a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Banking on the Blockchain

Episode Date: May 10, 2016

Whether you think of it as a distributed ledger, decentralized database, computing infrastructure, open source/ software development platform, cryptocurrency, transaction platform, or financial services marketplace, the bitcoin blockchain is driven by two key features: that it is a peer-to-peer network, and that it unbundles trust. Imagine moving from Googling for things to offering proof-as-a-service instead (which itself begins with rethinking identity). In fact, there's a lot of parallels -- both in evolution and development -- with the blockchain and the internet before it. Only the blockchain doesn't need the web. And that has profound implications for what applications and new businesses are now possible, especially in financial services. But if "the worst place to develop a new business model is from within your existing business model", then how can banks move beyond mere process innovations to offering entirely new services built on the blockchain? Many financial institutions are trying to get ahead of the blockchain disruption by exploring it proactively, but how do they overcome the innovator's dilemma and looking at startups like animals in a zoo? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, William Mougayar, the author of the new book The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology shares how traditional, established industries can overcome the innovator's dilemma in this case; what the future of banks might be; and what new applications, services, and startups are possible due to the features -- really, benefits -- of the blockchain. Because the blockchain, ultimately, is an innovation platform.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And today, Michael and I are interviewing William Mugayar, who just has a new book out, the business blockchain, about the promise, practice and application of the next internet technology. And we thought it'd be great to have William on the podcast because, you know, besides being a writer and investor in various Bitcoin and blockchain

related startups, him writing this book, it's actually one of the, probably one of the first books in the space that focuses on the business applications, which we think is great. Welcome, William. Thank you. Happy to be here with you. Why don't we start off, you know, we hear a lot about the blockchain and what it's been used for. And there's been lots of discussion about, is it fast enough Are the blocks big enough? Describe it in the way that you find people understand it best. Sure, sure. I mean, there's so many ways to describe the blockchain,

and that's what makes it interesting, but it makes it challenging as well. It's like the Internet. If you were to ask anybody what their definition is of the Internet, you probably get a different answer from every person that you ask that question, because one person will see it as a publishing platform, another person might see it as an e-commerce platform.

You might talk to a developer that might see it as a development platform. And it is very similar with the blockchain. It has this multi, multi, it has many properties, many characteristics. And the challenge with it is that some people just see one of the characteristics, and they just hone in on it. It's actually like that story of the blind men and the elephant, Whereas it's like, how do you describe the elephant and each person describes it based on what they were specifically focusing on? I think it'd be helpful to us if you honed in on as if each of those four men or women, actually, I hate the fact that it's all blind men in that anecdote, are touching the elephant and then sort of your big picture view of the elephant.

How would you define the blockchain from each of those vantage points as well as overall? So I have 10 characteristics, 10 properties that the blockchain has. And the ones that people really think about first is the cryptocurrency aspect. That's fairly easy to understand. And the second one is the distributed ledger property of the blockchain. And that's what the enterprises have really honed in on. Because it's something that's easy for them to understand. It's like an accounting thing.

And it touches their processes. But in reality, it's a bit more than that. It's a computing infrastructure. So think of it like another cloud in the cloud. It's also a transaction platform. It's a place where you can have your identity. It's a decentralized database as well. So it's a great software development platform.

In the same way that Java was so important for developing web applications, there's a whole new segment of smart contract languages and blockchain-specific. languages that are just coming out now that are going to allow us to write blockchain applications. So there is a virtual machine element of it, similar to the Java virtual machine. It's an open source platform, the blockchain. So this means a lot of developers can contribute. So it makes the innovation widely open. It's a financial services marketplace as well. And then the last two that are very important, and they are the enablers for innovation.

It is a peer-to-peer network. So when you think of it as a peer-to-peer network, it means that it could be a marketplace. It could be many different marketplaces. And then finally, it's a trust layer. It's a trust services layer because what the blockchain does, it unbundles trust. and whoever was performing a trust function now is going to be threatened because trust can be accomplished by the network. So whether that's a central bank or a commercial bank or you name it, right?

Any place where we had to go somewhere or get the authorization of somebody, if you think about it, when you put money in a bank, They own the database that includes a record that points to the fact that you have, let's say, $1,000. But they own that database. And they can give you access or not give you access one day. And then when you want to transfer money, then their database has to talk to another bank's database, which is owned by another bank. And that other database is also pointing to a record. So it's really database is talking to each other.

But with the blockchain, this kind of asset transfer can happen without the bank being in the middle. If you're a consumer, if you're a business person, the experience of sending money via a Bitcoin exchange and seeing the recipient receiving that money within 10 minutes without having anybody in the middle, that is an eye-opening experience because it doesn't just apply to money. It applies to any value. Because what's money? Money is value, right? But value could be any asset. It could be a bond, could be a stock, could be a digital asset, something with a right attached to it.

So imagine now that if you can start to move any assets ownership as quickly as you can move $10 from one person to another. But now you're moving those assets between institutions. So what the blockchain is is a very fast rail and a very efficient rail for moving assets. And we're talking potentially, potentially into the billions of dollars, if not more than that. So you make it sound very simple.

And I know we know that there's been lots of discussion about, you know, a break in the Bitcoin community or in the, you know, cryptocurrency community around how to move forward. I mean, is it as efficient and as solid as you describe? Right. Especially because, you know, one of the people who introduced your book is Vitalik Bouturin, the founder of Ethereum. And he describes crypto as being in three phases and crypto 2.0 is people are now adopting it more broadly than just insiders. And crypto 3.0 really being about scalability. And that is the core of the question that comes up. for the business applications that you are talking about?

Right now, I don't think scalability is going to be a showstopper. It is a challenge, but you put six engineers in a room and they will solve the problem. If you go back to the history of the Internet, we didn't have all of the networking issues solved in 94, 95. But very, very quickly, everything was solved. And now it becomes, it's a given that the Internet. Internet is scalable. That's a great analogy.

I mean, yeah, I mean, you don't solve the scalability problem that you're going to have in 10 years today. Right. You solve it when it's like a year or two away or three years kind of around the corner. And today, the Internet even will have a problem. If there are 50 billion things that are going to be attached to the Internet, they will have to upgrade the protocol as well. I love that. It perfectly encapsulates the way. to frame the debate because the people in the past with networking, the internet, the ones who

really care about solving the scalability problem up front are like pure academic sort of theoreticians. Yes. Whereas the ones who really care about solving it in a practical way, the way you're describing in this way as it evolves, are people who are really thinking about building practical applications, business applications that people can use that benefit consumers, that benefit create businesses. So it's actually quite interesting that you're using that analogy. I think that's a really powerful one. Yeah. And it's not just about speed of transactions processing. Some people have, some people would like to equate, let's say, Bitcoin to a Visa network. But it's too early

to compare Bitcoin to a Visa network. Visa works fine. The payment processing works fine. So let's leave it alone for a few more years, at least. I think the more interesting models around the blockchain are not just necessarily transaction specific. They could be tied into identity, for example. There are lots of new business models that do not require I don't know, 5,000 transactions per seconds necessarily. I mean, I'll give you an example, a company called Open Bazaar. We're investors. I am an investor. I'm on the board of Open Bazaar disclosure. So Open Bazaar is a peer-to-peer comment. marketplace that sits on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

It's think of it like an eBay without eBay. But you know what's the feature that they use on the Bitcoin blockchain? It's not the transaction speed. They use two features on the Bitcoin blockchain. They use the currency feature because it's a universal feature. It's a universal currency. It means that they don't have to worry about if you're selling something between the, let's say, between the U.S. and another country where maybe their currency is

being devalued every week, and you don't have to worry about exchanges. So, Bitcoin as a universal currency is great. It's as if there's no borders. And the second thing, they are, the second feature of the blockchain that they are using is what is called multi-signature. So this feature where you tie in your identity with an authenticated transaction and there could be somebody in the middle like an escrow individual that would

certify the fact that you have received the goods and this capability is called multi-sig multi-signature so it's the same thing as like requiring three signatures on a document and it is only valid when the third signature hits the paper

but this is all done in on the blockchain automatically within seconds. So by the second that the third signature hits, then the seller is paid automatically. You say that it's eBay without eBay. That sounds interesting to me. I mean, again, if you were going to build eBay from scratch,

you think the blockchain is the way to do it. But describe what you mean, because if you did it without the blockchain, it would look like eBay. Like, what parts of it then do they not have to build in? Like, how does it work differently than eBay does? and why is that an advantage? And you're saying it's not necessarily speed, but I think it's an interesting notion

that if this is a new tool, you can build companies differently around it. Yeah, because it's open. It's really at the heart of it. It's a peer-to-peer network. It means there's nobody in the middle. You don't need to ask for permission to become a vendor or a seller.

And also, there is a cost component. There are no credit card fees on Open Bazaar, and there are no listing fees. There are no fees that eBay or Etsy, whoever is in the middle, is going to be asking the sellers typically. So off the bad, there's like 8 to 9 to 10% that you can save initially. They say that they want to make commerce free, free in the sense of no transaction costs in the middle.

So that's what they did. They've kind of unbundled all these capabilities that used to be centrally controlled. But now you can open up. There's this person they were telling me about that makes great cookies from somewhere in Eastern Europe on Open Bazaar. They've ordered those cookies and they were received. Another person has already made 20 transactions, 20 sales back and forth. And it cost that person a $1.50 in transaction costs. They made 20 sales.

I hate that phrase that Tom Friedman. has the world is flat. I've always hated that. And I just think it's really reductionist and there's so many things wrong with it. But before I go off on a tirade about that, what I would say that's super interesting about this example is that, you know, of course, eBay allows transactions between international parties and you can do different things. But what's really interesting about the open bizarre example built on blockchain is that because of these no fees, it really does level the playing field. I mean, I hate to say it, but it flattens things where you have almost equal power where a small person in one tiny town can get in the international cookie business.

Right, exactly. So what's new about Open Bazaar? Here's what's really interesting about it. There is no web that is involved. There's no worldwide web that is involved with Open Bazaar. So Open Bazaar as an application is a blockchain application and it just needs the internet. So this is an important point. What this means is that if you think about it, like so far, everything we've seen on the Internet has been more or less in the form of web applications. So we're going to be seeing in the future blockchain applications. And blockchain applications do not need the web.

They go and attach themselves directly on the Internet. There are a few ways of developing blockchain applications. And at the most native stage, you can have a pure... blockchain application that sits right on top of the internet. In the case of OpenBazaar, you have to download a client, a software client that sits on your desktop and it looks like a browser, but it's not a browser. It's actually the app that is connecting all of those buyers and sellers together. And that's really, that's innovation. So it bypasses the web. This has profound implications bypassing the web.

passing the web such a big deal? I mean, do I, as the user in OpenBazaar care, whether it's on the web or attached directly to the internet? And if I do, why do I? So we could argue that the web, as it is today, 20 plus years after its first

commercialization, has become a bit too centralized for our liking. Even Tim Berners-Lee thinks that way, and he has an initiative called Web We Want, which is all about bringing the back the web to the way it was initially intended to be.

So the benefits of having a blockchain app that bypasses the web is that we can be more open with these apps. We can be more fair with the access. And then it's more of a permissionless type of application. And that's where you can innovate. If you're not constrained by central constructs, if the starting point is not something that is central, then innovation can be spread around, and there are many business models that can follow from this decentralization of trust as an initial element. It's an atomic element.

Do you mean by central? I mean, what we're really talking about are the big technology platforms, Facebook, Google, et cetera? Yes. Yeah, even publishing. For just about any segment that you can think about, there is a version of it that can be decentralized. that somebody is working on today. There are startups working on decentralized publishing, that are sensor-free. There are companies working on a decentralized base camp. Companies working on decentralized social networks.

So just about every version of anything that we see today on the web will have and might have a version of a decentralized version of it. But in this case, if the governance and the disbursement, of funds are tied together via a cryptocurrency type or a blockchain type of construct, then the minute that the decision is made, automatically the funds can be dispersed and the recipients can receive their money right away. So you know, William, you gave all those examples of companies where there's always a decentralized version of it, and it's now more possible than before because of the blockchain.

But it is interesting because there have been attempts in the past of like a decentralized social network, other decentralized apps. And I think the number one thing that it really boils down to is user experience, because if you really want to move beyond the early adopters and developer-centric community, there's a whole bunch of people who need a certain polish and UI in order to want to adopt and use something. And I don't even know necessarily if consumers care so much, whether it's decentralized or centralized, as long as they're getting what they need. That's correct. You're right. I mean, in my book, I say that in the long term, blockchains are going to be invisible.

And when they become invisible, then I think we'll know that they are doing something useful. And it's going to go back to being driven by the user experience. But it will have some new features that will be enabled as a result of that. And another thing I've said in the book is that in the same way that we are today Googling for information and we Google for everything, in the future we're going to be Googling maybe the name, won't be Googling. It'll be something else. I'm not sure what that name is. Blachshining. It's a bit

of a mouthful. Whoever comes up with that new name, or maybe as a company, would be interesting to see. It'll be, let's say, Googling for, to verify records, to verify identities, to verify rights, to verify that work was done, to verify that a title is owned by whoever says is the right owner of that title. You can verify, contracts, you can verify all kinds of things without having to go to the county office, without having to go to the bank and have somebody see your face, without having you use your fingerprint or having you use your signature, all of those old ways of verifying things by being physically present are going to be replaced by the blockchain, that's

blockchain types of services that will allow us with certainty. to authenticate these things. And I call this proof as a service or proof in a service. So proof as a service could be proof of ownership, proof of provenance. Oh, there's so many applications of that. I mean, artworks can be verified on the blockchain. You can do, I mean, provenance for so many different things. How do you develop that proof and then, you know, sort of that trust?

You give the example of showing up in person. Well, I'm there in person, so I trust that transaction. for this to all work, we need to develop that trust, and how do we go about that? It starts with the identity. I think identity on blockchains is one of the emerging areas that have barely scratched the surface off. There are probably, there's probably at least a dozen companies I know of that are tackling the identity issue on the blockchain in a different way. And there will be different ways to skin that kind of cat. but identity on the blockchain is going to be a big and emerging area

and it's going to be driving the applications. Having identity on its own is not really the big thing. What's more important is having the application behind it. It's like your passport. What's good is your passport if you're not traveling? Nothing. It's useless. It sits in a drawer unless until you have a trip until you enter the airport.

So for the passport, the application is the travel. And so that's what we need these new kinds of applications that are going to be using online identities in ways that are different than how we do it today. I think it's interesting because the most promising applications that you're describing are really around these things, around identity, smart contracts. It's sort of a precursor to distribute autonomous organizations and corporations. So it's a super interesting evolution. when you described earlier that the blockchain has all these properties, crypto, distributed ledger, you know, infrastructure, transaction platform, decentralized database, software development platform, marketplace, etc. The thing that kind of ties it all together, and this is a theme of

your book, is that it's basically an innovation platform. And that is super fascinating. I think what we're interested in, though, is how that innovation platform bumps up against existing traditional businesses like in the financial services industries. Sure. We're seeing a lot of adoption by banks and and big companies talking about blockchain. And it's so interesting to me because in the past, incumbents clearly knew what was coming and they would just be so focused on their core business that they wouldn't really think about

how to really truly get ahead of that. And now they've seen it happen enough and they're sort of saying, let's get ahead of this new blockchain thing and figure out what's coming next. And so what are you observing at that intersection? The financial services is probably the industry that's getting the most attention

as a result of the blockchain. But there are some interesting dynamics that are going on here. The biggest issue that financial services face is that they are regulated. So when you talk to a financial institution, they live and die by compliance and regulations. And that's really their starting point. So if you go back to the innovator's dilemma, the basic principle of it is that it's very difficult to innovate with a new business model inside of your existing business model. Right.

I think Clay Christensen actually said, like, the worst place to develop a new business model is from within your existing business model. Exactly. Because everything they will think about doing is going to have to tie back to their business model. So that is the dilemma that they are facing today. So I kind of joke and I say to them, well, if you want to innovate within your business, within your regulatory constraints, it is not really innovation. And that's not innovation in the sense of we as startups.

When we think of innovation, we start with a blank sheet of paper. We start with no baggage, no constraints, the sky is the limit. Let's start something new. Whereas the banks, they want to start to build on something that they already have. So what I say here is that my observation is that the banks want to improve themselves. But they don't want to disrupt themselves. As Clay notes in the classic work, there's no reason for them to disrupt their core business when that's a source of their money. Yes.

So as a result, what they start to do is they start to remove layers they don't like about the blockchain and then keep the layers that they like, which is the distributed ledger. Oh, we understand the ledgers. It's about accounting. It's about keeping track of who owns what. Yeah, we can do that. and they start to apply it to the existing processes that they have. So they see it as a process improvement. They see the blockchain as a process improvement enabler.

I mean, what I say is, okay, maybe they are wanting to walk before they can run. And this is a good way to start to get more involved with the technology. But don't expect miracles by improving a process. I go back to the analogy of the Internet so many times. because I've been there. I wrote a similar book back in 97 opening digital markets, which analyzed what the internet was going to do for us in e-commerce and e-business. If you think about it, when the internet came in,

the big company said, oh, this is too public. We're going to have intranets, and we're going to have intranets. Mark actually shared this anecdote with me because I didn't really believe him when he said, like, before there was people adopting internet, they were talking about intranets. Here's my question. Can you name a company that was, totally transformed because of their intranet.

No. Exactly. What did the intranet do? It just improved a few processes here and there. So one of the things about fintech, given the innovator's dilemma, is that sometimes the only way to succeed is to, you know, and I'm not saying this because I work at a VC, but theoretically, that the only way for a big incumbent to succeed is by acquiring a startup because you don't really have these capabilities in house.

I mean, to ask a bank to have this blank slate from scratch, like to read. reinvent something from scratch. It feels like that'd be impossible. And I guess the question I have is, what is the future of the bank in a blockchain world? Like, what happens to the bank? There will be many scenarios, but one of them is that they become more of a back end. If you think about it, now we are connecting more and more services to our bank account and we are manipulating this money, but without touching the bank account itself. When you connect your Uber app and you get out, automatically they do a pull request and it's taken out of you. bank account. If you're running an event and you're being paid on Event Bright, you connect your

bank account and PayPal is used as a processor and the money is deposited in your bank account, but you haven't visited the bank. Everything is done transparently. So one scenario is that they become a pretty good back end. I'm not sure if they like that or not, but it's happening. When you use PayPal, when you use even Apple Pay, they become the front end and the bank is just a back-end processing things. What I'd love to see the banks, what I tell them, is try to come up with new services. It's really about new services. I mean, there's two angles.

I think one side of the bank needs to look at the internal efficiencies that could be achieved with a blockchain type of construct, where if they can agree on transactions and move assets between each other more efficiently, that's fine. There's lots to be done there. But it's a good idea to also have another side of the bank innovate. Try to innovate totally with a blank sheet of paper. So it's like going to go for the top line and not just for the bottom line. It's also really saying like don't, to your earlier point, like don't think about incremental process improvements. Go native. It's like with the mobile phone and media outlets. instead of making your home page look like a print page in the early days of the internet, think

native. Like what is unique about this medium and this platform that you couldn't do before and that you could do differently now and in the exact same way. Exactly. It's sort of interesting to think about it that way. Yeah. I mean, in theory, it makes a lot of sense. For banks, it's very hard.

So what they do instead, and they start to get close to startups as a way of learning from them. But I use the analogy of it's like going to the zoo. And then when you go to the zoo, because the startups are a different kind of animal than a big company than a bank, specifically. So you go to the zoo and you have great fun with the animals because they are caged and they're in their own environment. These crazy wild startups contained in their cages. Yeah, but then the real test is to bring the animal home and see if you can domesticate them or not. That is the real test because a startup is wild.

And so can they bring something wild into the domesticated environment? and let them thrive or not, or will they, will they constrain them? And that's a big challenge. I know I keep harping on the innovator's dilemma. So what is the advice then for people who are sort of stuck in this place? They know, it's a story again that happens over and over again. They know that disruption is coming. They want to do what they can. They have an existing business. At the same time, sometimes the only way is to like, you know, do this sort of incremental process improvement as you're talking about, how do they then make the leap to really kind of getting to the place where they can truly adopt it in a native, like from scratch first principles kind of way?

It's not easy. I mean, at the beginning with big companies, it's probably going to start at lower levels of the organization. And there's usually somebody, some group or two or three people that are reading a lot about what's going on on the outside, and they start to bring this innovation and these ideas, these crazy ideas inside. So, So there's three ways, perhaps, that I've observed that companies could go kind of on a directional basis. One is to build a lab, build a blockchain lab entity that would include engineers that can get their hands dirty and their mind dirty as well, coming up with those crazy ideas, and then

move them to the fore and then show what's possible. But then the challenge they run into is then how do they move them from the lab to implementation? So another way is to have a task force, like a committee kind of approach, and perhaps they could have somebody from the technical side and somebody from the business side and they all meet on a regular basis and they share what they are doing and what they are learning from each other. But then the challenge is that maybe the strategy is not very clear there because it's like 10 different ideas and do the ideas all come together in a cohesive manner. matter or not. And that's a challenge of a task force. Right. It's like almost committee because then you're lacking a vision in a direction. There's nothing like directional about it. Exactly. And the third approach is maybe one that I would advocate is a kind of a hybrid approach. And the key part of this is to have somebody in the middle of it. And I call that

person the blockchain czar. So I really advocate big companies to have this position called the blockchain czar. And that analogy dates back to the re-engineering days. And I was involved in re-engineering. I was a re-engineering czar at Hewlett-Packard back in 94-95. I was responsible for moving re-engineering projects forward and working with the business units and the different business leaders to bring the re-engineering into their own departments. And that's the same thing needs to happen now. And that blockchain czar, we're responsible for having some leadership for the company, for removing the obstacles that exist, facilitating the education, the curation, and the sharing of best practices, and really having a blockchain strategy.

So what's important is to have a blockchain strategy. At the end of the day, you want to have a blockchain strategy where the blockchain is not just about cost savings. If your blockchain strategy is about saving costs and then doing things a little bit faster, I would say it's a weak blockchain strategy. There has to be an innovation component in your strategy. What's interesting about what you just outlined is it's actually not even that specific just the blockchain. It's actually about any organization trying to adopt and think about a new technology

beyond just a proof of concept and how to make it part of their business. I keep saying this is about 80% business and 20% technology. So that is the challenge that big companies have, is to work on changing some of the business side of things. And then the technology, implementing technology, is going to be the easy thing. It's funny because people are at the center of both of those things. At the end of the day, it's very human. I mean, do you trust the advocate, the internal champion, or is that person sort of an outlier? These are all the things that really at the very humane level affect whether a technology gets adopted or not.

And then what has to happen is, there has to be many champions inside the large companies for something to move forward. And again, I go back to the internet days. I mean, back in the day, there used to be an internet department. And I don't know any company today that has an internet department because the internet is everywhere. Don't silo the thing that you're trying to do. But maybe at the beginning, at the beginning to give it some focus, you might like the blockchain labs approach or a blockchain expertise. like a blockchain center of excellence.

That's okay at the beginning, but their job should be to obsolete themselves very quickly because their job is to make this blockchain thing infiltrate everywhere. And that's their job will be done when they are out of a job. Are you seeing real innovation then on the blockchain? And then to cut to the chase, are you seeing new business models? Like everything you've described so far

seems like it's going to be tough to make money for, That's a good question. All of these business models and these startups, it's not any different from any startup, which means that it takes two, three years before you start to see clarity into where the company is going to make money and how it's going to be viable. So the same rules of uncertainty, the same rules of risk that apply to the startups that we know of today are going to apply to a blockchain startup. And even more, because they They are innovating in new business models that we are not familiar with. We're not familiar yet with decentralized data constructs, with decentralized identity, with more openness. The blockchain brings with it a lot of openness. So how do you make money when you start by being open? And so now then you have to innovate by adding services that do not disrupt this openness. But over time, we're going to see these models.

And right now, maybe half of the innovation that I'm seeing in the blockchain space, I would label them more as projects as opposed to startups. So there's lots of poking and tinkering around. But in the same way, again, as we saw the Internet back from 20 years until now, there will be new companies. I'm still waiting to see the new Amazon. Who will be the new Amazon of the blockchain? As of today, it is not clear who that will be,

but there is lots of activity. But of course, there will be also companies that will be threatened by it and that might be affected by it. One area that I am hopeful for is, for example, enabling microtransactions. So if you think about micro-transactions, talking about microtransactions at scale, at scale. For example, there's a company,

there's an energy company in Germany, AEW, that's going to be working with a company called Slocket, where they're going to allow electric vehicles to charge themselves when they are stopped, let's say, at a red light. And automatically, it's going to deduct whatever, if you've maybe charged up 65 cents, then it's done. But it's, it's, all done with tokens and cryptocurrency and the cost of transactions on the blockchain can be very, very, very low. And it enables micro transactions to be done thousands and millions of times per day. That's a fascinating example, because it's not just describing the transactions happening and the enabling factor of the blockchain, but you're also describing the phenomenon

of sensors being embedded in the environment, in the physical environment, autonomous cars potentially in the future, like sort of automated and self-paying self, you know, we talk about the machine payable web. Like this all kind of ties together into the physical world in ways that I hadn't even quite processed, actually. So yeah, I mean, I drive an electric car. I can, I'm just imagining like wireless charging as you're driving down the street would be pretty cool.

It's like a totally new version of pay as you go, literally. Yeah. And it's only possible if the cost of transactions themselves is low enough to enable this so that you're not worried that. It's going to be prohibitive. Another example, like today, there's a street in Brooklyn where neighbors are selling and buying excess energy from each other on an Ethereum-enabled blockchain service. So they are going peer-to-peer.

And this is happening right now. So let me ask you a question, William. Okay, so we've all heard this fellow Craig Wright both claim and then now decline to provide I'm sorry. Oh, I didn't really mean it. I'm sorry. I don't look over here. I can't do it.

Does it matter? Do you care? Do you do banks and financial institutions and innovators or anyone involved in your book in your blockchain world? Should they be worried or even concerned or, I don't know, spending time on this? I don't think so. I mean, it really, there's two sides of this. First is the question you ask. Does it matter whether we know who that person is?

No, it doesn't matter because the technology. is already in the wild. It's already on wheels. It's flying. It's a nonstop kind of set of computers. Blockchains, once you turn them on and they are bona fide blockchains, that's it. They cannot be stopped. It's like 6,000 nodes. They will not stop. What if maybe even if a thousand of them go down, the whole thing keeps humming. So the whole train is humming, no matter who that person is. The second element, the second part of the question is, that process he is going through, I only have one question.

I mean, Satoshi Nakamoto was a fairly technical person. So if I was him, if it's a he or she, then I would have come out in a technical manner. I would have come out in a publicly verifiable manner. Because the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain, is all about public verification. So why didn't that person come out in a way where we can publicly verify his identity in the same way that the Bitcoin transaction is publicly verified? Instead, it sounds like, it looks like a PR stunt. That person, Sasuji Nakamoto, I wouldn't expect a PR stunt from that person.

I would expect a technical kind of undertaking when he would come out if that is the case. Well, it sounds like you're not buying it and neither is anyone else. But that's a good point. William, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, William. Bye-bye.