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On The Chain - Blockchain and Cryptocurrency News + Opinion
You’re ONE MISTAKE From Losing Your Crypto - Here’s How to Protect It
01:32:29
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to on the Chain. This is Jeff here with co host Chip. What is going on, Chip? What's going on? Everybody out there in the on the Chain community? Today we have a special guest and we're looking forward to getting into this. Why? Because every one of you, every one of us is one mistake away from losing all of your crypto and we're going to get into how to protect it. Today's guest is Chris Dangerfield and he has spent more than 30 years as a software engineer, entrepreneur and and technical leader. For the past nine years he's dedicated himself to xrp. That's right, you guys heard it here first. XRP building tools, educating developers and helping shape the ecosystem. He's the co author of the XRPL firewall proposal. So we're talking about, you know, big stuff here. A draft amendment designed to let account holders block wallet draining attacks before they actually happen. I love this.
- [00:55]
B
Yeah. And Jeff, he's also contributed to standards discussion, spoken publicly on security and the future of digital asset protection. And what really sets him apart from many of these so called self proclaimed crypto experts, it's a combination of expertise and consistency. He's also spent decades building systems where security is not optional. And most recently he's brought that same discipline to XRP. Specifically. His track record is public. Real contributions that you can verify for yourself. So with that being said, ready to get into it? Let's go.
- [01:29]
A
Let's go.
- [01:33]
B
Welcome to on the Chain. Jeff, do you have the drum roll ready? Let's do this big. Let's do get the drum roll ready. Let's bring in none other than I admired for a long time and finally getting a chance to have that conversation, but none other. Are you ready for it? Chris Dangerfield. Chris, welcome to on the Chain. Great to have you here.
- [01:57]
C
Brilliant. I'm really pleased to be here. What an introduction.
- [02:02]
B
Well, there you go. I mean you're the man, the myth, the legend and I can say personally somebody that I followed for a long time. So getting you on the, on the podcast is, is really great for both of us because you know, you've done a lot and of course I followed you through a lot of the projects that you've worked on. A lot of things in the, that in and around xrp, not only some of the books you've authored and you've really been this sort of voice for, for I would say authenticity and factual information separating yourself from the pack on that side as well. So great to have you here. I thought maybe what we do is Maybe get into it. And so you're coming to us from outside the US today?
- [02:39]
C
Yes, over the pond.
- [02:41]
B
Over the pond. So it's a, it's a lunch time over there for you, I guess, right, Right, Yeah, yeah. So I think we're four hours difference for a bit because you guys haven't
- [02:49]
C
done that clock change yet. We've got, yeah, usually a five hour and when you gave me the date I'm like, oh, I'm gonna make sure I don't miss it.
- [02:58]
B
Yeah, well I, I, I, I remember this period well because you know, I had a startup and two of my co founders were in the UK and there was that period of time we're like only four hours difference but it doesn't last long. I always remember that it wasn't just for a little bit, but, but maybe talk a little bit about some of the things you've done, you know, some of the most notable things. You've been in the community for some time, 10 years. So talk about some of the changes that, you know, when you first got into it and started hearing about XRP to kind of like the evolution of where we are today. What would be some of those sort of notable changes that you've witnessed?
- [03:32]
C
Well, as a developer my, my track is always going to lean to that development side of it and, and what I, what I can say for certain is that the developer tooling and the developer support has grown significantly during the time that I've been involved. I remember when I first heard of XRP and I kind of got introduced to it, one of my first things were to go and look at the GitHub repo and go and read some of the Ripple D code. And I did. And then I was like, well, how do I even use this? Because as well as being a developer more also very entrepreneurial, I built many different projects and companies this of my own as well as working for lots of other entities as well. And so my, my thesis for do I want to put my money into XRP as a speculative investment as everybody does, was more based on what I could actually use this technology for and could I see value in, in being able to use it as a tech stack rather than waiting for some other entity to make the price go up? So can I actually use this tech? And so when I started looking into it to see what I could build, it was very clear there was a lot of potential, but there wasn't a very clear roadmap for a developer to actually get started. It was actually way more difficult than it probably should have been. And my initial experience of the example was not particularly very good. Documentation was very much average. There was very few resources available. There wasn't much of a developer community at that time. There was a small pockets dotted around and over the last 10 years or so I've seen that mature now into an ecosystem that's got proper solid documentation, lots of different resources available, some of them of which are mine. And of course there is now a much bigger developer community and you know, thanks to the efforts of sort of like other OG developers in the ecosystem, like WI for example, have helped to create little small communities where the developers congregate and have conversations just about the core development side. So I think the biggest thing I've noticed over the the like I say the almost decade I've been involved is just the development of that sort of like developer infrastructure.
- [05:53]
A
Let's take a kind of a step back and get into the point when you found the xrpl. How did, how did you come across the XRPL and were you kind of already into crypto, into the blockchain use, you know, somehow involved in or using Bitcoin in some way? Was that your first entry point or did. Was xr. How did XRPL come into your life?
- [06:17]
C
They came into it, came into my life a result of a phone call and I'd heard of bitcoin at this point. So bearing in mind it's 2016, but I heard about Bitcoin in I think 201112 time frame. I remember reading about it in a magazine called the New Scientist, I think talking about. So we're literally at the point, when I read about it, it's, it's white paper talk, right? You know, bitcoins are thrown around like, you know, suites. So you want some bitcoins There you go. And I read the article and like everybody back then, I'm like that sounds quite interesting but actually I'm in the middle of building another project for something else. I've got far too much on my mind to give any air time in or my brain power to reading it and learning more about it. And so it remained in my mind as just some kind of like cool thing that attacks Interesting. And I think that I'd occasionally I'd see little bits and pieces pop up about it, but nothing was really happening particularly. And then I remember seeing something about the big Mt. Gox hack and stuff and so much negativity around Bitcoin at that point in time when the prices crashed, all that kind of stuff and like everybody that didn't know anything about it at the time, I just got sucked into this belief that that's just exam and yeah, and again it just was like chuck it to the back of the brain and when I've got some time, I might think about it then. And then you Fast forward to 2016, I get a phone call. Have you ever heard of bitcoin? Yeah, I've heard of bitcoin, yeah. What, what is it? Well, have you ever heard of this new one called xrp? Because it's better than bitcoin. And then I got given a spiel about it all and all this kind of stuff and they sold me on the idea very much Ripple heavy back in 2016. It's all about what Ripple are doing and how Ripple are going to use it. And then I. Okay, I'll have a look. So I went on Ripple's website, read a little bit about it, found some, some basic information about the xrpl and I just kind of like started researching it and I thought it was cool. And it just happened to be lucky enough that it was a point in my life where I had a little bit more time. So I had, I had the time to do a few hours reading here and there and over a period of maybe nine months to a year, I slowly started to just get more and more and more sucked in. And I started, like I explained, I looked at the repo, I looked at some of the, you know, the content that been written, the blogs. There was not much on YouTube at all. There was about two or three people talking about XRP back then. I used to watch their videos as well that were pretty useful and I just naturally moved very slowly. So from around October 2016 when I had that call to my first purchase of XRP, which would have been in around April of 2017. So unfortunately for me, if I'd have just done what most people did and just bought a bunch when it was at half a cent as opposed to waiting until April when I had to pay 15 cents for it. Yeah, very much be sitting pretty now. But I didn't. And I waited. And being the cautious person I am, I did the due diligence and made the decision that I am going to make a small investment into this stuff. And when I did that and I realized I'd now got some skin in the game, it became, well, I don't just want to, I'm not just going to sit back, hold this asset and wait for someone else to make me rich. The best thing I can do is actually use it and try and make some use of this technology. And that's where my sort of journey into the development sort of began. Really.
- [09:59]
B
Boy, how about you exercise logic and reason there?
- [10:03]
A
That's a. There were no dancing bears or riddlers. I, I didn't hear any of that.
- [10:09]
C
Well, no, the thing is, I predate all of the, all of the riddlers and all of the bears and all that kind of stuff that all kind of came out sort of like towards the end of 1718. But, but you got to bear in mind though, I'm a lot more like mature now than I was in like the 201718 time period. I was just as XRP was going to the moon like everybody else at that time. When this crazy bear comes on the scene and he's doing all these predictions, I'm like, well, we're gonna be rich, you know, and then that bear cost me a fortune. Because the thing is, I was holding a decent chunk from 2017 in April I could have sold it all at $3, no more, six months later. And I would have been very happy with that. And unfortunately, because of that bloody bear, I kept it and it went down to 15 cents. And I know, right? It rode it all the way from 15 cents all the way in its journey. And I haven't realistically done a whole lot with it since. I just sit on it and you know, my thesis has always been the technology is there to be used and to be built on. The coin is the mechanism to make the network work. So yeah, my goal is make money out of actually building stuff people want to use.
- [11:25]
B
But Jeff, imagine this. Imagine listening to somebody say I was late to the game because I didn't buy it at a half cent but I bought in at 15. Right? That's like, that's incredible because most people would be like, oh God, I would have killed for that opportunity to buy at 15. I remember, you know, probably buying it like 17 to 19 cents and then, you know, dollar cost averaging all the way up. But my gosh, it was stuck at 40 to 50 cents forever in a day. 50, 60 cents. You got there for the write up and I believe that was 2018 when Bitcoin had its first pretty, you know, accelerated sort of climb. But how amazing to hear this story and the fact that you did something which you would think most people would be in the mindset of like, hey, how can I affect this? Or what, what, what can I contribute that can help, you know, as a developer. Not everyone's a developer, but As a developer jumping in and saying, hey, let me figure out what, what can I do to sort of, you know, to kind of take part in this whole thing. So I think that's a really interesting sort of a mindset and I honestly wish that more people had that mindset other than Hodling, because there's so many great projects going on in and around the xrpl, you know, that many people just kind of breeze on by. They don't necessarily even take any time to look at it. Right? So that's something. See that right there? There's my list. There's my stuffed plushie of the bear, of my bear. You know, it's, it's a great little thing. I mean it's a, it's a fun little. But that's because I like to poke fun at it. But I always tell people I got an extra peeling because some bear told me that that'll be a good idea, you know, and then there was that, there's the Riddler and all that.
- [13:04]
A
The riddles or everything Chip at that time, you know, I find it, I find it so interesting that that period, the bulk of the people that get involved, it was all around that time, you know, initially. What was your first entry point, Chris? Was it bit stamp? Was that your, your first entry point to xrp? Because I think that was probably the easiest on ramp, wasn't it, back then?
- [13:27]
C
No, actually my first ever was oh
- [13:30]
B
gosh, it wasn't easy. I know that.
- [13:33]
A
It was not.
- [13:34]
C
It wasn't even a proper platform. It was one of those like, it was more like a share trading platform that got a bit of crypto. I can't remember the name of it now. And I didn't, like I said, literally I bought a small amount of it to try it. And then I realized after doing all the reading on how do I get this in my wallet and it's like, oh well, you can't because it wasn't really a crypto. So I realized what I'd done and then I had to basically go and sell it and then I moved on and I think I. Over in that time frame I think I was, I was using bit stamp point at one, one point. I was using Gate Hub for a while. Those were kind of the two main XRP exchanges in, in kind of like my area of the world, right? And you know, there was a great, great arbitrage opportunity back then. I used to sort of like trade between the two exchanges sometimes the, the drift could be 5, 10% just by moving XRP from one exchange and then selling it on another for, you know, for a few, a few weeks till some YouTuber went on and told the world that they could do it.
- [14:43]
A
And then I was done.
- [14:45]
C
You know, you have this amazing opportunity with 10,000 people and suddenly the opportunity is now gone. Well, well, now we can all make three books.
- [15:00]
A
But you know, it's, it's so interesting. I think back to that period of time, the amount of bitcoin that I purchased and then I exchange it for XRP is, was mind boggling back then. You know, I think about if I would have just kept all my bitcoin instead of converting it into xrp. But I thought that was the thing to do. I'm like, oh, bitcoin's going to, you know, I, I, because I, I got into it, it was like 17 cents at the time. And I remember it rolled up to 24 cents. I'm like, there's something here. And then I start applying day trading techniques to it. I'm like, oh, this is going to destroy me. You know, because of the, and so the, the buy and hold was great. But just like with what you were saying, you know, I got in kind of late 2017. And then I remember October, November, time frame was like super exciting because bitcoin was starting to really boom. And then we got to the end of 17. I'm like, this, there's, this is amazing. You can't not make money, right? It's like anytime you bought bitcoin, the next morning you wake up and it's gone up exponentially. And whatever you bought didn't matter except for XRP just held steady. It was like 24 cents. 27 cents. 24 cents, 27 cents. 20. And then when it rolled up to three, what's he had that. Yeah, exactly. More. It was super stable. The stable coin rides up to $3. I'm like, this is going to the moon. Then the next day, 15 cents. I'm like, all right, just got decimated. This is interesting. There's got to be something to this now. And wrote it and that it. That was such a crazy time.
- [16:34]
B
We have some comments here. Jeff, look at this. Osmond says I needed a phone call in 2011 for Bitcoin. But here's the thing.
- [16:40]
A
That's right.
- [16:41]
B
Some of us got phone calls. Chris talked about the phone call he got right. Or you know, he heard it right. So somebody's excited. They caught a live which is fantastic. We've got Osmond said he bought it when it was 15 cents. Plumbing 30. He bought in between 30 to 75 cents. Keep stacking. Sir John says hello, everybody. And then we've got. Zober says the use case is what got me. That was a lot of people were use case or at least saw that, you know, even back then it was a little bit different when we heard Ripple extensively talking about how, you know, their goal was to replace Swift. I mean, that. And those narratives are still being pedaled when it's really moved on from that. There's so many, so much more that's been going on and, and you know, Ripple itself can't be responsible. People like, well, Ripple put an announcement out. Well, Ripple has a business model. It's a $50 billion fintech right now that's looking after its acquisitions and its institutional clients and looking to build. That's what they're worried about. Ripple needs to take care of Ripple and the shareholders and builders can sort of jump in and, you know, have XRPL be more of, you know, where people are building. Is that, is that what you would tend to sort of agree with, Chris, is that there's, there has to be a use case. Look at Ethereum. Look at all the builders flocked to Ethereum, right? I mean, I, I'm not saying that's why the price went up, but surely that's where everybody ran because of the smart contracts and the ability on the builder side.
- [18:09]
C
Yeah, well, Ethereum ran up and, and got its name really, as a result of the ICO craze in 2017. That's what that, it's still running off of that momentum now because off the back of that momentum, it then bought in people to naturally build in that environment because of the sheer numbers that were sort of like going to be involved in the network. So, yeah, I, I agree with you that, you know, Ripple are a company and, and if you don't understand the difference between Ripple and xrp, you should probably not be in this space. You have to understand that, that, you know, Ripple's first priority is always going to be to their shareholders. They have almost like a responsibility to that. And that doesn't mean that when they do good things, it won't potentially have positive impact for the price of xrp. But it's not, it's not a guarantee and there's, and there's not a guarantee that they will always do what's in the best interest of someone that holds xrp. They will always do what's in the best interest of Ripple. And the thing is, anybody that's upset by that really needs to check themsel because as much as we would love it to not be that way, that's the way the world works. Because, you know, JP Morgan and Ripple are basically the same thing. They're just two big companies now, right? And pick any other company, stick some of the AI names in there. They're all just there to build big companies and make effectively money for their shareholders. Ripple are no different. And why we paint in a different way, I don't know. I think that's just a bad narrative. Just be grateful that you have a large entity that's using the technology as part of their stack and hope they're successful. Some of that will rub off on the price of xrp. But sitting and waiting for Ripple to do all the heavy lifting is the wrong play. And that's the thing about this, this entire community that's the most frustrating is people bought XRP however many months or years ago now on the promise that if you buy it, price is going to go up and you're going to make a load of money. And then nobody that told them that also said, but you know, you do need to try and use it a little bit. And I'm not saying that you go and spend all your xrp, but take a small amount, just take a little spice off the top and go and use it out there that, you know, really, really struggle. And if you prepare to go and spend like a couple of dollars a month and, and, and be involved in what they're building or go and support this project by buying something or engaging with them, you know, it's ultimately businesses need customers and you know, if you're not prepared to support those businesses that eventually they're either going to die or they're going to move on to another chain that, where they've got holders that will support them and they'll thrive there instead. And so if all of the reliance you have for the price of XRP is on Ripple, and we've already established that Ripple's first priority is to the shareholder, then you run a bit of a dodgy ground there. The best thing that we can all do is support all, all projects that you think have got a good idea and spend a very small amount of what you've got just right, like half a percent of your bag, just go. Because the thing is you're actually getting a service as well. We're not asking, people aren't asking you to go and give away your money for free. You know, you're, you're supposed to buy whatever they're selling and get a value from it. So find something somebody built that gives you some value and go and interact with them and get involved and then you'll be part of the ecosystem. And then when you, one of the days, some other little small little nothing company with one or two people, a little startup is going to come up with an idea and it'll either catch fire on the XRPL or catch fire somewhere else. Is for it to catch fire somewhere else, it has to catch fire on the xrpl because the best case scenario for any XRP holder is one of 10 large ripple sized companies. Because now you have an ecosystem, right, which is more balanced. The worst thing is having one big massive fish that just controls everything. And so you have to have a scenario where these little small fish have got something to feed on so that they can grow and they can grow their user base. And if you want to go into a vc, one of the first things they're going to ask you for fun if you want funding to grow your business is how many users have you got? And if you're answering we haven't really got any users because XRP holders won't spend $3 in order to support us, then they're going to say, you know, we'll tell you what, this is actually happened to me on a project I was involved in a long time ago. I sat on a call with a VC and they said, we absolutely love this project, but if you're prepared to go and build it over there, we'll support you. But we're not supporting Ledger.
- [23:02]
B
We've heard so much.
- [23:03]
A
It happened to us. Exactly. Chip and I had the exact same story. We were and we were trying to get support from somebody within the XLP development community. And this was maybe early on, but there was no support. They want to direct us to public forums and we can't put our idea out in a public format. And so we built it as far as we could get. We had a great team together. We're shopping it over actually in Europe. We had a partner over there. We had some good entry points into some big corporation. And you know where it side it kind of sidelined the, they're like xrpl, how about if you meet with this other chain and those guys are going to support your project? And so we met with them and they're like, yeah, here you go, here's we'll support you. We love the idea. We're like, yeah, but how do we build what we want on your chain? You know it's not going to work, you know, and you guys are a one component of it. The rest of it doesn't make any sense. And maybe in retrospect we should have tried it, you know, just taking the money and said hey let's try to do it. But we're like hey, we want to be xrpl. And one of, one of the stumbling blocks there has been that support mechanism. You brought it up early on that when you started there were no documentation, no support mechanism. I think the community at large and we should probably segue into security because it's really important but the community at large within XRP there a lot of misinformation that's been spreading unfortunately because of specific youtubers out there that hype and keep hyping up the 589 type mantra versus and also being super super to your point. Ripple, Centric and rip. We talk about Ripple a lot because it's growth within the ecosystem. Here's a project that we can focus on that's building on the XRPL that's making massive changes, changes for crypto, regulatory changes as well and legislation. And that's what Ripple has been like, the spearhead of that, some of the players and so it's really great to focus on them for that development within community. You're 100 spot on. We need more engagement. Zaldo, how come Zaldow isn't at a thousand yet? How come XRP Cafe doesn't have massive momentum from the XRP holders buying NFTs to. Let's see where we can go with the NFT ecosystem. We proved that the NFT ecosystem is a massive marketplace. Not on XRPL but over on Solana and over on the ERC 20s on Ethereum. So Ethereum blew up because they had an open ecosystem. The ERC 20s are smart contracts, first mover advantage. They dabbled and tried and the community there were engaged. They're willing to put their money out there and try stuff. The XRP community there, you know a lot of people that are hodlers, they don't want to part with one XRP and you do that, the ecosystem to your point dies. There's no ecosystem. And so it's really bringing individuals like yourself that are building and getting the voice out there and you wrote a book and you have a course and specifically to help people protect, to protect their investments and, and that's really important, you know and so yeah we'd love to really dig more into this because people are getting crushed also by losing Crypto losing access to crypto and you know it. There, there's so much, there's so much to do here.
- [26:44]
B
Yeah. Before. So I want to take questions. You guys have questions for Chris as things come up as you hear him talk here. But Osman is asking how do you see the future of crypto in the UK with all the regulations and government support etc, because they've had, you know, the FCA's had some pretty strong regulations from. But how do you see the ecosystem as it is and where do you see it going?
- [27:04]
C
Okay, before I answer that, I just want to make one, one quick point just to make absolutely clear that I am not an anti Ripple person because we've had a bit of a battle.
- [27:14]
A
No, no, none of us actually look
- [27:16]
C
Ripple as a company and I even have, well, I thought I had shares in ripple from League 2. I still hope I may one day get them. But I mean, so it's not like I don't have any faith in Ripple as a company. I just think that you have to draw the line and have to understand the neurons RPL and Ripple. And I also think we're doing a disservice. All the people that champion Ripple and XRP as one entity do a disservice to everyone and may do a most disservice to Ripple themselves because we're putting undue pressure on a company that that's not where it belongs. You know, it's decentralized network. If you're going to speculate in a decentralized network, you need to be part of the solution, get involved and make it grow yourself, not sit back and wait for a single entity to do the work. That's the total and utter opposite of decentralization.
- [28:07]
A
Right.
- [28:08]
C
Anyway, to the question with the uk, if I had more hair, I'd be pulling it out. I don't, I don't know. I do like you guys. I love my country and you know, that's a natural instinct for most people, for, you know, for a lot of people wherever they are. So I want to talk too negatively about it, but unfortunately I thought a few years ago the UK were, you know, showing you guys how it should be done. And the problem is in the recent couple of years as a result of changes in government, we appear to just have, have taken a different path. And now it just seems like it feels sometimes to me like somebody infiltrated the government thought was the best way we can get all the rich people to leave the UK and go somewhere else, probably America and everything that's left. So in terms of the, the uk, I think there's, there's big problems, but I think the problems are pretty much all the same across the world. And it boils back down to a lack of understanding of what the technology is really there to be for useful and how to use it. And just, you know, I've had my own personal experiences of where the fca, in my opinion, have protected me too much. You know, the whole point of decentralization and cryptocurrency is that you put some onus of responsibility on the individual and they're trying to force a decentralized system down a centralized set of regulations. And you know, if, if I, if I do something wrong in a decentralized network, that's my responsibility. I don't really almost want a central entity there to protect me because the whole point, point is I'm supposed to have that tradeoff of I want all these amazing benefits, don't take them away from me because you want to force me back down a centralized set of rules. And literally I've had awful problems with one exchange as a result of the new UK legislation changes around all this information giving. You would not believe the amount of things that I've had to give in order to get access back to the small amount of actual funds I've got on this one exchange. Like I've had, I had to prove where my, where the money came from for my purchases, right? And, and I had to go back and try and find documentation for where the money came from over nine years ago. The banks don't even keep statements longer than seven years. So I show money coming in my account. I don't have pay slips and things like that. Going back that length of time, it has been an absolute nightmare. I've had to send all, all manner of proof of identity, proof of funds, and argue the toss that I've now in order basically to get access to my money.
- [31:12]
B
That's crazy.
- [31:13]
C
So, and this is as a result of what legislation does when it is overreaching. And so everybody that's screaming for regulation, I understand why, but if that regulation is not done very thoughtfully and very carefully, we will fast find ourselves in a place where effectively what we're using is a very poor version of a bank, which in my opinion is what a lot of these exchanges are going to become, is a poor version of
- [31:41]
A
a bank rapidly becoming.
- [31:44]
C
And what we want is to go, is to just wind these things back so that the principles of protection so that, you know, you can't be scammed or at least you've given warnings about scams. Are there to have an element of education, protection, but equally not so much that you have to jump through so many hoops that you would never do. And the bottom line is if I wanted to try and onboard a new person into buy say a couple hundred dollars of, of any crypto today to get in an exchange account on this one exchange, then laugh and. But why have I got to do that for? I don't have to do that amount of effort with my bank, let alone this. And then they want to put a couple of hundred dollars in. So we're gonna have to be very careful. And I don't think that the FCA are doing a particularly good job at all. It's really sad because years ago I would have held them up as an example you guys should be following now.
- [32:38]
A
They were, they were, here's a red flag.
- [32:41]
C
Do not copy what we're doing because it's the total opposite of what we should be doing. And you know the problem? There's not enough people like me involved in the, the policy making in those types of organizations. There's too many people that just don't have enough understanding to at least put a balanced part side to the argument. We shouldn't be enforcing that level of. To have to go back nine years.
- [33:08]
B
It's unbelievable.
- [33:09]
C
That's.
- [33:10]
B
You don't even know. We did three years. I don't even know what I did last week. How do you know?
- [33:15]
A
Where did it come from a year ago? I don't know.
- [33:17]
B
I'll use the Apple analogy here. You know, Apple's never first released anything. Always came out on, you know, PC, Android for. first. But Apple thought about maybe a better way to implement it. I think that's where they had a little bit. Because you couldn't copy and paste on an iPhone for a long time was very frustrating. You couldn't until you could. And then it made a lot of sense why you could do it. I think sometimes, like we're right here in the midst of regulation and you see that the banks don't want me. Jeff. Other, you know, my countrymen here do not want us to make money on stable coins. They want to give us a half percent or a quarter percent interest and they want us to be okay with that because they're worried about outflows from the bank. Well, guess what? Build a better product and maybe people will keep their money with you. And if you don't build a better product then you give people choice and, but holding these, you know, holding Congress hostage and shakedown. We're not going to invest in your campaigns. We're not going to do this and that. It's against the people, right? So it's like, it's not we the people anymore, it's we the government are going to decide what's best for you, little guy. And we'll tell you, how do you access your money? So you, you know, in a lot of ways, I mean, I was, Jeff and I were very envious when the FCA was making all these regulations. We're like, oh my God, look at. And you know, you're right, because I think that the UK had an interesting opportunity to become a world leader for crypto. That's where everything should have gone. It should have been out of the UK because it made the most sense. You have. And you know, whether you like banks or not, that's what the banking, you know, infrastructure is. I mean, everything's there. It was prime and ripe for this sort of build out. So it is. I can understand your frustration.
- [34:53]
C
We, we so dropped the ball. I mean, in the nicest possible way. You guys were fumbling it big time. And if, if you're thinking in the UK terms, we're thinking, wow, this is the most amazing opportunity because now the UK can become the US for the Internet. But for crypto, we could have took the whole thing, right? We just didn't. I mean, the thing is, we got London right outside of the U.S. where's the financial center of the world?
- [35:22]
A
London.
- [35:23]
C
We had all of the, everything we needed was there. All we needed was a bit more like of a push towards it, be more open. Let's get the big exchanges centered in the uk. Let's give the regulations and the clarity that people need and let's make this something that people want to do in, in a combination of safe but not nanny state. And unfortunately, what we've ended up with is, is neither of those things, so.
- [35:51]
A
Well, to be fair, Chris, to be fair, the UK has a systemic problem, politically speaking. You know, if we're watching a football, American football game, it would have been really interesting, you know, from the analogy, I like what you had said, you know, the US had, you know, everything stacked up to be, to go score a touchdown. You know, we had the ball, we fumbled the ball. UK picked it up and immediately fumbled it. We picked it up and we're running it back for a touchdown right now. And, and it's. But there's a systemic political problem in the UK that has moved it so Far to the left that they can't even see a decentralized existence for the people anymore.
- [36:31]
B
That's why we fumbled initially.
- [36:33]
A
That's what.
- [36:34]
B
Right.
- [36:34]
A
We fumbled it.
- [36:35]
B
Systemic mindset. We had the same mindset where the government was anti. You know, the back. What Trump would said back when Trump said bitcoin was into this, we're not going to do this, and we're not, you know, so, you know, political wins can change, and unfortunately, sometimes they change in your favor and sometimes they don't. But even outside that, you have to be able to support it and make it. Because a lot of times where you look at when, when something comes into a particular area, tax breaks, you know, incentives, you know, there's, there's states in the US that have done really well only because, because, you know, Hollywood used to be the place where everything was made, but then Canada, British Columbia said, you know what, you guys can come here, you can film, we'll put you up and wherever you want to go, we'll make tax breaks.
- [37:19]
C
They're.
- [37:20]
B
Wait, wait, we don't pay less taxes. And then Georgia over here did the same thing. And all of a sudden you saw everything was made in Georgia for a while until the, until unfortunately, the Republican governor said, we're going to get rid of those tax breaks. Well, guess what happened. Three giant studios here. You got Marvel Studios, you got these biggest studios in the country in, up in Georgia there. And now they're. Nobody wants to go there anymore because again, you took away the incentive, the why they would want to be there. They want to be in Georgia because it was better than Hollywood, only because it made more economic sense. And so this is where, this is where political, you know, crosswinds can really hurt.
- [37:59]
C
You know, I'm not a politician and
- [38:02]
B
I thought you were Chris. That's weird. Jeff, didn't you think he was a politician?
- [38:05]
C
I was heading that way where I possibly can. But I'll say one more thing on it, right. Which is the, the thing that I'm most worried about from the person's question is if you followed what happened in the Netherlands around the introduction of most capital gains.
- [38:23]
A
Crazy. They're insane.
- [38:25]
C
I'm extremely worried that we may end up with some person thinking it's a good idea and decided to try and implement it in, in the UK And I have to say, it's the most. When you apply that principle to blockchain, it just demonstrates that nobody that implemented the rule understands blockchain because it's the most. It is the most ludicrous. Thing I've ever heard.
- [38:51]
A
They understand nothing.
- [38:52]
C
It is, it is absolutely mindboggling that someone could be so stupid as a thinking idea. But that's the thing I'm worried about most.
- [39:01]
B
It started here first, Chris. That idea, that idea floated here in Congress. Somebody named Elizabeth Warren floated that idea about capital gains way before the Netherlands caught wind of it.
- [39:13]
A
But I'll just say the Netherlands passed it.
- [39:16]
B
Yeah, that was the difference.
- [39:18]
C
Yeah.
- [39:18]
B
Here it was laughed at, but big problem if you're even bad ideas can get.
- [39:24]
A
Hey, Chris, checkerboard saying that you have politician glasses, so maybe you're an undercover political plant.
- [39:31]
B
All right, no more glasses.
- [39:34]
C
Political plan.
- [39:36]
A
I've never heard of glasses being political, but that's fine.
- [39:39]
B
All right, so let's, let's. So what I want to do is, let's segue into some really important topics that I think really need to be discussed. Because this is something that Jeff and I talk a lot of. Obviously I get a lot of DMS of people that, you know, chip. It starts out with chip, can you help me? And then they proceed to tell me this story that breaks my heart. And it's usually somebody that's been around the space for a long time. When I say a long time, six, seven years. It's not somebody that thought their first purchasing in crypto was three weeks ago. It was somebody who is pretty smart. And even people that I know in the community, and I know some notable people have also who were notable people that have lost their, their crypto. I mean, Stefan Thomas is one of them, you know, for upwards of 300 plus million dollars. Because. And so, and I recently talk about my, my foible of having XRP on a Zaman wallet and not using it for a year and thought, let me put the extra layer of security on there. And I can't move crypto or accept an NFT unless I put that extra password because I'm smart. And guess what happened? Don't know what the password is. I used it a year ago. Cannot remember it, cannot locate it. I gotta go in my safe that I put in my safe with my, my, my, my, you know, what do you call my base? Keep my keywords, whatever you.
- [41:00]
C
Yeah.
- [41:01]
B
For my, for my. But no, you know, no, where is it? And I'm like, it's panic, Phil. I'm like, this is crazy. Like this. And again, somebody who thinks you're smarter. Which is, which is what I want to segue into. You know, if you think about practical crypto security, happens to be the name of your course, but talk a little bit about what sort of prompted you to or inspired you, I should say, to really create this from your perspective. And it's a great course, by the way. I purchased it myself because I think that there were some things in there that I thought I knew and I guess I didn't think about. And so this is why I think it's something really key. Tell me what your inspiration was for putting this forward into the. Into the world.
- [41:44]
C
Would you mind if I take a 15 second break?
- [41:47]
B
No, no. Well, Jeff, don't worry. Jeff and I. Jeff and I will. Will cover you until you get back. But Jeff, I have to say that, you know, from my own perspective and I think we should share this. You know, I know other people have shared things that have gone off the rails. I know Solomon, you know, recently shared on a space that I was on about how he almost got scammed by something very elaborate as an interview. And. Oh, you can't.
- [42:16]
A
Yeah, all that stuff comes up. You got to be so careful.
- [42:18]
B
Well, what it was for him was he had, he had explained that he was having an issue with teams. So they said, well, here's the link. Just download it from here. And then they, he had turned his back for. So they did a whole interview with him, like he was being interviewed as a YouTube, you know, a crypto guy, like we're doing here. And then they got him back on another for a follow up interview. So they built a trust with him and I could be getting some of the things wrong. You know, it's. But the real thing that happened was he had to like walk away for a second because they had asked for something and they were taking over his computer. So whatever they, whatever they gave him was a. Wasn't a real teams thing and it had something faulty in it. And they were taking over his computer and. And he had just, boom, yanked the Internet cord, you know, grabbed everything, shut his computer down. And he said for him, he runs a company that has a lot of their funds stored in crypto. And he was talking about the fact. And this was. I just happened to be. It was in one of the space. It was one of the Zodiac spaces that Jen and I were running. And I was just like mortified because here's a guy who I look up to who's a really smart guy who runs a company. And he said, I was thought that my whole company was at risk and reformatting it because it's so fast. It happens so fast. It was such an elaborate scheme.
- [43:34]
A
Just never know.
- [43:36]
B
And I was just gonna be so guarded.
- [43:39]
A
You have to be so guarded today. And just level of trust. Don't ever connect with anybody that you don't know from that perspective. You know, when we bring people in, conversation, stuff, we're on this platform, there's no, you know, if anyone ever has to send you something to download a link on a platform, just to be in an interview environment like that, hell no, I'm not downloading anything that you send me. Okay. You know, why would I do that?
- [44:04]
B
So, Chris, get back to that. So tell us, tell us your, your inspiration for bringing this, this idea of protecting your crypto and putting it out there. What was your inspiration behind that?
- [44:15]
C
Okay, well, the inspiration is if you've ever been on a call with somebody that's just lost everything with effectively the crying, the screaming, the aftermath, and the unfortunate position that you have to be the one that says, I'm really sorry, but it's gone and it ain't coming back, right? Unless you've been in that position, you can't understand what that feels like. And for most people, the only thing you can really feel, you're going to feel, actually you feel two things, right? First of all, you're going to feel, oh my God, this is absolutely dreadful. I feel so sorry for this person. Right? Then here's the uncomfortable bit. You're gonna feel, thank God it wasn't me. And you're gonna get these conflicting views inside and it makes your stomach churn. I'm so grateful that it wasn't me that fell for it. But at the same time, oh my God, I can't believe this has happened. Terrible, terrible, terrible. However, for majority of people, the most you can do is feel sorry for them and console them. When you, with my skill set, I can do something about it. And I felt a bit of a heavy responsibility. There was this one lady that came on to this space that I was on and she came on and she basically gave the story, I've been hacked, lost on the crypto, doesn't have a clue what, how it happened. The lady, turns out she's from the uk, so I naturally felt a responsibility to help her. So I ended up giving her a phone call. She's 70 something years old. She heard about XRP through a little friends group and they'd all been buying little small amounts every month out of the spare money they've got to leave as a kind of in their will for their grandkids to leave their grandkids or something when they're older, right. So it's a lovely sort of story. And then she's. And she said, and I know that I'm not supposed to ever give out those, the, the secret numbers and all this kind of stuff. And I know it's in my safe, I know exactly where it is. I've done absolutely nothing wrong. I cannot understand what I've done wrong. Anyway, bottom line was she fell for the traditional ledger scam and they took the lot and she's just like, what am I going to do? I'm. I can't start again. I'm too old, it's all gone. And I never heard from her again. Bottom line is that when, when you, when you experience that it's horrible and you, if you can do something about it, you have almost got a responsibility to try. And that is actually was the motivation for the, the protocol amendment called XRPL firewall, which you mentioned earlier on, which is a, a way of offering an additional layer of protection to everyone. But the bottom line is that for the majority of people, the hacks and the scams and stuff that they fall for don't actually have anything really to do with blockchain, right? The blockchain itself is by design secure. It wasn't. It wouldn't be a blockchain, right? You don't hack the blockchain. Not the real proper ones. We next up is a proper, mature, solid blockchain. No one's going to hack the blockchain get your money, right? They don't get your money out of a blockchain by hacking it. What they do is they hack you, right? They do it in so many different ways of different levels of sophistication and different entry points. Anything from simple stuff like your email address, right? Just sending you an email with ledger and we notice you've got your crypto and there's been enter any one of 20 different reasons why they'll email you there's been a, a breach or there's been some kind of problem and we need to confirm your, confirm your wallet or we need to ensure that it's still safe or it's, it's been lost and we need to restore it. And they come up with all these different things and the point is that they always apply an element of fear, an element of pressure and time sensitive or it'll be the other, which is like if you do it really quickly, you're going to get some kind of extra benefit. It's one of those three usually anyway. What it always boils back down to is this massive funnel which is huge, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ways in which you can fall into this funnel. And slowly, slowly, as you go down, you go down. You'll eventually end up at the very bottom where you do something on chain which effectively gives them your crypto. You may inadvertently sign the transaction yourself. You may inadvertently give them the keys that lets them sign it on your behalf. Whatever way it happens. Ultimately, the blockchain bit is the bit right at the very, very bottom just before they get you right? But how you get into it, that's the bit that you need to protect. So this is not about somebody going, oh, well, I've got a ledger nano, I'm safe. Tell that to the lady that had a ledger nano and lost a lot.
- [49:30]
A
Someone else just got wiped out on
- [49:31]
C
a nano many different ways, all for it. And the biggest, the biggest problem is overconfidence in your understanding and your ability. And the worst thing is if you've been in this space a while and you make the assumption that because you've been here a while, I don't need this, then you pretty much calling out to pay the next victim.
- [49:53]
B
That's me. I mean, I had the overconfidence too. And, you know, this is what happens. And this is one of the things that I love. So this is from your, from your website and your course, but it says right here, blockchains don't get hacked, people do. So this guide you put together, how do you become a harder target? And you know, and looking at the course, myself personally, like, even though I thought, because, you know, Jeff and I, we've been talking about the space, been doing the show for six years, we know everything. And honestly, it turns out I don't know everything. And so what was amazing to me was the fact that, you know, somebody might go out there and buy a really rare NFT on the XRPL and some. Jeff and I sometimes marvel, right? Because we have an NFT collection and we'll go out there, I'm like, dude, somebody just spent 800 xrp for this. Yeah, and listen, listen, we, we have, we have two, you know, sets of XRP or XRPL, you know, based NFTs, all for it. But we're still like, wow. But yet would you invest in yourself? You're talking about your bags. My bags, I've been stacking since 2018. But meanwhile, you don't even put a little bit of intelligentsia into your stack to help you gain more knowledge, to realize that these are elaborate. Some of These scams, the way they do it. And so this is one of the reasons, like, you know, that, that we, we put this together. And you know, it was, I was so inspired by it that I went ahead and I actually put together a video. You didn't reach out to me about this at all, but I just think this is important because I'm, we're constantly trying to explain to people, you cannot take it for granted that you just know everything. So I put together this video because I thought it was good. I'm gonna start hitting out on social here. Just a short little spot. Let me go ahead and play this.
- [51:37]
A
It starts with a click, an email, a moment of urgency. You tell yourself it looks legitimate. You tell yourself you'll fix it quickly. And just like that, it's gone. This could have been avoided. Billions of dollars per year are being stolen by hackers. There is a way to educate and protect yourself with practical crypto security. Before you click, know how to defend.
- [52:04]
B
Protect your crypto.
- [52:06]
A
Protect your future with practical crypto security. That's, that's solid. Good job on, on putting that together, Chris. It's such an amazing, amazing critical project that you put together and, you know, Chip, I think, summed it all up. Boom, right there in that video.
- [52:26]
B
Yeah, protect there, you know, the comprehensive knowledge and everything you have until. Chris, tell us a little bit about this course. Because I actually thought it was priced pretty way for me. I mean, because I've done, I, I, I'm really steeped in AI and I paid hundreds of dollars for AI courses and again, a lot of what I did knew, but I got, I picked up enough useful stuff that it made it really valuable to me that I probably wouldn't have learned on my own or when it comes to this, when you learn it. Sorry, too late. So talk a little bit about, you know, what the cost of this course is and, and like, why, you know, why it might be a good idea for people to just kind of take a, a real serious look at it.
- [53:04]
C
Well, it's priced at 49.95. Right? So, well, $50. Okay, go work out how much value you've got, divide it by $50 and then get yourself the percentage. If that percentage is coming back at less than a couple of percent, you crazy? To not want to spend $50 to, to, to buy the book. However, it's, it's not just about will you spend $50. Because the thing is, you do, you do need to realize that if you're in decentralized crypto, you have to Accept responsibility. And that's probably the bot that's probably the most important thing is if it goes wrong for you, you screwed. There is no one you can call and all you're going to get is other people on the end of the phone saying, I'm really sorry. And that's literally as far as it's going to go. If you think some of these new companies that are talking about being able to like, get it back, it's all nonsense. Until we reach a point where crypto is so regulated that you, we, we've lost sight of what it was originally meant to be, right then we're always going to be a prevention is better than cure. And at the end of the day, these crypto companies are going to charge you a lot more than $50 to recover your assets. If you lose them all, they are going to be taking massive chunks and at the time you're going to happily give it back. You've got to say $50,000 of crypto and it gets stolen. And they say, well, I can get it back for you, but it's going to cost you 20,000. You're going to pay the $20,000. Yeah, but you just paid $50 and avoided making the mistake in the first place. And then you, you know, so the, the, the logic and the maths stack up massively. I just wanted it to be something that was going to be accessible for as many people as possible. Price point was pretty reasonable considering this is almost six months of effort that it's taken me to get to this stage. Everything I've distilled down for $50. And you have to just be prepared to do the work, right? No, I'll be completely honest. If you prepare to do the work, you could go and get a lot of this information for free off the Internet. However, you've kind of got to know where to look. Not enough to know that you want to do it. You know, you need to know what the things to look out for are first. And there is no curated single location that you can go to, which tells you everything you need to Google in order to be able to go and find out. So that's essentially what this is. It's curated everything that you would need to know. So it talks about the, the basics of the XRPL stuff you really should know if you're investing in xrp. Then it talks about like the real risks of crypto. You know, things like the funnels, how you get caught by fishing, by social engineering and all the different bits and pieces where you can, you can be caught. Like help desk scams are a big one, you know, pig, but is massive if you're single. It's a big thing. You should be looking at malware, which is what the kind of thing you were talking about with King Solomon. You've got like new AI enhancements which are just making scams. They supercharger scams. You know, back in the like the 90s when I started, I used to get this email from this Egyptian prince. $75 million, right?
- [56:24]
A
Oh my God. Yeah.
- [56:25]
C
At the time, I used to find it quite easy to recognize that that was a scam because he used to spell everything wrong. And however, the modern day equivalent of that now is so pixel perfect, worded perfectly, you cannot tell the difference. So if you don't know how to actually check the legitimacy of something, it's no wonder people click on wrong links. I know, I'm not trying to call anybody stupid because it's the kind of thing that happens to normal, regular people. And I know Ryan, right? Ryan Solomon. And ultimately if he's fallen for something like this, or should say nearly fell for something like this, right, I would put him in that top echelon of people I consider to be. Be smart, right. It just goes to show anyone, anybody, it can happen to anyone and everything. So like I'm doing a lot of these podcasts now. I'm asked to come on a lot of these shows and I get sent link click. Do you think that when you sent me the link, you know your link, do you think I clicked it? No, I didn't. I pasted the link into a text file. Check this, check the string, make sure it's where I think it is and paste it. And it's not because know each other, but you might. Your account may have been hacked, I don't know. And suddenly then attacker has got me to click a link through yours. And that is how other people have also been scammed. James Wall fell for that and lost access, access to his entire X channel for a week because he thought he's gonna go and be a co host somewhere and he got scammed. So it just, it's one of those things you just have to be prepared.
- [58:01]
A
So you got to be careful.
- [58:02]
C
Do is I didn't give you a list of the 5,000 scams you need to look for, right? What I p. What basically what I did is I've told you what to look for to spot the patterns because the list goes out of date tomorrow. If you learn, you know how to spot the patterns that, that show you what, what is a scam and what's not, then you'll protect yourself. So the book is all about teaching you that. That's one part of it. The next part is just talking about just general hygiene for security. Digital security, passwords, two factor authentication, making sure that you're using, you're going to sites via routes that you know are safe. Not clicking dodgy links somewhere. Right. Device segmentation. Massive, massive network hygiene. How many people just go out and just use their, their phone and a public WI fi while they're got crypto on it? I think it's more than one person does that. Don't do that. Right. You know, there's so many, so many things and I've tried to break it all down and, and give you as much information to help you make good decisions. Then there's a specific bit on XRPL protection, trying to explain what multi sign is and regular keys, all that kind of stuff. Idea of air gap vaults and, and different things. And then so all of that, probably the first 75 of the book is about giving you knowledge. The last part is about turning that knowledge actionable steps and it might be that you've read the book and you knew 80 of it. Well, that's brilliant. I'm really happy for you. It's the 20 you don't know that we need to worry about. Right, so, Right. Oh yeah, called an exposure map where you basically use all the, all the knowledge you've learned and you draw out a lot like a visual map of what you've got, where you've got it. Understanding the difference between custody, self custody, you know, is it in a hot wallet, is it a cold wallet? Do you even know all of this? You've already learned by this point. And when you get this piece of paper, you look at this piece of paper and you'll go, right, well circle that red and circle that red and circle that red top. The 20 things I've got, three of them need to be adjusted, right? And you go, well, I can literally do that one now because it's just I don't have two FA on my email, which is, which everybody should have, right, go and do it right now. But the other two are a bit more serious, bit more sobering. So what we're going to do is I'm going to plan that, I'm going to do that next weekend. So I'm going to take four hours out Saturday morning, I'm going to have a quiet room and I'm going to implement whatever that change is because it's more. So don't rush because it's not like if you don't do it today, then everything's gone tomorrow. You've just got to be step by step. And, and good security is about layering things on top of each other. The more layers of defense you have, the safer you become. So you don't have to go and do everything on day one. Just quick wins. Do a quick win the day you read the book or the, a couple of days after you read the book, get the quick wins in and then slowly, incrementally improve your security posture. And then most important of all, improve what's in here, improve your understanding of the risks. And the analogy I like to give is, I cannot be sitting on every person's shoulder saying, don't click that link. That's not a safe link to click. Right? But what it can be is a little voice in the back of your head that is, is there because you read something that told you something and you get this email, right? And a very common one would be you, you guys are YouTubers. I'll send you an email right now from YouTube. It's going to be impossible to tell it from a real YouTube one. It's going to say your video content has been flagged and you're, you're going to lose your account. Click here process. Right? There are more than one genuinely large YouTuber accounts that have fell for that and lost their accounts as a result of. Right, it's common. But what I did, the email, you've got, it's got a reason why you need to act. It's got urgency around it. You're panicking, you're thinking, oh no, what am I going to do? I've got to do something quick. I'm going to lose, I'm going to lose it. Click. The minute you clicked, you in the funnel, you're done. And the, and it's literally, it's just a spiral down to the bottom. And so you understand that if you can learn to just say, hang on a minute, I, I remember reading and boom. Chris says, just take 30 seconds and go and put the kettle on before you click that link. And sometimes just that little fire break of a few minutes, just to think about what you might be about to go and do before you rush into it, is all you actually need to do to be safe. Because if you don't, if, if you don't click that link, you just delete the email, you're safe.
- [62:56]
B
Yeah, I'll tell you something. I'll tell you. So I work enterprise, selling enterprise software, enterprise organizations. In the last three, four companies that I've worked for, I can tell you that I have done a pretty damn good job. What they do in these corporations. When you're an enterprise org and it's software and there's a lot on the line, there's a lot of IP that you can't afford to get out. You go through mandatory training twice a year, sometimes it's quarterly. And it's the same thing drilled in your head. Drilled in your head. But you know what the IT department does is they send around the fake thing you have built into all these emails that it's a specific thing you click. This is phishing and you report it, right? Well, they send around one internally to see if they catch people. You'd be shocked that people who are smart, who are engineers, who have been around the world. I'm not talking about your everyday person. These are enterprise level people. And about 30% of them click the link. But it's no harm because it's internal. But I'm usually one of the. Then they'll send around an email saying, hey, this was a phishing email. 30% of you clicked on it. Mandatory trading is coming up. And every company that I've been in is the same type of thing. And I know to look at the. You can spoof any sort of email. I know to look at it. I copy and paste it into a text document. Look, you can just be totally mad about like, I gotta be so careful. I gotta be really careful and still make mistakes. Which is why I think the people, they're so excited about being huddling on all this, you know, crypto, but they won't even take the time to really learn something about protect, about what, what that is to protect it. And God, I gotta tell you, man, my heart's panicked a bunch of times where I thought, oh God. You know when you talk about going away and just giving it a, a little breather? You're right. That's where the panic starts to set in.
- [64:49]
C
Give you the ultimate then.
- [64:50]
A
Hey, Chris, before you, before you go on, I've gotta run, unfortunately, I gotta, I gotta leave. Chris, this has been amazing. We'd love to continue supporting your course. So what I want to be able to do, and Chip and I will do it on our, on our shows, we'll keep putting a little bit of that video segment to keep promoting this idea because it's so critical, so important to get this message out There, but I'm gonna run. You and Chip can.
- [65:19]
C
It's awesome inviting me on your show. I really appreciate it.
- [65:24]
A
Thanks.
- [65:24]
B
Okay, Jo.
- [65:25]
C
All right.
- [65:26]
B
Have fun at the gun range. I think he's going. I don't know, it's. Or he's going out to do something else, but.
- [65:31]
C
Right, let me tell you this, right? You were talking about, you know, who falls for this stuff, right? So like you say, anyone can fall for something, right? From, if you want to put it in blunt terms, from the stupidest person in the world to the cleverest person in the world and everybody in the middle, anyone could potentially fall for something at any one time. So just because you don't consider yourself to be very tax tech savvy doesn't mean you need the book any more than someone that's got a Ph.D. in computer science. Anyone can fall for it because it's got nothing to do with tech. It's to do with emotions and to do with socially engineering you into fear. Right now this is my kind of like this is. This happened to me about three weeks ago. I just launched the book literally a few days before. I'm sitting there and I've been doing a bit of cleaning up on my machine and I've deleted a few files and whatnot and I use, I've got a bunch of different things, but one of the things I use is one drive. So I got this one drive account where I keep like personal, like family pictures on and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, so I'm cleaning up a bunch of bits and pieces and yeah, happy. Probably an hour or so later I get an email coming through from Microsoft. It's Microsoft One Drive. And it's like we noticed a massive deletion of your files. Blah, blah, blah. I'm thinking, massive deletion. I only deleted like probably about eight or 10 files. That's not, certainly not like four gigabytes. And I thought, what have I deleted? Because with one drive you have like a period of time where you can go in and you can un delete and not lose everything. So I'm thinking, oh, I need to, I need to go and check to make sure I've not done stupid. Anyway, I got, I'm sitting on this thing. This email looks absolutely spot on, right? I am about to fall in the funnel. I thought, well, I always do check. So I'm like, okay, go and check. And I check it. It's not Microsoft. It's a Microsoft esque version of an email. Everything about it looks visually bang on the Fact that they just happened to send it like at that time, right. With me knowing I'd done something a few hours earlier was nothing more than just like good luck on their part. Right. And I was, you know, at the precipice where you're about to fall in. And it's when you at that precipice where you need to make sure where this, everything you're going to learn is, where it kicks in is to say, stop, take a second and breathe. Do the two or three things you need to do, which take no more than a few seconds just to quickly check and just be absolutely certain. I mean, number one, you should never be clicking the link in an email anyway. You should be going to your bookmarks and you should be going to that OneDrive account directly from a reliable source. So in Windows and also on Mac, you can just go to once OneDrive directly from within the OS, which is then a safe link. You click the email link and it's dodgy. You're in the funnel and you're boom. So I'm at the precipice and my natural instinct is, is fighting me now. I've got this fear that I've done something stupid and I don't want to lose a bunch of family photos, but at the same time I'm like, stop, check it. And I did and I stopped, checked it reals it was fake, deleted it. Then I went and checked just on my own local copies to make what I've done. And I hadn't done anything wrong at all, it was fine. But it was that, that combination of luck and fear that it got me for a split second, like literally a few seconds, just in fear that I've done something wrong. And it's that fear that makes you fall over the edge and the pressure that if I don't go and sort it soon, the ability to undelete will be gone. If they get access to your OneDrive account, they can get access to other elements of Microsoft and before you know it they can be in your emails. And when they're in the emails they can reset to a 5. When they be set to a fan, they all they got to do brute force your, your passwords and they in everything. So it's like it doesn't take a massive chain of events to go from something like I might lose a personal photo to losing everything you've got. And it's, it's not many steps for it all to go wrong. And the thing is, I didn't fall for it obviously, but I'm very much prepared to put my hands up and say there was a momented time of a few seconds where I was like, oh, I need to do something.
- [70:21]
B
That's amazing.
- [70:22]
C
What I'm trying to make is that if I'm the person that's writing this thing to protect you and I'm openly coming out and I'm saying, look, you know, if I hadn't had that knowledge that's in the book, that I may very well have gone through and ended up falling for something, what might have happened? Who knows whether or not it may have gone no further than them having access to my family photos, which I wouldn't have wanted, but wouldn't have been the end of the world to me. But if somebody else got sucked in, well, let's put this on you. You get the YouTube, you click, oh, my God, the channel's about to be taken away from me. You click, and the next thing you know, the channel is taken away from you because they've now got access to your channel and took it away from you. Right? Now, let's put it in crypto terms. Coinbase emails you, and it's like your account has been suspended. You need to do the kyc. Here's a link to the. To the FCA that tells you what you need to do. We talked about it earlier, right? It's happening now. You need to do all these things and we know it's real and the link to the FCA is real and they're referencing a real thing, right? So you. It builds on this here that it's real, and then you get sucked in, and then you click it and you go to the website, and now you're on Coinbase's website, and it's Coinbase's website, except for the fact that it's not. It looks identical, but there's a very small little nuance. Like you on something like coinbase.secure.com which is not Coinbase's website, right? Or you're on YouTube.fun.com, which is not YouTube, but it looks like YouTube, but there's all these different ways in which you can get sucked in. And now it's like, right, log in. Well, okay, I'll log in, then log in. Boom. What do you think's happening when you're logging in? Somebody behind the scenes is actually recording that password. It's. It's more than likely automated. So the second you type that email or password in, it's instantly logging you in right now to the. The real Coinbase website. Or I should say it's logging the attacker in, right? Then it's going to be like next stage, enter your 2fa, right? You get the 2fa message through. You put the 2fa message into their website, right? And then, and you've got 30 seconds, right? It's automated. Within 100 milliseconds your 2fa is in their database. It's now in the coinbase and they're logged into your coinbase account.
- [72:54]
B
It's really.
- [72:55]
C
A minute later, everything you ever had is gone.
- [72:58]
B
Chris, you know, I'll tell you something that really amazes me. So openclaw, when openclaw came out, okay, so people are buying Mac Minis, they're installing it on there, they're giving access to their email. First thing I thought of was, well, suppose you get one of these phishing emails and it's responding to your email or it's clicking links, right? I mean, why would you ever give something that you're not going to ever be able to author the right guardrails on it? So I'm thinking to myself, yeah, do I get envious sometimes of what people are doing with openclaw? I do, I think it's great. But would you want to sacrifice. The whole thing about AI too is that you got to be careful there because everything you enter into a console is public and it's training on it. So you never want to put any sort of valuable information on there. You can actually go to hugging face and you can download LLMs that'll handle most of what you're looking for that is self contained on your own computer. But I'm like, this is another thing where the AI component where people are just putting whatever they want in there because they're not thinking about it. And companies have a very big problem, especially enterprise. Most enterprise have locked down sort of. I don't know how locked down they are, but whether it's from, you know, anthropic or let's say, you know, perplexity or OpenAI, they're locked down instances where that IP knowledge can't go. But you know what happens? Someone's working remote, they happen to have a window open. That's just, you know, the regular perplexity. That account they have and they're typing IP stuff and we've seen things happen there. The reason I bring this up is because this is just one more thing. You can't think of all the instances of life. But when I started hearing the horror stories of people's bank accounts being reset because it couldn't Log in. So it went ahead and reset the password, set a repassword. And I'm like, with all these phishing emails, do I want AI clicking links and responding to hackers? I mean, this is crazy. So I've just been miffed because the people that set. First of all, it's not that easy to set up. I've had some friends that said, yeah, it was supposed to be an hour. It took me three hours. I could still, still struggle to get it set up. But they're giving their lives over to this thing to say, sure, handle my life. And, you know, I'm like, what if you're, what if your seed words are in there? What if it gets access or resets this? Or like, it's, it's. There's way too much. You can go off the line of the, the rails. So I figure, like, hey, you guys, be careful with AI too, about what you're putting in there, what you're doing. Yeah, I can do a lot of great things. But the scams are getting more elaborate.
- [75:25]
C
It looks like Claw is a whole category of itself, and it's, it's not covered in the book because when I finished writing the book, it hadn't even been released.
- [75:34]
B
Well, it's. But it's also. That's like, next. I mean, most people aren't going to engage with, with, with setting up a computer.
- [75:40]
C
I'll tell you this now for Open Claw perspective. Anybody that's thinking about Open Claw, you should engage with it. You should, if you can. I mean, it's, it's an amazing tool if used correctly. And it doesn't. You don't have to be a genius to set it up in a relatively safe way. You want a completely standalone fresh machine, right? You want, ideally, to connect it. If you've got a, A decent home network, which the book talks you through, you should be setting up VLANs, which means you got segregated networks within your network. That means that if, when you're on network A, you can't get to anything that's on network B, you can get out to the Internet. That's fine, right? Get in a separate vlan. Right? And then when it says about having things like emails and whatnot, what you got to do is you got to give it its own email address, you got to give it its own accounts for, you know, word and whatever you want it to do, it needs to have its own accounts now. Yeah, that might mean that you have to have another subscription somewhere or like, if you want to get it to do Review code, right? You create a new GitHub account for it. You do not give it your own GitHub account, all right? And so you let it go in and you, and you put the guardrails in place. This, all these guardrails have nothing to do with AI. But like, you could take on an intern, right? If you took on an intern, would you give the intern access to your email and your passwords? No, you give the intern their own email address and you'd make them set up their own passwords. Treat the AI like an intern, give it fresh everything and make him start from every, from scratch and everything. And when you get to the point where you want to start having it, like looking at your emails, you need to just do simple email things. Like you could, you could give access to read your emails, right? And it can read the emails, but your instructions are going to be to just, to just order them and let you know the ones that you really need to look at urgently and just leave the rest for you to handle at some later date. But you could do that, and that's perfectly safe. Now, if that AI does click on a link to your YouTube to try because it's worried that you might lose your channel, right? The AI will not have access to your password, so it will not be able to log in and it will not be able to compromise you as long as you don't give it access. And by give it access, I just mean don't put it on a network where it can get access to your stuff and give it fresh everything. Can do. And if you apply that, those simple principles to Open Claw or any kind of AI thing that you're doing, you're gonna, you're gonna cut down the chances of being one of the people that lose or lose out in some way dramatically, like by an order of like, probably from 100 down to like 1 to 2% chance. So with those with the benefits you can get for a really low risk, then it's. It's something that everybody should be starting to at least dip the toe into. Although I will say I think Open Claw is amazing, but I don't think Open Claw will be the end result. I think the product will evolve and I. Eventually it'll be made to the point where it doesn't take three hours to set it up. It. It should take no more than five minutes. It should be no more difficult than signing up for a Microsoft Office subscription. And realistically, I think eventually the D all run in the cloud. I don't think I Mean I do want sometimes where there's some smart person at Apple. Well if we pay a load of AI influencers to talk about how they're buying MAP Minis and using overclo and map money then we'll get a massive spike in sales because I mean why a Mac Mini? I mean why did, why didn't they go and use a Dell? It's not like Mac Minis are, you know, the, the only software or the only hardware that can run Open Claw. You could run Open Claw on a
- [79:42]
B
little Windows run on Linux. I mean you don't, I mean you could run it pretty much on anything.
- [79:45]
C
So, so for me that the whole MAP Mini thing is just good marketing. Apple have just been on the ball, got the right people at the right time and everyone's buying MAP Minis because I think that's the way to go. You can run it literally on best thing to do is find an old laptop that you've got that you haven't used for years, right? Format it, reset it up, run it on that totally segregated. And you know what, it's not like it needs all those resources anyway because if all you're doing is using it, it's just an orchestrator. It's not actually, it's not actually doing any of the complex AI stuff. It's still handing all that off to an LLM in the cloud, still going to open AR anthropic to do all the requests. The, the Open Claw is just sort of like acting as that kind of like brain in the middle which is just orchestrated. Do that bit there, do that bit there. Give me the information and put it all together and give me a result, you know so it doesn't have to be some latest tech to use.
- [80:43]
B
No, not at all. But I've seen you know, people put funny posts on X like well hey I woke up the next morning, checked Open Claw. Turns out, turns off turns out that it reset all my bank accounts don't have access to it. I've gotten divorced. The good news is I got the house, blah blah blah and they're making jokes of it in light of it but, but you're like that's really. Some of this stuff's possible and I did hear people saying that reset bank accounts and you know was answering their emails and people like it for companies because it can respond to things. But you know, let's, let's be honest, let's, you know I always sometimes jumping on the craze. I mean you, it looks like you've set it up, but you're somebody who is a little bit lot smarter than most people and can set something up to run. But, you know, I'm also seeing a lot of clones of that happening too, which are running in the cloud and do have more guardrails around what it can do. But again, it's just another dimension of something you've got to be, again, cautious of. And look, we're humans, we mostly run an emotion. Sometimes, you know, people say, well, invest with logic, don't run on emotion. It's really difficult to separate the two. I don't care what you do. It's very difficult as a human being. If you're a computer and you're AI, great. But it's difficult to do. People say just invest with logic and watch the charts and then make those kind of investments. Well, great. Sounds good. On paper, it's not what reality is because we always have that emotional part.
- [82:02]
C
1% of the people holding crypto, crypto can do that, are the food for the 1%. And that was part of the 99. Because every time I've attempted to trade, all I've done is make somebody else rich and lose money. Hence, I don't know, I literally haven't for years. Just no point. Every time I attempt to do it, I make a bad decision. And you're right, it's usually because we're very emotional and you. And it's very difficult to be that clinical and make a decision based on. Purely on logic. Logic. So if you hold in crypto the same principle for the reason why you shouldn't be trading is the same principle of why you really need to think about your security. Because it is not going to be the technical solutions you have that are going to let you down. It's going to be you, it's going to be your emotions, it's going to be your fears. That actually is where the scams of the hack starts.
- [82:56]
B
That's a tough pill to swallow. Now, can people buy. You said it's 49.95, but can people purchase with crypto also?
- [83:02]
C
Yeah. So we, we've talked a long time, haven't we, about our. Answer the question. $50. That's where we left off. It's 50.
- [83:10]
B
Right, right.
- [83:10]
C
There's a bunch of like codes floated around now because it's, obviously it's new and I'm trying to get some traction. The best traction for me is for somebody to go and buy it and then talk about what they've learned and how it was useful for them. And that hopefully will drive further sales. So there's a bunch of codes that people can use that will bring that down by $15 to $35. And if you pay and you can buy it with a credit card if you want to, but if you pay with XRP or RLUSD then you can get another $5 off. So the effective price for the vast, vast majority of people that are effectively watching is basically 29.95. So just go there and yeah, just get it, see how you go. And the thing is, right, I would encourage everybody at the very minimum to just go and create a free account because you don't have to, you don't have to pay to start. You could just go, you could create an account and when you've created the account you can go on and you can actually go through the first section for free. So don't see what the actual, the tooling is like. Yeah, that's it, you're doing it now. So if you click buy you'll get prompted to register. Your registration is actually really simple. So if you, if you click buy now and then click register so you can, you can sign up with either an old fashioned email and password, very simple. You can link and sign in with your Google account. You can also sign in with X which means that your email account is not then known to be. And you can also sign in with Zaman as well. Zaman have an oauth provider which they use, which is the same technologies Google use. So you can, you can use any one of those four methods to create an account. It's totally free. You no way obligated to buy the course at this point in time. You just log in. Once you've logged in you'll see the, the ability to try. You go in. The entire first module is free. Just go in and you know you can go and learn what the tools are because you can read the guide or, or you can also, you can also listen to it because it's got the ability to play back audio so you can have it treat it like an audio book. And some people have messaged me and said it was brilliant because what they've done is they, they've put it into audio book mode where you, you autoplay on load and then you auto move to the next chapter when you finished and it just plays continuously like an audio book. And then they just put the headphones on, drop it in their pocket and when they're walking to work or they're on the, the, the treadmill in the gym or whatever they're doing in their day to day lives. They're just listening to it being read back to them and it's just subliminally going in over and over and over again. These are the red flags for social engineering. These are things you need to be wearing, thinking about. And it's, it's, it's getting that information into your mind in a subliminal way that's going to create that Chris on your shoulder that's going to say hang on a minute, don't click that link. So go and try it. You can bookmark different chapters. If you think it was helpful and you want to go back to it, you could add notes to each lesson. So if you're going through the course and you find something that's really helpful and you think, right, I really need to do this or I should go back and recheck. Create yourself some notes about what you want to do. There's even an ability to do like a Q A with me live. So basically if you have a question about one of the lessons, you can just click and write your question. You may say maybe you're doing something to do with password and you have a question on password strength or something like that, or which password manager should I get or whatever. You send me a question and what I do is then I'll read the question and obviously I'll reply to that question. But if you've asked a question which is insightful, then I think would be beneficial for everyone. This is a live living resource, which means I can update the content live. So you could be reading a page and I might, you know, from the other side of the world, change the text. The next time you go back to it, it's changed and it might be slightly different. I might have added something extra which clarifies a section or whatever. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. You could go and try it all out for free. Free work out, you know how it's going to work for you. And then when you finish the first module, the last, the last lesson is called what's next? And that lesson is just there to give you an indication of what you'll get if you buy. The guide goes through all the different sections, explains what you get from each section and then if you want to to progress through the course, you just go back to the dashboard. There's ability to buy a couple of clicks later with your Xenon wallet 29.95 paying Rl USD. You don't even need to have Rl USD. Because I built the site to use pathing, which means that you may only have xrp, but that doesn't stop you from paying in RL USD. So when you, when you log on and you use Amman, you'll sign in and then it will ask you what you want to pay with. So basically goes off, uses pathing and comes back and it gives you the best way to make that payment.
- [88:42]
B
So you and your efficiencies. That's great. No, I mean, I wish more places would do that if you think about it, right? I mean, it's really fantastic that you, you pay the way you want to pay. Use XRP and boom, you know, in the back, that's what it's doing in the background.
- [88:55]
C
So you could use any coin that's on the exception, right?
- [88:58]
B
Sure.
- [88:58]
C
Of course, I don't like shouting at other projects because the ones I don't shout out get disappointed. So I won't shout out a project. But if you've got a coin from another project, you use that. As long as you've got $30 worth of that coin and there's a market open somewhere or there's a route to a market through three other coins to XRP to RL USD, you could pay with that. And that's the beauty of pathing. And so there's not really any reason why somebody shouldn't be able to buy this if they've got an XRP IPL wallet. And you can use xaman, or you can use Cross Mark, which is the browser extension for Chrome, which is pretty good. And if you don't have either of those and you just have a ledger or a trezor, there's still a mechanism whereby you can buy the book. With crypto, the mechanism I built basically works exactly the same as if you were sending money to an exchange. So you'll say, I want to pay with a ledger. You click the thing and it gives you a popup and it'll say, here's the address to send the money to. This is your specific destination tag which is linked to your account. You just send the XRP to that account and when you sent it, you click I've sent the money on the website. And then you'll see a little spinner coming up at the back end. My website is basically checking the XRPL to see whether you have sent the money. And if that money's come in and it's got your destination tag, it associates the payment to your account and then instantly gives you access to the book. So you'll get it whatever way you do it, you're going to have access to this book within, literally within five seconds.
- [90:29]
B
Beautiful. Because that's the beauty of transaction time when it comes to xrp. Well, Chris, I really want to thank you for not only sharing about security, but I think the bigger, broader perspective on your entry into the xrpl, into crypto, some of the changes you've seen. So I think that expertise is really phenomenal. There's not a lot of people here in the community that have been around as long as you, and so I really thank you for coming on. It's been great because I've. I've interacted with you for so many years, so it's great to actually finally, you know, meet you and. Well, I'm gonna say this in person, but at least have you on the pod and, you know, have a conversation with you. So it's been fantastic. So thank you for, for coming on. I really do appreciate it.
- [91:11]
C
No, I really appreciate the opportunity. I hope that we've provided some value to the people that, that listen and listen back, and hopefully some of those people are going to take heed of what you said and maybe going, at the very least, go and try it for free.
- [91:25]
B
Yeah. At least, if anything, you know what? Go check it out for free. And again, like, you know, I'm.
- [91:30]
C
I'm not.
- [91:31]
B
I'm most of the way through. I haven't, I haven't finished it yet, but that's on me. But I do like the audio part. I'm, I'm a. I'm an audio person, so I like to listen to stuff I won't read, necessarily a book. I may want to go back and read a section, but for me, the audio is that. That was, that was a good move because I like to listen. I like to listen and kind of digest and I listen to a lot of podcasts anyway, so. But some people like to read. Some people get it better when they read it. And so you have your, you know, you have both options available. So that's all I have today, guys. We'll be back on the podcast tomorrow night. You guys have a great rest of your weekend. Chris, thank you so much for coming on. And stay. Stick around for a little bit as we, as I take us out of here, but we'll see you guys tomorrow night. Chris, hang on for a second.
- [92:15]
C
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