathematical equation, a very complex equation. It has to be solved in order to allow that block to be added. And what happens is to solve that equation, computers around the world, which are called miners, they compete to solve this equation. The reason why they compete is because they are incentivized. The first computer to correctly solve the equation gets awarded a certain number of coin from that block along with transfer fees and whatnot. So the community is incentivized to compete against each other because everybody wants to get their own coins. They're not incentivized to collaborate, which would spell disaster for the blockchain because if everybody collaborated, they could try to hack the system through what is called a 51% attack. I'm not gonna get into that but it would be disastrous for the system if there was collaboration going on. So there's a lot of game theory used to make sure that it's a competitive environment that people are competing against each other to mine these blocks and get the reward from them. So how does proof of work work? So all the computers are competing to solve this mathematical equation. The first one that solves it gets a proof of work. And what happens is the rest of the computers see that the equation was solved and then they look at the proof of work and there has to be a consensus with all the other computers, all the other miners that say, okay, yeah, you did this correctly. The proof of work is correct. Once that consensus is agreed upon, the miner gets the reward and the block is added to the blockchain and it just keeps going on and on like this at Nauseam. So every time somebody buys, sells, trades, exchanges, coin, this is the process that is happening through proof of work, all right? Now there are other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. These are the two major ones, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the original one. It was built on the original blockchain. Ethereum is built on its own blockchain. And like I said, Bitcoin works on proof of work. There are advantages to proof of work and there are disadvantages to proof of work. The advantages are that proof of work is highly secure, highly immutable, meaning it cannot be changed, almost impossible to hack. Ethereum is similar, but it works on something called proof of stake. I'll get into proof of stake in a second, but there is a huge disadvantage to proof of work being that there's a massive energy cost. In the early days, when there wasn't a lot on the block, the computational power of a computer to try to solve the equation didn't require too much energy, but as the block has grown, the equation gets complex, more and more complex with every block that is added and it takes more computational power to solve these equations, which creates a ton of energy use around the world. It's estimated that the blockchain right now under a proof of work, the annual energy use is equivalent to about Argentina. And Argentina is a pretty big country. So you can imagine how much energy is being used on an annual basis. Ethereum's proof of stake uses way less energy. It's about seven times less, six to seven times less. So proof of stake is an alternative to proof of work and that's why you're seeing Ethereum becoming more and more popular. And getting back to, so let's talk about proof of stake for a little bit. Why is it different from proof of work? Proof of stake is based on not computational power of one computer. So it's not just all these single computers competing with each other to solve the equation. It's based on how much coin I own in the entire pool of coins. So let's say just hypothetically there's 1,000 coin. There's like millions of coins, but let's just say 1,000 to keep this example easy. And let's say I own 100 coin. That means I have 10% chance of solving this equation and it's not necessarily built on the computational power of my computer. It's built on my ability to solve it and also my stake in the pool. Now, if somebody had 200 coin, they have a better chance of getting an opportunity to solve this equation. They have 20%. So that's at an individual basis. I could compete with other individual stakeholders if we own a lot of coin, but let's say I only own one coin out of 1,000. My chances of getting a reward from completing the equation or adding the block is almost minuscule. It's like 0.1%. So I could join a pool to stake, meaning like let's say somebody has 10 coins, somebody has 50, somebody has 60, and I have one. All of a sudden we have, what is that? 121 coins together and together we can compete against the other percentage holders. So proof of stake is another interesting way to basically secure the blockchain and verify the blockchain without as much energy consumption as these massive computer rigs that are trying to do things on proof of work. So if we look at it from an energy consumption standpoint, proof of work is not very good. It sucks. Battery or the environment generates a lot of heat, use a lot of energy, Ethereum is better, but in the grand scheme of Ethereum, still uses about as much energy as let's say Ecuador. And that's still a full-sized country of energy consumption. So there's other proofs, like proof of time and space, there's proof of authority, not even gonna get into all these things, but there's all these different proofs of methods that are being tested to try to bring down this energy cost and make transactions more efficient and whatnot. So, but that still doesn't tell you whether or not Bitcoin is better than Ethereum. Ethereum has something called smart contracts. The Bitcoin blockchain does not have smart contracts. So what are contracts? Well, it would be good to start off with what's a basic contract. So like in the world, when we draft up a contract, the parties agree on something, and oftentimes there's a third party that makes sure all the conditions are met and then the result of the contract is executed. So for example, let's talk about the real estate transactions, for example, in California, there are escrow companies and title companies that service third parties to the real estate deals. The seller and the buyer agree on a contract, everything goes through this third party, this escrow service and these title insurance companies or even mortgage lenders and all these kinds of things. Then once all the conditions are satisfied, the key is transferred to the new owner and the money is transferred to the seller. Now that can be cumbersome and there's also room for a lot of human error. We kind of talked about human error and all that kind of stuff earlier with the central authority problem. Thankfully, human error doesn't really occur too much in these older systems, like real estate transactions, they happen so much that people know how to do them really well, but the errors do happen. In fact, I used to work in the real estate industry, so I've seen the errors happen, I've seen fraud happen, so it's not a perfect system. Smart contracts, on the other hand, they get rid of the third party basically smart contracts are programmed contracts to execute perfectly when the conditions are all followed. And it's highly trustworthy, you don't have to worry about the contract being hacked because the blockchain itself is highly secure. You can't change the contract. If you don't suddenly like the terms, you can't hack it and change it. So let's say with the real estate contract, once you know that you've programmed like all the inspections have been done, the loan is in place, you know, you have all these conditions in place, the contract can then execute and say, look, time to turn the keys over, here's the deed, the digital deed, the money gets transferred to the seller's account, done. You don't have to go through all these intermediaries. Now that hasn't happened yet in the real world, there's still some barriers to implementing smart contracts at scale. A lot of it has to do with the cumbersand of blockchain because it's not fast. Like all those equations that have to be solved take time. And the reason why they take time is actually part of the security measure. If those equations were easily solvable, then hacks could happen more easier. But because they take time to solve and energy to solve is really to try to hack the blockchain, there's zero incentive to try to even do it. That's why it takes time. But that time also works as a disadvantage in the real world where things need to kind of happen faster. So for like, for example, a Visa card, they process, I think something like 50 million transactions a day or something like that. We could be wrong in that number, but it's in the high millions. Blockchain transactions, crypto transactions don't even come close to credit card transaction volume yet. So that's something that does need to be solved. So to kind of give you a little bit more in-depth understanding of smart contracts, it's all about trust. And why do I have a picture of a Lego vending machine? Well, because first of all, I'm a huge Lego geek and I had no idea Lego vending machines existed until today, which blew my mind and that's awesome. But the vending machine also serves as a really good example of an example of a basic contract. You're probably wondering, what are you talking about? So a vending machine is generally it's a trusted thing, right? You feed money into it or you slide a credit card and you expect the machine to just spit out the item that you bought. Now, there are problems with vending machines. Sometimes things get stuck. It could eat your money. What if the credit card machine's broken or maybe the machine is just trash, somebody just trashed it and you're never gonna get the item. No matter how much you shake it, it's just not coming out. So there are problems, but generally it's a trusted mechanism for a contractual transaction. The contract being I give you money, you give me my thing. Now, I want you to imagine a hypothetical fantasy vending machine where let's say it says, if you put in $1,000, I'll give you $5,000 back. All right, first of all, that's crazy. Who would do that? That's a great vending machine that does that. But it would immediately make you question all sorts of stuff. Like, is this true? How can I trust this crazy idea of somebody willing to give me $5,000 if I give them a thousand? Like that's a lot of money to put at stake to trust this machine, to do what this thing proposes it's gonna do, right? I have no way of verifying that it will do what it'll do. There's no service person around here to verify that if the machine breaks, I can get my reward. So as you scale, when you put more at stake in a transaction, you have to have a lot of trust in this contract and how those contracts are being executed. And that's why smart contracts as a technology are super important. They can basically make it 100% trustworthy. You can go to a vending machine that says, if you put in $1,000, I'll give you $5,000 and go, okay, I understand how smart contracts work. So I can 100% trust this is gonna happen. Even though it is preposterous, I just know it's gonna happen. Here's my $1,000, gave me my $5,000. In a fantasy world that might happen, but it's obviously not gonna happen in the real world. But smart contracts essentially create high amounts of trust around any complexity of a contract, a digital contract that can be executed. So that's smart contracts in a nutshell. And again, smart contracts run on Ethereum or Ethereum's blockchain. Smart contracts do not run on Bitcoin's blockchain, so which is why you're seeing Ethereum gaining in popularity than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still very popular. I think one coin's at about $55,000 right now. Last night it was like $59,000 plus the $60,000. But Ethereum has recently jumped from around $2,000 to $4,000 just in a few days. So Ethereum is gaining steam and it's projected to be more valuable than Bitcoin in the future because of its smart contract technology. So you might be wondering, with all these fluctuations of cryptocurrency, like I mentioned Bitcoin is like at 55 or 57,000 right now. Ethereum's on 4,000. There are hundreds of other coins that are fluctuating constantly in value. So why hasn't crypto been used for buying goods in the real world? A lot of it is because of this crazy value fluctuation, but does the constant fluctuation of cryptocurrency values affect the value of goods bought or sold with crypto? You might have seen like online or like in tweets or whatever, people saying, oh my God, 10 years ago I bought a shirt with one Bitcoin that was worth, and Bitcoin was worth $10. And so my shirt was worth $10 and now Bitcoin's worth $55,000. So my shirt must be also worth $55,000. That's not how that works. So I just wanna talk about this real quick to dispel that myth. I'm gonna give you a really simple example. Imagine just hypothetically one Bitcoin equals $1. Let's just say for simplicity sake that's what that is right now. And let's say you're at the grocery store and you see a candy bar also for $1. That candy bar, you can be bought with one Bitcoin because it's all equal to about one, all equal to $1 and it's an even exchange. So now let's say Bitcoin goes up, is now one Bitcoin is worth $2. Does that mean the candy bars are also worth $2? No, the candy bar is still worth $1 because it's based on a physical economic market. And basically you would be able to buy that candy bar for half of Bitcoin because if one Bitcoin is equal to $2, half of Bitcoin is equal to one. The candy bar is equal to one. So you get half of Bitcoin to buy the candy bar. The candy bar isn't suddenly worth $2. And let's say I sold you the candy bar, I have your one Bitcoin, at the time one Bitcoin's worth one. So as a seller of the candy bar, once I get your coin, I want the value of that coin to go up. So if I held on to that coin for many years and now it's like worth $55,000, suddenly that one coin that, you bought my candy bar with so many years ago, now I have $55,000 because of the value of the coin, not because of the value of the candy bar. So and the person who bought the candy bar couldn't hold on to that kind of bar and then a few years sell it for $55,000. It's still worth maybe a little bit more than $1 because of inflation or whatever. So maybe it's worth $1.50 or something. It's probably worth nothing because food is disgusting if you eat it like 10 years later. But I think you know what I'm trying to say here. So to dispel the myth, just because you buy something for Bitcoin at one value and then the value goes up and the coin, the physical good does not go up in the physical value. The physical good is still tied to the real life market value in the economy. So based on some of the information I've given you and the craze around cryptocurrencies, should you or shouldn't you get involved? This is a good question. I personally love the technology. I also, there is a lot of speculative stuff going on with the valuation of crypto. There's a lot of money to be made. It's kind of like the stock market. You can buy stocks, speculate on the stock, whether or not the stock will go up or down and make money or lose money. However, you shouldn't look at cryptocurrency just from a speculative perspective when you think of should I or shouldn't I? Like I said, in regions that don't have financial access to banking systems, should you or shouldn't you becomes a very different question. It means if this is the only choice that I have as access to a financial system, then yeah, you should because cryptocurrency currencies are democratic. They equalize the access to finances and they're not like identification dependent. You can be anonymous. You don't have to go through central agencies, central authorities. So that's a very different question depending on your situation. In rich countries like America or other parts of the world, the should or shouldn't I is more based on should I put my money in to maybe make money or lose money? So it just kind of depends on your perspective and where you are in life. Also, I think should you or shouldn't you is tied to do you believe in the technology? You know, cryptocurrency, the blockchain itself as a technology is gaining in strides, gaining in adoption. You're starting to see corporations except that as payment you're starting to see governments consider creating their own digital coins. China just made their own digital coin. So governments are getting in on this too. I don't know whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'll leave that for another discussion. But if you believe in the technology you probably should get into it because as more adoption happens throughout the industry the value of cryptocurrencies will just grow and grow and grow. Even though the values fluctuate violently right now that's on the short term. It's a violent fluctuation over the long term you're probably gonna see a steady growth. Again, I'm not a financial advisor so kind of take all this and I'm saying with a grain of salt but this is just what I believe, okay? But you should do your own research and probably consult with other people if you really want to treat it as a money making mechanism. That's something you need to be comfortable with. So if you do decide to get into it bitcoins worth $55,000 or whatever it is right now and you're not rich, how can you get into it? Well, fractions are your friend. You can buy coins in fractions. So even if you have $100, $10, whatever it is, $1 you can buy a Bitcoin. You can buy a fraction of the Bitcoin and the value of whatever your own will coincide with the value that is currently happening with the coin. So you can buy Bitcoin, you can buy Ethereum. I own different coins like sand, Cardano. There are hundreds of coins. So you need to do your research and understand the differences between these coins. Every coin is built on a different blockchain technology by different companies. So do your research. I own the ones I own for different reasons, personal reasons. And you can feel free to ask me about those if you want. Oh, real quick, I see an interesting question. Can a government ban cryptocurrencies? They can make it illegal. They can't, it's very, very hard to ban because in order to ban cryptocurrencies you would have to essentially shut down the internet. You have to shut down every computer around the world that is part of the cryptocurrency decentralized system. So you can't ban it from that sense. You can't just shut it down. I mean, you can kind of like in China you hear they shut down the internet sometimes but they're just shutting it down within China. It's still happening around the world. So they can't effectively ban it completely but they can try to cut it off from their citizens but there are so many ways around it. So you can't really ban it. You can make it illegal. So if you catch somebody taking part in it you can send them to jail. Does that work in favor of the government? I don't know. You know, back many, many hundreds of years ago they tried to make it gold illegal because it was challenging the monetary system. That failed because gold wasn't going anywhere and people invested so much that they could so they made it legal again. I feel like that's pretty much it's going to be the same thing with cryptocurrency. Some places are going to try to make it legal, try to ban it but you're just going to realize this is a fight they can't win. So I just kind of want to answer that question real quick because that question popped out to me and I'll answer the other questions later. So if you buy crypto, how do you store it? Well, you can get a crypto wallet or you can go through an exchange. So there are things called custodial wallets and non-custodial wallets. If you buy your cryptocurrency through an exchange, exchanges are like, you might have heard of Coinbase or Gemini or Binance. These are the three major ones. There's a bunch of minor ones but these are the three major ones and the most secure ones. When you buy through an exchange, private key is created for you, the digital private key. And that private key basically proves that you own the coin and that private key is held with the exchange. The exchange is a custodian of your private key. So the exchange is essentially a custodial wallet. Now there are downsides to that, meaning that exchanges do get hacked occasionally. We've heard of this happening in the news and you don't have control over your private key. It doesn't reside with you, it resides on the exchange. So if the exchange goes down, you're kind of just shit out of luck, excuse the language, but that is the case. Now non-custodial wallets are not held by the exchange. You take the private key or you take like a software app or a hardware like USB wallet and you move the money that is being held at the exchange, the crypto being held there and you move it to a wallet like on your phone or onto a USB key. And these are called non-custodial wallets because the exchange is not the custodian of your private key. And in non-custodial wallets, you are the owner of your private key, you are in control of it, so it gives you more better security around the private key. As mentioned, there are hot wallets and cold wallets. So non-custodial wallets fall into these two categories, hot wallets are basically software based wallets like on the web or on mobile apps. They give you high access to the funds, you can transfer at will with exchanges or between wallets very quickly just on your phone. It's always connected to the internet but they are vulnerable to phishing and hacking. So if you are phished, part of like a phishing scam and you give away your private key, you just gave away all your money. So it's kind of like a password to your bank account. You don't ever want to give away that password. So if anybody ever asked you for your private key, it doesn't matter who they are, do not give it to them or else you're just kissing your crypto goodbye. And phones can be hacked, right? Like to access my wallet on my phone, for example, I set it up to accept the other password or my face ID or touch ID, but let's say somebody circumvents that on my phone, now all of a sudden they had access to my wallet on my phone without needing to know my private key. It's very rare, but it can happen. Now there are cold wallets. So it means you're transferring all the crypto you hold in the exchange to let's say like a USB dongle. There are companies that make these Ledger and Trezor are the main two companies that make cold wallets. They're extremely secure because they're physical hardware. They're not connected to the internet all the time. So hackers can't just access it online. They'd have to literally have access to your physical USB dongle. But they have less access to the funds. If you wanna transfer them, you have to reconnect the USB, plug it into your computer or connect your Bluetooth to a software app, mobile app and then transfer the funds that way. So it's not as fast as hot wallets. And it's not connected to the internet all the time, which is a good security measure. So cold wallets are more secure than hot wallets. Hot wallets are more secure than exchanges. So that's a good way to think of how to keep your cryptocurrencies. Now, I mentioned private keys. Well, let me talk about private keys last. When you're considering a wallet, you're gonna wanna consider what coins those wallets support. Not every wallet supports every single coin. There are hundreds of coins. So for example, with my stuff, just as an example, Cardano and Sand, the two different coins. I have to own two different wallets to hold those coins because one wallet supports sand, it doesn't support ADA, which is Cardano. My other one supports ADA and it doesn't support sand. That's kind of ridiculous, but it's just kind of the name of the game. So when you're choosing wallets, it kind of depends on what coin you wanna buy and that'll help you base your decision on what wallet to get. If you're just focusing on Bitcoin or Ethereum, every single wallet supports that. So you don't need to think too hard about it. But when you start going into alternative coins like Cardano or Dogecoin or Stellar Lumens or Neo or something like that, then you do have to start thinking about does your wallet support the coin? Can I actually hold it there? Even the cold wallets, Ledger and Trezor, they support different coins. They have a lot of intersection with what they support but they also support things that are just native to their wallets. So it's not a unified system, kind of a pains sometimes, but wallets are secure and you should definitely hold your crypto in either hot or cold wallet. It's highly recommended. So private keys, as mentioned, keep them secret, keep them safe. As Gandalf says, do not ever share your private key. You're literally giving away your money if you do that. Okay, it doesn't matter what excuse anybody gives you. I don't care what anybody says to me. I will never give it away, okay? Unless I put it like in my will or something and I trust the executor. Even then, I'll probably do that right before I die. And if you lose your private key, guess what? Your coin is lost forever. Hackers won't be able to get into your wallet even if you lost your key. Like if I'm a hacker and I'm gonna try to hack your wallet, the amount of time it is predicted to try to hack a crypto wallet is approximately 650 million years based on current modern computing power. So you can see that it's impossible to hack a crypto wallet unless you start having the advent of quantum computers and whatnot, but that's a near future technology. So we don't have to worry about right now. But if you lose your private key, guess what? You lose your crypto forever and that cryptocurrency is taken out of the pool overall pool. So to give you an example of how devastating this can be, there's a story where a guy held his private key on a hard drive. Back in the day, Bitcoin was worth maybe $1, $2, $5 or something like that. He was just like, this is never gonna be worth anything. So he threw his hard drive away, got a new hard drive. Years later, suddenly Bitcoin hit $10,000 and he had millions of dollars worth of crypto saved to that private key on his hard drive. Now that hard drive is sitting in a landfill somewhere and he's out tens of millions of dollars right now. In fact, he's so desperate that he started paying people to help him look for this hard drive in the landfill. Good luck to him. It's probably worth it if you have tens of millions of dollars at stake but he's probably never gonna find that hard drive. So need to keep your private keys safe. I keep mine locked up in a safe which I'm not gonna disclose where it is but typically private keys are a string of 12 to 24 words that you have to input into correct order and it's very, very hard to hack. The downside to the private key is because you do have to keep it somewhere secure and it is something that's really, really hard to remember. People already have a hard time remembering simple passwords to try to remember a string of 12 words in the correct order or 24 words in the correct order. It's very hard to do. So that's one of the barriers to adopting cryptocurrency or for people to come into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. So that's also something to consider when you ask yourself, should I, shouldn't I? Can I deal with the private key issue? I personally think it's worth it. It is a big barrier but it's a secure barrier. So that's why it's worth it to deal with it. But again, I'm gonna reiterate, if you do get into it, do not lose your keys, okay? So I wanna talk about some other stuff that's in the news. You're hearing a lot about NFTs. They're all the craze right now. NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens. What is non-fungible token? Again, like random words, strong together. Non-fungible simply means that it's unique. It's irreplaceable. And at NFT, right now, the craze all around the NFTs tied to artwork. NFTs represent the digital rights tied to artwork. So you're familiar with Niantcap. It's been around for decades. But somebody recently sold, the original creator of Niantcap recently sold the digital rights for Niantcap for $580,000. Not the art, the rights behind the art. So whoever owns the NFT, whoever this person is simply has bragging rights to say, look, I own the rights to the Niantcap. It's kind of silly because Niantcap as an art has been shared millions of times over the internet. So it's not like this person can tell everybody to take the art down. And he doesn't actually own the art itself. He just owns the digital rights to it. So that's what an NFT is. Some people think that when they buy an NFT, they're buying the art. Just wanna be clear, you're not buying the art. You're buying the digital rights to the art. Anything that can be digitized can be turned into, the digital rights can be turned into an NFT. So music can exist in a digital realm. You can have digital rights to that. There are trading cards, digital trading cards like Top Shot, NBA cards, even tweets. Jack Dorsey recently sold his first tweet that he ever made for, I think around $3 million for digital rights, some absurd number. And other NFT examples are like Sandbox. I own Sandcoin, which is based on the Sandbox game. Within the game, people are selling digital rights to the digital land that they're creating within the game because there's only so much land you can buy in the game. It's got its own real estate ecosystem. It's kind of neat just to kind of think of how the NFT ecosystem is growing. I kind of wanna talk about real quick about where the art is held. If you own an NFT, like I said, you don't own the art. So let's say all of the Nyan cats in the world were suddenly taken down from the internet. Do I have access to the art anymore? Even though I own the NFT? No, because the art isn't hosted online anymore. It's just gone. Now hopefully I had downloaded a copy of Nyan Cat for myself, kept it on my computer on my phone. Otherwise, if I didn't, if it's not hosted online somewhere, I have zero access to the art. So that's something to just keep in mind when you think about NFTs, again, they reiterate it's the digital rights, not the actual art. What's great about NFTs is that it's created an entire economic ecosystem for artists to make money in different ways. And it's opened a lot of doors for independent artists to make money. Not all of them are selling things for like $100,000 or whatever. I think there was a GIF recently where an animation sold for $69 million. That's absurd. So there's a lot of craze in the collector industry right now around NFTs, but generally you can sell things for like five, 10 bucks. Whatever, if you're an artist. I'm creating my own NFT. It's like a digital sticker. That's just something fun I'm doing. NFTs are based on smart contracts, which are based on Ethereum right now. So NFTs are kind of like a jumping off point to implementing smart contracts at scale. So think of like NFTs for real estate transactions later on, they can be very important. So there are other uses besides art, but right now the craze is all about collecting art. So what does the future puddle for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology? You know, the sky's the limit. We're just starting to find out. Corporations are just starting to accept payment in crypto. We're starting to see the energy costs come down a little bit. So we're gonna be able to start seeing implementations of blockchain. I'm very excited for people who are in more desperate states who need access to financial systems or even digital passports to create highly secure and trusted identities that aren't controlled by governments that could exist on the blockchain. That's super important. But what does the future puddle? Who knows? It's up to everybody's imagination, but I'm very optimistic about the technology. And I think you should be too. So that's my talk. Thank you so much, Eve. That was so interesting and really fun. There are many, many questions. I know you can see the Q and A before we also have some questions from the chat and some from our friends watching on YouTube. So before you kind of get into those I wanted to hit you with a couple. So people would like to clarify. So there's a finite amount of each cryptocurrency that exists. Yes. And is there a way to find out what amount that is? Like, can I look up how many doge coins there are in the world? Yeah, you can look it up. There are market caps. It's all public knowledge. Like I said, for instance, Bitcoin, there is a finite amount of 21 million blocks that can be created. I think there's actually more crypto coins compared to the actual blockchain, but it's all public knowledge. You can just look it up. And then some general questions like you can purchase crypto without a social security number, right? You can. Yeah, that's the beauty of crypto coins. Everybody has access to it. If you don't have any of those things, social security identification, you still have access to it. It does leave room for nefarious stuff that can happen, but the nefarious stuff that's happening through the crypto community is nothing compared to regular fiat money, like US dollars or whatever. So I don't really worry too much about that stuff. If I purchased 10,000 in cryptocurrency, do I need to report it to the IRS? I know you were not an accountant. I thought I was bowing anyway. I'm not an accountant, but the IRS is starting to crack down. They're treating investments, them as investments. So if you cash out your coins, there are different rules. Don't quote me on this again. I'm not a financial expert, but I think if you cash out your crypto over a certain amount under a year, it's taxed at a certain rate versus if you cash it out over a certain amount after a year, it'll be taxed at a different amount, a lower amount. It's just like stocks, actually. Stocks operate the same way. Capital gains taxes. So they're trying to apply capital gains taxes to cryptocurrencies, but if you're doing it in small amounts, the IRS usually isn't gonna think about it. It's only those who are doing it in like large, massive amounts where this matters. And then this is interesting. What data is the blockchain behind the cryptocurrencies whole day? The identities of all the owners of coins and someone asked if I'm mining crypto with my computer, is my computer part of the blockchain? No, your computer is not part of the blockchain. Your computer, your computer, can't even talk. Your computer is just there to try to solve the equation and help usher along the adding of blocks to the ledger. The one thing I didn't say is that the entire ledger is the copies of the entire ledger are kept on each computer, but your personal information on the computer is not on the block. What is in the data blocks is the transactional data. Like my coin went from this wallet at this address to this address on the exchange, but it doesn't give my name, doesn't give my social security number, none of that stuff is kept on the blockchain. It's just a public ledger of how the transactions sorted themselves out. And then some people would like to know what are some of the factors that influence the value behind a particular crypto and or currency, and what kinds of things should they look into when they're researching what they might wanna hold? That's a really good question. That is like a million dollar question actually. People to this day, they think they know what affects the value. There are some like easy answers to that. Like, for example, like last year when PayPal suddenly said they're accepting cryptocurrencies, accepting Bitcoin, all of a sudden Bitcoin jumped in value. That was tied directly to somebody in the market space saying, hey, we're gonna legitimize this technology. So you can kind of predict value that way, but there are other crazy things happening in the space that you just can't predict. It's kind of like the stock market too. There are things that are predictable with stock market and there are just things that are happening behind the scenes. I would say that if you believe in any particular technology, then you should look at this over the very, very long-term. When I'm talking long-term, I'm talking five, 10, 15, 20 years out. Don't think of this as a short-term thing. If you do it as a short-term thing, you're gonna drive yourself insane trying to figure out how to calculate the value of coins. But if you believe in the technology, let's say I believe in Cardano because Cardano is a blockchain based on proof of stake which is a competitor to Ethereum. I believe Cardano will become important as a competitor to Ethereum the next five to 10 years. So I bought a bunch of coins. I'm just gonna let that value sit there for five to 10 years. It's fluctuating a lot right now. I'm just not paying attention to it because you're gonna drive yourself insane thinking about the short-term valuations. You covered this a little bit, but we have a lot of questions around sort of tools or platforms to buy and sell and how do you spend crypto? The main tools are through exchanges. Now let's say you can't buy through an exchange because you do have to have an account, a bank account. Actually, that's not true. You can use credit cards, you can use gift cards, you can use prepaid cards to buy crypto. So if you don't have a bank account, you at least go to the store and get a prepaid card and buy your crypto that way. Now there's something that I understand that when you buy crypto, there are fees involved. So take that in account. Just because you buy, let's say $100 worth of crypto, it doesn't mean you're getting $100. Typically getting anywhere between $90 to $80 to $90 worth depending on the fluctuation of the transaction fees. But let's say you can't buy crypto. There are projects that do give away crypto for free. Those cryptos aren't worth as much, but they are creating its own financial ecosystem. So you have access to a financial system. You can also ask people to just transfer crypto to you if they're willing to say, hey, can I borrow some crypto or can you just donate some? Now I have been advising a lot of nonprofits to accept crypto donations. They shouldn't be leaving money on the table. They should accept all donations. And so if a business is accepting crypto, how do I spend the crypto? Well, let's say for PayPal, for example, if there was actually a button that says pay with crypto. And what you do is when you say you wanna buy this with crypto, you go into your wallet, which has a public key versus a private key. The public key is for transferring, or no, the public key is for like, let's say somebody wants to transfer money to you, you can give them a public key. So if PayPal would have their own public key, I can transfer the money too. So I would insert the public key, say this is how much I wanna send to this public address, and that's how it's sent. Now your private key, it's used for other things. Like if I want to send money elsewhere, in order to verify that transaction, I have to be able to verify that I am the owner of the private key to send gobs of money between wallets and so on and so forth. But to receive crypto, that's based on public keys. Thank you. And then how do you see blockchain expanding into markets like healthcare or other verticals, given that they create a distributed secure ledger? Oh, I think it's a great use. The only reason they haven't been adopted right now is because of, first of all, the speed I mentioned of how blockchain transactions proceed and also the energy costs around blockchain. So once those two things are solved, you're gonna see mass adoption. It'll be probably the most secure way for your data to be secured. And that's really important with healthcare data, for example, or even like password data or any type of financial data, anything like that. So hopefully we can get over the energy hump and the transaction speed hump to see mass adoption. I hear the question, can you speak to crypto funds? Is there a mutual or an index fund for crypto? And there are pros and cons. Yeah, well, if you go on the stock market, there's already funds, people, mutual funds investing in cryptos, you can take part in those. You're not actually buying cryptocurrencies just so you understand you're investing in the fund. So you have to trust the fund. There are ETFs and stuff like that being created. So just remember that when you take part in ETFs and all that stuff, again, you're not buying the coin itself. You're trusting these people that are buying the coins themselves to be custodians of that transaction and you're basing your speculation on the fund itself, not the crypto. Okay, now I'm jumping around a little bit here. This is interesting. How does the cryptocurrency like chia function based on proof of space instead of proof of work or stake? I hope I read that correctly. Yeah, I kind of alluded to proof of time and space. So proof of work works on the combination of power of one computer. Proof of stake is based on the pool of ownership of your stake in the entire crypto pool. Proof of space is based on how much space you have on your hard drive that can be dedicated to mining the crypto. So if you have a lot of space, you have more priority in terms of your priority to get the reward out of mining the block. It's kind of like proof of stake just with space on your hard drive, I suppose. It's a little bit more complex than that, but that's what it is in much no. People would like you to talk about Dogecoin. Do you have thoughts about Dogecoin? Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about Dogecoin. So Dogecoin is what's called a meme coin and it's based on nothing. The person who created Dogecoin had no intention behind the blockchain behind Dogecoin being used for anything. He just created it for the sake of creating it. So people who are speculating on Dogecoin are only doing it because right now it's the thing to do because Elon Musk was tweeting left and right about it. And so suddenly it just blew up when Elon said, invest in Dogecoin. And then recently on SNL, I think it was SNL, Elon said Dogecoin is a hustle. And then we saw Dogecoin plummet in value. So again, it's just there for the sake of being there. If you want to gamble like pure gambling, get in it. I don't do it because it's just silly to me. In the long term, my opinion is that you're just going to lose all your money. A couple of questions about PayPal's involvement. PayPal's offering to sell you crypto and hold it for you. Is this a good idea? What do you think about PayPal? I mean, I think it's great that PayPal accepts crypto for purchasing stuff. I think it's awesome. I think there's also other places that are something to adopt crypto payments. So that's beautiful. Whether or not you should buy crypto through PayPal, I would not trust. Again, that's custodial. And that is the least secure way of holding your crypto. I don't know. I have to do more research on this because I don't use PayPal for buying crypto. So I don't know if you can actually transfer out of PayPal. I think when they first started doing that, I read that you could not transfer to a wallet. So it had to be held with PayPal. I'm not going to personally do that. Because again, like I said, that's the least secure way. It's custodial wallet. If you're going to buy crypto, look into the exchanges because you can easily transfer to a wallet from the exchange after doing that. Thank you. And how do you think all this is likely to affect real currency? Or I should say traditional currency? I don't know. I can speculate. I'm not a financial expert and I'm not an economist. I think digital currencies are the way of the future. Maybe not the immediate future because you're seeing a lot of pushback. Governments have put in a lot of time in maintaining their fiat currency. Like is the US just suddenly going to give up their dollar? No. But they might consider creating digital versions of the US dollar that run on blockchain. In fact, I know they're thinking about that. China just rolled out their first digital point. So it's happening guys, everybody. It doesn't mean that the value of like the US dollar or the Chinese Yuan is going to go down just because they're starting to create digital currency. In fact, what they're doing is by creating these digital currencies that are run by governments, guess what? There's a central authority. It's not a decentralized currency. So they're going to attempt to try to create the own digital currencies, which will tie into the current value of their physical currency. So whether or not the two ecosystems will affect each other's valuations, only time will tell. I can only speculate. I think if the global population decides fiat currency sucks, banks suck, we're all going to live in the cryptocurrency world and yeah, you're going to see upheaval in the financial markets. But I think it's going to happen slowly. I don't think it's going to be like an overnight switch. So governments will have time to kind of react and figure out what they want to do with this. All right, as a librarian, I love this question. Is there a book you recommend to understand cryptocurrency more? I'll top my head, sorry, no. I learned everything I know by just getting involved in the cryptocurrency world. Like I mentioned, I'm trying to create my own crypto wallet for NFTs. To create something like that, I've had to do a lot of research on the side and try to understand what's going on at the technological level. I didn't do that through books. A lot of it is through, like my partner works at a cryptocurrency company. So he's very knowledgeable and he's taught me a lot about this. I'm sure there are books out there. If I find out, I'll send you guys books. Okay, thank you. And then how, back to sort of technical questions, how would someone transfer crypto from a custodial wallet to a non-custodial wallet? Oh, very easy. So you go, let's say you buy crypto through Coinbase, which is the custodial exchange. To transfer to your wallet, you just give them the public key, like I mentioned. And then you enter that key and then the transfer takes place. You pay a transfer fee and there is like a period of time. It's not instantaneous. Usually the fee scales with how long you would like the transfer take place. So like, let's say you want the transfer take place within an hour. The fee is going to be higher where you can set it to 24 hours. Sometimes you even see people do like a week because they just don't want to pay the least amount of transfer fees. But it's very easy to do. Just enter your public addresses and it's easily transferred. Thank you. And then I think a lot of people with the understanding that you are not making recommendations for purchase, a lot of people would understand how you decided what crypto you wanted to hold and what were some of the factors that you evaluated. I'm always looking at the underlying technology. Like for example, we talked about those coins, for example, it literally serves no purpose. So I'm not getting into it. It's a short-term fun coin to get into. There is money to be made, but because I've seen no future for the technology itself, I completely just ignore it. Now I look at something like Cardano, for example, the coin is called ADA ADA because I believe that Ethereum is awesome and I actually do own some Ethereum, but I believe there's always room for competition. We live in the free market, and Cardano is positioning itself to be an Ethereum competitor. Now if it becomes the number two or the primary competitor to Ethereum, there's a strong case for the rise in value of ADA, ADA, the coin. And also I think the technology is solid because the person who created Cardano, technology is one of the co-founders of Ethereum. He left Ethereum to create Cardano. So I do a lot of research in terms of the technology itself, whether or not I believe in it, and that's why I get into it. In the beginning, I bought some Bitcoin and some other stuff. I was kind of naive and just kind of getting into it because people told me to do it, but the more I look into Bitcoin, I don't think it makes sense for me to get into it right now, even though Bitcoin will probably hit 100,000, maybe even 500,000 in the future, but I think the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin is gonna become ancient compared to like Ethereum or Cardano and all these newer technologies coming out. So I look at the technology. Thank you. And then what happens if the people or the platform with the company behind your crypto just folds? Well, that would suck. I mean, it would basically fold the coins that I'm invested in because the technology is not running and the coin is based on technology, it's worthless. So that could happen. I mean, there's always risk in any type of investiture into these type of things. So you have to really believe in the company. Like before I invested in Cardano, I had really looked at them and was like, do they have staying power? Do I really, really believe in them versus like, let's say like some random company like Neo or something like that where I don't really understand the technology. Do I think there will be mass adoption at scale with Cardano? I believe that. So I am investing in it. On the flip side, Cardano could just go out of business. They could just say, this is not gonna work. And yeah, all my money's gone. It's just worth nothing. So that could happen. But if you stay on top of it, they should be able to get out. If you feel like a company is about to go under, they should be able to get out. Thank you. Does the SEC have any involvement in cryptocurrency markets? Yeah, of course. They're trying to crack down on all sorts of stuff. Weird things going on in the crypto markets. You probably heard of ICOs, initial coin offerings. There was a lot of scans that happened and not too long ago around ICOs. You got all these startups all of a sudden creating their own coins to raise money illegitimately instead of going through traditional investors and stuff like that. So ICOs were the way to do that. And ICOs are used for money laundering and stuff like that. So you have to be careful with that. So the SEC caught wind of this and they started cracking down on ICOs to make sure that the legitimate and that they follow true investment structures. And I personally think that's a good thing. It shouldn't just be that big of free for all. It's too dangerous for the public if they're not educated or not. So the SEC is always gonna look at weird things like that. I wouldn't ever count them out. Thank you. I want to acknowledge that I know we are over time and Ebb is currently staying a few minutes extra to answer some more of these very good questions. I think that people might like to hear the name of a couple of crypto exchanges. This is the biggest one. They actually recently went public with their stock. Gemini is the one I use because I think for me, at least I've noticed they have the lowest transfer fees. And then there's Binance. Binance is a little bit of a pain to deal with, but those three are the major exchanges. There are a bunch of other sub exchanges. I haven't explored them because I just don't feel like they're secure or worth knowing about. So I recommend just dealing with these three primary exchanges. Okay, great. Thank you. And then lots of technical questions. Like what, we sort of talked about the pros and cons of custodial wallets, but are there any that you would recommend or that you think are better than others? Well, first of all, yeah, I recommend non-custodial wallets. I do not recommend holding them at your exchange. Again, like I said, it depends on what coin you want to get into. I guess if you're concentrating on Bitcoin or Ethereum, the two major ones, every single wallet supports them. Most wallets are functionally the same. They might just have better design or UI design. So you can go to the app store and click around. There's like BitPay. There's, oh man, I could just go on with this. There's BRD. That's one of the first wallets. Coinbase has their own wallet, which is not the exchange, but it actually a non-custodial wallet. There's Lumi. I use that for my sand coin. There's Yoroi. I use that specifically for Cardano. In fact, Yoroi was just made for Cardano as a wallet. For the cold wallets, there's Ledger and Trezor. Those are the hardware wallets. So those are the main players. I highly recommend looking to Ledger and Trezor if you're going to buy a ton of crypto. You want to hold them in cold wallets. They're the most secure. Okay. I think we kind of did it. I apologize if I did not get to your question, you guys, but we did cover an awful lot of this. Thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight to go over all this. It's an exciting and interesting world. Yes, it is. It's crazy.