Blockchain & NFT: An Introduction

all right thanks uh everyone for joining uh this is um i'm taking some part of my typical slides and splicing in certain stuff about nfts uh so the topic of the talk is usually blockchain 101 into a rabbit hole of money decentralization and smart contracts today we'll cover a bit more of on nfps if you've covered some of these products please just feel free to let me know and i can skip or just fast forward through some of them and if you have any questions at any point uh feel free to just unmute uh or ask in the chat um i've baked in about two hours for this talk uh it can go much longer depending on people's questions and how much they want to know i'm completely okay with uh going maybe four hours max um if you guys are not again we can cover the stuff that everyone wants and there can be more questions at the end right so i asked these questions already for the people on the call uh and yeah so the first thing i want to show is this uh tom cruise uh video if you've seen it don't uh spoil it for everyone else can you hear the sound let me know in the chat if you can hear tom cruise's voice all right instead of taking too much more time i'll just like put the link inside uh yeah so you can either uh watch it on your end it's just like a few seconds um but for the sake of completeness i'll just play on my end as well all right uh so i hope you uh got the the voice as well uh feel free to put in the chat if you know why i'm showing you this video or what's so unique about this other than it being tom cruise um all right i don't see any uh correct answers in the chat so um this is actually not tom cruise at all uh it's an ai video that is it's a deep fake video that people use ai to fake tom cruise speaking and doing many many different actions if you go to deep deep tom cruise on tiktok uh there's a bunch of videos that they've created uh and none of them is uh the real tom cruise and uh why i'm showing this is because um it may you know you may not think he has anything to do with nfps but actually using nfps can be a good solution for this kind of problem because uh imagine if there was some celebrity or imagine if there was a video of anwar ibrahim or azmin ali doing certain activities um that isn't actually really them and uh if you can imagine any um i guess for me some aunties who love sharing uh chain messages on whatsapp those kinds of stories can can snowball and uh become much bigger than it was and in this case even fake and there can be a lot of big impacts on society potentially negative so nfts is actually a way to prove authenticity of videos like this so that if you were to see it the real tom cruise could show that okay this is a video of him uh with the nft to show that this is really done by him and uh a video that is sort of released anywhere without some sort of reputable person or uh or entity that is stamping their mark of authenticity with an nft on it um you could dismiss it as not real because there's no one that's claiming authenticity whereas the ones that are um ones that are shared um without any kind of um authenticity claim behind it uh could potentially be dismissed uh it may not sound like a that big of a deal now but as this ai technology improves over time this can become more and more real and the risk of it damaging kind of relations or stability within any community or society goes higher and higher um yeah so uh not a knock one antis uh just a common stereotype forgive me for using stereotypes all right um so why rabbit hole is uh if any one of you have watched the red alice in wonderland you know that uh she falls down this uh rabbit hole into this crazy magical world uh full of things that don't make sense and that's actually a lot of the experience that people who fall in into the blockchain or crypto space you end up sort of hours and hours in front of your laptop or phone watching some video or reading some article and discovering all these different concepts that some of them may not even be real it may just be like a scam that people are trying to trying to pull on you but a lot of them are actually real concepts real advancements that have been made um and yeah you end up with like uh big eye bags uh when you wake up so it's actually quite common to see like crypto people with heavy eye bags um quick introduction to myself um i work at ediscan which is the leading block explorer for the ethereum blockchain i'll explain what it is a bit more later i also run the ethereum malaysia meetup group uh it's a sort of a group of it's a community of people who are interested in blockchains not in the sort of buying and selling and making money but in understanding the technology and its use cases uh primarily focused on here and a quick overall sort of tldr of what we'll be covering uh some preamble uh some concepts on blockchain 1.0 and some concepts on blockchain 2.0 i'll explain why there's a two point over there and inside that we also covered a bit more about nfps uh some local companies and communities in malaysia and uh so what like why should all of this matter to you so quick one preamble um yeah so the difference between bitcoin and blockchain i'll just go through it very quickly um you can imagine as a venn diagram where bitcoin is a subset of blockchain and a blockchain is a subset of glt or distributed ledger technology and you can think of it as toyota is a subset of a car and car is a subset of just generally transportation so uh there's a lot more blockchains than just bitcoin bitcoin is one type or one brand of the blockchain even though it is the og the the filer of all these uh newer newer blockchains around um but it is just one of many blockchains so you shouldn't um sort of misunderstand between bitcoin and multi and between cryptocurrency so the actual more correct term is to use crypto asset because a currency is one type of asset there are many other types of crypto assets out there so for example there are crypto tokens so you can picture this as uh chips in a casino or if you go to like a sports day you could buy certain coupons or vouchers and use that to be able to play games or eat food crypto security is just a representation of uh let's say a stock or a bond that is in the sort of real world and then there is a cryptocurrency which is uh used mainly as currencies to transact with each other uh then finally there is a difference between bitcoin the blockchain or the the technology and bitcoin the unit of currency so going back to the analogy of the car to power the car to be able to drive it from point a to point b you need to um sort of uh uh fill it with some fuel so that it can actually travel the miles so without that unit of currency you can up you can't actually use the bitcoin blockchain or technology it's also sometimes a little bit confusing because people use capital b bitcoin to mean the unit of currency uh or small b to mean the technology but if you understand the context of the sentence you should be able to figure out when someone is talking about the technology versus the unit of currency okay there's also some background on what money is there's this store value unit of account medium of exchange that i would presume most of you would know already from like your basic economic class or just going on wikipedia so i'm not going to delve into it too much some things that people don't necessarily cover when they talk about money is that it has to have a limited supply or it has to be scarce and something else that sometimes people don't appreciate when they talk about money is that money isn't a real thing it's just a representation of value like many of the most important things in life whether it's say religion or politics or love there is no physical item that um is those things uh you may have physical or virtual items that represent those uh feelings that that we have uh with other people but they are not like they don't exist in the physical world it's an abstract uh idea uh to quote uh lord varys from the game of thrones uh value or to misquote him value resides where men believe it resides it doesn't actually um exist there's no um piece of metal or or paper that actually is the value it is those things are just sort of representing uh value between you and me it's it's a social fiction it's a [Music] an illusion that we convince each other so you might say uh what about all these things that we know of as money you know the pieces of paper that represent the dollar or the ringgit uh these gold bars um these are not actually um what kind of what value is it's a representation of that value and if you even think about it a little bit more uh if you look at your e-wallets you know it's all just pixels on the screen there's no physical item that actually represents your money it's just digits that can completely uh be made up and if you consider some sort of different communities out there if you are ever in prison which uh i hope none of us will be um typically a stereotypical example that people use is that uh prisoners would use cigarettes as a form of currency you know you use you trade in your cigarettes for other goods that a fellow prisoner might have or other uh services that they could provide um if you think back to maybe uh say 20 years ago people would use or kids who use pokemon cards to trade with each other for you know their toys or or other things and certain communities from hundreds or thousands of years ago are known to have used things like seashells as as a way to represent their money none of us in today's world would in the sort of majority of cases would accept any of these things as money but within those communities uh in that point of time and place uh these were widely used as a form of currency uh to to pay each other um uh with and uh to give a more sort of real example uh this is the bolivar which is the currency of venezuela uh it's had millions of percentages in invasion uh such that people uh there now would run would rather use these pieces of paper that that represents bolivar as uh origami handbags or to draw cartoons on and by doing these they actually derive more value or more uh utility out of these physical objects than uh that function of money itself and uh we don't have to kind of like look too far uh even in malaysia there is this thing called the duet pisan or banana money um for those of you who if you were in malaya at that point in time or if you know any family members or friends who were there back then um so you know that this is the japanese dollar that was sort of uh enforced uh in malaya while we were being occupied by the japanese military and it's called banana dollars because there's a picture of the banana on the 10 note um and this was the sort of widely accepted form of currency so you'd have to use this to pay each other to to get any goods or services now imagine you were a banana farmer yourself and every day you've been sort of farming and then you've claimed your harvest you went to the market and and sold your bananas and you got this do it besan and because you want to save for your future for your kids you know you go and um you know put it in some piggy bank at home maybe under your bed and um now imagine you go to sleep one night and you wake up the next day and you hear this really good news that the japanese military has left malaya they've lost the war um they're not gonna sort of occupy malaya anymore and they're going back home and while it is an awesome story for everyone uh it's there is a little bit of bitter sweetness for you because imagine all that one thousand dollars that you have under your bed in the blink of an eye or in the space of one night you wake up and all those pieces of paper that represent a thousand dollars which maybe one day before could you could buy like 10 000 nasi lemak with but the next day you wake up and you can't use it for anything because no one in their right mind would want to accept this dwight pisang from you uh when there is no japanese military to enforce the the use of this partisan so uh i'm not giving some theoretical example about how money is this um this story that we tell each other uh that belief that is shared because it has happened uh in malaya where you know a form of money can come and go depending on circumstances and um to give a more sort of modern like example that people can appreciate in their daily lives perhaps if you look at even the u.s dollar uh its value between um let's say even 1970 to um now 2020s uh it has dropped uh in value uh over time like you could have uh bought like maybe the stereotype is you could buy a whole uh tray of goods from a supermarket with the same amount of money in 1975 and with that same amount of money you can buy maybe just one or two items today and if you go to this website called wtf happened in 1971.com it will show you official statistics from the us government and other places that uh indicate how kind of a lot of metrics have gone crazy uh since 1971.

there is an agenda there that you know 1971 is when the u.s government went off the gold standard fully and most governments uh after that uh followed suit uh so there is an agenda that they're trying to represent but the statistics are real that for example the consumer price index that tracks inflation uh has gone like multiples above what it was uh after 1971. and um these are statistics but for real people like uh maybe for someone like me of my generation i can see how different it is for me to buy let's say a house or a piece of property compared to my parents or people in their generation but i can work the same amount of hours have roughly the same level of skill and experience but it is nowhere close for me to be able to afford a house than someone like them would have been able to do and why does all of this matter is because bitcoin was created as a reaction uh to this irresponsible um management of money by central banks and governments uh bitcoin's first ever block uh actually quoted a headline from the times uh newspaper on the third of january 2009 uh chancellor on drink of second bailout for banks and um one of the reasons bitcoin became highly successful especially in his early days was uh it became a counter reaction to the global financial crisis that people wanted to have a form of money or a form of asset that isn't easily uh manipulatable by the people in power by the people with connections so that even if your national fiat currency loses its value you have an alternative uh form of currency that you can exit to so that's what a lot of people have been doing since then you exit into a form of currency that cannot be manipulated cannot uh be sort of uh just like that have more supply printed um by any um entity or group of entities that's money another key concept before we even talk about blockchains is this idea of decentralization so if anyone of you is muslim or you know friends who are muslim you might know that this book called the quran isn't just a book it didn't kind of it wasn't a book that fell from the sky um it was a series of verses like thousands of them that were memorized in exact uh content and an order by thousands and by now millions of people around the world and um such that if i wanted to go up to uh someone or to the community and i wanted to fake a verse in that maybe just add one small line that just says uh haris is handsome then if there were only two people that memorized the quran in its exact content i can much more easily find them and um write them and coordinate with them to make it look like that verse is is real but when there are thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands the difficulty becomes more and more like exponentially more difficult uh as there are more people that do it because not only would it cost me a lot more to influence them but it would be much harder to coordinate with all of these people from around the world and another example is that of the wedding so i guess the people in this call may not fall into this disney idea of happy ever after kind of marriages but um you know a lot of younger people might might have that kind of me but weddings have a much more practical value for societies across time and one of the reasons for having weddings with like a lot of people attending is that they can all bear witness to this joining of lives between two people and why does this matter because let's say if i get married and one week later or a month later any one of you who is maybe in the neighboring village you could you might see me walking around like being all romantic with another lady and because you were at my wedding you could act as a witness to sort of um report against me uh so that um i am encouraged to act in the best interests of society uh that if i'm married to a uh to one person that i should be uh only with that one person and not be sort of uh prancing around with someone else if there was only one imam or priest or rabbi who was a witness to my wedding that it's much more likely that i can get away with my misdemeanor but if there were hundreds of people in attendance then it's much harder for me to to get around those things another more modern example is the difference between google docs and microsoft word um so if any of you have used both of them you know what i mean uh it's much much more easy to coordinate to to work in sync with other people if you're on google docs versus in word in word you have to do some edits save it and send that file over to to someone else and they have to make sure that they don't have any clashes in their versions and they make their changes and then you have to like get back together and if one of them tries to manipulate the the contents it's it's much easier for them to get away with doing it on word uh versus in google docs like everything has a uh has a trace uh you can see the file version history you can see who changed what and and even outside of that the key thing is that you can do changes all at once you have to wait for each other you can do like your part and i can do my part on the same file at the same time and how this works is that google has a bunch of say thousands of servers around the world and they're all connected to this um in sync to this particular file such that even if like hundreds of these servers go down for some sort of natural disaster there are hundreds of other servers that are still online and whatever that we type and change i will be reflected by all those hundreds of servers uh and it's not like one uh windows um or one sort of shared uh local network where if i were to um um have that network fail then nobody can make any updates anymore so the key thing with decentralization is that you're not relying on one entity that is trusted to manage things for everyone uh you are breaking down uh that that trust to uh you know hundreds or thousands of people the more decentralized it is uh the less reliance on any on any one entity to be trusted and why i mention all of this is because bitcoin in essence is just decentralized money uh it's a form of money that uh doesn't have any centralized parties or group of parties that control or manage it quick and uh what do i mean by decentralized money like that's just a headline sounding uh term if you think about our modern finance typically whatever we do there's always a third party in between so there's always either a bank or money changer or some sort of fintech company that we have to trust so for example if i wanted to send money to shrut unless we do it in person we need a third party in between because i can't um trust sharat necessarily that if i were to send him ten charade might say oh i've never received that ten ringgit in that letter that you sent it may have gotten lost sort of halfway and vice versa i could uh lie to shirat and say that hey i've actually sent you that tendering it but um somehow maybe uh the mail didn't uh get sent through and it's not my fault and you know quickly if we rely on this kind of method uh things will break down and nothing can can can work the economy can't function so what we've done uh to get around this is to have a trusted third party in between let's say a bank and they have a lot of capital a lot of reputation and licenses such that i don't have to trust sherrod and that he will tell me he received the money i can just look at a bank and the bank will tell me that it went through or not uh but we can see already that in certain cases that doesn't work uh if you were in a country like venezuela or or uh zimbabwe or palestine then a lot of these central institutions um have broken down and cannot be trusted and there's also even cases where where the centralized situations do exist but they may charge a lot of fees for just for that simple function of being the middleman in between so for example if um i was a web designer that was sort of creating a website for uh for ray and um ray was someone in the in the us let's say and if i wanted to get paid ray would have to pay me using something like paypal and people would charge maybe three or four percent um of the fee that neither ray or myself would benefit from uh it's it's just an extra three percent that um goes to paypal just for facilitating that payment now imagine if we had an alternate form of currency where the few of us in this call uh we have like a shared whatsapp group and it's pretty simple uh let's say we all have this or like a small notebook where we write things down and we just keep track of everyone's balances so let's say haris wants to send money to uh cam and um let's say i wanted to send 10 units of our currency let's call it the um sk currency so uh if i wanted to uh to send 10 sk to uh to cam uh everyone would check whether i have enough balance like if i have at least 10 sk in my account if i do then everyone will verify and they will deduct 10 for my balance and increase 10 to camp's balance but if i don't then they will reject that payment because i don't have enough balance and we can actually relatively easily do that just every time someone wants to make a transaction you send a message in the group and everybody needs to say that okay i verified and i put a check mark then we consider the transaction to have been done but i'm sure you guys can already see that it's not going to be scalable uh even with the few of us in this small group uh it will take a lot of time to verify a transaction each time um and if there were like 100 people or a thousand people again it becomes exponentially more difficult and we won't have any time to do anything ever other than just verifying each other's transactions but what if you were to replace these human beings with computers and it might sound a bit crazy but if you think about how our even our small mobile devices can can stream netflix movies or play massively multiplayer online games then just updating and verifying a transaction and updating a ledger is a very very straightforward thing for your computer to do and if this code that each computer is running uh is open source that means the all of that code is published online for anyone to see as long as as you understand the programming language you can verify that the code is doing what it's supposed to do it's not hidden behind any curtain of a wall garden uh of uh sort of patents or or exclusive uh rights uh anyone can can see that code and by doing so uh it's trust minimized because you know you can verify all the code and you have to trust any one company or entity that they are running things properly so that's some basics on decentralized money um if you have any questions i'm gonna take a short a few second break uh if you want to unmute and ask or put it in the chat otherwise i'll skip ahead okay cool so um we'll cover a bit about um some concepts around bitcoin and um it's relevant because all these things will also apply for almost all other blockchains that came after bitcoin so the first thing to talk about is the block explorer so as i mentioned i work for e to scan which is a block explorer the first thing that you want to know before i even talk about explorers is that blockchains are not anonymous so if you've ever heard about these stories about how criminals are are selling their their returns from from selling you know drugs or pornography or doing assassinations um and how you know they're doing it because uh people can't detect uh they are that can't trace their funds it's actually uh not true if you're a criminal i strongly suggest you not to use blockchains or or at least bitcoin because it is not anonymous and it can be traced and the worst thing for you is that even 20 or 30 years later when you're like living your life in some island paradise um those transactions will still exist online on the blockchain and anyone who wanted to could still trace the transactions back to you so you'll never be safe entirely if you're a criminal but it's not also um entirely transparent so what the term we call uh we describe it with is pseudonymous and what do i mean by that so if you look at the top left of this um of this webpage uh beside address you see this random string of characters in this case there's about uh 42 characters and it's all randomized so that um there's no id that's tied to this address so there's no um like just by seeing this random address you wouldn't know that it's tied to uh harris camera roll of whatever ic number or phone number because there's no relation between passports or ics with your uh blockchain address it's created randomly when you create a new world address but all of the other details are there so i could see someone's address i could see all of their balance all of their transaction history how much they sent when and who they sent to or received from and as i mentioned earlier this stays on the blockchain forever so you can check 20 years later for a transaction that was done and you can see all of these uh like fully transparently so even though it's um i can't tell who the owner of this address is but if you ever make a transaction to me or i make a transaction to you then i know that that address that set money to me is somehow related to you and if i can put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together i can trace a lot of the transactions that have been happening even up to 20 or more hubs and and trace it back to you the person and this is actually what regulators um and and and sort of enforcement agencies have been doing uh throughout the world for the last decade or so so yeah if you're a criminal please don't use blockchains um or don't simply use blockchains you have to do a bunch of other stuff to protect your um your trace of movements an analogy of uh to think of a blocks explorer is is to imagine a library and in this library you can walk up to the librarian and you can ask him hey i want to see the contents of this book in shelf 17b and page 350 and the librarian will never uh stop you from seeing the contents of any book it will there's no exclusive or or um sort of restricted area of the library any book that exists in that library will be able to be shown to you and librarian will never stop you uh one key thing to note is that uh the bitcoin library for example is not the same as the ethereum library it's two it's in two different buildings so you can't walk up to the bitcoin library to see the contents of a book that is in the ethereum library and this is extremely powerful if you think about it like if you look at modern finance right now if you look think about your online bank account you'd have to input your username and password to be able to see um the the details of um of that account but with blockchains you can use publicly available blockchain explorers or if you run your own computers that's connected to the network you can see all of these details like no one can hide anything you know there's no 2.6 billion that can be hidden because all of it is fully transparent on the blockchain the next key and related concept is what's called a wallet and a wallet is a bit of an unfortunate misnomer because it's it's not really accurate to think of it as a wallet uh it's more accurate to think of uh these blockchain wallets as safety deposit boxes and these safety deposit boxes are virtual they exist um on the internet in the cloud there's no physical um vault that stores these things just imagine like there is this imaginary uh cloud deposit box and out of those like millions of or gazillions of boxes you own one of them and you have the key to unlock that box so a blockchain wallet is just the box and the key to unlock it and you can put in all your you know your money all your precious valuables inside and you can lock it and you bring your key and go outside into your day-to-day life if you think back to the library analogy uh what a wallet allows you to do is that not just that you can see the contents of the book in 17b but now you can tell the librarian to hey can you move this book from 17b to this other shelf um let's say 13a and if you wanted to do that then the librarian will ask you to prove that you own shelf 17b and if you can prove that you own it then he will listen to you and transfer the book but if not then you won't be able to do it and even if you own 17b and you successfully transferred to 13a but let's say five seconds later you decide oops actually it was a mistake i meant to send to 13c instead but because the book has already left 17b and is now in 13 a there's nothing you can do unless you can prove that you also own 13a as well so uh while a blog explorer allows you to see contents uh in in kind of computer um sort of speak you can read something but a wallet allows you to write or to to make a change or or transfer and um so what let's use this technology called public private key cryptography i'm not going to go into it in too much detail but you can just think of the analogy of a public key as the mailbox to your house and let's say you want to buy something from lazada you have to give your address for them to be able to put this package into your mailbox otherwise they don't know where to send things to you and a private key is not just the mailbox but also the private key to unlock that mailbox or even to unlock the door to your house and it's very important to understand that the private key is both the address the mailbox address and the key to unlock it's not just the key so if you ever lose your key or have it stolen then it's the same thing as you know you giving someone a map with an x marks the spot and a key to unlock the door to your house and if they have these things they can just walk up to your door open it grab everything that's inside and move it back to their own homes and there's nothing you can do about it so another key thing to highlight when it comes to uh blockchain wallets is that when it comes to blockchains and cryptocurrencies you are your own security because it's decentralized you cannot trust anyone out there there's no uh bank there's no pidm or like a deposit insurance will help protect you if something goes bad there's no uh google that you can click on forget password um if you lose or have your private keys stolen then even if you have a million dollars in bitcoin all of it will be completely gone and even if you have a trusted sibling or a significant other and that you will happily sort of let's say married with and like one day things go sour um if they have your private keys they can open up your wallet and grab everything that's inside and there's nothing you can do about it so there's there's a lot of things to cover here i'll i'm not gonna go too much into it but there is a psychological element as well that people get a bit paranoid when they sort of get into this space uh so ray's asking why does it take two weeks to make a change in your account uh i i believe you're talking about uh an exchange account which is not exactly the same as a wallet uh and i'll cover that um soon after this uh so just to quickly mention different types of wallets out there uh so the simplest form of wallet is what's called the paper wallet and this is where um you you go to any sort of legit blockchain wallet website you click on create a wallet and they will give you these details and it's called the paper wallet because you never met who save this in a digital format or even take a photo of it using a digital camera because if you've ever heard about all these celebrity sort of adult videos uh most of the time it's not because the artists are willingly sharing their private parts with the whole world uh it's because they did it maybe with just for themselves and their uh spouse and then they send their laptops for repair and they think that they've deleted the file but you never truly delete a file from your computer and so let's say the repair shop finds this file and just leaks it online for a little bit of money um so there's no digital files that are truly deleted unless you burn the hard drive so you should never save any of your private keys in a digital file because um there's always that risk of someone being able to recover it later so what you want to do is you want to print it on a piece of paper uh laminated some people go even the extra length of like using steel wallets so like you know even if there's a fire it doesn't um get burnt uh and you store a couple pieces of these paper wallets in a few different places that you fully are sort of is secure to you um so that if one of them let's say it gets burned down then there's other places that are secure um and that's your paper wallet but you can already see that it's not very practical because you know if you want to make any transaction you have to uh carry around and if you store it in a bank vault you have to trust that the bank employees are not gonna uh go and sneakily open that box uh with a with a spare key that they have um yeah because like if you do all those things then you're essentially trusting someone else and it defeats the whole point of having a decentralized uh of of currency or network where you don't have to trust anyone else so what's been created after that is what's called the hardware wallet where um there is a piece of hardware device and you never even get the private key exposed to you it's only in that device and the device has strong encryption and so uh even if you lose that device you have a backup seat phrase and if you can see the piece of paper and those backup phrases you store in a very secure place and you can bring your device around with you so even if you get robbed or kidnapped you know they can take their device but they can't easily break into it um and in the meantime you can go back home and use your backup phrase to uh restore access to your account and sit and and safely transfer all your wealth into a completely new wallet that the the robbers wouldn't have access to and the third type is what's called a web tree or a smart wallet where you can have it either on your phone or in your browser and these are called smart because you can do a lot of fancy sort of blockchain 2.0 stuff on them i'll explain a little bit more later things like nfps and so on you can make transactions almost trustlessly in some cases completely trustlessly just by using your computer or your phone okay so the next thing is um to cover this thing called mining some of you might have heard what this thing is i'm not gonna go into how to make money and so on but just the key concept uh behind it or concepts and in actual fact um to me one of these things is uh the the most powerful most beautiful thing about blockchains but i'll get to that in a bit later so mining is uh made up essentially of two parts uh cryptography and hash functions so cryptography you can think of like if you can imagine a movie where the bank robbers are trying to like break into a bank vault uh they have to like just like try out all these different combinations of numbers or digits to unlock the bank vault so that's essentially what cryptography is uh to kind of simplify it uh there are many different things that have been done with cryptography it stretches back to thousands of years ago um you know in world war ii uh the british managed part of the reason the british managed to win the war was because they managed to break the encryption uh the cryptography behind the german army's uh enigma i remember that right um and i'm not gonna go into that but just uh just keep in mind that uh mining involves a lot of cryptography behind it and actually even cryptocurrency the word crypto comes from uh cryptography and another key concept to understand is what's called a hash function so um just go back a little bit so a hash function such as this one ketchup256 allows you to when you input something like let's say cat you will uh output a result that is completely random um that you know all the this whole long string of characters 52763 and so on has nothing to do with the three letters c a t and if anyone in the world um replicates the same input c a t with ketchup 256 function they will get the exact same result that true from the visible eye you cannot tell the relation between this input and the output and if you input something else that's very close so in this case car then um you will get something completely different uh like 5ad fb and you won't be able to tell if you were to see the two outputs that the inputs were very close to each other [Music] um and and another key thing is that they have the exact same number of characters uh the length of the string is the same um i'm not sure what sheriff's mentioning there uh but i'll just continue um and and uh so an ex an analogy to think of what hashing is is um it's a mathematical it's a mathematical function but an analogy to think of it is um if you can think of a snowflake and snowflakes are all supposedly uh completely unique um and they're all distinct from each other but imagine if you were to melt these snowflakes into a puddle of water and then you will be able to tell the difference between snowflake a and snowflake b um but a hashing function is kind of if you could um re sort of uh recompose that melted puddle into back into the unique snowflake that it once was um so a hash function is something where by having the unique private key that only you would have you are able to uh reconstruct the snowflake from that puddle of water so it's a mathematical function where uh doing it one way is much easier like melting into a puddle versus doing it the other way and a more mathematical example is if you can think of like your high school maths um like to do exponentials to do let's say seven to the power of three is much easier than to do the cube root of seven so that's one example where um of a mathematical function is relatively easy to do one way and much more difficult to do the other way and we'll just keep it at that there's a lot more uh technical maps uh behind it but that just kind of explains the concept so what does this cryptography and hash functions um have to do with mining okay before that um blockchains also use this concept of merkle trees which are hashes of hashes so um you can imagine um a tree that um sort of has a root at the top and if you change just one sort of block uh one square out of uh or one root out of the tree let's say instead of green to uh pink then that change carries through into the next layers such that when you reach the uh the bottom layer you can see that it's completely different versus the other and what has this got to do with mining is if you think about the previous example that we had you know if we were to have this small circle of computers that would verify the transactions between a small number of people here some of you might have already asked like what's in it for me if the only people who are transacting are sharad and haris let's say uh i'm sanesha at 10 he's sending me back 10 sk and everyone else is just you know you're running your computer and you're not benefiting uh from this network uh you might go and say uh okay i'll just shut down my computer and when i want to make a transaction then i'll turn it back on and that's actually disastrous for the network because if everyone shuts down except for shirat and harit then we could potentially cheat the system we could say okay harith is spending more than he actually has or spending a double in one transaction because the other people are offline you guys cannot verify that i'm doing it um the transactions have been done correctly so there is a need to keep all these other computers online even if they're not making transactions so what satoshi nakamoto this person or persons who created bitcoin uh what one of the most beautiful things that they did was uh to create this incentive such that when you mine uh a bitcoin block that means uh mining just means you uh you compile a group of transactions into one block and you re you um you propose it for everyone else uh to verify that it's correct then you potentially can win new bitcoin that gets created um and it's completely random uh if you think about to the example of the the bank robbers trying to like guess numbers to break imagine now there are a hundred robbers who all trying to guess the right number and the first one that manages to do it uh wins uh the block and they earn the new bitcoin that gets created so when that happens even if you're not making a transaction and you're just leaving your computer running and paying for the electricity costs now you have a reason to keep it running because if you were one of the lucky um if your computer was lucky enough to win a particular block then you earn new bitcoin so you have a potential revenue stream uh instead of just like paying costs of running electricity for your computer um yeah so in this way you incentivize people to to run sort of witnesses to the blockchain and so you don't have to have to default to one or two uh nodes or computers in a network only um yeah so uh the word mining comes from this idea of like a gold mine where you know you you go randomly prospecting and you strike lucky if you that that hole that you dug uh manages to unearth some some gold pieces uh so that's kind of the analogy that is being put forth by the word mining and when you mine you earn that block reward and you also earn any transaction fees that people are spending uh to make their transactions and it's very important to highlight here that when you use blockchains you have to pay transaction fees as opposed to the sort of normal financial system that we're familiar with um i would uh put forward that in actual fact there is a transaction fee if you were to use something like visa or mastercard it's just that the fee is charged to the merchant and what often happens is that the merchant will sneakily add a little more um to the price that you're paying as a user so that you are actually paying fees but it's just abstracted away from you and transaction fees are um are not static uh it's uh dynamic so you can imagine a highway where if there's a lot of traffic jam then people get um congested and you could shortcut but imagine there's a there's a this imaginary uh sort of highway lane where if you just decide okay i'll pay a hundred bucks on the on the duke highway they will magically create a new lane for you to shortcut uh before anyone else so it's a it's a total system that is based on auctions rather than a flat price and one of the cool things also is that um the difficulty uh for mining a block is adjustable such that if today there are a hundred minus and tomorrow there are um a hundred thousand minus then if you think about expected value and just like simple maths uh you would expect that 100 000 people guessing would um find the answer a hundred times faster than just 1 000 people just by probability uh and because blockchains we don't want to like allow people to uh create so many blocks we want to we want to keep a certain hiddens certain consistency in how fast blocks are then difficulty is adjusted such that in bitcoin new blocks get created on average once every 10 minutes and on ethereum is about once every 15 seconds so there is an adjustable difficulty when it comes to mining it's not just like one set uh difficulty um i'm not gonna go into too much detail but if anyone's interested uh this is essentially what people refer to when they say proof of work it's a consensus mechanism a mechanism to reach consensus there are other consensus mechanisms out there and if you're very nitpicky it's technically not a consensus mechanism it's a [Music] uh simple uh civil prevention mechanism but i think that's like way too technical for for this talk uh but if you're interested you can uh google on footwork and there's a lot of talk especially when it comes to nfts and how you know it's um uh uh polluting the the world and it's not uh sustainable and so on which i'll touch a bit more later um yeah so uh a node is just what we call uh one computer that's connected to the network one witness uh that's verifying that the transactions are being done properly so um just a small thing to also highlight the word blockchain comes from this idea of blocks being added to a chain of other blocks such that if i wanted to manipulate the the content of one block you know again to put in this line that says iris high resistance the more blocks there are in the chain the harder it becomes because now i have to not just hijack the content of one block but i have to hijack let's say a hundred blocks uh from before to to be able to uh to tweak the content from 100 blocks ago okay so a natural question that someone might ask now is that um how do i buy uh cryptocurrencies so uh when you talk about any kind of market out there you could buy over the counter which means i find someone and and buy something from them um so let's say i walk up to shirat and say i want to buy something from you and we do it over the counter and we negotiate between the two of us but humans over time have figured out that there are much more efficient um things uh we can use called a market where you can have like uh let's say a pasama where you have like thousands of people hundreds of people who try to sell different things and i could go there and much more feasibly uh be able to find someone who is let's say selling a piece of chicken for me who uh i want to sell a loaf of bread uh this just the fact that there is a more people in one place it's a shelling point so the chances of you finding something that you want uh for something that you have is much higher so exchange is literally just a marketplace um there are generally two kinds of exchanges uh one is fiat to crypto and another is crypto to crypto uh fiat just means you know your your national currencies that are uh decreed by the government uh so your ring gates and dollars so um there are exchanges which you can um use to transfer ringgit to crypto uh typically these are licensed like in malaysia i believe right now there are five licensed exchanges um and within those there are also different types there are brokers and marketplaces brokers generally just mean that they set a price and you because you're lazy you just take whatever price that they're giving either to buy or sell and the marketplace is more like if you were to go to any like bursa malaysia um broker uh and you can put in your buy or sell order and it can get matched with other people out there marketplaces are generally just like third-party um websites that host other people to buy and sell with each other and so these are fiat to crypto but typically a lot of the limitations is that you can only legally uh licensed they are only licensed to allow for sale of maybe five or six cryptocurrencies uh i think in malaysia right now uh but there are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there so if you wanted to trade those cryptocurrencies you go to these crypto crypto exchanges uh there's a bunch of them mentioned here um these allow you to trade let's say your bitcoin for that random coin that your cousin's been telling you to buy because those are not like reputable enough to be licensed by uh the local regulators okay but the one thing that i wanted to highlight with exchanges it's not so much about you know where you can buy um but the key thing to remember is that exchanges are not wallets so i described earlier what wallets are and exchanges are not the same in actual fact exchanges are antithetical to the idea of decentralization because exchanges are trusted entities you deposit your funds and they manually manage your funds for you an analogy to think of them is a money changer so imagine you walk up to a money changer and you say i want to change my 100 ringgit for 25 but one key difference here is that instead of taking the 25 and putting it into your own wallet and going back home what you do is you tell that that guy that abang um can you keep my 25 um like um hold it in your shop and tomorrow when i want to exchange it back for ringgit or some other currency i'll um come find you and make that transaction again and if that guy um wanted to uh sort of run away with your money or if the uh money changer gets robbed or burnt down then there's nothing you can do because that money is already with them and you know it's kind of your fault for trusting them to hold on to your money for you so exchanges are like that where you put in your bitcoin into their hands and you're trusting them to keep it secure um or to have the integrity not to run away with that money and a lot of the times when you hear about how bitcoin has been hacked and so on in a vast majority of those cases it's actually not bitcoin that has been hacked it's the money changer that's holding on to other people's bitcoin that has either been hacked or um had been an inside job so it's incorrect to say that bitcoin has been hacked in those cases because you would never say that the ringgit has been hacked if a money changer gets robbed um so shiraz asking what am i buying when i buy uh you are buying bitcoin in in this example um but just think of the money changes like you're buying bitcoin but instead of getting that bitcoin and putting in your wallet you are leaving that bitcoin in that exchange's hands and from the blockchain's point of view that bitcoin still belongs to the exchange because they'll see the exchange's address and let's say it has a 100 bitcoin and your let's say one bitcoin is part of that 100.

um and from the blockchain's point of view it's entirely belonging to the address because the blockchain doesn't have any concept of id or identity as long as this address with this private key uh has ownership of a hundred bitcoin that's all the blockchain cares about so from the blockchain point of view you don't own anything unless you withdraw those bitcoins that one bitcoin that you have in the exchange you withdraw it to your wallet then you can say that you own that one bitcoin at least from the blockchain's point of view because you can see that this address that you hold the private key to um has one bitcoin yeah so coinbase is an example of an exchange uh it's one of the biggest exchanges out there um but again you're trusting coinbase to hold on to your cryptocurrency for you if one day it gets hacked there's nothing you can do uh maybe you can complain to the regulators and so on but from the blockchain's point of view it's not your bitcoin um yes coinbase is an exchange um it has both the broker and the marketplace functions but it's an exchange that you're trusting and you know it goes against the whole idea of blockchains in the first place because you're supposed to decentralize and not have to trust anyone but using exchange means that you are trusting uh this third party out there and in some cases it's even worse than our current financial system because you're trusting an entity that may not be regulated or licensed with all of your money um you know you might as well just put it in a bank because at least they're licensed and insured and regulated so sure is asking whether it's better to buy and then move into a wallet uh a simple answer is yes but things are often also not that simple uh putting into a wallet means you have to trust yourself some people would much rather not trust themselves so in that case you might want to just leave it in an exchange and just find an exchange that's licensed or regulated so that at least there's some level of comfort that you would have um because yeah you might get scary to secure your own uh your own blockchain um i'll get a little bit an example of why you may want to hold your um your bitcoin anyway yeah so like i said there's a lot of uh paranoia that comes out of um of of being in the crypto world um so uh aren't five actually using malaysia there are actually a lot more than five exchanges only five has been licensed so far uh but even let's say luna it's not insured so if luna gets hacked one day um as far as i understand and you know if anyone from luna is watching this later you can feel free to correct me but uh there is no liability for luno um that that it's sorry i should say there's no insurance for the funds that are in you know they will be liable for losing their clients uh funds but uh you know if let's say they go bankrupt and they don't just don't have the funds to pay off then there's really nothing the clients can do um licenses are kind of i mean just generally licenses just means that the regulators have checked that these entities these companies have done like the sort of best practices to ensure that they're secure and you know they're legitimate uh they're they're uh you know they're paying taxes uh they're they're they're fully you know functioning respected members of the society but license doesn't necessarily mean that you know a company cannot go bankrupt unless there's always that that risk no matter how many licenses you have um but yeah so it's a balance between trusting yourself or trusting a licensed entity uh one example and i believe a very powerful sort of reason for having something like bitcoin is that um imagine if you were a doctor a medical doctor in in syria a few years ago uh you were living a sort of upper middle class life you know a nice house nice car a nice family and then one day um this sort of uh uh revolt or this this um conflict uh starts and you know bombs start getting dropped on on people's houses and you feel very insecure and unsafe and you want to um move away to somewhere that it's um safe um for you and your family now if you had thousands or even 100 000 units of the syrian national currency you won't be able to uh at that point at least you won't be able to exchange it for let's say us dollars uh easily or in a exchange rate that is um reasonable for you because no one in their right mind when bombs have started dropping would want to take your currency at a rate that would have been fair only you know a few weeks or a few months before and you know even if you had a nice car a nice house all these nice assets you can't carry those with you in your luggage when you're trying to you know flee the country as a refugee uh you could carry some gold bars maybe but even then there's only so many that you can carry and you also run the risk of of being robbed you know as you're in a boat that's that's traveling to somewhere safe um in contrast if you had a bitcoin wallet all you have to do is um write it the the private keys or the seed phrases that i mentioned earlier uh in a safe place or or memorize it or you know if you're scared that someone might know what it is you could let's say do certain tricks like write it in a diary you know the first word of each page in your diary is uh that seed phrase that unlocks your bitcoin wallet and if you were to do that then you know even if you were to travel uh you know be a refugee and go halfway around the world to a new country and not have anything any assets and you have to start over um you would then be able to just if you have access to the internet you could just open up that same bitcoin wallet that you have using the the seed phrase the same seaface that you have and now you have access to all the bitcoin uh that you had before and um you feel free to correct me but i don't see any form of asset that has ever existed in um human history that allows you to transport um huge amounts like millions or billions of dollars worth of assets um just like that just with a piece of paper or or words that you memorize uh in your brain so that's extremely powerful and regardless of any criticism that people might have of bitcoin and i have some of them myself um that's something that bitcoin's unlocked that has never before been possible um okay sure um i'll skip your comment there this can be a bit controversial although when it comes to cryptocurrencies there's a lot of controversy that can be brought up okay so that's uh blockchain 1.0 uh oh before that so schwarz asking is it a stable store value uh that is uh sort of there's no one right answer to give uh if you think about um i mean obviously right now we can say that given its track record it's not stable uh it can fluctuate you know it can go up by 10 in one day or you can go down by 50 uh the next day um and in fact over the last 12 years of bitcoin being around it hasn't been stable at all actually it's been extremely volatile um the good thing for the people who've had bitcoin is that it's been volatile and moving upwards so if you had one bitcoin that you bought for a dollar years and years ago now that same bitcoin is worth fifty thousand dollars um so it's not stable in that sense um which might be good for the people who own it um [Music] but yeah so it's not stable the key thing is if you were in a situation such as what i described earlier even an unstable store value is better than a stable store value that you cannot safely and easily transport with you [Music] uh so um there's a question uh what makes it volatile so uh i think it's suleim sorry if i got your name wrong um volatility is just a function of market supply and demand when a market is liquid enough that means there's a lot of supply and a lot of demand then even if one person would want to make a transaction it wouldn't move the market price up or down too much but when it's less liquid then it can uh fluctuate so uh because cryptocurrencies in general uh including bitcoin is relatively new uh so there can be people who like just one person who has let's say a billion dollars and and buys bitcoin will like quickly shift the the market price uh upwards um and this is the same whether it's a cryptocurrency or whether it's a stock um you know in the in a um and a share in the stock market um that doesn't have much liquidity in malaysia that might be the ace market if someone was to buy a big chunk of the volume then the price can also uh you know very quickly move so it's just a function of um the volume that's uh in there [Music] so i'm going to answer the the volatility question first um so yeah so so if you compare let's say to gold uh gold has been around for thousands of years um some people would say gold isn't a stable store value because it can still go up and down uh depending on the year that you're in um uh you know you can versus the dollar it can go up and down but if you consider um historically over time the same let's say gram of gold would be able to buy you almost the same items from a thousand years ago than it would be now um there's some research out there i forget the actual source or reference but you could buy the same amount of loaves of bread with the same piece of gold uh a thousand years ago and like hundreds of years ago over time until now it's actually been remarkably consistent when you look at it from that sort of macro scale and the idea of stability versus the dollar or the ringgit is also not necessarily the right frame because the dollar and the ringgit are constantly being devalued over um real world assets and that's what inflation is right like um nasi lemak that's worth 50 cents some years ago is not worth a ringgit or touring it um so we are just conditioned to understand stability uh in the form of the unit of your national currency but if you consider stability as being able to buy goods and services that are just out there your your cpi your consumer price index um which doesn't even include things like education and property and so on um being able to buy these things is what actually constitutes stability so everything is just fluctuating uh versus this ability to to buy goods and services um yeah so so even during it or the dollar or in like in venezuela the bolivar uh in that case you even proven that uh these are not stable and uh a currency that may be stable today in let's say a couple years could change very quickly to become something very unstable such as economies like the syrian economy uh so okay sure is asking in other words can an exchange see one's personal 12-word key um most of the time an exchange would have its own uh wall addresses and it would just pull together let's say a thousand of its customers funds into one blockchain wallet and then it would have its own internal database that it manages to keep track of you know uh ray versus harris versus charade how much each person has of which crypto assets so no if you create your own wallet um they wouldn't be able to see your your private keys or seed phrases that unlock your wallet and the key thing also is just that the whole point of of blockchains uh is that you never have to sort of share you never have to have someone be able to see your private key like if if there was a blockchain that didn't allow for that then it defeats the point of a blockchain because now you have to trust some other person out there instead of just yourself okay so um uh students are you saying crypto is more reliable than a real currency uh it's kind of a touchy question uh-huh um the sort of hardcore sort of vigilantes or um uh people who buy into the whole um religion of cryptocurrency would say yes um some people would say no uh some people would say certain national currencies like the bolivar is definitely less stable than um cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum and something like the dollar is definitely a lot more stable than those but it's not so much about which one is more reliable than the other it's about having an option if central banks of any country is manipulating or irresponsibly managing the uh the money of that economy then you have an option to exit so that optionality exists um if something bad were to happen then you have a backup plan um a way to exit the current system uh we can discuss like a lot of the sort of more controversial stuff but we can do that maybe uh afterwards if people are interested questions feel free to ask uh if i think it's more relevant for later i will tell you uh but if i think i can answer now i'll just i'll just answer it uh just with the sort of um just note that it might extend the duration of this talk and if people need to leave earlier then you might not be able to stick around until the end okay so i'm gonna leave a couple more seconds if there's any questions otherwise i'm gonna start with the blockchain 2.0 [Music] okay so uh blockchain 2.0 with the example of ethereum uh and the primary thing with blockchain 2.0 is this thing called a smart contract and what does a smart contract mean so it's another one of these like jargon that you hear people throw around and a lot of times people don't really know what it means either but to understand it it's actually pretty straightforward if you break it down now imagine a vending machine a vending machine for someone who was around maybe 200 years ago would be seen as this completely magical thing because uh you know you walk up into this metal box and you give it a coin or a piece of paper and you press a button and it knows exactly what to give you like if you put in 5 ringgit it will give you back 3 ringgit exactly and if you press the button for coke it will give you the coca-cola can uh and not you know sprite or ruby or anything else and it's it's magical for for someone who doesn't know how these things work right like like there's no human being there's no brain behind this thing but it knows what exactly to give you for the people who are familiar like people in our sort of uh world like we know that what's actually going on is uh there is programming code behind it where um there's these things called conditional statements or an if then function where the the piece of code will check if the user is giving this paper that is the five ringgit paper and if it presses the button that um represents the coca-cola shelf then you drop one can from that shelf and you give back five minus two equals three there's a bunch of like if then functions that are powering this uh the code behind the vending machine and if you think about another sort of industry that's highly like there's a lot of hype behind it uh the internet of things one of the common examples is this thing called the smart refrigerator where um uh and an example that people like to throw around is that uh you can have your your eggs inside the fridge and when your eggs are running out the fridge will be able to detect it based on its senses and it will automatically make a transaction to your nearby online grocery store to buy like a new stack of eggs to be delivered to your house and again this is just using some sensors and some if then functions to be able to automatically purchase these eggs for you but one key thing to highlight is that when it's buying these eggs it's still using your centralized banking financial system so there's still a bank account that is uh you have to be tied to there's still human beings that have to verify the transactions now what ethereum or what smart contracts allow you to do is it combines the idea of this if-then function uh with the decentralized money that is bitcoin so that now um you can benefit from both things not just the decentralized nature of uh bitcoin but also the programmability of of this if-then function and that doesn't sound very impressive by saying it that way but if you think about it more [Music] it actually unlocks a lot of things one kind of way to think about it is if you think about the smartphone uh when the iphone was created in about 2007 it changed the game versus the mobile phones that existed before so with the mobile phones you know you could call you could play some games you could use certain applications but it was very limited for each phone but when iphone came around and the app store was launched anyone in the world could create their own apps even if you weren't employed by apple and you could list it on the app store and you could sell it uh or give even give it for free and in that way the iphone could have thousands of applications that people could use with it versus just the you know dozen or so that a sony ericsson phone will be able to have and that completely changed the game for your mobile devices and skip something there uh another analogy is if you think about a calculator um so a calculator can do its job very well you can calculate numbers um but if you wanted to do more out of it if you wanted to play a game or watch a video it's very very difficult it could be done but it's practically impossible for most people to be able to use the the capabilities of a calculator for other purposes so you can think of it as with bitcoin i can send uh the bitcoin currency to someone and i can receive it from someone but that's all i can do i can transfer and receive but with smart contracts now instead of just saying i can send money to shirad i can also do such a thing as if shah is my employee i can say i can do some conditions where if at the end of the month sharat is still working and he hasn't done any um sort of hasn't been blacklisted hasn't done any sort of hasn't had any disciplinary action against him um then i will pay him his full salary and i don't have to like sit in front of a computer at the end of the month and just like click buttons to transfer from my account to shiraz account it can be done automatically programmatically by the piece of code so that's what something that's something that smart contracts like have unlocked from blockchains that didn't have those before which is why it's commonly referred to as blockchain 2.

0 um right thanks kam um you can watch the video recording later as well um if we ensure i don't explain it well enough for you see you in a bit um so another example to describe smart contracts is uh for malaysians especially um you know up until a few years ago there's always this drama whenever election time happens because uh we always think that hey if i vote for the red party i don't know if uh behind the scenes someone is like uh doing this blackout and and changing my vote into the blue party or vice versa i always have to trust this election commission which may not have um deserved my trust now imagine an election where uh you do it online um that's still problematic because if i go to website and i click a button to say vote i don't know whether the code that is powering the website um is actually doing what it's supposed to maybe it's still changing my work from red to blue but because it's behind a walled garden i can't see the code and i can't verify that it's doing what it's telling me it will do but if there was a smart contract and if i went to the voting booth and i clicked a button with that smart contract then it will check let's say these conditions harid has registered to vote is above 21 is in this constituency and most importantly uh has not yet voted in this election uh before this and only if these conditions are met then my vote gets added into the blockchain and if i go back home and i check the block explorer i can see that my vote is still for the red party and it hasn't been manipulated to change to be changed into voting for the blue one so i can have a lot more confidence that my vote has been done properly and i do have to trust any one entity that um the vote has been done correctly um that's a theoretical idea because in reality blockchains are nowhere near um good enough for elections um right now and as it stands alone there's a lot of other things that need to be fixed for uh voting to be done um reliably on the blockchain but i won't go into that um so i'll go to some use cases and i'll jump into nfps uh i think i'll just go through them relatively quickly um so you might have heard of this term called initial coin offering um there's a lot of sort of scams a lot of like um um unrealistic promises that have been made from people fundraising using icos and i'm not to go into how to make money out of these but it's a key thing that uh ico central has allowed is that even though 99 of them have probably turned out to be scams and uh if not have probably failed but a key thing that it allows is that now even if you're not a rich person or a well-connected person you're not a venture capitalist based in beijing or shanghai or silicon valley um you don't have the connections but if you find this really really cool project that's starting out there and you think it can be the next google or alibaba even as a normal person you are able to invest in these companies at an early stage um and so if you know if they become the next google you can get the thousands of multiples of returns from supporting them at the start and vice versa uh if you were an entrepreneur and you didn't have connections with the silicon valley or or with with shanghai then traditionally it would be hard for you to raise funds for your venture in a valuation that would be matching your ambition but uh with icos you are now able to receive funds from anyone in the world um and whether you are based in uh in the us or china or malaysia or even some random remote uh place in anywhere in asia or africa as long as you have connection to the internet you are able to raise funds uh from anyone anywhere and uh i'm not saying this out of some theoretical example i've actually experienced this myself i've tried to invest in a um ecf or equity crowdfund in malaysia that's fully licensed but because they're using normal financial sort of services i was asked to send money to a maybank account that was listed on the website which i did and um unfortunately for me by the time i i sent it or they received my funds uh the fund had already been maxed out so i was too late and so they had to refund me and that's that's still fine you know refunds happen um but in my case i had to wait and wait and wait and only a month afterward uh did the refund actually get processed and sent back to me if it wasn't because this platform was licensed i would be very concerned whether my funds had been you know taken away from me uh and it's not because of some fault or or fraud from the platform itself but it's because we in the our current financial system there are a lot of checks that need to be made by different entities uh to check that transactions are done properly and because of those checks it takes time that those refunds had to wait a month before he can come back to me in contrast um with icos and even from years and years ago like maybe 2017 if i were to participate in an ico which i have um if you were to put in a a certain amount of let's say ether which is the currency for ethereum um into a smart contract it would check the conditional statements the if then functions and immediately you will be able to see whether harris has let's say um registered the know your customer details and he has uh transferred a certain amount and if that amount is higher than the ceiling uh the the individual cap that has been put then um the contract will refund harris whatever the leftover amount is immediately and because it's done by code there's no human that needs to verify things i get my refund within seconds or minutes instead of months yeah and so there are there have been many projects that have been raising lots and lots of funds uh this is a sample from 2020 they raised millions or billions of funds which they might not have been able to or been able to do as easily uh without this blockchain technology another example use case is what's called a decentralized autonomous organization so very quickly think of let's say uber where instead of just having a um sort of an uber where there's a driver they have been researching to have driverless cars where you can have as a passenger you walk in you open a car and you sit inside and there's no human being that's driving you it's just computer code that's driving you safely from point a to point b now a dao uh decent plus autonomous organization uh is if you can imagine this uber and instead of just having a driverless car it's also an uber that is a humanless company where there is no hr there's no finance there's no um no employees that do these functions because all of this is uh conducted via computer code um so the the the driverless car uh already knows where to drive you and so on and you make payment using your blockchain smart wallet and uh it will accept it and refund any any amount automatically and once a month its code will tell it to drive itself to the nearest partnering workshop for it to have its maintenance and then continue on its way so this is a little bit science fictiony um and we probably are not going to reach this this scenario for like a couple decades maybe but what smart contracts have uh made possible uh have have opened the doors to uh is is this they are already sort of companies um and sometimes companies may not even be the right word like projects that have billions of dollars of funds and are managing billions of dollars of capital um and there's no company there's no entity behind it it's just uh people coming together in an internet forum and putting into a smart contract that runs by itself and no one can can um stop it even if you were to find the members of this company and and and arrest them the smart contract already exists and it can't be shut down unless you shut down the entire blockchain network um so uh you might have heard this as well uh this what's called d5 short for decentralized finance and upon on on defying traditional finance um these are all projects that already exist there's even more there's hundreds if not thousands of these projects out there and they are already replicating the functions of traditional finance services whether it's lending insurance asset management payments all of these already exist um out there um thanks for joining try uh just uh catch up on the recording afterwards um but so if you are in any financial space or if you have friends who are in financial space um i would strongly suggest uh to them uh to understand what d5 is and and try and get your hands dirty with d5 because um i personally think that within a few years it would there's a high chance that it would completely disrupt uh finance as we know it whether you're a bank or an insurance company things can be completely turned upside down because you can um do things without having to rely on a a bank or or a big highly capitalized let's say insurer to to decide things for you it's all done via computer code one quick example is what's called a decentralized exchange so i talked about exchanges just now and how it's not consistent with the idea of blockchains um so that's what's called a decentralized exchange and within that uh subcategory called automated market makers and one example is uni swap um so it's an exchange where you never have to put your money into a third party it's just a smart contract so if you wanted to trade between let's say bitcoin and ether you could transfer ether to the smart contract or interact with it and and send it and it will automatically send you back um uh bitcoin or a derivative of bitcoin and now you are able to trade without having to rely on any human or company to store your funds for you and one cool thing with unisoc also and why dfi is extremely powerful is that instead of just being a customer or a user of unison you could also be the kind of owner or or capital provider to unison where you could kind of give your funds it to the unisoc smart contract and you that those funds get added into the pool that is um behind the unison smart contract such that whenever someone trades uh your pool is used uh to give them uh the currency so let's say if you have ether and bitcoin if they trade if they send ether and they receive bitcoin that bitcoin comes from the pool of funds that you've contributed to and when that happens you get a 0.3 uh fee that the user is paying so you're not just the user that's paying a fee but you're also on the other side that's benefiting from the fees that are being paid and that opens up a lot of things because you essentially can become the bank or the stock market exchange you can you can earn from uh from providing capital to these things and so again you may not need banks anymore or need them in the same way because you're powering them using smart contracts instead of this huge company with all kinds of buildings and capital that um that they need to manage okay finally we get to nfts sorry that took a while um so what's the deal with these non-fungible tokens um there's some nice art that's out there uh but there are also some very simple pixelated art that's you know not extremely you know pretty or beautiful um nothing too special about them but these are being traded for you know some of them millions or billions not millions so millions of dollars uh in some cases uh the third uh picture here is actually in kl from lot pen uh some people just for fun decided to advertise this pudgy penguin nfp just because they could so why why do people want to buy nfps so nfts there's a bunch of different things you can do with it but the key thing is that nfts allow you to prove authenticity so imagine a nike air jordan pair of shoes some people are willing to pay thousands of dollars or a shoe that they would never even wear that's always kept in its box um and there's only like a certain supply of them maybe that's like only 100 pairs of these shoes um and people are willing to to spend money and uh you know keep it at home and it gets traded for thousands of dollars uh sometimes uh why does this um happen why does this matter it's because you get to say that this authentic rare piece of shoe created by nike there is only a hundred of them in the whole world you have one of this 100 you are in the small exclusive club of people who are able to um utilize this bragging right of saying that i have this unique pair of shoes and if you think about it i am certainly not a art person whether as a painter or a trader of arts but a big chunk of the value of art is from having um that dragging right of saying that you own the say original mona lisa that someone could create an almost perfect replica of mona lisa or in in to the visible eye completely perfect uh replica of the mona lisa but it will not go nearly as much um nearly as much in in value for the real mona lisa even though it may look exactly the same so why does this happen is because the original is authentic uh it's proven to be the original one and and that's something that uh money can't buy even if you could download right click and save image or or get someone to draw an exact replica it will never be exactly the same because society hasn't been convinced that your version is the correct or original version versus another [Music] obviously in the current space there's a lot of hype and when it comes to bubbles you know like humans jumping on the bandwagon uh it always happens that hypes go crazy so a lot of the current valuations that you see are also reliant on this hype and it in my opinion at least probably will not sustain itself at least high values um [Music] but some of them probably would still regain high values um so rey is asking did i create an image in my background it's a good question because i'm just gonna yeah uh so if you see my image is actually an nft that got created um if we zoom in and i can zoom it later uh it's actually a drawing of a robot with the ether scan logo uh it's a blog explorer so it's exploring the blockchain world i don't actually in fact own this nft but i got the permission from the artist to reuse it it kind of points to the point points to the idea of you know you not owning but still being able to use um a certain piece of art but the the person who owns the nft can say that they own the original sort of vouched for version of this piece of art um and nft goes way beyond art so art is just one use case i've already mentioned the top cruise ai defeat video proving um the originality of a video but there are plenty other use cases out there um so for one uh it's also a funding mechanism um and and not so much uh necessarily you fund something and you stand to gain a return out of it or a financial return but let's say in this case uh it's it's crowd funding a documentary about ethereum and how their crowdfunding is um when people like send a certain amount of ether then they get rewarded with an nft and that nft just kind of the owner can use to prove that hey i'm one of the small uh select a group of people that funded this uh special documentary and if that documentary ever goes um like big and and goes out to the to the mainstream and everybody loves it then i can say that i am one of those people you know in the in the credits uh of this of this movie and and there is a certain sort of not necessarily financial but social capital that i gain from um having this this right um similar to the right of being let's say a member of any of an exclusive uh gentleman's golf uh resort where um only the sort of uh either the rich or the well connected uh have access uh to this uh to this special right uh another thing is uh what's called a metaverse uh so shirat mentioned before he he used to play second life a lot um and you know metaverse is just a universe that exists completely in the digital world uh in these kind of spaces you could buy a house or some sort of space or any kind of asset but you uh in something like second life you have to trust that second life is um managing the records of that uh virtual world properly um they might accidentally or purposely delete your asset from their database and you have no recourse your house doesn't exist anymore if they do that or they could like print or create a hundred new houses just for their team members and you know what was once rare uh that you owned may suddenly not become rare anymore and you have to trust second life as a company to manage it for you whereas with a smart contract um everything is done publicly so you can look at the blockchain and you can see if a project is minting something more than they promised they would because it's completely transparent so you have this um again this decentralized sort of witness network of witnesses who to say whether uh um the uniqueness or the the rarity of an asset um is true or not and yeah so by having an asset to be non-fungible in the digital space now you can have ownership or you can have property in in virtual reality universes in any of the many different meta verses out there um there is an element of of rarity or ownership that you can prove uh within those spaces uh so rey's asking i used to have a mosque which i commissioned on a piece of land in second life uh i have a film of it can that then be sold as an nft so um when it comes to second life at least at this point it's entirely in their own database uh they manage that database and they control it so uh even if you were to sell uh this piece of property um it's only an entry in second life's database so the person that's buying it from you have to trust that uh when they're buying it that somehow you guys are managing to convince second life to change the ownership within their database to go from you to that person and um that second life itself is is securing the transaction records uh and and the total supply of assets within their database are properly so just the video record um so if you were to uh say take this video and and mint an nft and and link the nft with this video uh you could potentially sell this as an nft but whoever is buying it from you would quite conceivably ask what are they actually buying are they buying an asset in a metaverse that they can use um let's say to do house parties or or uh well as a mosque to to house let's say um readings of uh the quran or or um uh just host uh like gatherings in or is just a video of a mosque um that they can't actually use in other contexts so so there's a there's a big difference there right it's like the difference between saying that you have an original nike air jordan or a video of a nike air jordan um what exactly is this other person buying uh if it's just a video of this um second life mosque that you have then i would argue that uh it's essentially the same as you selling a video of a nike air jordan shoe and not the shoe itself um okay so another use case is domain names um so if you think about how websites have these names like in for computers they don't know your uh let's say shirat.com.com [Music] it's just uh 191.192 point uh whatever other digits that come after that uh it's just a bunch of numbers in your ip address uh similarly when it comes to the blockchain the blockchain only knows your random string of characters but as humans we'd like to see uh legible words or names um to transact with so uh nfts could also be used to create domain names so there is a popular project called ens ethereum name service that allows you to name your wallet and so instead of um telling you guys to transfer to my address at 0x123 i can say just send it to harris.

if and then you'll be able to type it in in your wallet and transferred to my account and that's just one basic use case uh you can also use it as a universal sign on imagine applications where you don't have to enter an email or password anymore you just sign using your wallet so i mentioned a smart wallet earlier you can sign sign a message using your wallet to prove that you are the owner of this wallet and from there you can um [Music] uh sync or sign in to a particular application and so they would never have to store your username and password so that helps you because you never have to manage that many passwords anymore and you never have to trust a company to store your password and and it also helps the company because they don't have to deal with managing the security of your password anymore like being hacked like um you know you might have seen in the news recently some i don't know if a government agency or or some highly trusted uh national agency uh have been rumored to be hacked so if you are this agency you also don't have to worry about securing these passwords you just tell people to use their wallet to sign in so you you can imagine a world where the same wallet can be used to sign in across 100 different applications out there so that's just some use cases of being able to use nfps as domain names another example is gaming so you might have heard a very popular game called xc infinity uh it's a bit like pokemon um and the cool thing is um so so each character in the game is an nft and people have been using this game to actually earn an income because you can play um against other people and if you win points and this points are in another form of cryptocurrency which you can then use to breed new monsters or characters in the game or you could sell it off in the market so people have actually been able to earn money from playing the game um like the one shown in this slide and another more recent example is you could even create gaming assets before there is a game uh so if you want to google you can google for loot nft lot where someone i believe the founder of vine just launched this smart contract and there was no uh sale he just launched the contract and anyone could could uh claim uh this uh let's say a bag or a pack of these gaming items and um it's it's a a pack of items that's common to any kind of game out there or rpg game you have a head piece a chess piece a leg piece arm piece um so these are just like like wearables that you can wear and people have already created games on top of these assets so that you've created gaming assets and other people out there can create games on top of those gaming assets so you can have a gaming asset um and use it in a game and and it can be multiple games so like in the example that i really said earlier of the second life thing like uh potentially like the mosque that you've bought could be used in not just second life but also in other games or virtual reality universes out there but it's um not even transferable like it's it's usable in multiple multi-verses instead of just one so that's one potential thing with uh using nfts in games or of meta verses as well um this one was just recently announced you can see a couple days ago uh i don't know if you guys have heard there's a website called keterjager.com they've done quite a good quite a big job of it's of of encouraging donations so it's essentially it's a website where you can match people who need something uh and they can put a pin in the map of where they are and and what they need and someone else can uh donate um directly to this person uh so it doesn't use any blockchain or cryptocurrency technology uh for that part of the platform but a couple days ago they announced um they can give nfps for the people who donate money so when you donate you get this badge that you know you can show off or you can just store in your wallet and and so then there is a again a social not necessary financial but but a social capital that you provide by by providing donations to people in need so it's incentivizing uh donations um by by giving people like this kind of bragging right uh of of being one of the few people that qualify uh for this uh special nfp um another example is uh of how nfts can be used is uh like there are certain nfts that are not just art but it has traits so these traits um so a platform uh called for this is called e-pill cards it has at least a couple malaysians uh malaysian based people in the team um and and they are building a platform for anyone out there so you can see people like steve aoki i think mike tyson launched nfps where it comes with art but also you can use those nfts to let's say qualify for let's say attending an event or or getting discounts for that particular uh celebrities um let's say future items or events and access to certain features that can be unlocked uh later so it's it's nfds that are dynamic that can be provided with superpowers that uh that you can use and and you as the say artist or celebrity uh instead of having to create this entire nft with this weird like technical parts to it uh you can just use their platform uh to give to your users or fans um not just this piece of art but certain uh traits or character characteristics later on um that can you know get you closer to your community um so before i get into this uh so nfts in many ways is a way for you to prove bragging rights it can also be a way to um especially when it comes to the art world uh to prove uh patronage uh i'm not an expert but um historically what i understand is that a lot of art have been sort of subsidized or had patrons would provide those artists with a sort of sustainable source of income so that they don't have to worry about making a living and focus on providing these creations of art that can be benefited or can be enjoyed by the wider community as a whole um there's even um not crypto or blockchain uh platforms like patreon where people can uh provide patronage for for creators and nft is just one step for any creator to be able to access a wide range of patrons as well okay so in short what blockchain 2.0 or ethereum allows you to do is instead of just decentralized money it allows you to do decentralized applications um another way to think of it is it's not just decentralized money but also programmable money and my favorite way to describe it is it could be unstoppable applications where in the example of unisop that i mentioned earlier even when the us government has blocked the team from providing their services to people from iran so they've blocked their website from being accessed to by the people in iran but those people could still access the smart contract because the smart contract cannot be blocked or censored it exists on the blockchain itself and so people will create like mirror copies of the unisop website for these people from iran to be able to access those smart contracts as well so that's blockchain 2.0 um i'm just going to very briefly skim through this uh if you're interested there are certain local companies and communities so i vote for e to scan this malaysian company based on shallam uh with the leading block explorer for ethereum and a bunch of other chains um a scoring gecko which is like a company that aggregates data um for any particular cryptocurrency uh kind of think of it as like even on your bosom malaysia you can let's say go to some websites and see like what's the price what's the volume what's the like certain details of a particular stock um or share so kung does that for uh cryptocurrencies there's a project called ribbon finance which is well not exactly malaysian but the two founders are malaysian uh the skeeter jagged of course i mentioned earlier uh blockline which is a kind of education company that tries to uh train up more blockchain developers and there's lux tag which is a company that tries to prove provenance uh using the blockchain technology there's also some communities as ethereum malaysia the meetup group that i run and is a very big facebook group which i think right now have maybe like 55k members called bitcoin malaysia uh this is g1 group that has some of the like richest whales uh in malaysia it's a highly curated group there's access malaysia which is like a kind of like a group that's representing the uh the local blockchain space and talking to regulators and government agencies and so on and it is very interesting for people in this call is there are local communities that are uh very active in the nfd space uh especially nfp art space uh so there's both nfxt uh which is not strictly malaysian but a lot of the members are malaysians and there's malaysia nft and both of them have very active discord groups where they would have as i understand it even weekly mint parties where people can join a a community call and mint nfts together and so if you're not sure you know they can help during those calls and it's just very active discord groups in general uh one key note on the culture within blockchain or cryptocurrency is that uh when you talk about cryptocurrency a lot of people are traders this is um just in general and a lot of them may not even understand the technology and when you ask them for their opinion on something or another uh there's a certain thing that you have to be aware of where someone is always shilling their own bag which basically means um they will sort of say nice things about the coins that they are invested in because there is an incentive for them for you to buy those coins because then they earn a higher return uh and to disparage another coin that they're not invested in because it's essentially competing with their investment and this happens like everywhere even so-called experts even people like myself although i try to be as objective as possible sometimes like subliminally we may not be aware that we have this bias so for you who are let's say new in this space you might want to like filter any answers that you get based on on this uh and then there is a a kind of a scale between the people who are saying that blockchains can only be used for hard money um and these are typically the sort of bitcoin only people uh they're very rigid and intransigent almost dogmatic about their belief and there are the people who are extremely experimental who will say that blockchains can be used for everything in this world whether it's money whether it's music or or social networks or elections and so on um so they're at the extreme end of the scale um and as with many things in life i personally believe that the right kind of bell right answer is always a balance in between somewhere with uh across that scale um um but but there's no right or wrong or at least there's no proof of which kind of uh ideology is right or wrong uh the people who are on the rigid side will say that um when you keep things simple like how bitcoin is simple it doesn't have all the smart contract stuff then um you reduce the surface area of attacks or or hacks or corruption because you know exactly what the code is doing there's only a few hundred lines of code whereas if you have all this fancy stuff with smart contracts and all these different conditional statements then your piece of code can be very long and convoluted and it can be this weird to imagine as this weird shape where the surface area is huge and you might miss out on certain corners of that shape and so there is a potential vulnerability for hijacks or or what's called a rug pools where the project kind of like cheats its own users um okay so getting to the final stage uh the so what um so it's a like a defining technology even the way that it is now i believe that it's it's changed a lot of things uh it's an investment but an extremely high risk investment i hope you understand from what i've described here uh with the security and so on there's also an element of if you were to buy let's say google in the mid 90s uh or late 90s right now you'd be very rich if you were to buy the google share but but if you were to buy let's say a different um dot dot-com share like let's say you were to buy yahoo or maybe i know netscape or some of these companies that aren't around anymore then you might have lost all your investment instead of uh gaining like thousands of times of returns so there is a lot of risk involved um you might be buying the wrong cryptocurrency or even blockchain as a whole may not live up to its um potential and uh it may not prove to be able to do much more than what uh people like me are are believing it would and if that happens then you know there might not be much return that you get out of your investment uh another key thing is to understand the impact to your career because if you are like me and you believe that you will change a lot of things whether it's finance or you know art or a lot of different industries or spaces then um you should understand what it is and understand how it can affect your career uh or your space because um that might affect your future especially if you're a bit younger and um lastly uh my request uh from um people who are listening is um help the community whether you are a computer science programmer uh whether you're a designer or you're in any kind of industry out there or an academic or regulator it's only from the efforts of people uh everywhere around the world who strive for a decentralized blockchain that we can have a future where blockchains are decentralized and once upon a time there were efforts to create a centralized internet where um there are many walled gardens and and so you know if you use yahoo or netscape or many different other let's say browsers or networks you are only able to to see within those networks and you cannot cross over to other places and it could be argued that even the internet that we have now is highly um has high wall gardens like facebook and twitter and and amazon would um restrict the number of things that you can do or might be able to kick you out of their networks or things that you are not necessarily in control over and it's not fully decentralized so it's only from the efforts of people like you and me who can benefit in any small way the wider community that blockchains can be uh remain decentralized as it is now um there are efforts whether it's by governments or companies to create their own sort of uh private uh blockchains and if that were to happen and to [Music] dominate what's going on then [Music] one of the potentials or blockchains of having a decentralized space for doing finance and many other things would be a lot more limited uh yeah so my call to action if anyone's interested is to join ethereum malaysia which is the meetup group that i run we try very hard not to talk about uh prices and so on but understanding the technology and the use cases of this technology and and we so far have been able to invite guests from all over the world from leading projects in the space who can share from the you know firsthand what their projects do and and the different things that they're dealing with so as a review we covered some preamble blockchain 1.0 blockchain 2.

0 companies communities and culture and finally the so what if you don't remember anything else remember that blockchains are not anonymous that you are your own security in the crypto space and that exchanges are not wallets and there's a lot of other things that we can go down um into and you can you know try hands on with creating your own wallet and sending transactions or using these decentralized applications there are different use cases out there that can be explored there are many many concepts that i've barely touched on or not even touched at all one very key thing right now is blockchain 3.0 and how we can scale blockchains so that costs can be reduced like these transaction fees that you may have heard of can be reduced and make more sustainable um yeah so so the the space is huge um it will still very very early um in in this space akin to uh the internet let's say in the mid 90s so yeah there's a lot of space for growth and and learning and i welcome you to uh to understand more um yes so i raised asked a couple very good questions i actually wanted to put it in the slides what i think i forgot uh two things i wanted to cover with nfts are um the sort of uh environmental impact and how to get into the space so i think first i'll cover the environmental impact um it's a broad topic and it's again no clear black and white uh when it comes to this um [Music] the first thing is to discuss proof of work and how it is um very bad for the environment so um you could argue that it's not bad but first let's say assume it's bad there are blockchains out there that are not running using proof of work so a lot of them or some of them are running using this consensus mechanism called proof of stake um and proof of stake is a lot a lot like orders of magnitudes um um in its use of resources or electricity and therefore uh its impact to the environment uh so they are way way way cleaner than um blockchains using proof of work so you could use those blockchains if you will then certain blockchains well i guess one major blockchain is ethereum which is currently running using proof of work but is exploring is researching and is committed to switching to using proof of stake uh as a way to secure its blockchain so there are those as well and the honest answer is like the vast majority of nfts are on the ethereum network so this is a big question for a lot of people who are using a current proof-of-work blockchain which has committed to moving to proof of state but right now it's using proof of work and expending a lot of energy uh to run its uh network so that's one side of things another side of things is um [Music] it depends on how important you think proof of work is or or a decentralized network is so if you were to use bitcoin um if you think the value of having a decentralized currency that no government has control over um that if you are a syrian doctor you can store your wealth that you've accumulated over your lifetime and such that if you were to um [Music] migrate as a refugee somewhere else and be able to start over with all those wealth that you still have if you put a lot of value to that then you may argue it's worth having proof of work even with all of the costs that it incurs because it allows you to exit a financial system that you may argue is is corrupted or stacked against you into one that is fair uh for for everybody um and if you consider the sort of amount of energy used by something like bitcoin uh versus the amount of energy that you need to um maintain a fiat national currency um so to it to maintain a national fiat currency you'd have to have this wide bureaucracy of the government of the military of of the banking system and all of those have costs you know the the electricity the building costs the the buying of tanks and bombs uh those all involve costs as well and so if you were to um weigh the costs of bitcoin versus any government's national fiat currency then uh you could argue that um bitcoin's cost is way way cheaper than the cost of a fiat currency um so if you put a lot of importance significance or value to having a decent class currency uh to you it may not be a waste um any more than a national currency is uh but to someone who doesn't have that same uh weight of importance to a decentralized currency then they might say that it is a waste so it's relative um on what is considered wasteful or not um this is a very quick note there's also an argument i don't necessarily buy into but other people have put out that um proof of work actually incentivizes um uh clean energy because um it incurs costs for you so if you can get renewable energy to power your mining computer then um it's cheaper for you because let's say if you were to run a computer and the electricity that it it uses up you can also use to let's say heat up your um your office building then uh you don't have to pay electricity for your heater so you um you're using up um the same electricity for for two use cases and and um if you rely on recyclable or renewable energy it's cheaper for you than uh potentially then to let's say buy electricity off from the power grid market then you can become more competitive versus other miners out there because they have to pay a certain amount of costs monthly and you have to pay lower costs and therefore you can let's say deploy more miners uh versus others and therefore increase your chances of winning that that race to mine a bitcoin law um so i hope that answers the environmental impact question um ray is asking can educational processes such as this workshop b and nft uh i mean theoretically anything can be an nft so um one way this could be an nft is potentially we could do such a thing where um anyone who attended this workshop can be given a proof of attendance uh nft there's actually a real nft call a poep a real nft project p-o-a-p where if you attend then you get rewarded with this nft and you have that social capital that bragging rights of being able to prove that you attended this workshop and if let's say in future i was to kind of get this workshop verified and licensed by some educational authority in malaysia then you could say that you know you have an nfp to prove that you have this certificate of attending uh this um this workshop uh potentially maybe i require you to answer some exam questions and so on for you to deserve this nfp but yeah so that could be one use of an nfp for a workshop like this yeah and proof of attendance is also a very cool project that uh there's a lot of use cases for um but yeah that's probably for another time um okay and another thing that i wanted to mention just now was how to sort of get into the nft space i mentioned already there are two very active communities in malaysia who are on discord and they're very open they're very friendly you can join and they will actually help guide like artists who figure out how to um uh how to create their own nfps and what platforms uh they can sell their nfts on um so i highly encourage uh people to join these two these two communities there are also other communities out there that are not restricted by geography so like international communities a lot of them are on discord um maybe on twitter on reddit but i think discord is the most popular uh so you can join these and they're different communities like focused on different things or even on different platforms so you can join them and um one cool thing about the crypto space is um it's a very 21st century thing like uh you were if you were to join these decentralized communities that live on the internet there's no a lot of times uh you find communities that are not restrictive there's no question of like um you have to be a certain well-known person or or uh only those who have been around for a long time are allowed to speak up a lot of these spaces they welcome a new joiners you can start asking questions um contributing to the conversation even suggesting things that you've learned yourself and this applies not just for nfps but for any blockchain kind of project out there if you want to uh advance in the space like all you have to do is participate and contribute and you might find that very quickly you can become a well-known person uh in this space like it's not unheard of that someone who didn't know anything about blockchains six months ago um they've come in and and and really learned and contributed and after six months like they become a key like world thought leader on a particular niche within the blockchain space um or even in the nft space um that can happen because the space is so new and we're still learning so much every day that someone new can still come in and very quickly become a influential uh person um so so key thing to wrap that up is um participate actively in communities um and another thing that you might want to consider especially if you're thinking of like selling your nfps is uh different platforms out there so for example in malaysia there is a a recent popular nft platform called puntas.io so p-e-n-t-a-s um it's i mean it's a malaysian kind of platform created by malaysians so there are a lot of malaysian users as well even though it's not restricted to just malaysians but it's a good way to like if you want to sell your nft to a malaysian market especially with the malaysian communities like you find your your target users potential buyers like very easily if you use that platform and the local communities um if you are you know care about clean nfps and like only proof of stake uh blockchains um a popular kind of blockchain that people use is called tesos t-e-z-o-s um and you can sell your nfts on the different marketplaces there um primarily though like if you're you think that your nft can can sell on uh the most sort of luxurious market like the grade a quality market where the the richest people are then you would want to meet on an ethereum platform uh most popular one is open c and variable as ray has mentioned um because the the the the biggest number of people with the deepest pockets are in these platforms uh are on the ethereum blockchain so uh you might want to consider uh selling so you can think of it as like um like if there are art galleries they are like the expensive art galleries and there is the kind of more i know local or basamalam level gallery uh so if you know what a good market or target user you want to sell to that might uh inform your decision on which platform or which blockchain to sell on um just generally if you sell on ethereum it will incur quite a lot of cost because as i mentioned earlier the transaction fees and it's very high right now especially on ethereum uh and that's a function of a lot of people are using it so it's very congested um yeah so kind of like high risk high reward you know you pay a relatively big amount to mid-year nfp and potentially get people with deeper pockets to buy your nfp okay cool so uh yeah so i hope that answers the question uh and yes i am familiar with variable i believe it's the second largest nft marketplace platform voice i'm not too sure of um yeah i can still have to leave but uh practically this is this is it for for the top um yeah so i think it's okay two and a half hours so yeah a bit over the two hours that was uh promised um yeah so this is pretty much it uh if you have any other questions feel free to ask i'm happy to um to answer uh to shiraz question um i'll put this up on youtube as soon as i can um compile the video and and upload it um but yeah so if everyone needs to go this is perfectly fine we're at the end of the talk already other than any questions so yeah feel free to leave if you have to and if you have any questions feel free to ask otherwise i can end the talk already how to contact you uh i'll i'll i'll message you separately afterwards i'll pass it around all right so thanks everyone for watching uh either live or on the recording later and i will stop recording now