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What's up, everybody? Merry Christmas. I hope you're all surprised. This is my Christmas present to you. I decided to do an episode, a little recording here for on Christmas Day. I know we're supposed to say Happy Holidays in the United States and normally I do do that, but it is Christmas Day, so I think I can get away with saying Merry Christmas. So I hope you're all having a Merry Christmas and a Happy Christmas morning. So we don't have a guest for today and likely won't for New Year's Day, which is the next Monday. It happens to be that both of our episodes and dates are falling on holidays. And so I'm probably going to release, if I release anything, I'll release something similar next week. But I'll make a good point for it to be good because I'm actually going to be away for the week and I'll have a studio at my disposal that I'll be able to record at, hopefully stress free. It's been a very intense week. For those of you who don't know Mike Maloney, who is the founder of Gold Silver and has created a bunch of really successful documentaries, some of which have had millions of views. I was actually in his second of the Hidden Secrets of Money series years ago, and in fact it was during the time and some of you know, I had a brain tumor and I had developed symptoms of dementia in 2013 as a result of that tumor without knowing that I really had dementia other than I was exhibiting symptoms. And I had dementia when we did the documentary, unbeknownst to me. But I seemed totally fine. Apparently I didn't have dementia this time though, and he interviewed me. In fact, Mike came to New York for the Hashgraph panel that all of you heard in the audio of the podcast and some of you hopefully, many of you hopefully watched on YouTube, whether you saw it on the Hidden Forces channel or the Assemblage channel, which now has, I think, close to, or actually over 20,000 views. I'm recording this right now on a Wednesday. So I invited Mike to New York City to come to the Hashgraph panel event because I had become. He had heard my episode with Lehman Baird and he got excited and I was excited as well. And I remain excited, of course, about this technology and about hashgraph. And I invited him to come to New York and he was there at the event and he got increasingly excited with the panel. I will say this also, and I'm going to mention this a number of times, I think people who haven't seen that panel need to see it. I think in some ways it's the most important piece of content that I've released on hashgraph. In particular, about after 38 minutes in, for at least 20 minutes or so, possibly more, we get into the distinction between permissioned and non permissioned and questions of governance. These are really relevant and I think they're particularly relevant and they're going to be particularly relevant in the days and weeks to come, given the amount of attention that Mike Maloney's documentary has already gotten. Last time I checked, I think we were near 150,000 views and it's only been out for 48 hours. I think one of the. The big questions and the question of course I had on the panel is, or not so much a question, because I was aware of what the founding team had to say on this at the time because they were only doing permissioned ledgers. But really the distinction between permissioned and non permissioned ledgers, the distinction between private and public ledgers and networks, how do you secure the nodes and how do you basically maintain or get close to the same types of throughput and security performance measures on a public ledger as you would on a private ledger? I think some of those answers are implied in that panel. If you can read between the lines. I know the team mentioned in a few weeks that they would have more information. I think it's important to note and you'll get this. Also, for those of you that listen to my video interview or watch my second video interview with Leemon Baird, we talked about this again about the challenges of building a public ledger. I want everyone to take a step back. I want everyone to think about how enormous this challenge is of building a solution to scale globally or for the planet, basically, which is what a public ledger would be. As far as I'm not here to endorse anyone, but I've taken this team to be a very serious team from the beginning. Anyone that meets Lehman is impressed and they're impressed for good reason. The same is to do with Mance. My coverage of this technology from the beginning has always been one of curiosity and excitement. Why is that? I also want to mention why is that most of you know this, but I want to repeat it, especially for new listeners, because we have gotten a bunch of subscribers after Mike Maloney's episode came out. I've devoted a tremendous amount of time talking about our technological future. What is the world that we want to inhabit? What is the world that we want to build, that we want to live in? What is the goal of the engineer. What do we want? And what is the future that we're building? I've done it with Jeffrey Rosen in our Constitutional Law episode. I've done it with John Borthwick. I've done it with Mark C. Taylor from all different angles, whether we're talking philosophically, whether we're talking about the law, whether we're talking about the brain, whether we're talking about our artificial intelligence. For me, the really big question here is, can we build a distributed future so that we can maintain our autonomy and freedom in the digital age? For me, this has never been a conversation about cryptocurrencies. Anyone that's been listening to the show knows that I don't talk about crypto. I don't even know if I use that word. I almost find it sort of like I get a gagging reflex when I hear it, to be honest with you, because of the mania around it. And I think the mania around cryptocurrencies concerns me in this conversation because I don't want our coverage of hashgraph to be conflated with the larger crypto community. I have my own thoughts about Bitcoin and blockchain technology, but they aren't. They aren't contingent on hashgraph. It's not like I think that, oh, hashgraph is coming along and they're going to displace blockchain, and that's the new big crypto. Let's bet on that. And I'm the man because I saw Hashgraph. That's not what this is about. Hashgraph is a fascinating, exciting technology, and the conversations we've had with Lehman in particular, but the panel as well, on the consensus protocol and the gossip protocol and the gossip about gossip, the hashgraph, the virtual voting, the consensus, that is exciting. And for any of us who are concerned about consensus and concerned about distributed networks, distributed societies distributing the data layer, those of us who are concerned about these things and the issues that I talk about on Hidden Forces should take notice of hashgraph, because there is a huge promise there. No one here is telling, least of me. No one is saying that that's it. They're out. There's a public ledger, and they've done it. Okay, but like I said this in a previous episode, I don't know if they're the ones that are. If they're the DLT of the future, but they're the ones that have gotten me excited, and I still stick by that. I'm actually happy to talk, and I will. Actually, I should make a point I'll make a note here. This is completely impromptu. I assume all of you can figure that out. I should make a point that I do want to talk about Bitcoin, actually, before I get over this podcast today. And I want to talk about also the futures market and the futures exchange and the CBOE and the CME and sort of what I think about that without ruffling any feathers. But yeah, I wanted to say that out front that those of you who have not seen Mike Maloney's documentary, please do. It's really cool. He's obviously very excited about Hashgraph. He's a passionate guy. I've known Mike for a long time and he's been very excited. He's no dummy. That said, that's Mike's viewpoint and he does interview me there and I'm very enthusiastic as well. I know that many people who saw that documentary and many who will still see it will have a few questions, two that I've seen asked consistently and they're great questions and they're very relevant. Why is this patented? What does that mean? That it's currently patented. Currently the technology is being deployed in permission settings, so that shouldn't alarm anyone. Also, I think again, let's hold off, let's hold off on freaking out about what that means that the technology is patented. Until we get further information about it, there's no reason to go crazy. And I think that also feeds into the question of governance. And I have my suspicions about this, my ideas about why this matters. I don't think, personally speaking, I don't think there's anything crazy at all about creating a brand new technology, even if it is a game changing technology that needs to scale, let's say, in a non patented open source way. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a patent on it, at least initially. But then again, I think that this is such a complicated process and in fact that's sort of. So here's my honest opinion on this, having spoken to Lehman a couple of times. What I think the Hashgraph team is grappling with internally is how to deploy this technology, this really remarkable consensus protocol that could be game changing, how to deploy it in a non permissioned way or for non permissioned use cases as we think of them in a manner that will be successful. Because I think unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, these guys have the opportunity to learn from his mistakes, from what he's done well and what he could have done better. That's not a knock on him and his game Changing blockchain protocol. It's just simply a recognition that this is an opportunity to see what's worked, what hasn't worked as well. I just know, like many of you know, governance has been a huge issue in the blockchain community and Leemon has talked about it in our interviews and Mance has mentioned it on the panel. And I can surmise from those conversations like anyone else that that's sort of central in their thinking. How do we manage proper governance? The patent is a great question that sort of, I think dovetails to another question that people ask which is basically okay, you have all these great results that you're claiming on a permissioned networks, but Bitcoin and Ethereum, these operate in non permissioned networks and they use proof of work in order to secure the nodes, in order to scale these networks. We're talking about alternative solutions like proof of stake or lightning network and off chain transactions and all stuff. And yes, absolutely correct, 100% these are proposed solutions to the problem of scale in distributed networks, specifically blockchain. And none of these solutions are proven and hashgraph isn't proven either. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But once again this is about, let's separate from the craze and the mania and the hype around cryptocurrencies and the desire to make money and the FOMO and the greed and all these different acronyms that people come up with and let's just focus on what the big opportunity here is, which is a distributed future, a future where we can manage to have our digital lives which are becoming increasingly digital and even our analog existence is influenced by this. The notion of online and offline is becoming increasingly antiquated and anachronistic. But how do we have this existence without doing this on a server that's controlled by one entity? This is really a huge challenge. Blockchain has shown us an opportunity, but it's an opportunity that hasn't been able to scale. And Hashgraph may be able to solve that and I'm very hopeful, but I don't think it's going to be some magic bullet. I think it's going to be a process. I think what we may end up seeing with them is that when they do announce this, that again it won't be just some clear cut solution but it'll be a path towards it. But I'm not sure, I'm not Lehman Baird. That's why we've been covering it and we've been first to cover it. I don't know anyone Else that covered hashgraph before us. Not only did we cover it, I did an interview with Lehman and then we did a panel in New York in early October and then again an interview, video interview with Lehman which has been fantastic. The focus there has really been on these shared worlds and distributed future. He's a really compelling guy and a very exciting guy. I highly recommend you all listen to those. Let's talk a little bit about what's been going on in Bitcoin these days because I think that's part of the craze. Again, I'm recording this on a Wednesday, December 20th. The futures market, the CBOE started trading last Monday. It's actually not pronounced cboe. They call it CBOE or something, but I hate that terminology. CME was this Monday and there's been a lot of price action. I was actually hoping to have someone on today to discuss this, someone from Wall street, but we weren't able to actually make that work. We won't get into the details of it, but I want to express basically my concerns around the futures market once again, just to make it very clear. Just because I have concerns about this doesn't mean that I'm poo pooing it or saying it's an evil thing or just I'm just coming because that's my area of thinking, which is I find it somewhat ironic. And this is where I want to speak about my lack of enthusiasm for Bitcoin specifically. We'll probably just stick with Bitcoin for now because that has been the very successful implementation of a cryptocurrency. But I think there's something deeply ironic about a cash settled because that's what we have with the CME and the cboe. These are cash settled futures. I even have a problem when I say problem. I even see an irony around gold cash settled futures. Not that I don't understand why Gold is a physical commodity. It's very difficult to settle in physical. And you have cash settled futures because it's convenient and it makes sense. I do see a value to that because of the nature of gold. But at the same time I think gold as a value proposition, beyond the industrial use of it is a value proposition exactly because it is an asset that sits outside the financials system and is a hedge against credit risk and financial system risk on a system wide basis. That's partly what drives gold's price at different times. And if that's why you're buying gold, then you should buy physical gold. Buying futures contracts that settle in cash wouldn't make sense in my view. But again, I see the value for that with gold because it's physical. It's a physical thing. But I don't see that with Bitcoin. Why do I not see that with Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin is supposed to be supposedly digital money. I know the debate around whether it's money has actually departed a long time ago. Many people are no longer of the opinion that it's money, but still see value in it. And I see that as well, which is why we had a conversation with Gil Luria on the show, the sell side analyst, and we asked the question of what is Bitcoin? How do you value it? Is it money? Is it an asset? Is it a commodity? In many ways it is very much like a commodity. I think it's ironic that you have a cryptographic asset, a digital asset that in order to be secure is extremely difficult to transact in. In fact, because of the difficulty of the transactions, not only do you end up having futures exchanges set up that are cash settled to trade it. Some of that I'm sure is for hedging, but a lot of that's for speculation. I don't know how much of it is which. But also at the same time you have these exchanges. And this brings us to these hacks that we've seen other exchanges, which is that the process to secure Bitcoin, to make it secure is so cumbersome and the using it is so cumbersome that in order to actually do it, many people just go ahead and store their currency on exchanges. You'd think people would have learned this lesson from Mount Gox. But it's ironic that you take this really cryptographically secure asset and you store it on a less secure platform, on a less secure server. I'm sure I'm not the only person that's thought of the irony of this. This makes me just further makes me question really what is the value, the underlying value? Obviously there's a huge speculative premium here. There's a giant mania. And I think the fact that I've never bought a bitcoin in some ways really protects me from having to be fed by the bias of wanting to see this asset rise in price. And I'm perfectly happy with anyone making tons of money off of it. Don't get me wrong, I haven't hated on anyone for making money in bitcoin. That's great. If you take a risk for something, you should do it. The price of Bitcoin has driven the market. But anyway, there's so many things. Also the proof of work, the massive consumption of energy, the fact that the consumption of energy rises with a rising price. If I had to bet one way or the other, I would not be in this market. I don't know what that means in terms of the time function here and how long that's going to take before we see any kind of downdraft in the market. For many reasons you would expect that. But yeah, those are just some of my sort of negative views on bitcoin and I hope no one hates me for saying that because I'm not looking for that. Then blockchain in general is what we've talked about before, which is just the inherent nature of the blockchain and its limitations. And the proposed solutions like the lightning network that require off chain transactions present a number of other security issues. I think that brings us back to the larger issue which is that these are very complicated attempts to solve maybe the biggest problem we have in front of us. Because as exciting as AI is, and that's a catch all term, as exciting as virtual reality is or augmented reality or advancements that are happening with voice recognition and mobile and everything else, those are all incredible amazing technologies. But if we can't secure where we have our experiences and how we have them, then. And I don't really want to be on any of this technology and in some ways, unfortunately I wouldn't really have that choice because how am I going to survive in this world if I'm not actually using the technology that increasingly the world and people are interacting on? That was my long winded soliloquy on hashgraph, on bitcoin, on blockchain, on the exchanges, on the futures market. I also plan to bring someone who I've met here in New York City I really like. I met him also at a crypto working group that I'm part of who is a tax accountant who has actually taken the time on his own to learn the tax implications of profiting in bitcoin and how to report those. Because that is serious people. You don't want to just make money, you want to keep it and not go to jail. I think that's a very practical conversation to have and I look forward to bringing that to you. We have to just schedule a time to do that. That's it. People look out for something. On New Year's Day I will have a studio and I'll probably record something on my own and I'll do something probably similar. Maybe I'll put some more thought in it and hopefully I'll be more rest it because it has been a long series of weeks for me and hidden forces here. So with that, have a Merry Christmas. If you want to celebrate Christmas, enjoy the day off and enjoy the rest of your week and thanks for listening.