>> Live, from Toronto Canada, it's the CUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by the CUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is the CUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, we're here all week. Yesterday we were at the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit put on by DigitalBits and the community, here is the big show around thought leadership around the future of blockchain and where it's going. Certainly token economics is the hottest thing with blockchain, although the markets are down the market is not down when it comes to building things. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, here with CUBE alumni and special guest Hartej Sawhney who is the founder of Hosho doing a lot of work on security space and they have a conference coming up that the CUBE will be broadcasting live at, HoshoCon this coming fall, it's in October I believe, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Always great to see you man. >> What's the date of the event, real quick, what's the date on your event? >> It's October 9th to the 11th, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, we rented out the entire property, we want everyone only to bump into the people that we're inviting and they're coming. And the focus is blockchain security. We attend over 130 conferences a year, and there's never enough conversation about blockchain security, so we figured, y'know, Defcon is still pure cybersecurity, Devcon from Ethereum is more for Ethereum developers only, and every other conference is more of a traditional blockchain conference with ICO pitch competitions. We figured we're not going to do that, and we're going to try to combine the worlds, a Defcon meets Devcon vibe, and have hackers welcome, have white hat hackers host a bug bounty, invite bright minds in the space like Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, the founder of the Trezor wallet, RSA, y'know we've even invited everyone from our competitors to everyone in the media, to everyone that are leading the blockchain whole space. >> That's the way to run an event with community, congratulations. Mark your calendar we've got HoshoCon coming up in October. Hartej, I want to ask you, I know Dave wants to ask you your trip around the world kind of questions, but I want to get your take on something we're seeing emerging, and I know you've been talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction and vision on: we're starting to see the world, the losers go out of the market, and certainly prices are down on the coins, and the coins are a lot of tokens out there, >> Too many damn tokens! (laughing) >> The losers are the only ones who borrowed money to buy bitcoin. >> (laughs) Someone shorted bitcoin. >> That's it. >> But there's now an emphasis on builders and there's always been an entrepreneurial market here, alpha entrepreneurs are coming into the space you're starting to see engineers really building great stuff, there's an emphasis on builders, not just the quick hit ponies. >> Yep. >> So your thoughts on that trend. >> It's during the down-market that you can really focus on building real businesses that solve problems, that have some sort of foresight into how they're going to make real money with a product that's built and tested, and maybe even enterprise grade. And I also think that the future of fundraising is going to be security tokens, and we don't really have a viable security exchange available yet, but giving away actual equity in your business through a security token is something very exciting for sophisticated investors to participate in this future tokenized economy. >> But you're talking about real equity, not just percentage of coin. >> Yeah, y'know, actual equity in the business, but in the form of a security token. I think that's the future of fundraising to some extent. >> Is that a dual sort of vector, two vectors there, one is the value of the token itself and the equity that you get, right? >> Correct, I mean you're basically getting equity in the company, securitized in token form, and then maybe a platform like Securitize or Polymath, the security exchanges that are coming out, will list them. And so I think during the down-markets, when prices are down, again I said before the joke but it's also the truth: the only people losing in this market are the ones who borrowed to buy bitcoin. The people who believe in the technology remain to ignore the price more or less. And if you're focused on building a company this is the time to focus on building a real business. A lot of times in an up-market you think you see a business opportunity just because of the amount of money surely available to be thrown at any project, you can ICO just about any idea and get a couple a million dollars to work on it, not as easy during a down-market so you're starting to take a step back, and ask yourself questions like how do we hit $20,000 of monthly recurring revenue? And that shouldn't be such a crazy thing to ask. When you go to Silicon Valley, unless you're two-time exited, or went to Stanford, or you were an early employee at Facebook, you're not getting your first million dollar check for 15 or 20 percent of your business, even, until you make 20, 25K monthly recurring revenue. I say this on stage at a lot of my keynotes, and I feel like some people glaze their eyes over like, "obviously I know that", the majority are running an ICO where they are nowhere close to making 20K monthly recurring and when you say what's your project they go, "well, our latest traction is that we've closed about "1.5 million in our private pre-sale." That's not traction, you don't have a product built. You raised money. >> And that's a dotcom bubble dynamic where the milestone of fundraising was the traction and that really had nothing to do with building a viable business. And the benefit of blockchain is to do things differently, but achieve the same outcome, either more efficient or faster, in a new way, whether it's starting a company or achieving success. >> Yep, but at the same time, blockchain technology is relatively immature for some products to go, at least for the Fortune 500 today, for them to take a blockchain product out of R&D to the mainstream isn't going to happen right now. Right now the Fortune 500 is investing into blockchain tech but it's in R&D, and they're quickly training their employees to understand what is a smart contract?, who is Nick Szabo?, when did he come up with this word smart contracts? I was just privy to seeing some training information for multiple Fortune 500 companies training their employees on what are smart contracts. Stuff that we read four or five years ago from Nick Szabo's essays is now hitting what I would consider the mainstream, which is mid-level talent, VP-level talent at Fortune 500 companies, who know that this is the next wave. And so when we're thinking about fundraising it's the companies who raise enough money are going to be able to survive the storm, right? In this down-market, if you raised enough money in your ICO, for this vision that you have that's going to be revolutionary, a lot of times I read an ICO's white paper and all I can think is well I hope this happens, because if it does that's crazy. But the question is, did they raise enough money to survive? So that's kind of another reason why people are raising more money than they need. Do people need $100 million to do the project? I don't know. >> It's an arm's race. >> But they need to last 10 years to make this vision come true. >> Hey, so, I want to ask you about your whirlwind tour. And I want to ask in the context of something we've talked about before. You've mentioned on the CUBE that Solidity, very complex, there's a lot of bugs and a lot of security flaws as a result in some of the code. A lot of the code. You're seeing people now try to develop tooling to open up blockchain development to Java programmers, for example, which probably exacerbates the problem. So, in that context, what are you seeing around the world, what are you seeing in terms of the awareness of that problem, and how are you helping solve it? >> So, starting with Fortune 500 companies, they have floors on floors around the world full of Java engineers. Full Stack Engineers who, of course, know Java, they know C#, and they're prepared to build in this language. And so this is why I think IBM's Hyperledger went in that direction. This is why even some people have taken the Ethereum virtual machine and tried to completely rebuild it and rewrite it into functional programming languages like Clojure and Scala. Just so it's more accessible and you can do more with the functional programming language. Very few lines of code are equivalent to hundreds of lines of code in linear languages, and in functional programming languages things are concurrent and linear and you're able to build large-scale enterprise-grade solutions with very small lines of code. So I'm personally excited, I think, about seeing different types of blockchains cater more towards Fortune 500 companies being able to take advantage, right off the bat, of rooms full of Java engineers. The turn to teaching of Solidity, it's been difficult, at least from the cybersecurity perspective we're not looking for someone who's a software engineer who can teach themselves Solidity really fast. We're looking for a cybersecurity, QA-minded, quality-assurance mindset, someone who has an OPSEC mindset to learn Solidity and then audit code with the cybersecurity mindset. And we've found that to be easier than an engineer who knows Java to learn Solidity. Education is hard, we have a global shortage of qualified engineers in this space. >> So cybersecurity is a good cross-over bridge to Solidity. Skills matters. >> If you're in cybersecurity and you're a full sec engineer you can learn just about any language like anyone else. >> The key is to start at the core. >> The key is to have a QA mindset, to have the mindset of actually doing quality assurance, on code and finding vulnerabilities. >> Not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental component of the development process. >> I could be a good engineer and make an app like Angry Birds, upload it, and even before uploading it I'll get it audited by some third party professional, and once it's uploaded I can fix the bugs as we go and release another version. Most smart contracts that have money behind them are written to be irreversible. So if they get hacked, money gets stolen. >> Yeah, that's real. >> And so the mindset is shifting because of this space. >> Alright, so on your tour, paint a picture, what did you see? >> First of all, how many cities, how long? Give us the stats. >> I just did about 80 days and I hit 10 countries. Most of it was between Europe and Asia. I'll start with saying that, right now, there's a race amongst smaller nations, like Malta, Bermuda, Belarus, Panama, the island nations, where they're racing to say that "we have clarity on regulation when it comes to "the blockchain cryptocurrency industries," and this is a big deal, I'd say, mainly for cryptocurrency exchanges, that are fleeing and navigating global regulation. Like in India, Unocoin's bank has been shutdown by the RBI. And they're going up against the RBI and the central government of India because, as an exchange, their banks have been shut down. And they're being forced to navigate waters and unique waves around the world globally. You have people like the world's biggest exchange, at least by volume today is Binance. Binance has relocated 100 people to the island of Malta. For a small island nation that's still technically a part of the European Union, they've made significant progress on bringing clarity on what is legal and what is not, eventually they're saying they want to have a crypto-bank, they want to help you go from IPO to ICO from the Maltese stock exchange. Similarly also Gibraltar, and there's a law firm out there, Hassans, which is like the best law firm in Gibraltar, and they have really led the way on helping the regulators in Gibraltar bring clarity. Both Gibraltar and Malta, what's similar between them is they've been home to online gambling companies. So a lot of online casinos have been in both of their markets. >> They understand. >> They've been very innovative, in many different ways. And so even conversations with the regulators in both Malta and Gibraltar, you can hear their maturity, they understand what a smart contract is. They understand how important it is to have a smart contract audited. They already understand that every exchange in their jurisdiction has to go through regular penetration testing. That if this exchange changes its code that the code opens it up to vulnerabilities, and is the exchange going through penetration testing? So the smaller nations are moving fast. >> But they're operationalizing it faster, and it's the opportunity for them is the upside. >> My only fear is that they're still small nations, and maybe not what they want to hear but it's the truth. Operating in larger nations like the United States, Canada, Germany, even Japan, Korea, we need to see clarity in much larger nations and I think that's something that's exciting that's going to happen possibly after we have the blueprint laid out by places like Malta and Gibraltar and Bermuda. >> And what's the Wild West look like, or Wild East if you will in Asia, a lot of activity, it's a free-for-all, but there's so much energy both on the money-making side and on the capital formation side and the entrepreneurial side. Lay that out, what's that look like? >> By far the most exciting thing in Asia was Korea, Seoul, out of all the Asian tiger countries today, in August 2018, Seoul, Korea has a lot of blockchain action going on right now. It feels like you're in the future, there's actually physical buildings that say Blockchain Academy, and Blockchain Building and Bitcoin Labs, you feel like you're in 2028! (laughs) And today it's 2018. You have a lot of syndication going on, some of it illegal, it's illegal if you give a guarantee to the investor you're going to see some sort of return, as a guarantee. It's not illegal if you're putting together accredited investors who are willing to do KYC and AML and be interested in investing a couple of hundred ETH in a project. So, I would say today a lot of ICOs are flocking to Korea to do a quick fundraising round because a lot of successful syndication is happening there. Second to Korea, I would say, is a battle between Singapore and Hong Kong. They're both very interesting, It's the one place where you can find people who speak English, but also all four of the languages of the tiger nations: Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, all in one place in Hong Kong and Singapore. But Singapore, you still can't get a bank account as an ICO. So they're bringing clarity on regulation and saying you can come here and you can get a lawyer and you can incorporate, but an ICO still has trouble getting a bank account. Hong Kong is simply closer in proximity to China, and China has a lot of ICOs that cannot raise money from Chinese citizens. So they can raise from anybody that's not Chinese, and they don't even have a white paper, a website, or even anybody in-house that can speak English. So they're lacking English materials, English websites, and people in their company that can communicate with the rest of the world in other languages other than Mandarin or Cantonese. And that's a problem that can be solved and bridges need to be built. People are looking in China for people to build that bridge, there's a lot of action going on in Hong Kong for that reason since even though technically it's a part of China it's still not a part of China, it's a tricky gray line. >> Right, in Japan a lot going on but it's still, it's Japan, it's kind of insulated. >> The Japanese government hasn't provided clarity on regulation yet. Just like in India we're waiting for September 11th for some clarity on regulation, same way in Japan, I don't know the exact date but we don't have enough clarity on regulation. I'm seeing good projects pop up in Korea, we're even doing some audits for some projects out of Japan, but we see them at other conferences outside of Japan as well. Coming up in Singapore is consensus, I'm hoping that Singapore will turn into a better place for quality conferences, but I'm not seeing a lot of quality action out of Singapore itself. Y'know, who's based in Singapore? Lots of family funds, lots of new exchanges, lots of big crypto advisory funds have offices there, but core ICOs, there was still a higher number of them in Korea, even in Japan, even. I'm not sure about the comparison between Japan and Singapore, but there is definitely a lot more in Korea. >> What about Switzerland, do you have any visibility there? Did you visit Switzerland? >> I was Zug, I was in Crypto Valley, visited Crypto Valley labs... >> What feels best for you? >> I don't know, Mother Earth! (laughs) >> All of the above. >> The point of bitcoin is for us to start being able to treat this earth as one, and as you navigate through the crypto circuit one thing as that is becoming more visible is the power of China partnering up with the Middle East and building a One Belt, One Road initiative. I feel like One Belt, One Road ties right into the future of crypto, and it's opening up the power of markets like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore. >> What Gabriel's doing in the Caribbean with Barbados. >> Gabriel from Bit, yeah. >> Yeah, Bit, he's bringing them all together. >> Yeah, I mean the island nations are open arms to companies, and I think they will attract a lot of American companies for sure. >> So you're seeing certainly more, in some pockets, more advanced regulatory climates, outside of the United States, and the talent pool is substantial. >> So then, when it comes to talent pools, I believe it was in global commits for the language of Python, China is just on the verge of surpassing the United States, and there's a lot of just global breakthroughs happening, there's a large number of Full Stack engineers at a very high level in countries like China, India, Ukraine. These are three countries that I think are outliers in that a Full Stack Engineer, at the highest level in a country like India or Ukraine for example, would cost a company between $2,000 to $5,000 a month, to employ full time, in a country where they likely won't take stock to work for your company. >> Fifteen years ago those countries were outsource, "hey, outsource some cheap labor," no, now they're product teams or engineers, they're really building value. >> They're building their own things, in-house. >> And the power of new markets are opening up as you said, this is huge, huge. OK, Hartej, thanks so much for coming on, I know you got to go, you got your event October 9th to 11th in Las Vegas, Blockchain Security Conference. >> The CUBE will be there. >> I look forward to having you there. >> You guys are the leader in Blockchain security, congratulations, hosho.io, check it out. Hosho.io, October 9th, mark your calendars. The CUBE, we are live here in Toronto, for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, with our good friend, CUBE alumni Hartej. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, be right back with more live coverage from the Untraceable event here in Toronto, after this short break.

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering CoinAgenda. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Hello and welcome to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here covering all the action at Restart, we've got a ton of events, all the thoughts leaders, influencers, decision makers, you name it, in the industry, pioneers making it happen. My next guest is Toni Lane, who's the founder of CoinGraph. She's a true influencer with a lot of impact in this market. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're so glad to have you on. Like the little joke at the beginning about being an influencer, you actually are an influencer. You've done such great work in the industry, well regarded in the community. You have publication and you do a lot of great content. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, for sure, yeah, thanks for having me. >> So being the influencer, what does that mean these days? Because we were just talking before the camera on, we came on camera, influence changes. You can't be an influencer all the time. You can be super or expert at something, but your expertise could change, you move to a new topic, learn something. And there's a lot of people in the digital marketing world saying I'm an influencer. It's kind of half baked, and really, I mean, it's not about the followers, your thoughts? >> Well, I mean, most of those followers are purchased. So there's a big difference between being an influencer and having actual influence. Because if you're, you know, if you have a million followers on Twitter, that's nice. How much engagement do you have? And that's actually what you look for, it's like when you look at someone's, whether it's, you know, social media, their digital presence, it's not about followers, it's all about engagement. You know, I don't even have that many, like I don't spend a lot of time doing that, at least I haven't so far, it's something I'm getting more into. But I have people that are really engaged, and so I look at people that have 15 million followers and I'm like, you have just as many likes on your things as I do, right. Because these people aren't real people. And it's less about, having influence in general is in many ways about having authenticity. And so influence is your ability to get something done. Being an influencer is your ability to hold someone's attention for a fragment of time. But being an influencer is not the same as having influence. >> And this community here, certainly, with decentralization here, you get the decentralized applications coming up blockchain, you got ICOs booming. It's all about the network effect, if you look at network effect, that is a new concept that ad technology does not know because you can't cookie a network connection. The only way to measure someone's true network is through malware today, and that's not good, no one does that. Well, they do, they're-- >> Toni: Unfortunately, yeah. >> But you can't you do it at business price, not sustainable. So the point is, it's not about how many followers you have. It could be that one follower, maybe 200 or 2,000, that opens up more. This is the network effect. This is what this community is all about, so I want to get your thoughts on this community's vibe. A lot of mission-driven, impact-oriented, merged with tech. So you have a fusion of technology, artistry, craftsmanship and mission-driven societal change in one melting pot. This is your wheelhouse. Share your thoughts on this. >> Well, so all of the different digital currencies have different value systems and they attract a different breed. And there are different incentives for each of these based on how the technology is designed, each protocol, right? So if you look at Bitcoin, in Bitcoin, the incentives are, you know, mining is done by computers, so your only incentive is like having social influence? And this is, I think, why we've seen a lot of kind of I would call it a scarcity mentality in terms of the way, why we see even more trolls in Bitcoin is because social influence is a huge way that success is measured, because as a developer, you can't have, you can't achieve a level of status any other way as a developer or as an influencer in Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin network is so far removed from that. And that's actually a perverse incentive in and of itself, and not only that, but early days in Bitcoin, there were major organizations who would hire people to man 100 Reddit and Twitter accounts and go into the Bitcoin community and actually fragment the public opinion using a technique grassroots psychological insurgency. So buying Reddit accounts that had been active for the last 10 years and going through and, you know, essentially just stabbing at people and creating, even having conversations with themselves to empower the voice of trolls. And what happens is you start bringing out what we call, actually, what the former Assad called, after Henry Kissinger, there was a big move that happened in the Middle East, where Kissinger realized the Middle East was becoming too powerful, and he saw it as a threat to American democracy. And so Kissinger organized a deal that fragmented the Middle East. And Assad said to Kissinger that his actions would be, he played Assad, basically. And Assad said to Kissinger, "Your actions "will bring up demons hidden underneath "the surface of the Arab world." And that strategy is actually something used in the Bitcoin community to leverage the incentives that are created, which is why we have seen previously so much, even from our industry leaders, so much fragmentation and so much tension. But the network is the most secure and the least corruptible, hands down, fundamentally. It's real cryptography. >> But let's talk about that, I love this conversation, because with networks, you have the concept of self-heal, and this gets nerdy on the packets, how packets move, at that level, self-healing networks has been a paradigm that's been proven. So that's out there, that's got to go to a societal level. The other one is the incentive system, if you have an immune system, if you will, in a network, this is a cultural thing. So actions, the Reddit's obvious, right. Weaponizing content has been well-documented, it's coming now mainstream, people are getting it that this outcome was actually manufactured by bad behavior. Now, I argue that there's an exact opposite effect. You can actually weaponize for good, 'cause everything has a polar opposite. So what is your view on that, because this is something that we've been teasing out for the first time. How do you weaponize content for good, (mumbles) not the right word, but look for the opposite value? >> Right, yeah, I mean, it is in so many ways, right. So I think it's about, there's a professor at Stanford whose name is BJ Fogg, and he's a behavioral researcher and he talks about essentially, you know, he writes a lot about habits. But something that's even more interesting about his understanding of propaganda is I studied a lot of Edward Bernays, he's responsible, he created the theory of propaganda, right. And he's the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he's responsible for essentially every consumptive theory in like leading up to the last century, he's actually, I would say he's responsible for the state of advertising and the economy today, almost really single handedly. And what's fascinating about this theory is that you can use propaganda to get women to smoke by unearthing what it is unconsciously in men that makes them not want to smoke. You can also use propaganda to get people to invest in health and wellness. You can also use propaganda to get people to stop their bad habits. So it's understanding that a technique works in a cognitive capacity in a way that affects a large amount of people. And it's really about the intention behind why a person who has influence, as we were saying, is leveraging that relationship. So I would say it's more about-- >> So we have to reimagine influence. Because the signalings that are igniting the cognitive brain can be tweaked. So that's what you're getting at here, right, so that's what we have to do. >> And it's an illusion from almost every angle. It's even the idea that, in the United States, the level of influence the president has and who's running, you know, and who, yeah, and who's at the wheel, right. So it's, we live in a world that is built on manufactured consent, and manufactured consent is enabled through thinkers like Bernays and through what I call the illusion of things like our former construct of even American democracy. That these things we've imagined to be so, the foundation and the structure for the way that we live. All of those things have become so far removed from their theory that they're no longer serving the principles under which they were founded, and that disconnect is actually a huge, it's a gap, it's an inertia gap for exploitation or it's an inertia gap for growth, and usually what happens is you have the exploitation first. Someone says oh, here's a big gap of information asymmetry, so I'm going to exploit the information asymmetry. And then once people start realizing that that information asymmetry is being exploited, you experience a huge inversion of that and you have enough kind of, you have enough inertia behind that slingshot to launch it into something totally different. >> Yeah, this is a great concept, I interviewed the founder of the Halcyon HAL in Washington, DC, and she's an amazing woman. And she had a great conscious about this, and what she postulated was, bubbles that burst, exploitation's always, we've seen it in all trends. The underbelly, 'cause it's motivated, no dogma. They don't care about structural incentives, they just want to make cash. But she had an interesting theory, she was talking about you can let the air out of the bubble with community and data. So all the societal entrepreneurship activities now that are mission-driven, now getting back to mission-driven is interesting. There might be a way to actually avoid the pop. Because, depending upon what the backlash might be on the exploitation side, as we saw in the dotcom bubble, you can actually let the air out a little bit through things like data. I mean, how do you see, in your mind, just thinking out loud, how do you see that playing out, because we have community now. We have access to open data. Blockchain is all about immutability. It's all about power to the user's data. This is a mega trend. Your thoughts? >> So interdependence is huge in the blockchain community, and that's actually to touch back on the incentives in Bitcoin, I think that that's actually one of Bitcoin's, it's not that it's a wrong or a right, it just is, right, like sidechains will be launched eventually, but the idea that Ethereum created something that was adaptable and empowered people to be creative, and yet they're creating incentives for her people to launch products that are, I believe, 'causing, in some ways, could cause some serious harm to the ecosystem once the air is let out of that bubble. >> John: The data. >> The data, so data, yes yes yes. >> How do you let the air out of the bubble, because the pop will be massively implosion, it'll leave a crater. >> So data is a non-scarce resource. This is actually how I describe blockchain to people. And this is actually, I think, one of the, the challenge, if you want to look at it from the perspective of challenge, and then I'll talk about for the benefit, just between Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are obviously other blockchains, EOS is like coming out super soon, Holochain. There are tons, Steem has actually its own infrastructure, tons of other blockchains to speak about. But just to take these two main blockchains, which are not competitors. In Bitcoin, you have, it's really cryptography. Cryptography is not about, you know, like let's do some rapid prototyping, cryptography is about let's like put a lot of thought into this thing and have mathematical certainty that this is not exploitatable. And Ethereum is just kind of like, well, let's build a framework and then let people play as much as they can. And so there are challenges and benefits to both of those models, the challenge of Ethereum being that you've let all of this capital into the industry which is not actually, 46% of ICOs have already failed. Already failed. And then if you look at Bitcoin-- >> And a person with your industry (mumbles) at 1,200, so it's a 50% discount. >> Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then if you do the same thing and you're looking at the Bitcoin blockchain, we've seen that the capacity for innovation, Bitcoin could have done what, they could've been the first to market for what Ethereum is doing. And they chose a different route, and I think there are some pros and cons to both of those things, but I think there is an intentionality behind why the world played out in the way that it did. And I think it's the right strategy for both products. So the way I describe applications using blockchain technology to people and what I call the future of an infinite economy is that, if you think about why are Facebook and Google these multi billion dollars companies, it's really simple. It's because what do they own, right? The data, the data. And they're some of the last companies that are still stewarding these things in a way that is taking vast amount of aggregated ownership over an asset that people are generating every day that's extremely valuable to companies in the private sector. So the way that I describe blockchain is that, if we being to own our self-sovereign identity, then when we're owning our data, that's the foundation for universal basic income. If we take a non-scarce resource like data that's being generated every day, not just from us, right, but the data in the health of the ocean, right. The stewardship of the ocean, the health of the fish, actually saying okay, fish are thriving in this area, and so there's a healthy ecosystem, and so this coin is trading higher because we're stewarding this area of the ocean so we don't overfish. The quality of the air so that, when we're actually de-polluting the air collectively, everyone around us is creating and generating data to say we're making the air better. The air, actually, the health of our bodies, of our Earth, of our minds, of our planet, of even the health of our innovation. Right, what are the incentives behind our innovation, those are all forms of data. And that's a non-scarce resource, so if we take all of these different applications and make many different blockchains. Which I fundamentally believe that there's a powerful theory in having blockchains that are economically scarce, because I believe you're going to empower more diverse spectrums and also have a level of difficulty in creating the coin. You're going to have more innovation. And so-- >> Well, this is a key area. I mean, this is super important. Well, I mean, you step back for a second, you zoom out, you say okay, we have data, data's super valuable, if you take it to the individual's levels, which has not been, quite frankly, the individual's been exploited. Facebooks of the world, these siloed platforms, have been using the data for advertising. That's just what everyone knows, but there's other examples. The point is, when you put the data in the hands of the users, combine that with cloud computing and the Internet of Things when you can have an edge of the network high powered computer, the use cases have never been pushed before. The envelope that we're pushing now has never been in this configuration. You could never have a decentralized network, immutable, storing users' data, you've never had the ability to write the kind of software you can today, you've never had cloud computing, you've never had compute at the edge, which is where the users live, they are the edge. You have the ability where the user's role can enable a new kind of collective intelligence. This is like mind blowing. So I mean, just how would you explain that to a common person? I mean, 'cause this is the challenge, 'cause collective intelligence has been well documented in data science. User generated content is kind of the beginning of what we see in user wearables. But if you can control the data streaming into the network, with all the self-healing and all the geek stuff we're talking about, it's going to change structural things. How do you explain that to a normal person? >> You don't, you don't, right. So you show them. Because I can sit here all day and I can talk to you about, you know, I could talk to you about all of these things, but at the end of the day, with normal people, it's not something you want to explain. You want to show them, because with my, actually, my grandma gets Bitcoin. My grandma hit me up in like 2012 and she was like, "Do you know what that Bitcoin thing is?" I'm like, "Mimi," I'm like, "How do you know "what Bitcoin is, Mimi?" And she's just like, "I don't know, I read." You know, I was like, "This is, so what are you reading? "Like, are you hanging out on like libertarian forums, "like what's up?" And so-- >> What's going on in the club there, I mean, are they playing-- >> Yeah, but she is a really unique lady. So I would say that, for most people, they are not going to, when you explain things to people-- >> What would you show them, I mean, what's an example? >> The way that, so when I was, so I got into Bitcoin in 2011, and the way that I would explain Bitcoin to people is I would just send it to them. I would be like, "Here's Bitcoin, like take this Bitcoin, "here's some Bitcoin for you." And that was, people got it, because they were like, I have five dollars now in my hands that was not there. And this person just sent it to me. And for some people even still, you know, to be honest, even then, I remember how much energy it took for me to do that. Everywhere I go, I'd be like, in cabs, I'd be checking out grocery stores and I would try, I would essentially pitch Bitcoin to every person that I met. >> John: You were evangelizing a lot of it. >> It took so much energy though, and even after that, there was a period-- >> It was hard for people to receive it, they would have to do what at that time? Think about what the process was back then. >> Oh yeah. There were very few people who, even after doing that, really got it. But you know what happened. This is so much perspective for me, I remember doing that in 2013 and I remember, in 2018, actually, I think it was the end of 2017. I went to a gas station, it's the only gas station in San Francisco with a Bitcoin ATM. And I was like, I need to get some cash and I'm running on Bitcoin. >> John: You guys want a mountain view now. >> Yeah, yeah. And so I go in and these guys, I'm like frustrated, I'm like oh, the ATM is like the worst user experience ever, I'm like (groans). That's literally, I'm like, it's just, it was like eyes rolling in the back of my head, like just so frustrated because I'm a super privacy freak. And so it was just a super complex process, but the guys that, the guy's (mumbles) he looks at me and he goes, "Yo." And I was like, "What's up, man?" And he goes, "Are you trying to buy some Bitcoin?" I was like, "I'm trying to sell some Bitcoin right now." (John laughs) >> You're dispensing it, they're like yeah. >> Yeah, he's like, "Oh, word." And he's like, "How much are you trying to sell?" And I'm like, "I don't know, like 2K." And so he goes, "Aight." And he's like, "Let me hit up my friends," he literally calls three of his friends who come down and they just like, they're like, "Do you want to sell more?" They're like, all they just peer to peer. It's like we bypass the ATM and it was actually a peer to peer exchange. And I didn't have to explain anything. You know what made people get it? You showed them the money, you showed them the money. And sometimes people don't, you can explain these concepts that are world-changing, super high level or whatever. People are not actually going to get it until it's useful to them. And that's why a user interface is so important. Like, if you even look at the Internet. Who made the money on the Internet, right, it was the people who understood how to own the user interface. >> I had a conversation with Fred Kruger from WorkCoin, he's been around the block for a long time, great guy. We were riffing on the old days. But we talked about the killer app for the mini computer and the mainframe, the mini computer and then the PC, it was email, for 20 years, the killer app was email. We were like, what's the killer app for blockchain? It's money, the killer app is money. And it's going to be 50 year killer app. Now, the marketplace is certainly maybe tier two killer app, but the killer app is money. >> For sure, that's amazing. >> That's the killer app. Okay, so we're talking about money, let's talk about wallets and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know personally that had been, wallets had been hacked. Double authentication (mumbles) news articles on this, but even early on, you got to protect yourself. It's something that you're an advocate of, I know recently, you've been sharing some stuff on Telegram. Share your thoughts on newbies coming in, be careful. Your wallet can be hacked, and you got to take care of yourself online. Is there a best practice, can you share some color commentary on when you get into the system, when you get Bitcoin or crypto, what are some of the best practices? >> It's not even, I think you need to remember a key principle of cryptography when you're dealing with digital currency, which was like don't really trust anything unless you call someone, you have like first hand verification from a person that you trust. Because these things are, I mean, I've had, literally last week, I had seven friends contact me, actually more than that once I posted about it, and they were like, "Is this you?" And I was like what, like people would literally just go online, they would scrape my Facebook photo, they'd go on Telegram and they would make, my name is @ToniLaneC, T-O-N-I-L-A-N-E-C, and so is my Twitter, and people would scrape my photos from my Twitter or my Telegram or my Facebook and they would create fake accounts. And they would start messaging people and say "Hey, like "what's up, how are you, that's cool, great, awesome. "So like, I need like 20 BTC for a loan. "Can you help me?" And all my friends were like, "I was just talking to you, is this you?" And I'm like no. And so I think that there's, the other thing you have to, it's not just security in terms of, and this is actually a problem Blockchain has to solve, right. It's not just security in terms of protecting your wallet and, you know, getting like a Ledger or a Trezor and making sure that you're keeping things like in cold storage, that you're going, there are so many, keeping your money in a hard wallet, not keeping your private keys on your computer, like keeping everything, storing your passwords in multiple places that you know are safe. Both handwritten, like in lock boxes, putting it in your safe deposit box or, you know, there are so many different ways that we can get into like the complexities of protecting yourself and security. Not using centralized cell networks is one of the big ways that I do this. Because if you are using two factor-- >> John: What's a centralized cell network? >> AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Because you are putting yourself in a situation where, if you're using a centralized system, those centralized systems are really easily exploitable. I know because my mom, when I was a kid one time, she put a password on my account so I couldn't buy games. I was not happy about it, it was my money that I was using, it was my money I was using to buy games, she was like, "You should just spend your money on better things." And so I remember going in when I was a kid, and I was like, this is my money, I totally want to buy this upgrade on this game. And so I went in and I essentially figured out how to hack into my own phone to be able to use my own money to buy the games that I wanted to buy-- >> Highly motivated learning opportunity there (laughs). >> But I realized that, in the same way we were talking about things that can be used for good can be used for bad, in the same way that someone can do something like that, you can also say, well, I'm in a call and say that I'm this person and take their phone and then get their two factor auth. So I don't use centralized cell networks, I don't use cell networks at all. >> John: What do you use? >> So, I mean, I have different kinds of like strategies or different things that mostly-- >> You might not want to say it here, okay, all right. >> Yeah yeah yeah, they're different, I'm happy to talk about those privately. The way that I've kind of handled that situation, and then the other thing that I would say is like, we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and for the world. And not social reputation systems like what is happening in China right now, where you can have someone leave you, like let's say I get into an Uber and I'm 30 seconds late. I can end up in a situation where I'm like not able to be admitted into a hospital or I'm not able to take a public train. Because someone rates me lower on this reputation system, I think that's a huge human rights issue. >> John: Yeah, that's a huge problem. >> And so not reputation systems like this, but reputations like the one we're working on at CULTU.RE that are really based more on the idea of restoration and humanization, rather than continued social exploitation to create some kind of collective norm, I think that kind of model is, it's not only a-- >> Well, the network should reject that by-- >> Toni: Exactly, exactly. >> All right, so let's talk about digital nations, we have China, so there's some bad behavior going on there. I mean, some will argue that there's really no R&D over there, and now they're trying to export the R&D that they stole into other countries, again, that's my personal rant. But the innovation there is clear, we chat and other things are happening. They finally turned the corner where they're driving a lot of, you know, mainly because of the mobile. But there's other nations out there that are kind of left behind. The UK just signed this week with Coinbase a pretty instrumental landmark licensing deal, which is a signal, 'cause I know Estonia, Armenia, you name every country wants to, Bahrain's got, you know, Dubai envy. So I mean, every country wants to be the crypto country. Every country wants to be the smart cities digital nation. I know this is something that you liked, and you and I were talking about 'cause we both are interested in. Your reaction, your thoughts on where that's going, I see, it's a good sign. What are the thresholds there, what are some of the keys things that they need to do to be a real digital nation? >> Well, I think it's less about digital nations in terms of like a nation is a series of borders, and more about first nations that we are, this is what we work on at CULTU.RE, that we are actually a nation of people and a lot of those nations have overlap and we should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good, rather than just saying like I care about me and mine, because that strategy, the way government works now, it's a closed network with low trust that is extremely inefficient in management of resources. And the only way you can really-- >> That's the opposite, by the way, of what this movement's about. >> Yeah, exactly. And the only way you can have influence in government is to go in government and to work through government. All right. So it's the idea that, look at how much food we waste in the United States. If we took the food we wasted in the United States and repurposed it, we could literally cure world hunger. That is how bad it has gotten, right. And there are people starving in the US. There are people on food stamps in the US. >> Well, I mean, every institution, education, healthcare, you name it, it's all, you know, FUBAR, big time. >> Yeah, but we're throwing away tons of lettuce and all of this different kinds of produce because it like looks funky. Like this peach looks a little too much like a bottom. So we're like not able to sell it. >> Or lettuce got a little brown on it, throw the whole thing away. >> Yes, exactly, exactly, and that waste is unacceptable. So what we need to move toward is a model of open networks of governance where we have peer to peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefiting the way that they believe the world should work. So it's about creating a collective strategy of collective non-violence and eliminating harm, so obviously, you know, having a society that has enough proper incentives so that people are well off and that people are provided for, and I think blockchain will-- >> I noticed you're wearing a United Nations pin. >> Woo-hoo, yeah. And blockchain, I think, will also create this. >> John: I have one too. >> Let's up top. (slap) Yeah, I think blockchain will also help create universal basic income, but in addition to that, it's the idea that, if I'm living next door, I'll give two examples. So one is about the legality of the way that we contribute to the society. So let's say I have a next door neighbor. And let's say that this next door neighbor and I feel literally, we totally get along on everything, there's just one issue we feel we're like, I totally disagree with this, I totally disagree. And that issue is the use of, and I hope this isn't controversial to say, but anyway. So the use of medical marijuana, right. And it shouldn't be, because we can have two different opinions and the world can still work and that's the point. >> Well, in California, it's now legal to own marijuana. >> Yeah, for sure, it's legal here as well. So it's the idea that, if I, so let's say I'm a woman who, you know, I have someone in my life who was injured by a driver who was driving under the influence of marijuana. And so that's all I know about marijuana because I don't really do drugs, I've never been around drugs. So when I hear that word, I immediately think about the person in my life who was harmed because of, yes, and so immediately triggered, and I'm like, I don't want to support anything, I don't want to support anything to do with marijuana, I think marijuana is like the Devil's lettuce. And I have no interest in supporting marijuana. She never has to support marijuana, she doesn't have to. But her next door neighbor is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, her, me, whatever, is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, okay. And the only way that this man can move is, he's literally shaking, but when he smokes medical marijuana, he's actually able to, you watch and literally 30-45 minutes, he's upright, he looks like a normal healthy man. And so he says, "I believe that every, "after I fought in this, I believe every person "should have access to medical marijuana, "because this is the only way I'm able "to even operate my life." >> The different context. >> And I'm so, yes, exactly. And so what culture is really about is about understanding each other's context, that's even how reputation works. It's contextual awareness that provides greater understanding of who we are as individuals and the way we work together to make society work. So maybe they can mutually agree that he is not going to smoke while he's driving and he can pay to support everyone to have access who needs access to medical marijuana. >> Or he could finance Uber rides for them. You know, or whatever, I mean, these are mechanisms. >> Yes, yes, but it's the, yes, exactly, exactly. It's the idea that we are all, we're coming together to share context is a way that's not aggressive and not accusatory, so two people can believe two totally different things and still develop enough mutual respect to live together peacefully in a society. >> You know, the other too I'm riffing on that is that now KYC is a concept (mumbles) kicked around here, know your customer. I've been riffing on the notion of KYC for know your neighbor. And what we're seeing in these communities, even the analog world, people don't know who their neighbors are. Like, they don't actually even like care about them. >> Toni: For sure. >> You know, maybe I grew up in, you know, a different culture where, you know, everyone played freely, the parents were on the porch having their cocktail or socializing and watching the kids from the porch play on the lawn. Now I call that Snapchat, right. So I can see my kids Snapchat, so I'm not involved, but I have peripheral view. >> Toni: For sure. >> But we took care of each other. That doesn't happen much anymore, and I think one of the things that's interesting in some of these community dynamics that's been successful is this empathy about respect. They kind of get to know people in a non-judgmental way. And I think that is something that you see in some of these fragmented communities, where it's just like, if they just did things a little bit different. Do you agree, I see you're shaking your head, your thoughts on this? This super interesting social science thing that's, now you can measure it with digital or you can measure that kind of-- >> We can incentivize it. We can incentivize it. And that's the difference, measurement is one thing. Incentive is a behavior changer. Incentive is a behavior changer. And that is what we actually have to do in the way we think about the foundation of these systems, is it's not incentivizing competitive marketplaces that are like my way of thinking about this is right and your way of thinking about this thing is wrong, and like ah, it's not about that. At the end of the day like, I think we forget or misquote so much of, so many of the great thinkers of the last generation, like if you think about Darwin. What does everyone know about Darwin, right, it's like survival of the fittest. It's not what Darwin said, okay. It's misquoted and it's used, it's like one of those things where people who want to exploit-- >> It's a meme, basically. >> Yeah, people who want to exploit someone else's knowledge for their own ends will use that to, in some way, uplift the kind of like strategy of, you know, incentives of the time. What Darwin actually said was that human beings with the highest capacity for sympathy, qualities we now identify as altruism, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, will be the most likely to survive during hardship. Fundamentally, I mean, look at the state of the world today. It doesn't look good, it's like, you look at the way people interact with each other, it's like a virus that's attacking itself in an ecosystem that is our planet Earth, and we need to be, you know what is the antibody, our own sense of consideration for our fellow man. That is the antibody to violence. And so we can incentivize this, and we're going to have to because we're going to, AI, automation, these will fundamentally transform the way we think about jobs in a way that will liberate us like we've never known before. And once given the freedom, I think that we'll see the world start to change. >> Toni, I really appreciate you spending the time in this thought leadership conversation, riffing back and forth. Feels great and it's a great productive conversation. I got to ask you, how did you get there? I mean, who are you? I mean, you're amazing. Like, how did you get here, you obviously, Coin Telegraph's one of the projects you're running, great content. You're wearing the UN pin, I'm aligning with that. Got a great perspective. What's your story? Where did you come from originally, I mean... How did you get here? >> I think, you know, I don't know. I'm really connected to Saturn, I don't know where my home planet is. >> Which spaceship did you come in on? No, I mean, seriously, what's your background? How did you weave into this? 'Cause you have a holistic view on things, it's impressive. But you also can get down and dirty on the tech, and you have a good, strong network. Did you kind of back into this by accident on purpose, or was it something that you studied? What's the evolution that you have? >> Yeah, you know. I studied performance art and I was an artist all of my life. And I had a really big existential crisis, because I realized, as I was looking around, that technology was replacing every form. I remember the first time I watched an AI generate, this was maybe in like, I don't remember how, this was a long time ago, but I was essentially watching, before like the deep dream stuff, maybe like 2009 or 10. And I remember watching computers generate art. And I just was like, I was like mic drop, I was like anything that could ever be created can and will be created by computers, because these are, you are looking at this data, you can scan every art piece in the world and create an amalgamation of this in a way that extends so far beyond team and capacity that the form that we have used to express artistic integrity, all forms will, in some way, become obsolete as a form of creative expression. And I had this huge existential crisis as a performer, realizing that the value of my work was essentially, like, how long would the value of my work live on if no one is, I am not alive to continue singing the song. You don't remember the people who played Carmen, you remember Bizet who wrote the opera, you remember Carmen the character, but the life of the performer is like that of a butterfly. It's like you emerge from the cocoon, you fly around the world beautifully for a very short amount of time. And then you just, you know, stardust again. And so I had this huge existential moment, and it was a really big awakening call. It was as though the gravity of the universe came into the entire dimension of my being and said these, what you have learned has given you a skill, but this is not your path. So I went okay, I just need some time to like process that and so, 'cause this is my entire life, it's the only thing I ever imagined I would ever do. And so I ended up spending three months in silence meditating. And people are like whoa, like how did you do that? And I don't think people, I don't know, not that people don't understand, but I'm not certain that a lot of people have the level of this kind of existential moment that I experienced. And I couldn't have done anything else, I really just needed to take that time to process that I was actually reformulating every construct at the foundation of my own reality. And that was going to take, that's not something you just do overnight, right, like some people can do it more fluidly, but this was a real shift, a conscious shift. And so I asked myself three questions in that meditation, it was what is my purpose, what is the paradigm shift and where is my love. And so I just meditated on these three questions and started to, I don't know how deeply you've studied lucid dreaming or out of body experiences, but that's another, a conversation we can get into in another time, that was my area of study during that period. And so I ended up leaving the three months in silence and I just kind of, I started following my intuition. So I would just, essentially, sometimes I'd walk into a library and I would just shut my eyes and I would just walk around and I would touch books. And I would just feel what they felt like to me, like the density of their knowledge. And I would just feel something that I felt called to, and I would just pull it out of the shelf and just read it. And I don't know how to explain it-- >> (mumbles) Energy, basically-- >> I was guided, I was guided to this. This was in 2011. And so what I started getting into was propaganda theory, the dissolution of Aristotelian politics as an idea of citizen and state when we're really all consumers in a Keynesian economy structured by Edward Bernays, the inventor of propaganda, who essentially based our entire attitude of economic health on, you know, a dissolving human well being. Like, the evolution of our economic well being and our human well being were fundamentally at odds, and not only was that system non-sustainable, but it was a complete illusion. At every touch, point and turn, that the systems we lived in were illusions. And so is all of the world, right, like this whole world is an illusion, but these illusions in particular have some serious implications in terms of people who don't have the capacity, or not the capacity, everyone has the capacity, but who have not explored that deeply, right, who haven't gone that deep with themselves. >> And one of those books was like a tech book or was like-- >> It was just multiple, no, it was multiple books. And it's not that I would even read all of the books all of the way through. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and I would just open it to a certain page and I would read like a passage or a couple pages, and I'd just feel like that's all I need to read out of that book. It's, you just tune into it. >> When was your first trade on Bitcoin, first buy, 2011? >> You want to know something nuts? People always, people are like, "When did you first buy Bitcoin?" I was not, I didn't. So after I started, once you know, all this knowledge came to me, I just started talking about it, I was like, I've been given some wisdom, I just have to share it. So I started going out into the world and finding podiums and sharing. And that was when someone put a USB full of Bitcoin into my hands. I very rarely, I don't necessarily buy, I've just been gifted a lot. >> Good gifts. >> Toni: They've been great gifts, yeah. >> And then when did you start Coin Telegraph, when did that come online? >> So that was in 2013. I joined, the property had been operable for I think like three or four months. And some guys called me and they said, "We're just really impressed with you "and we want to work with you." And I said, "Well, that's nice," I was like, "But you don't have a business, right?" And they were like, "What do you mean?" And I was like, "Well, you have a blog, right?" And so I went in and I said, essentially like, here's, to scale the property, I was like, "Here's a plan for the next three years. "If we really want to get this property to where "it needs to be." I'm like, "Here are the programs that we need "to institute, here's like this entire, "countries we can be operable in "and then other acquisitions of other properties." I essentially went in and said like, "Here's the business model and the plan at scale," and they were just like, I think they were a little like, the first call that we had, I think they were just like, "We just called you to," it was a bold move, like, "We just called you to offer you something, "and you countered our offer by saying "we don't have a business?" It was one of those things, but they-- >> Well, it was the labor of love for them, right, I mean-- >> Well, for all of us, yeah, for all of us. >> When all you do is you're blogging, you're just sharing. And then you start thinking about, you know, how to grow, and you got to nurture it, you need cash. >> Yes, and so I essentially came in and then started, I was both editor in chief and CEO and co-founder of the property who helped bring in a lot of the network, build the reputation for the brand, create a scaling strategy. A lot of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of franchises and-- >> How many properties did you buy roughly, handful, six, less than six? >> So I would also say that-- >> Little blogs and kind of (mumbles) them together, bring people together, was that the thinking? >> Yeah, you know, what's interesting is media from all shapes and sizes, 15 to 20 offices in 25 different countries. I always say this when I talk about this, a very important lesson that I learned. How do you manage a team of 40 anarchists? You don't, you don't, that's the answer, you don't, you don't even like, you're like oh. I remember when I was like, "We're a team!" And someone was like, "No, we're not, "I don't believe in teams, I work for myself "and I don't need," I was like oh, wow. I was like oh-- >> John: The power of we, no. >> I was just like, all right, but it was a good learning experience, because I was like well, this is the way, these are your needs. So if that's your, I was like, well, let's embrace that, let's embrace the idea-- >> But that's the culture, you can't change it. >> And let's create the economy around that, let's actually do direct incentive for it, if you think that you're, if you want to be in this on your own, then let's say okay, we're going to make this fully free market economics and we're going to have a matter of consensus on whether or not someone who's exploiting the system, you write an article, you send it out, the number of views and shares that it gets from accounts that are, you know, proven verified, that is how much you get out of the bounty that's created from our ad sales, and if the community comes together in a consensus and says that someone wrote an article that was basically exploiting the system, like beer, guns, tits and weed plus Bitcoin and then they just shared it with everyone, then obviously, they would be weighted differently because the community would reach consensus so-- >> Change the incentive system. >> We just, I started, yeah, I started redesigning, essentially, once I had that moment, I was like okay, I was like, well, we really got to change the incentives here then because the incentives are not going to work like that. If that's the, if there's a consensus that that is the way you guys want to do things, then I got to change things around that. All right, cool, and so yeah, it was a really interesting awesome learning experience from like, you know, a team of like, maybe like 20 to 40 into, probably took it up 40, and then with all of the other, you know, companies and franchises, to about 435 people. And then just took the revenue from, yeah, just took, it was like skating revenue and then rocketing revenue. So that was really my role in the growth of the business and we're all, you know, it's amazing to see how these kind of blockchain holacracies work, you know, at a micro scale and at a macro scale. And what it really takes to build a movement, right. And then, in some ways, I guess it'd either become or create a meme. >> Well, I really appreciate the movement you've been supporting, we're here to bring theCUBE to the movement, our second show, third show we've been doing. And getting a lot more this year, as the ecosystem is coming together, the norms are forming, they're storming, they're forming, it's great stuff. You've been a great thought leader, and thanks for sharing the awesome range of topics here for theCUBE. >> For sure. >> Toni Lane here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, we'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's The Cube covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (rhythmic salsa music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico, Blockchain Unbound Global Conference where the leaders in the industry from entrepreneurs to investors and everything in between, from San Francisco to New York, Miami, South Africa, Russia, all over the world are here in Puerto Rico, The Cube's coverage. Our next guest is Naomi Brockwell who is hosting the event here on stage. She's emceeing it all. You go to her YouTube channels /naomibrockwell, check out her videos, hosts events all over the industry, Blockchain, celebrity, thought leader, futurist. What else are you? >> You're very, very kind. It's all not true, but I have been in the space for awhile and I love Blockchain text, so it's exciting to be here. >> I'm really impressed by your stamina and passion on stage. What a line up today, so give us the quick highlights What happened today, we were here filming. What happened inside the venue? We saw some great talks come through there. >> Yeah, we saw some great ones. A probably a highlight for me was seeing Alena. She was the former CEO of SatoshiLabs, which created Trezor, one of mt favorite hard wallets, by the way, and it was just great listening to her talk about security because that is something that is so important and people do not take seriously enough. I have people telling me, "Oh, Naomi, I started up this wallet, and I stood my public in the..." I was like, "So did you write down your private key and all that, it's in a safe place?" He's like "Yup, it's in my DropBox." I'm like, "No, what are you doing, this is not good!" Hearing her basically say anything that has touched the internet ever, any device that has been on the internet ever is not secure. Do not trust it, you need to use offline things. >> There's a lot of wallet grabbing going on digitally. >> Absolutely. >> That's come up. I saw some stuff on Telegram, people that we know, be like, "Hey, beware, a lot of hacking out there. "Got to watch your coins." >> And also, I mean there's just huge gains to be made, right, so it makes sense, especially we expect the price of Bitcoin to go up. You have hackers just targeting at specific wallets, and specific vulnerabilities, and they just keep going until they get through, so you've got to be vigilant and you got to take every precaution possible. Got to take it seriously. >> Is there a best practice that you observed? >> Absolutely. Don't store anything online. And another thing, people are telling me, "Yeah, you know, I have my private key written down." I'm like, "Great, you wrote it down twice?" They're like, "Yeah, I just printed that out twice." I'm like, "No, your printer stores an image "of everything you've ever printed out "and it's connected to wifi at all times. "That is going to be hacked. "Do not print out your private key, "your paper wallet, anything. "You've got to write this down." Paper and pen is the best practice you can use and-- >> Going old school analog, big time. >> Absolutely. And isn't that funny? You have this amazing new tech that's fantastic, cutting edge, and what are we doing to keep it safe? Pen and paper. >> Yeah, turn off all wifi, put on some vinyl records, eight-track recorder, going old school. Okay, I got to get-- >> But holding your own coins, holding your own money, having control of your own money, no one said that's the easiest practice. They just said it was the most secure and is going to give you the most power over your funds, and so if you want to do that, there's a price to pay and that is being vigilant about your security. >> One of the things about that I'm interested in talking to you about is being someone who's present at creation of a big movement like this. You've seen the evolution. What's the growing pains in the industry 'cause we're seeing a lot of people who are the pioneers, now that people, I won't call them tourists because they're still young and emerging, but you have a lot of get-rich-quick schemes. Those are obviously being filtered out pretty quickly by the community, but you're seeing new entrants come in. You have financing, got big numbers coming in, big money. How has it evolved, I mean, what's your observation? How is it maturing? What's some of the vibe? You've got some factions over here, you've got some factions over there. People are still getting along. What's the overall sentiment? >> I've been in this space for about five years, so in this industry, it's like being an absolute veteran, and what you've seen is it started out as this very libertarian space. People were interested in taking their money out of the control of government and having more autonomy over their finds, having more control over their funds. Blockchain was invented as a tool for giving people more freedom, and what you're seeing now is a bunch of people who entered the space who don't necessarily share that ethos, but what I love about Blockchain is that they're taking this technology that is inherently taking people towards a more decentralized free society, and they're applying it to all different industries. So my point of view, it doesn't bother me at all that the new entrants don't necessarily share this passion for freedom that the people who've been here since the beginning have, but the fact that they are taking this and making the world a more free place regardless is really exciting to me. >> And that's the real opportunity 'cause inherently the ethos is Blockchain, so it's not so much a political orientation or this or that. It's how you apply it. >> Exactly, and so Blockchain, being a decentralized ledger is great because when you decentralize any power structure, no matter what industry it is, I mean, you're really making people more free, you're giving them more responsibility, and I like seeing things become decentralized. >> Certainly we're a media company, we're kind of a new car, we don't believe in a central gatekeeper, so I got to ask you the question. As a YouTuber who has a big fan base and in the community, it's really disheartening for me to see John Oliver take down Brock Pierce, although it was a hilarious video up until the point where he maliciously went after Brock in a very vicious way. How does one person have that power. I mean, it shouldn't be that way, or the New York Times or a certain publication that, they're the gatekeeper still. That was an example I looked at and said, "That's where Blockchain can disrupt the media." I mean, it's great comedy, but it kind of went over the top. >> For me, I mean-- >> He got fired by the Eagles project. They wiped his name off everything. I mean, that's just, I just see that as a problem. You, what's your thoughts? >> When you say how do these people get there, John Oliver is a funny guy. I see how he got there, he's very talented, he has a great team, great writing, but that section, I thought it was pretty spot on for most of the Bitcoin segment. It got to that section, I was like, "Oh, this is kind of sloppy research." so that was disappointing. I saw that Brendan Bloomer had a nice response that he posted. He's the head of EOS. >> What did he say? >> He was just very funny and playful with John, so that was nice to see. He set him straight in terms of saying like, "What does this technology enable?" He was basically arguing Blockchain doesn't go far enough. It doesn't fulfill the needs that I see in society so I created this other thing which does XYZ. He was authoritative in stating that, "no, you just don't understand the tech." He basically clarified the Brock situation and said, "No, actually having him involved was really great." He's not involved for various reasons. Yeah, it was an interesting segment that the-- >> It was so funny after that one point. I'm like, "Oh, boy." >> I was enjoying it up til then. I was like, "Okay, this makes sense, you know. >> It's funny. >> And then it gets up to that and I'm like, "Okay, this just became an at home and I'm going to tag. This is a cheap throw, and people do that with Bitcoin. Since it's inception, you've seen people in media and mainstream media in particular target Bitcoin and they're just adopting the government narrative saying, "Oh, everyone in this industry is corrupt," or "Everyone in this industry is an ICO scammer," or "Everyone in this industry is a drug runner "and they're all selling drugs on the dark web." It's like, you know what, you can do some research and do a bit better than that, so to see John Oliver perpetuating those at-home and I'm going to attack was disappointing, but at the same time, we are seeing that narrative shift, and you're seeing more news outlets become more positive about Bitcoin. >> Also the data is the self-government and the community has the data. The truth is going to get out there. That's the purpose of Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Crypto. You've got consensus, you've got algorithms, you've got machine learning. Okay, cool. What are you up to? You've got an exciting couple things going on. You've got a lot going on, so take a quick minute to explain your big project. You've got some exciting, cool things, share it. >> Got some fun things going on at the moment. While I'm not emceeing 20 to 40 Blockchain conferences a year, which is exciting, but takes up a lot of my time, I am a television producer. I have my own show. It's Bitcoin, Blockchain-tech based. Then on top of that, I'm a film producer, television producer. We're working on a really exciting series right now. It's called The HardFork Series. It's this dystopian future, it's a sci-fi thriller. $18 million, or it's a large budget, and we have one of the guys from Ozark, on Netflix originally. If you haven't seen it, you should see it. It's a great show. Christopher James Baker is our lead and the community support we have garnered for this project is great because we have not only Hollywood types, our director is a Sundance alumni. We've also got people in the Crypto Space who have a huge amount of credibility. We've got Bruce Fenton, Jason King on our Board of Advisors. People who understand the space, so the community is excited about for the first time having a mainstream production that is being created with a large budget where people in the industry have control of the narrative. We haven't had control of the narrative yet. >> That's true. >> The government's still controlling it, mainstream media's still controlling it, and so to create a series that could potentially expose people to this technology for the first time and to have control of that narrative is exciting. >> Is it going to be inspirational, it going to be a comedy? >> It's going to be gritty, it's a sci-fi thriller. We call it a crypto-thriller noir. Is that not the best genre you've ever heard? It's pretty cool. It's this idea that in the future the government has their own Blockchain and there's Crypto Coins that they have. It's all centralized and they control the populous with this augmented reality where everything is gamified. Basically the idea is the government's trying to distract people from important issues, like gamifying everything. You have this group of renegades who comes in. They're like, "No, we're going to decentralize this." They come and work their magic. >> It's Mr. Robot meets Black Mirror. >> Oh, yeah, no, it's pretty great. >> Kind of thing goin' on? It basically is a tale about the power of decentralization and how it can disrupt all authoritarian role, which I think is just a great topic for right now. >> What's your background? Where are you, out of LA, New York? >> I'm based in New York. My background actually. >> How'd you get here? >> I was an opera singer. That's how I got here. I moved to New York as an opera singer and then pivoted into movie production, and from there went on to television production. I got into the Crypto Space because I'm really interested in Australian economics and love the philosophy that Bitcoin was created on. It's been an interesting journey. >> You got addicted. >> Yeah, now I kind of-- >> You went to the light. >> Yeah, I'm bringing everything together now with my Bitcoin, economics-based, Crypto-thriller noir, so it's pretty exciting. >> I'm super impressed. Congratulations on all your continued success. Great job emceeing the Blockchain Unbound. >> Thank you. >> Great energy, great mind, great to have you on The Cube. Thanks for sharing >> It's wonderful to be here. >> your story. Thanks for everything. It's The Cube, I'm John Furrier here. Breaking down, we've got all the action in Puerto Rico. Thought leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, people in the industry sharing their story. Sharing the data with you, that's our mission. Thanks for watching. Day two tomorrow, we'll see you then. (engaging tones)