Blockchain for the Win – Panel Discussion

all right thanks bad crypto podcast fabulous so we're gonna move right along we're running it just a tad behind schedule we have a really interesting conversation coming up with some heavyweights of the industry so we're doing sort of a blended sort of effort here we're gonna mix up two podcasts so we have John Mohan from let's talk Bitcoin and we have Tatiana murrow's from proof of love and the Tatiana show so they are going to moderate a panel that's talking about blockchain for the win so what is it that we're gonna do what are the kind of movements what are the events what are the things that are happening in the space that are going to ultimately cement everything for the win so with that I'm gonna go ahead and just get it going so John Tatiana oh you hi everybody how are y'all doing alright this is my first my first eath denver it's very fun to be here we're missing a chair but Liv can we can work that out my name is Tatiana Moroz I'm really happy to be a part of this panel it's my good friend Jonathan just to give you a little bit of a background I'm a singer-songwriter I got into Bitcoin in 2012 I created the world's first artist cryptocurrency in 2014 using counterparty which is even before aetherium it's great to see the space growing and I look forward to our panel hello and I'm Jonathan Rohan I'm one of the co-hosts of let's talk Bitcoin whoo so if you know what trace Antonopoulos I have the distinguished pleasure of being told I'm wrong several times a month from him on that so if you think trusted in those types of conversations check that out but on to the topic of the conversation which is blockchain for the win so could you please join us in giving a round of applause for our distinguished panelists and we can do introductions as they join us like my audience I like you guys so I figure we start off the conversation with an introduction and then from there talk about the wins blockchain and where we see the industry moving forward from there so Caitlin for those who may not be familiar with your work in this space tell us a little bit about you and your involvement in blockchain I'm from Wyoming and worked on Wall Street for 22 years got into Bitcoin in 2012 and left Wall Street 2016 and spent the last two years working on getting legislation passed in my native state of Wyoming just moved back we made it we've by far the most crypto friendly States despite what the rumors saying about Colorado are hi everyone I am Erik Voorhees I am the founder and CEO of shape-shifts I've been in the Bitcoin world since 2011 basically I got into this stuff because I disliked all governments around the world and I think I know my audience basically I think pulling away financial control from them to people is extremely democratic fair ethical and a way forward for all of humanity so this is what I do so Vinnie Gupta first year ping Pei being paid a hundred percent in anonymous digital cash was 1999 project-manage the etherium launch and now I work for Bill Shatner on project cold material so we're doing basically digital identities for physical things and we'll talk a bit more about that later but it's it's extremely dirty and it's lovely to be here and I used to live in Colorado many years welcome home thanks so much everybody the title of this panel is blockchain for the win where have you seen the biggest wins in blockchain thus far so I don't know if you guys were here yesterday but we saw two state governors reading a book about cryptocurrency to the next generation of youths and technically one of them was kneeling to Vitalik yeah I mean it was it was kind of a little thing but it's a demonstration of how far this technology is somewhere where you know sitting governors of states in the United States will talk about stuff with rainbows and unicorns because they take it seriously despite all that so I think I think at this point the biggest win of blockchain is that it's working you know we we are pulling finance into decentralized systems and it's messy and it's chaotic but I think every year that goes by everyone sees new people in the industry and you pull people in from every every place on earth so it's just the growth that is the success so far Vinay um so I want to say like we keep thinking the word know what success is gonna look like you know so once upon a time it was the tax starvation of the state and everybody goes bankrupt and everything moves over to Bitcoin that was kind of model number one then model 2 is we're gonna fix you know banking the unbanked and that will all get sorted out and then it's gonna be remittances and sold us and then that kind of rolled around trial not didn't happen then it was like the ico thing and the answer it's gonna it's gonna change everything about finance and it turned out to be just the enormous numbers of scams so I think that we haven't had the big world-changing win yet we're building up momentum you know the forge is hotter and hotter and hotter but we haven't had that moment where somebody turns around was like oh yeah that was that that was where we got the world-changing history-making single point win what do you think Caitlin I think it is world-changing in history making that we actually can own our own financial assets and most of us probably hoped that we would have the value of the ecosystem be where it is today but probably a lot of us wouldn't have bet money on that a long time ago and and yet here we are and so that sort of leads into one of the questions we had which is what do you think a world where everyone owns their own money looks like and how would that change our daily life tears down Porter said tears down intermediaries it tears down friction and solves real real world problems in addition to empowering people and allows the financial sector is a huge drain on society it the fact that it takes so long to clear a payment means that companies have to keep cash on their balance sheet that they're not otherwise deploying in their business just waiting until their payments clear that's a that's a huge deadweight loss and nobody's ever thought about how to do it differently and we can do we can we can do that differently and free up businesses from the noose around their neck real quick I want to say hello to my little daughter over there four year old Athena hi Athena I think there's going to be a somewhat more subtle effects of people owning their own assets that is maybe less appreciated than it should be when people own their own assets they are required forced almost to become a little bit more responsible to understand what they own a little bit better to pay attention to things like finance it is astounding that finance is so important in the world and so few people understand even the basics of it and so I think I think as we move to a world where people are holding their own assets they can pay each other they can lose their assets if they don't know what they're doing and they can screw up a smart contract and you know 100 million dollars gets lost that requires a certain degree of personal responsibility that I don't think has been in finance for a very long time and I think that will have ripple effects around culture far broader than just in finance yeah that's super interesting super interesting I mean I do think the more we've learned about this like an old friend of mine said that you know what's happening is that nerds are beginning to learn finance and it's creating this whole new kind of financial literacy and you know step one was like The Wall Street people began to understand Bitcoin and that was okay but then the second step was that the Bitcoin people began to understand Wall Street and that was when things began to get really really dangerous like okay wait a minute so that enormous machine that takes about seven percent of the global GDP you know that machine really is just like four shell scripts so I think we are at that kind of you know point where you know figure what happened to newspapers once we got the web then the notion that that could happen to the entire financial system seems more and more credible because the legacy financial system looks more and more ridiculous you know there's that funny why everybody's kind of circling in it with the big fins on the back like this is basically as outdated as corner stores or you know print newspaper why not this next as we think about what this space looks like moving forward and what future wins could be could you maybe talk to what that briefcase is and yeah you got you're okay without her to get involved in etherium well so about a year ago I got a Twitter DM from William Shatner being like I want to do something on the blockchain I hear you're the guy to talk to cuz it turns out my love of science fiction had preceded me and so what we've got is a kind of generic technology for doing digital identities for physical things and then taking incredibly tight and precise legal control of those things so when you alter the state is that the thing on the smart contract the real-world legal system acknowledges that change without any screwing around and this is all bedrock on the 1958 New York Convention on arbitration it's a it's a simple approach but we wanted to start with something that was easy to deal with and where you could see immediate benefit so we started in collectibles and antiquities and so we're gonna be doing a whole pile of objects for William Shatner over the next year and these guys are already on main chain so if you go to a material comm slash about you can actually see the asset passport for this thing and you could put a door in there to enter into a contract that tells you that these things actually exist and it's live now as of a week ago we launched it in Cancun Cancun with William Shatner I just love that what is it seven years ago Ron Paul said I don't understand Bitcoin but if I can hold it I think I can understand it and we got casillas goings and then Bill Shatner says hey this etherium thing I want to get involved but now we have material yeah absolutely and I mean you know it's not it's not a small thing right you think of the size of comic-con that's two million people that could very quickly become blockchain users if they're using a tour fan to get all the collectables all the rest of that stuff and it's nice because it's not regulated space right it's not like we're doing securitization it's not like we're doing you know fractional ownership it's not like we're you know collateralizing stuff in ways that has regulatory impact it's just what is this and who made it and that's nice because you could roll out you know quite large platforms without ever having like you don't have to deal with tax problems you don't have to deal with security you know it's just SEC free and that makes life nice and simple thank God Caitlin you've done a lot of pioneering work in Wyoming what can other states learn from your partnerships and how did you really make that happen because some other states would be a little bit resistant well you can you've probably met representative Tyler Lindholm guy walking up tall guy walking around in the cowboy hat no there is in the front in the front row and representative Jared else and it was just on the previous panel those guys made it happen they're the elected officials and I just was a conduit from the industry to feed-in ideas and representative Lynn Hall really gets a lot of the credit because we were just gonna fix the money transmission statute in Wyoming which which had a problem and he said no let's go further what else could we do what else can we do so we were the first state to recognize utility tokens and I think there are now 12 states that do and that has really set the conversation at the federal level and so for other states I would say the most important thing that Wyoming did that other states can and should also do is clarify the status of digital assets under the law I know that there is big coat is law contingent here and I think it is unless unless we live in a stateless society which none of us do the logs can unfortunately snatch you and create problems for you and so the easiest way is if we can make this backward make the tech backward compatible with the law then you don't have to worry about it and that's exactly what we did in Wyoming and so other states should be recognizing the legal status of digital assets under commercial law so that when they go up in value by a lot more that the there are not easy attack vectors where all of us all of a sudden we all start getting lawsuits trying to steal our crypto I remember when you started engaging with Wyoming you taught me about how Wyoming pioneered the LLC and how that became a state-by-state thing and now the most obvious thing as an entrepreneur is to form an LLC and so when you said what your thought your thoughts were with Wyoming was to do the same thing with utility tokens so it's so amazing to see it happening in Colorado yeah yep Colorado is one of the other states it's really the Rocky Mountain in arc of states that is taking the leadership on on this so it's not a surprise but that the big event is here in Denver and obviously shape-shifts got a huge presence here in Denver and there are a lot of a big presence in Denver it's not a not a surprise and so Eric what do you think someone looking at the blockchain community now thinking about their keys and what services they should use and how they should understand the risk how should they be approaching this space so people should understand that crypto is a journey it requires learning it's like riding a bike or driving a car you don't just suddenly wake up and know how to do it responsibly so I think in the crypto community there's a lot of people who will vilify you know the coin basis of the world because they're custodial or if someone's not doing their keys right or if they don't understand like all the history of the cypherpunks but I think that's really alienating and I much prefer a world where people are welcomed into the community and that means socially but also from a technology perspective I think coinbase has done a great job of helping people get introduced to Bitcoin and it is then on incumbent on us to help them like leave coinbase and go to something that is self custody right so this is the ecosystem and we're all we're all helping each other like change the world I don't think that there will be a world where everyone should always hold their own keys for everything that would be a little silly and probably capital inefficient but I think there is a world where everyone should know at least the basics of how to do that themselves and then they can make a choice themselves on which assets they hold on their own and which assets they share with other people and how again this gets back to that personal responsibility no one should expect that that happens overnight it is a learning process and those of us who care about this industry in this technology it is on us to teach these people how to do it um each of you where do you see the space going forward and what about the difference between state rights and then federal imposition if there are odds where do you see that progressing thanks are definitely going to win that except in the securities area and it's what we saw from the SEC the proposal for the safe harbor was definitely a step forward there's it still needs a lot of work as you know but it can fit with what Wyoming did and again I think that the industry push here helped help to redefine it I think that we've been we're building a parallel financial system that's not basically the traditional system is just not interested in this technology because the settlement system is so different it doesn't it's just fundamentally incompatible with what they do and so we're building a whole new parallel system and the most important thing that we can be doing in the next couple of years is building bridges between the two so that we can have the giant sucking sound of assets coming out of the traditional industry and into this one so the federal and state issue is a really big one and a lot of the interest I think that people would have and actually affecting the state-level regulations is is harmed by the fact that even if they go through all that effort the bigger more problematic regulations still exist at the federal level and I don't really know a way around that other than with with time I do think it's absolutely amazing that that there are a number of states now that have legalized marijuana even though it is federally illegal that's that's incredible it's like an indication that there are still little traces of freedom here in the United States and I think we should we should seize on that and I hope that there will be a number of states that lead by example and have the courage and the fortitude to legalize open permissionless finance even if it is federally illegal I think that is the ethical approach to take and if it can be done with with weed it can certainly be done with finance what do you think the neh yeah that's an excellent point that's really an excellent point so I'm in the UK and you know so we have a different regulatory regime it makes a lot of the same mistakes but my probe predominant area of interest is international law right so the 1958 New York Convention on arbitration puts enormous amounts of power into the hands of arbitrators in the event where they're managing a contract dispute between two parties and that mechanism has been used to defend assets in crypto contexts since oh I don't know maybe nine he 998 Ian Greg did a lot work on this one thing Goldy gold so I think that at the international level there's an enormous amount of room to use the 58 convention plus small states like Bermuda or Singapore that's different regulatory regimes to build a kind of de facto international platform which will a lot of these things to get done today and as long as your assets are legally technically theoretically offshore but you're still paying your taxes when you have to I think we can get a lot of things done using those tools and I think the crypto community overall is kind of unaware of the power of arbitration and the power that the 58 convention provides and because it provides a mechanism where you know the treaties that the federal government has already signed up to create the possibility of very large areas of freedom that are basically just a question building out with contract law and so I would like to see all of those systems fully exploited and extended in partnership with the small states like Bermuda that are doing kind of radical work on changing frameworks and if that turns out not to blow up because people aren't doing stupid things it gives an example of you know trucks that can be followed either at the state level in the US or eventually by the federal government so to round out this panel sort of to end it with the question we began with what do you think the biggest wins yet to come will be in this space Oh for me it's simply its identity right you know we're doing digital identity for physical things because nobody regulates identity for physical things there is no you know GDP are for physical stuff so that's an easy place to get started but in the long run until we crack digital identity to the point where got routable and points all these keys are just floating around in a cloud of hearsay about what key belongs to who without public key infrastructure and digital identity it's incredibly difficult to get over that hump because this as hard as using the internet was before we had domain names right we need namespaces figure it out and when that gets done I think you'll see the number of users go up by a factor of ten or a hundred pretty much organically even if nothing else changes we need the ability to route to people biggest win that we can get has to be financial privacy but it is not at all guaranteed and even it doesn't even look very likely but people should understand that if we lose that going forward well I should say we don't have it now crypto has provided us the tools to actually regain financial privacy that we have never had I am worried that too few people care about that too pressure society toward it and those who generally advocate privacy are very quickly vilified I love being here and seeing out in the audience there's like three or four people with just dark black hats and say privacy and big bold letters I love that I love that the culture of rainbows and unicorns is being paired with a a die-hard advocacy of financial privacy there's something very special about that I think it demonstrates that good people that are just here to have fun and be social together also understand the importance of privacy so the biggest win that we can get will definitely be privacy but it's not going to happen automatically it's going to happen only if a lot of people spend a lot of time fighting for that over the next decade Caitlyn I would say making that giant sucking sound a big old giant sucking roar of assets that are coming from the front from the unfair and unstable traditional financial system into this one that will help I think Eric with with the privacy angle because as people get their assets out of the unfair and unstable traditional system there will be choices we will you keep your coins at a custodian or at a new new-generation custodian or will you will you go with a noncustodial solution will you use the coin joint structures and unfortunately potentially actually face legal ramifications as we're as we're facing as we saw with the news yesterday you know but but the point is that we actually have the ability to opt out and that is in and of itself a win and as more people actually get into this system and realize they have an ability to opt-out which they don't have in the traditional system that's a win in and of itself with that I'd like us to thank our panelists as we discuss blockchain for the win thank you and bring us your physical stuff we can get it out of the system [Music] you