>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, It's The Cube! Covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to The Cube's exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico. We are on the ground covering Blockchain Unbound, Restart Week, Coin Agenda, a variety of events happening here in Puerto Rico, where the world is converging from Silicon Valley, New York, across the globe, here for a long week of bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrency, the decentralized internet. We're here for two days, wall to wall coverage. Here with me, kicking off, and special guest Miko Matsumura, who's the founder of Evercoin, also a venture partner at Bitbull Capital, influencer. Been around the block in the industry, seen many waves. Miko, great to have you on The Cube. >> Terrific, great to be here. >> So one of the things I want to get with you, we've had many conversations off camera over the past year, about what makes this wave super different than others. I've been saying, with Dave Allant and our team, that it feels like all the waves combined. I mean, look at all the major inflection points in the industry. The PC revolution, the mini computer revolution, the PC revolution, inner-networking with TCPIP, the internet revolution. You kind of had a web 2.0 thing going on, with the beginning of democratization. But now, major inflection point with infrastructure change with blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized applications, which is disrupting the developer community. So you have an entire stack being disrupted, and at the center of it is an opportunity. >> Miko: Yeah, I think what you described earlier in our conversation, about this notion of a killer app, right? There's a bunch of people kind of clowning around, saying like, "Oh what's the killer app for blockchain?" It's under our noses, it is open source money, right? So if you look at what happened with open source software, for the past 25 or more years, we've watched software eat the world. Software has eaten the world. We all know this. Mark Andreasen said it famously, right? So the point is, is that open source has eaten software. Right? So now, what do you think is going to happen next with open source money? Open source money is going to consume proprietary money. >> I completely agree with you, and you look at all the tell signs in the industry, a lot of people putting the brakes on Google banning ads on Google, you're seeing the SEC putting signals out there, but the problem is this is a global money marketplace. So you have a global ecosystem now, connected via the internet, you have disruptive technology that kills the gatekeepers and any central authority, and you have money. So you can put the big rock in the river and try to hold the stream, but the thing is just moving so fast that the dam can be broken no matter what's put in place, because moving money faster, running money, whatever you want to call it, makes a difference. And today, breaking news is that Coinbase got a license to support the UK's faster payment scheme, which will speed up time for faster payments. So essentially the UK is taking a pre-emptive move against the US government, this is a game changer. They could kind of go to the top of the pack in terms of sovereignty leadership in the financial world, because how they handle the money situation. If they tap the software market, if they make the open source money work, this is again, the game is on. This is a real data point, the UK government. This isn't some underground economy, this is a nation. >> Well, and there's no question that domicile competition creates an open playing field for a planetary establishment of protocol, right? So the thing that's amazing about it is absolutely that there's no national regulator that has a global footprint. And so at the end of the day, the thing that's fascinating about what's happening is that the reason why I'm so confident about open source money is that it competes for consent, right? So it's really trying to acquire users by providing better services. And what government entity can resist, for the long term, something that's actually trying to provide a better and better and better financial infrastructure? >> Miko, I've got to ask you, because I've seen your presentation, and we've talked many times about open source money. I want you to take a minute and describe, what is open source money? Also you mentioned software eating the world, that's the seminal Wall Street Journal article that Mark Andreasen wrote about around the 10X engineer, and how software, cloud, computing, all these big data technologies, can change the nature of enterprise competitiveness. You're kind of teasing that out with software and money, open source. What is open source money? >> So, if you go to the bitcoin.org website, you're going to see the title of the website, and it basically, title tag says "peer to peer open source money." So those aren't even my words, those are the words of Satoshi Nakamoto. Open source money. Open source money basically just means, So let's say that money is software, and it is software, so if you buy something with a credit card, what do you think is happening? It's all software. So money is already software. There's some money now, paper money, that's not software, but that's all going to become software. Once you accept that money is software, then what kind of software should it be, right? And what has happened is open source software has always eventually won with respect to closed source software. So proprietary money is probably back on its heels because open source money is coming, and I think that's really the power of developers and the power of consent. >> I think one of the nuanced points, just to kind of highlight that, to kind of take it one step further, is if you look at proprietary, you mentioned the word proprietary. If you look at the open source revolution with software, everything that was proprietary essentially got dismantled, down to either some irrelevant point, or a smaller role in whatever that system would be, whether it's a mini computer or a mainframe, or software. Open source always seemed to grow into the primary, first tier citizen of the mechanism. So there's history on our side. What, in your mind, makes this movement, with open source money, different? Is it the reshaping of the internet infrastructure stack? Is it the decentralized application developer? Is it the role of the currency? Because you now have three dimensions of change. >> Yeah, so to me, I love your mindset about this kind of combination, and I just want to characterize my position properly, which is that I'm not a crypto anarchist or even a crypto libertarian. And when people talk about proprietary money being back on its heels, if you watch what happened to open source and proprietary software, the proprietary software industry is larger and more valuable than it's ever been. So I'm not saying proprietary money goes away. It doesn't go away, it continues to grow and become valuable but what happens is open source money will essentially take over all of the commodity functions and become the platform. >> And certainly the alpha geeks, everyone that I know that's an entrepreneur, that I would call kind of pure entrepreneurship, whether they're old or young, are gravitating to this magnet of opportunity. What are you seeing? Obviously you're in a lot of advisory boards, and you really can't do all of them, but you're getting a lot of requests. We just had a conversation with some entrepreneurs here in the hallway. What are some of the conversations that you've had that really kind of point to the energy and the relevance of this new ecosystem that's emerging? >> I think one of the things that's extremely exciting to me is that there seems to be a race going on between basically three parties. I'd say one party is sort of what I call the blockchain for good. So there's actually a tremendous amount of NGOs, there's non-profits, there's the United Nations getting involved. Tremendous amount of folks working on beneficial foundation backed projects, ripple works. There's a tremendous, huge open source foundation feeling that's happening. Second party is really more of the commercial cryptocurrency and blockchain, represented in large part now by the ICO movement, about six billion dollars. But the third arm, which is actually the negative side, is that there actually are a lot of scammers, and a lot of, like, dark forces inside of the cryptocurrency movement. So that's why I think we welcome, kind of, more regulatory influence. Because, you know, none of us want to see bad actors in the space. >> And what's the coolest project you're involved in? Pick a favorite child. >> Well, at the moment, you know, the sponsor of this conference is actually lottery.com, which is tremendously exciting. A couple of others to mention that I think are exciting are Celsius Network, so that's a large scale lending platform, and then Hub Token. So Hub Token is building essentially a problem. It's a protocol that solves a problem of second party trust in the internet of value. >> Well, Miko, great to have you on. I really appreciate your friendship, and I really appreciate the feedback you've had for The Cube team so we can be better with our open content model, we're open sourced content, as everyone knows. Thanks for sharing your perspective in the data with the crowd. People can find you online, what's your twitter handle, how do they get ahold of you? >> So you can follow me on MikoJava on twitter, but my website is miko.com. Miko.com. >> Great URL, obviously an early pioneer of the domain name, land grab, great job. Miko.com. Miko Matsumura, thought leader, influencer, investor, advisor. Really in the front lines of this movement, this revolution. Legitimate revolution in the changing of the world for good and for businesses. This is The Cube coverage from Puerto Rico, we're back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)