Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Adam B. Levine: Building a Blockchain Podcast Network

Episode Date: March 28, 2017

In the world of Bitcoin podcast, there is one show which definitely stands out as the longest running, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! In its 4-year history, the show has produced over 320 episodes and expanded to become a network of podcasts which includes Epicenter and many others. We’re joined by Adam B. Levine the founder and host of Let’s Talk Bitcoin! It was thanks to Adam that Sébastien and Brian first connected in 2013, so in many ways, we consider him as the “”spiritual grandfather”” of Epicenter. Adam reflects on his signature show and the network he created in 2014. He discusses the future of the network and makes an announcement live on the show, which even takes us by surprise. Topics discussed in this episode: The history of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin! podcast What listeners can expect for the future of the show The LTB Coin reward token experiment, what was learned and the future of that project The Let’s Talk Bitcoin! Network and how it’s evolving The Tokenly project and its use cases Token.fm: a platform for music creators to sell licences to their music as tokens Episode links: Token.FM - Early Access BTC Media Adam B. Levine: Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network, LTBCoin, Monetizing Content & Crowdfunding — Epicenter Let's Talk Bitcoin! This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/176

This episode of Epicenter is brought you by the Ledger NanoS, the hardware wallet which sets the new standard in security and usability. Get it today at ledgerwalt.com and use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your order. And by Jax. Jax is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and Ether. Go to J-A-A-W-X.I-O and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets. Hi, welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Sebastian Kujo. And my name is Brian Fabian-Train. We're here today with Adam Levine.

Adam, for those who don't know, he's kind of like the godfather of the Epicenter podcast. So when we started this show, which was now three and a half years ago, almost, not quite. Yeah, almost three and a half years ago. Yeah, December 2013. because Let's Talk Bitcoin put out this contest back then where they were calling for pilot episodes and both me and Sebastian, we were both excited about this and then there was a conference call

and there was me, Sebastian and maybe two other people on there and we decided to do the show together. We didn't know each other, but it turned out very fortunately. So yeah, he's basically responsible without him this show wouldn't exist and the forum today. So we're really excited to have him on. he's also been producing for a long time, the longest running and, well, certainly among the best known podcasts in the space. So thanks so much for coming on, Adam.

Thanks, Brian. Thanks for that intro. I don't know if I'd say I'm responsible. I'd say maybe I'm the instigator, but I'm the troublemaker that kind of connected the dots there. But you guys have done a great job with this show. Yeah. Thank you. No, it's funny to look back on time and like you know I think Brian and I were in very different places in our lives and you know everything that's happened since then it you know I think personally when when when we recorded those first episodes I don't ever like I wouldn't have thought you know like three and a half years later we'd still be doing this and like you know have become somewhat successful in the space and so yeah it's it's been it's been a wild ride well it's been great to have you

guys on the network so I'm excited to share some some of this stuff with you guys which we've been working on for a long time talking about for a long time and finally we're ready to get into it. So let's go. So with Let's Start Bitcoin, right, you've done 323 episodes I was checking before, which is a ton, right, for I guess just about four years since you launched. And but recently, you guys have been taking a break. I think the last episode was like in February. And I was also listening to, you know, one of the last episodes before you stopped.

And Andreas and Stephanie. and I think also you, you sounded a little bit, I don't know, jaded, a little bit kind of disconnected from the community. So can you run us through a little bit? What's going on with Let's Talk Bitcoin? What's next? What is the current status? Sure. So, yeah, so we did a lot of episodes of Let's Talk Bitcoin.

I actually have the next episode recorded right now with Andreas and Stephanie and I. talking about some of the stuff that's been happening over the last month while we've been on break. But you're not wrong in that the show has gotten harder to do, both because the community that when we got started used to be really, you know, aligned, used to be really kind of one entity has instead become really factionalized. And I got into it with Andreas on the episode we'll be releasing in a couple of days. Just the bottom line is that people change as time goes on. And that's been true for all the hosts on Let's Talk Bitcoin, and it's also been true for basically everybody in the community. Like, we all have the goals that we have for cryptocurrency and that

we have for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin hasn't necessarily behaved according to our expectations. So, you know, we've done a couple of episodes where we say to ourselves, well, you know, like, so what does it mean that the stuff that we thought so early on seems just like it was wrong, you know, like there's no simple answers to any of these things. But the answers are getting progressively more complex and different people benefit from kind of. of different paths forward for all of these things. So I think that cryptocurrency and Bitcoin has become a lot more complicated since we started. And at the beginning, it was possible to kind of spend, you know, a couple of days a week or your entire life in some cases, you know,

focused on absorbing all of the content, but you could do it. There was a small enough amount of content out there, and it was all relatively aligned because the people who are interested were thinking in a lot of the same ways. But over time, that's really changed. And instead it's become very factionalized and people have different interests. So from like Andreas's perspective, he's now touring constantly. So that both gives him a great perspective, but it makes it hard for us to record because like this last episode we recorded, he was in Cape Town, South Africa, recording with us at 10 o'clock at night, his time. The next episode we're going to do, he's going to be in Mumbai. And that's been, you know, before that, it was Vietnam.

It was, I mean, like he's been, he's been all the heck over the place through, you know, kind of touring parts of the world that have poor internet connectivity. So there's that kind of difficulty that made it, has made it just a little bit hard to do recordings from a technical standpoint. And then for Stephanie and I, we're both in really different places than we were when we got started with this. And for me, it's because I moved. And for Stephanie, it's because she didn't. Stephanie's expectations have basically remained the same for cryptocurrency, have basically remained the same for Bitcoin. Because the stuff that she wanted from it, the privacy, the community aspects, all of those things, you kind of got those at the beginning. and they've become much less emphasized as time has gone on. Whereas for me, with starting businesses that use Bitcoin and that use cryptocurrency as an

underlying enabling layer, I've come to need to use the blockchain and need to think about the blockchain in fundamentally different ways than I did when I was just, you know, speculating or I was just using it personally as currency to do stuff. You know, so that's, I think, the thing that's changed is everything. Because Bitcoin has changed, we've changed, the show's changed, the ecosystem's changed. Back when we started doing the show, like you said, we were, you know, like, I think that there was one show before us called The Bitcoin Show that had gone off the air about three months before I started, let's talk Bitcoin.

And so at the time, it was, you know, just a land of complete opportunity and openness and the rewards that you got from putting out an episode, you know, were great because, again, you've got this unified community that's lacking content. So it was just a lot easier in the beginning. And as time has gone on, it hasn't gotten easier. It's gotten harder because there's more competition. There's more interest. There's more all of these things.

So that said, let's talk Bitcoin isn't going away. I'm very pleased to say that we're at a place where I think the show will be sustainable for at least a year. And I hope far beyond that. We will be returning to weekly shows, weekly episodes. We have some guests lined up. One of the other things that's kind of different about the later show compared to the earlier show is that we used to do a lot of interviews with people who had, you know, businesses and projects and stuff like that. And as time went on and as the ICO thing happened, it got really hard to do that because it wasn't just about talking to someone about their project anymore. It was about them wanting you to basically like their project on the air so that people will give them money because they trust us.

And that was a position that I always felt very uncomfortable with. And just in general, you know, it's just, it was time for a break. It took a long time for me to get comfortable with it. But I was like, all right, you know, I just need a month-long break to kind of work on other things and to get everything back in order so that we can start getting strong and, you know, and keep doing this thing for a long time. It's true that what you say there is that the ecosystem has morphed into something that is exponentially larger than what it was. back, you know, in 2013, like when we started doing this, you know, the number of projects

has exploded, the number of currencies has also a significant number of currencies are now gaining traction. From a content producer's point of view, I see it as, I see it as a great opportunity to produce content about all these different things. Now, on the other hand, I also agree with you that, you know, it's hard to pick and choose because, there's a lot of economic incentive for these projects to get on the air a lot of times. And, you know, you can't have to choose which ones you want to, I wouldn't say endorse, but have on the show because there is so much like writing on that, you know, if you endorse a project that doesn't work out for some reason or, you know, it ends up being a scam or something

like that. That's something that we've also kind of not struggle with, but try to be, try to be vigilant about what types of projects we're going to talk about. And a lot of the projects that we've talked about, you know, throughout the years have, a lot of them have disappeared or ceased to exist. Now, with regards to Let's Talk Bitcoin, you mentioned that the show is going to keep, you'll keep doing the show, at least for another year.

Is there a transformation from like the Let's Talk Bitcoin before the break and Let's Talk Bitcoin after this little pause? I hope that the difference between the two is more frequent, reliable episodes, less of me leaning on pre-recorded stuff, because just really that's what it's become. I put myself into a situation where I've continued to try and do everything for the show, and it's just a fail. It's just like when I was not doing something else full time, then it was easy to do that. And when I was doing something else full time for a while, it was possible to do that. And then just as time went on, it just has become completely impossible for me to do that. You guys do a really great job of systemizing your show. You've got like a process and all of this stuff. We continue to be after even three and a half years, four years, completely seat of our pants. You know, we pull somebody on. There's no prepped questions. We just talk. You know, we go through after the fact. We edit out a little bit of stuff, you know, for like flubs and things like that. But that's pretty much it. It's a, and so that's easy to do if you're super plugged in. And it's hard to do if you're not super plugged in. And so for a very long time, I was really plugged in. And then for the last year and a half,

I've just been, you know, nose down, working on this other stuff. And you kind of have to just block everything else out if you want to try and be productive. So, you know, over the last couple of years, I've definitely shifted the balance in my life from kind of treating myself as a journalist on the one side, treating myself as an entrepreneur on the other side. And the downside, good news, bad news, is I still retain the ethics on the journalist side. I still have all the guilt complexes with helping people who are, you know, wind up then betraying the trust and all that stuff. So what it's meant is that lacking the time to do that due diligence, we just don't talk to them. You know, we just, I mean, like, I wish we could.

I wish we had the bandwidth, but it's just not what we've done. And luckily, shows on the network have picked up that slack for us. So I've never really felt like it was such a bad thing that we had stopped doing. That's simply because it was creating opportunity for everybody else. Yeah, I think that then if you sort of knowingly have projects on that you think are not necessarily legitimate, then you get into this other type of this guy. which just becomes... Yeah, knowingly or not.

I mean, knowingly is a whole other can of worms as far as I'm concerned. Unknowingly is just as big a problem. It just has, you know, like you feel bad as opposed to you're a bad person. But, you know, ultimately enabling any of it is still a net negative for everybody. And I think we've seen this from the amount of projects that are out there right now that have done the fundraising, but haven't actually, you know, especially through the cryptocurrency stuff, but have never delivered on what they were going to deliver on. And I hope that we see that change.

I mean, if you guys remember way back in the beginning, like, light coin was for a long time, and Feathercoin too, were for a long time the most innovative cryptocurrencies out there besides Bitcoin. Because they solved the problem of getting transaction sizes even lower than Bitcoin was able to with more numbers of tokens. So, I mean, like, this is not different where we are now, right? It's just that the pitch has gotten a little bit more sophisticated instead of saying, oh, well, the problem here is that Bitcoin only. has 21 million tokens, while Feathercoin has 21 billion tokens. Now they're saying, oh, well, the problem now is that, you know, nobody's using it for these purposes. So if only we do this, then they will use it for these purposes. But the things that they're talking about, I mean, I just wrote an article. The way that you make money right now in cryptocurrency is you pick

a large vertical, right, that has a blockchain opportunity associated with it. And you don't actually try to solve the problem. You just build the infrastructure that then somebody, else who wants to solve the problem can build on top of and do that. And that's a great thing to do because then success is not your problem. All you had to do, all you told people you would do is just build out the underlying rails. And it's not your problem and it's not your fault if nobody then comes and builds on it. So we've done that kind of internally, you know, not having fundraised through an ICO. But we did run into and go through all of that same stuff. We're not actually building any blockchains. We're just using blockchains. Even we found that when you just build the

infrastructure, nobody cares. Because the people who are big enough to actually have a problem that could be solved by the infrastructure don't want to be first movers. And the people who are too small to be really useful to the infrastructure, but who like the idea are the wrong people to make it successful. And so you wind up with this chicken egg problem where even after you build the infrastructure, it's still not enough because nobody who is worth moving first is going to move first. And so that's where I have a project a little later. I'll talk to you about that is our attempt to solve that problem using tokens. But yeah, I mean, just in general, it's gotten so much harder to winnow through the content because the people who are in the space now

are people who want to make money as opposed to before when it was people who had awesome ideas. And that was pretty much the extent of it. Maybe they wanted to start a company, you know, patenting and monetizing that awesome idea. But even at the beginning, nobody wanted to patent anything. Everybody was super into the open source thing. Well, over the last year or so, it's gotten much more competitive at the application layer. I mean, I think the one thing where I feel like, you know, that's like a line I don't want to cross with Epicenter is, for example, advertising for any of these projects, right? So we did that once with gems, like many years ago when they had this mobile wallet. And, you know, they didn't deliver.

And it was just, it was sort of, it was really the wrong thing, especially because you can't. really talk about the risks properly, right? If you could give... So it feels like wrong to do an ad on that. And then having them on the show, I mean, I think if anything, of course, there is a challenge as a lot of these projects will fail. There's certainly a challenge that you're also pointing out that, you know, people build projects,

but they don't have really this pressure to actually make it work and actually get like real users. So that's also certainly a problem. But at the same time, you know, if you think like, what is the killer application for blockchain at this point? Then I think still Bitcoin, and that's this kind of store of value, even though, you know, maybe it's not working so great,

but still people value that. And the other thing is crowdfunding, right? I think that has had a massive impact. And I think that's here to state. as a financial vehicle, I agree with you. I think that cryptocurrency's killer use case so far has been Bitcoin value transfers. And there are a lot of other interesting use cases out there and speculation. I mean, to be totally clear, speculation is what really drives a lot of the value transfer use case at all. But that's okay. Because once you have money, you can do other stuff with it.

So I don't really know what the killer application is. I think that we're on the right path with the token stuff that we're working on. And like I said, I'm happy to talk about that a bit more later. But the reality of it is is that anybody who tells you that they know is totally lying. Because even if you're working on something, like you might hope that it's the killer application, but none of this stuff has been proven yet. There's no use case for cryptocurrency that actually has any sort of meaningful number of users besides the speculative value transfer thing. So I, you know, like I said, I hope that we change that and other companies out there changed that by creating applications that rather than trying to be like elegant technical

solutions are practical real world solutions that use cryptocurrency in places where it really adds a lot of value, but they don't force people into the ecosystem for ideological reasons, basically, because at least in our experience, we have seen that when you try to do that, you lose like 80% of the normals. So, you know, like you want the normals. You want the people who aren't already in cryptocurrency and who don't care about this at a fundamental ideological, technological level, right? You want people for whom it presents a better option, because that's how you actually get real people to use this, not by saying, hey, by the way, you missed your opportunity to buy this, but buy it now because it'll be worth

more later, even though it's near all-time highs, right? Instead, it's just the most convenient thing for them to use, and so they just use it. And that accomplishes the same goal, but instead of having the argument about why this is valuable from these technical and monetary reasons, instead you just say this is useful use it because it's a product so that's the strategy we're taking yeah and i think that's a good segue into the topic of ltb coin because with ltb coin you know you really try to do that right you try to create something that's useful for you know your average podcast listener and ltb coin i mean i i was always super excited about it i think it was an awesome an awesome project it also worked quite well in the way that you know we usually you know we usually

to have these magic words until recently. And then people were really using that. And people, you know, we have often like a thousand listeners per episode. Let's take a break to talk about the Ledger NanoS, the new flagship hardware wallet by Ledger. I'll let Ledger's CEO, Eric Larchavec, tell you all about how simple the NanoS makes it to securely store all your private keys. The Ledger NanoS is our latest generation hardware wallet. This is a multi-currency hardware wallet.

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We'd like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter. What are your main takeaways from L2B coins? What went well? What went badly? And what's next for the project? So I've talked about this a couple of times, and my takeaways haven't changed so much since the last time I discussed. So if this is old, I apologize. The thing that we didn't know when we started LTV coin and that became increasingly obvious over time, there were two things.

One is that if you give away something for free, then you create a kind of problem for it, right? Where unless you have a lot of money, just kind of sitting there waiting to make it valuable, then it has to become valuable for other reasons than putting money into it. And so if the network had been a success, then the token would have gotten more valuable. And when I say success, I mean a commercial success. I mean, if we, if the network was selling a lot of advertisements, you know, if the network had been able to effectively help podcast monetize and things like that, then we could have seen an ecosystem start that would have recirculated that back into it. And you could have seen a really functional system. But for the first year and a half, actually, we didn't really have the

ability to do that. And that was the big problem is we created the token. We created the very, very early in the idea in the kind of life cycle of tokens built on Bitcoin. And so at the time, there were no other services out there which existed. So this is what led to essentially the creation of tokenly was creating the vending machine and we had an auction machine kind of upfront that would allow people to bid with LTV coin in a live auction format on advertisement slots and things like that. And that was popular for a while, but basically what we discovered is that the people who were willing to play the game were not the people who actually wanted to buy the advertisements. And the people who wanted to buy the advertisements, they didn't care that like the price was cheaper if they went through the auction or if they could get a bonus by using LTV coin.

Like they just wanted a predictable price that they could pay with money that they understood. And so it became this, again, problem where the people who had the time and who had a relatively low, you know, like they were able to learn the system. But everybody else, and a lot of those people were people who we really needed to make the system work in a economical way were not willing to use the system just because, again, it was so new and because it was very different from what they had done before. So that was a big problem with LTV coin. And then the other problem we ran into is that different people, based on your geographic location, have different ways of viewing value. And so what we discovered is that when LTV coin, especially as it became worth less in later, you know, as time went on and as the value of Bitcoin went up, the price of LTP coin went down, basically what we saw was that somebody who lived in Ukraine or Indonesia or something like that had a lot of value in. each weekly LTV coin distribution. And so even if it's just like a buck or, you know, $3 worth of value, for somebody who's

in the Western world, they say, okay, cool, great, I got some LTV coin, I'll just hold on to these because I don't actually care about that much money. But somebody from Indonesia has basically a huge incentive because their cost of living is so different to take that dollar worth of LTB coin, go to the exchange and sell the LTV coin for, you know, Bitcoin, which they then convert into their local currency and actually make a decent amount of money, relatively speaking. And so that was a real problem with the dynamic early on, is on the one hand, we didn't have tools built yet for actually making the token useful. Secondly, the people who were using our early tools were the wrong people. They were people

who were interested in the game technologically, but didn't actually have the money or products that they wanted to sponsor and advertise. That's a very interesting point, Adam. Can you just expand a bit on that? Because to me, it seems like that's pretty great, right? So let's say you have people in Indonesia or wherever and they're using this and they're getting a dollar and they're actually per week and they're selling that and they can like buy two meals or something. That's awesome. So is that really something that happened in any significant amount? Yeah?

Yes. Yeah. Actually, it was very interesting. What we saw, one of the real data points that we pulled out of the LTV coin system was a large increase in user accounts from Indonesia, from Russia, from Ukraine. There are a whole bunch of places in kind of like Eastern Europe and Asia where the audience just went way the heck up. And you notice it in comments too, because there would be people asking for you to spell the magic word because they didn't speak English. So yeah, we did see a large increase in that. And it would

have been, you know, like in the way that you described it there, I agree it's a positive. It's something that allows people to actually monetize. It's a real use case, right, for monetizing their activity in a content creation community. But the downside of it is that because we're giving everybody else who probably wants LTV coin, LTV coin for free every week, there's no incentive for them to go out and buy it. And that was the problem, is that what winds up happening is you get this spiral, where the people who are economically incentivized to sell it, go to the market, sell it. This pushes down the price, adds more supply to the,

available that's amount, you know, the amount that's available on the market. While at the same time, the people who might want to buy it under normal circumstances are probably already getting it for free and they don't have an incentive to sell it. So they're just banking it every week over time and feeling good about that. And so what happened is that this pushes the price down because you have buyers who are satisfied and sellers who are always ready to sell because they're happy with the money that they're getting, even if it's very small. And so through that dynamic over the course of about a year and a half, we saw the price of LTV coin get pushed down very, very, very substantially. And you could see it because every time we would do a Saturday distribution,

you'd see the price drop at that point because people would be taking him straight to the market and selling them. So I think that from, you know, like an experiment point of view, we learned a lot from it. I'm very happy with it. And also, you know, like, it's not over yet. You know, we stopped doing magic words. We didn't actually stop doing magic words. Magic words still work. We just stopped giving out the rewards program. So that was another experiment actually to see, you know, kind of like, what happens? Do people still do the magic word if you aren't paying them? you know, LTV coin, even though LTV coin is basically worth nothing at this point, and the amount that we're giving out is absolutely tiny.

And I think that we did see that even though there, like, something is still a better incentivizer than nothing, right? So it's a very strange thing. I'd be curious to know, like, how much of a drop you guys experienced since we did that. No, I actually checked because I heard your episode a bit belatedly, or they mentioned that the reward program I only realized like a month later

so we kept running Magic Word afterwards and then I checked and there was only like 50 or 80 or 100 or less than 100 Magic Words a minute and we used to have like a thousand or something so people seem to have noticed before we noticed

Yeah Magic Words was a I think it's a really cool listening metric but it's very interesting that you guys experience such a drop. That's like, that's like, you know, 120th of the people kept doing it. That's very interesting. So anyways, you know, as an experiment, LTP coin has been really fantastic, and it's taught us a lot about this. It's forced me to use cryptocurrency in ways that we hadn't before. And really the reason why we stopped it is because the project has come to kind of

the end of the distribution point of its life. And now it's time to do the next thing with it. So you mentioned that one of the things that perhaps would have made LTV coin more useful as if people had a reason to buy. One of the incentives that you tried to implement in the beginning is giving advertisers a discount on their advertising rates. And on our side, we never, I think in the beginning for some advertisers, we had proposed it, but then quickly realized that it was making it harder for them to go through those hoops to buy the LTV coin.

and, you know, like, the amount that they would save wouldn't be worth, like, the hassle, basically, to just pay in Bitcoin. So we continue to just charge in Bitcoin. In retrospect, are there things that, you know, perhaps now you've learned that would seem as good use cases or good applications for LTP that would have, you know, perhaps sparked more interest on the buy side rather than just people selling it every week? Yeah, I think the, like I said, it's all about creating the opportunity for for frictionless economic activity to happen, right? You want to make it so that people can do stuff that they want to do it when they want to do it. And when we first did this, like the auctions, for example, you couldn't spend Bitcoin there. You had to spend LTP coin. And we at the time thought that this essentially making it so LTP coin had a monopoly on our ecosystem would be a net positive because it would force people into doing this.

And in practice, we saw the same thing that you did, which is just that if you try to force someone to do something that's inconvenient, they just don't do it at all. So over time, I've come to recognize this in almost everything about my earlier opinions is that being an ideological purist has advantages from an ego point of view and from like I felt good about it. And I felt like I was on the right side of things. but in practice, I've seen that it causes so many more problems than that value is worth that, yeah. So I think that it's just another example of that. So now my suggestion is and continues to be that you accept every form of value that someone is willing to give you. And if you want to have preferential pricing, then you give discounts for the stuff that you want. And you don't force people to do it.

You just give them the option. And even then, I don't think many people wind up taking it because, again, like, there's this training that has to, happen, right? And most of the people who are willing to do that training are not the same people who actually want to give you money or have, you know, money to give you for things that are good. And Brian, just to hit on that, the advertiser thing for a second, this is, I mean, it's the same thing. Like advertisers are even worse than having guests on, right? Because they're paying you, right? So like, you know, I did an experiment in, I guess November, right after we did, we did a two-part episode with Roger Veer. And during the first part, I mentioned during one of the, I mentioned, in the show notes that, and when he was talking about, you know, Bitcoin scaling and stuff like

that. So it was a controversial set episodes. I asked, I mentioned in the thing that in 2013, he was our first sponsor, right? He sponsored us for, I think, about six months. In 2013, just when it was let's talk Bitcoin before the network. And, and from that, I got four or five comments from people. It was about half the comments saying that, you know, like, because we had taken this money, you know, years ago, uh, that we couldn't really talk to him about this stuff because it was like, we were conflicted. And so like, he had actually offered to sponsor the show with a pretty decent, a decently large amount of money, um, you know, before we had done this stuff. And I said no, because I assumed that this would be the case, but it continues to be the case.

So that, that really is the problem is that the people who have money to give you when it comes to advertising, a lot of times are not projects that you actually want to advertise. And there's this unfortunate just reality that if a project is a scam that's effective, right? Like it's not just an obvious scam, but it's a good scam, then A, you won't be able to tell. And B, they'll actually have a lot of money to pay you to do whatever you're going to do because they're a scam. So they don't actually have many of the costs associated. So we just wound up just completely walking away from advertising after a certain point and just not even doing it. We're now kind of looking at it again with this kind of new plan that we have going forward. I really don't have a strategy for it.

But advertising continues to be very difficult for me just because of that disconnect between people who you want to advertise with you versus people who have the money to advertise with you. So one last point on LDB coin. Is there any value to it anymore? You know, should people hold onto it? Or is that something they can throw away? I guess now is as good a time as any to jump into it. So the thing that I've been working on for the last year and the end of life for Let's Talk Bitcoin, sorry, not Let's Talk Bitcoin, but LTV coin, is there going to be a buyout of LTP coin. So everybody that has LTV coin, there will be an exchange opportunity into a project that I've been consulting on. It's a reinvention of proof of existence in a method that turns it into essentially monetizable licenses.

So let me back up for a second and say that I can't give total details on that. There are no firm dates for when this exchange is going to happen, but this is all part of essentially the LTB network being acquired by BTCmedia.org, which is the parent company of Bitcoin and the parent company of Y Bitcoin and parent company of, I believe, a Chinese publication as well, but I can't recall the name off the top of my head. So this is the network, right, not the Let's Talk Bitcoin show, I'm continuing to do the Let's Talk Bigwin show.

That continues to be entirely my thing. But what's happening here effectively is I've been working with David Bailey, who's the founder of BTC Media.org, and who's been a long time fan of the show and network. And as you guys know, I didn't really intend to start a network. I thought that we, you know, like in the winter of 2013 and kind of early 2014, we thought that the bubble that we were in at the table that we were in at the time, which was to 1300, had changed the dynamic of things and that it was going to be even easier than it had before to monetize and so we could bring in other people and help them do that.

But it was never an area that I actually had any personal success in. And in general, we tried a couple of times. We hired a team and kind of tried to make the network useful because really what I wanted from it was to not have to focus on monetizing the podcast. I just wanted to focus on making the podcast, on having the resources to, you know, like have an editor constantly and have a producer on the show and stuff like that. And I just was never able to make it work because that's not my skill set. And I was trying to do too many things at once. So essentially, for the last year, I've been talking with David Bailey about whether or not and how

we can work together in order to make it so that they can bring a lot of the success that they've had in monetizing and creating a sustainable enterprise with Bitcoin Magazine, which was pretty much a basket case before they bought it. And, um, and, um, um, and, um, um, um, and, um, um, um, and, um, um, you know, and other things, essentially, to make it so that, you know, we all have the resources to do this. And most importantly, so that the network, rather than being just kind of like, it's there and you can use it, which is what it's been to this point, you know, it's a really functional, you know, pushing forward, growing the audience, useful structure for all of the podcasts and podcasters that are on it. And that was always the problem that we had is just that,

you know, like, we worked with volunteers, we paid out of pocket. We, you know, and didn't frankly have a lot of to do it and got very poor results as a result. So what this really is is a big infusion of money and resources into the network that will then go towards growing the audiences of the podcasts, towards improving monetization, and making it so that this can be a sustainable thing for everybody. I mentioned that the name is changing towards the beginning of this episode. Maybe that was off air. But yeah, so basically what this is is the network is going to be in about three or four

months rebranded and relaunched as the Let's Talk network. and we're going to see it expand beyond just cryptocurrency and into basically all disruptive technology. There's a lot of other stuff. I'm very excited about it, like I said. There's going to be a lot of resources coming into the network. And as the founder of Let's Talk Bitcoin, the show, I'm very excited to have kind of some more stability

and a more professional organization behind us to make this next jump. So that's the thing that I was really waiting on is it was just killing me editing the show. It was killing me editing and producing the show. And we were just putting out worse and worse content. And I really hate that. I hate putting out stuff that's low quality.

And I know when I do. So this is an opportunity for me. And everybody else will be contacted within the next couple of weeks by the management to, you know, go through this whole process that we've been going through as well. And we'll continue it as well. But yeah, that's basically where we are right now is the LTB Network is going to be rebranded as Let's Talk. we've been acquired by BTC Media and as a result of that

anybody who's holding LTV coin will have an opportunity to exchange their LTV coin for a token that's going to be going through its own ICO and I believe that it will be available to people with LTV coin before the ICO but that's not exactly certain at this point

so that's that's the long and the short of what's happening there happy to answer any questions okay well this is a this is a live announcement because we were also just finding out about this now. We didn't know about this before. So I have some questions. I mean, maybe now is not the... No, please. Because we have a lot of other things to talk about. But one question that comes to mind immediately is what does it mean for... What is this going to mean, if anything, if you already know,

for content producers on the network? So content producers on the network are going to be contacted by both myself and essentially the team that will be running it. David Bailey is not going to be running it to essentially go through a negotiation process to figure out what types of services you actually want from the network, whether or not. And I mean, you guys are kind of like on the extreme end of the spectrum where you're doing a good show by yourself, your advertising and, you know, doing the monetization and have something that at least from the outside seems sustainable. So you guys probably will need less service from the network than most people. But I've talked with a lot of the other podcasters who, like me, have been struggling to really

keep producing good quality content on a regular basis and not really having much success with the monetization. And for them, again, like, that's what this is. So they'll probably wind up with, so it's going to be a little different for everybody. But the bottom line is, is that things will be getting settled in the next couple of weeks. There's going to be no changes on the network. You won't notice anything different for probably three or four months. And then Q2 or towards the summer, we'll see a relaunch of the platform with some of the new branding. And with, I mean, the other thing that's happening here is that the LTV network has been receiving. requests to join the network and has been saying we're closed for almost a year.

The only reason the crypto, the only reason the crypto show made it on was because they literally bothered me so many times that I was just like, okay, fine, we'll put you guys on early, but I'm still in this negotiation. So things might change after a certain point. But yeah, so that's something that's very exciting to me too, is we've had a lot of shows contact us in the past. If you're doing a show or if you want to do a show that kind of goes beyond what's being offered right now on the network, then there's going to be an open call just like we did three years ago when you guys were getting started and we're going to take in pilots and hopefully put on a lot of stuff. But some of the more exciting things from my perspective are regionally

targeted shows. This is a big focus for the BTC Media.org folks and for a long time, I've wanted to do it too. Back in 2013, we put together a pilot with Juan Yanos and Rodolfo from the Argentine. Bitcoin Embassy, and one other gentleman whose name escapes me. We put together a pilot episode of Hablamos Bitcoin, which was, let's talk Bitcoin in Spanish. And the problem there was just that they wanted me to edit, and I don't speak Spanish. So I wound up just kind of banging my head against that wall for about two days, and then we kind of moved on and moved on. But I think there's a huge opportunity and an increasing opportunity to have shows that are targeted at the Chinese market that are targeted towards miners specifically and focus on that type of news.

And really to kind of go really niche on a lot of these things. Like I think we're probably going to wind up having a show entirely on licensing, right? Like entirely on how blockchains interact with different licensing applications. And I have been teasing a new show for almost two years now that I hope I'll have an opportunity to do in the next year called Thinking with Tokens. that is basically, you know, is that. Is, you know, a panel of people, you have somebody on who has a project that they want to talk about in the context of tokens, and you kind of just go through the whole thing and lay out the system and just kind of get the ideas flowing.

Because that's been the real problem that we continue to see is that people don't know how to think about this stuff. And they don't really know what it's good for. And they just kind of are like, hey, you could use tokens or smart contracts or another example. You could use smart contracts for that without really thinking, is a smart contract a good vehicle for this? Or is it just something I can technically do? There's a lot of the technically stuff, but not a lot of the good use stuff. Well, on that, I'd be glad to do Parlon Bitcoin, you know, French version of less talk Bitcoin. If only I had the time.

This is also an idea. I had this idea a while back than to do from the podcast in French, but. Totally. Well, I mean, that's the thing is that with resources, everything gets so much easier, right? Yeah, yeah. So the network then would prove, from what I hear, the network will, the network provide resources to the shows that want to produce and send the you know there would be an exchange there so of money for those services uh you know so you know they'll have editors uh perhaps uh

salespeople selling ads and if you want to if you want to partake in that you can but if you just want to be on the network you know maybe maybe there's some other arrangement that you can yeah that's right that's that's basically the idea here um and the other thing that's very important that was one of the real reasons that kicked me over the edge to do this first is not, is that the marketability of a show's like advertising gets much, much, much better at 10,000 listeners per episode. And basically all of our shows, including, you know, let's talk Bitcoin and you guys too, like you occasionally will get a show above 10,000 listens if something goes a little bit viral someplace. But the vast majority of episodes are in like the 4 to 6,000 range. So there's

kind of a necessary growth that has to happen for all of the shows in order to, in order for it to actually make economic sense for them to do this. So again, the commitment from their perspective is they have to get these shows to that. And so they're very incentivized to advertise and very incentivized to do kind of all these other things because it makes the network much more marketable to people who would advertise with it. So, you know, so hopefully we'll see, you know, But I'm very optimistic about it. Like I said, we've been kind of talking this out for a very long time. And, you know, I didn't actually talk to anybody but David Bailey.

He was really the only person who I felt like, you know, kind of groked what I was trying to do with this and could also help us with the business development side that I had personally had my failings in. So, yeah, so like I said, I have high hopes for the network. I intend to use it. Cool, cool. Let's take a short break to talk about Jacks. Jacks is your wallet, your complete user interface to cover all your blockchain needs. I've been using it and I've been loving it.

Now, Jack supports a lot of different cryptocurrencies. I suppose Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, Augur rep, and they're adding many more, keep responding to users' needs. Now with Jacks, the nice thing is that you can manage all of those coins within a single wallet and you are in control of your own private keys. they're not on their server, and there's a single 12-word seed that you can use to backup your wallet, all your coins, and sync them across different devices. Talking about devices, they're on pretty much any device that you can think of.

You can get it on PC, Mac, Linux, you can get it on smartphones like Android and Apple and iPhone. You can get it on tablets, or even browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. And on top of that, in Jax, you can actually exchange different cryptocurrencies for each other, because they've integrated a shape shift. And more partnerships and integrations are coming down the line in 2017 that are going to make Jax even better. So Jax is really making blockchain and cryptocurrency is accessible for the masses,

easy to use for the masses. Make sure to get your own Jax wallet at Jax.I.O. or you can get it from any of the app stores you are using. We'd like to thank Jax for their supportive epicenter. So let's talk about tokenly here. We talked with you about it once before, but that's, I think, just when you were in the early stages of the project. So what has happened since then? So June of last year, we did an equity crowd sale on the Bank to the Future platform with great help from Simon Nixon over there, who I know you guys have talked to.

Bottom line is we raised some money over there on the idea of taking and connecting cryptocurrency and crowdfunding. And not in the ICO fashion, which we've seen. become very prominent, but in the actual traditional rewards-based crowdfunding type of space. And the argument behind that is basically that rewards-based crowdfunding has a meaningful problem with refunds, where basically if I back something on a crowdfunding platform, that money, and it successfully funds, that money then goes to the person who's going to do the project, and they spend the money doing the project, and then at the end I get my thing. But the problem is that without tokens, effectively what I get back, until the project has been

completed is a promise from the person, from the person who's going to do it. And the problem with that promise is that it's not transferable. It's not a tangible thing that I can actually do what I want with. I just have to kind of wait. And then it's a marker being kept on their side that tells them that I am owed one of these things. But if in the middle of this project, like for example, I have a student loan, right, that I really need to pay. And this was affordable at the time, but it's not affordable now. So I need to get a refund in order to pay this student loan. payment that's super important, what do you do there? And the answer right now is you complain to the person that operates the project and they basically have nothing that they can do about it.

They have an kind of impossible choice between either refunding you with the funds coming out of the funds that were actually being used to fulfill the project or to not refund you and you're unhappy about that because you're stuck with the situation that you don't like and you have no options. So if you introduce tokens into this and you say, all right, you've paid me for this thing, I'm giving you back a token that represents one of these widgets that I'm creating when it's actually ready, then if I need a refund during that point, all I have to do is just sell it to somebody else. And I might not get exactly retail. I might even get better than retail if it's something that is limited in supply. And most importantly, it doesn't come out

of the project, right? So the project doesn't have a change in the amount of money that they have available to do it. Because what can happen is that you can effectively get like a run on the bank kind of situation where somebody asks for a refund, they get a refund. Other people see that they got a refund and they want to get a refund too because they see that they're being offered now and it's available. And the projects can effectively run out of money because they start giving refunds in this kind of, like I said, run on the bank sort of way. So that was the pitch that we made. It funded well. One of the things that I learned from that whole process was that the project we were talking about didn't actually matter that much. The majority of the money that we got came from the fact that

people knew me and had listened to me for a long time. And our biggest backers by far were people whom I had personal relationships with going back. So, you know, Bank to the Future was great in terms of being a vehicle for us to do the fundraise. But I really did learn that, at least in our situation, the project was secondary to the fact that people just wanted to invest in what we were working on at Tokenly. So we funded. It was very successful. And we started hiring up. We brought the team up from three people, which was myself and my two co-founders, Devin and Nick. My two co-founders are developers. They both went full-time on the project. And we brought in two business development people, two people on the kind of artistic side, and two developers.

So from there, we basically went through and overhauled all of our old services, not all of our old services. We went back and overhauled token pass, which is our account service. And at the same time, we were doing this. We were doing meetings with crowdfunding platforms, and we were just kind of investigating the space and figuring out where we actually saw the opportunities in the near term. And what we discovered once we started sending business development people into these meetings was that nobody wanted to be first and that everybody liked the ideas and everybody thought that there were problems to be solved. But everybody was basically happy with the way that their business was going.

And they saw this as an optimization rather than something really innovative that they needed to kind of jump onto. And so we had a lot of interest, but not a lot of people who wanted to actually be the first to try this thing out and kind of incur all of these unknowns. So from there, we basically, at the same time, we're quoting on a bunch of different projects and were just kind of digging in as deeply as we could to different use cases with cryptocurrency and tokens where we thought that they really made sense. Because prior to that, the problem had been that the infrastructure use case was too broad, right? If we're saying, well, you know, people build tokens and then they need a way to make their tokens

more valuable. They need a way to sell their tokens. They need all this other stuff. So we'll just build that and people will put stuff into it and that'll work. And in practice, we saw that that didn't work. Nobody did that. We built the infrastructure, but again, you had this disconnect between the people who are interested in it versus the people who could create real useful, valuable businesses with it. And we just didn't really see it. So in about November of last year, we essentially settled on one of the use cases that we had been working towards that was a more specific version of crowdfunding. And the idea here was that rather than trying to create just another crowdfunding platform that basically looked like other crowdfunding platforms but had this kind of

token element to it that was its differentiating factor, instead we would create a service, a music streaming service basically targeted towards artists that also had crowdfunding built into it in this way and that use tokens to represent crowdfunding rewards, but those crowdfunding rewards were actually the reward. So the product is called token.fm. Token.fm is basically a reinvention of, you know, kind of like the radio format, with the idea that artists, rather than, you know, putting their music onto every platform out there and having someone buy it on iTunes and then have it not be transferable or convertible

into something on Spotify, instead, you could create a system where the artist can sell licenses directly to their fan, and then the fan can use those licenses to access the music, on a tokenly platform, but also eventually on these other platforms as well. And so that allows you to do kind of all these things. You effectively get the ability to create like a physical CD type of thing, except that it has these digital characteristics about it. It can move like Bitcoin. But at the same time, it's limited like a physical object is.

It can only be created in an official capacity by the person. So it has kind of all the desirable characteristics of something, physical, but it's entirely in the hands of the artist. They control the supply. They control how much it's sold for. They control the monetization and kind of all these other things. That's kind of the short version of where we've come. So we started focused on crowdfunding.

We found that crowdfunding platforms themselves had the problem of nobody wanting to be first. And so we wound up building our own, not a crowdfunding platform, but an application that makes tokens valuable that then has crowdfunding built into it a kind of a base layer. Okay. I'd like to stay on this topic of licensing. So if I understand correctly, then tokenly would be this platform where one could sell licensing and token.fm will allow for one to sell licensing for music. It could be software, it could be artwork, but we could probably see this use case spreading

to different types of areas for content. And then with that license, which is essentially a token, you are. are given access to the content, not through the token.fn platform, but through some other platforms. So you're decoupling the license from the content itself. And then you then rely on content distributions like Spotify or whatever, other ones, Pandora or whatever, to get access to the content with this token. So that's the long tail. The long tail is integration by the bigs. In the short term, Really, it's just, so the token.fm application is a very Spotify-like application, lets you have playlists and lets you have kind of other value-enhanced features too,

like there are chat rooms and things, where if you own an artist's fan token, then they can also create a chat room that grants access via that. We built a front end because there were no front ends. And the back end actually uses the Alexandria project. I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with that. But you've heard of these different types of content changes. that are out there that are essentially for putting the metadata of content. Like creative chain is the most recent one I've seen ICOing.

Basically, the idea here is that you can create a distributed directory of content metadata that lives on a blockchain. And the cool part about that is that if you put the metadata onto a blockchain, then anybody who looks at that blockchain can see the metadata. And so if you have tokens that represent licenses, and those tokens are on a blockchain, and you have some other way to determine that those represent license, licenses, then anything that looks at that blockchain can then recognize those licenses without

taking custody of them, right? That's the nice part, is that the person still retains ownership, but a platform can look and say, aha, this person really does actually have this. So what tokenly does is we make it so that rather than having to look at the blockchain, which we found a lot of resistance to, instead, you just integrate our API and it does kind of everything. So when you're actually uploading music to token.fm, you're uploading it to the Florentcoin blockchain. That's where the metadata is going.

And it's stored long form there, right? So all of your monetization, all of your ownership information is actually stored long form in the Florincoin blockchain. And then the files themselves are hosted on interplanetary file system, which right now we provide most of the bandwidth to, but as time goes on, it'll become kind of more like a permission Napster type of thing, to be perfectly honest with you, where having, you. the token that represents the license, enables you to engage in a peer-to-peer network with other people who actually own the license. So it's a really cool thing where we can take the Napster

model and apply these licenses to it because there doesn't need to be a platform that's managing the licenses. It's happening on the blockchain. That seems like an interesting sort of niche application that certain artists may want to adopt. But I'm looking at the long term. So you mentioned that you want to try to get this integrated by the bigs. I see some problems there. Honestly, I see, so one is, well, one question I would have is, what incentive would they have to one board? How would they make money?

And the other is simply, do you think that people, now that people have access to these, these platforms where the user experience is really great? And there's these network effects. Like if you take something like Spotify, there's just, you know, millions of people using this platform. People have their friends there. They can share playlists and whatever. And also we've gotten used to this subscription model, you know, through things like Netflix, Spotify. The subscription model is very useful.

If I have to start paying token by token, like even though it's, you know, even though in terms of cost, it can be a reasonable amount, I'm so used to paying this $10 a month or whatever to get access to this platform, which, you know, the content also comes with, but it's this platform of content. how do you think, like, because if it feels like people will have to go back to this other model of, like, I want this piece of content, I want to buy it, where people are now accustomed to this subscription model where you pay once and you have access to all the stuff and, and, you know, other services like curation and, you know, like, there's a really cool thing on Spotify where I get, like, my place every week and I discover music and this kind of thing. Yeah, so that's a totally good point, and it's something we ran into, too. And this is something that. that actually is the case with everything. When it comes to cryptocurrency and token applications, is that these network effects are huge. There are meaningful problems kind of with all of this stuff, and people are used to subscriptions,

and subscriptions are terrible when it comes to cryptocurrency. It's a major problem because cryptocurrency is a push system, right? And they're terrible for the artists. I want to point out, too, that, meanwhile, they're also terrible for music artists. Well, the platforms are terrible for the artists. I mean, the platforms are terrible for the artists, But honestly, it doesn't have a lot to do with the platforms. It has a lot to do with the licensing terms under which the platforms make these agreements.

If you look at like Spotify, like they make a lot of money and they're still not profitable. And if you look where that money goes, most of it is going to their licensing agreements. So there's a bit of exclusivity that happens there. So regarding subscription models, I totally agree with you. We have had such a time trying to figure out how to price this in a way that actually makes sense. And what we've come to is what we call a play-as-you-go model, which is effectively you pay a $7 monthly subscription fee and you get enough credits within our system

to, it's basically like a fancy jutebox system. You get enough credits within our system to play, I believe it's about 17 hours worth of music that you don't own using the credits. And then if you want to buy more credits, then it costs about two and a half cents per song you want to play twice because you get to play them twice

in this paper listen model. and then if you actually own the token that corresponds with something, then you don't have to pay anything. It's included in the price of the token. So we do actually have both of these models. And the reason why we went with the subscription model was both because of user behavior and because we've stopped being purists. I've stopped being a purist about all of this stuff. And I've now come to the conclusion that it makes way more sense to create something that people don't have to use cryptocurrency at all for in order for them to use cryptocurrency. And so that's a That's really where we've gone with this product, is that if you don't have cryptocurrency, if you don't have a wallet, if you never want to set up a wallet, you can still use this application. You can still own tokens and you can still get the benefit of them, even if you are only using credit cards and have no wallet and stuff like that. So that's, I think, that's partly because of the way that we've approached this problem

and partly because of the problem that we are approaching that we are able to do that. But it is our pretty firm belief that most of the users who are going to be using this product are not going to be people who are interested in cryptocurrency up front or even necessarily know that they are using it if they buy an album. It'll just be something that'll kind of happen because it's... So, and then as far as why someone would want to use the platform, the basic reason is that we are going after artists through a couple of different channels

with the argument that this enables the direct connection that basically every artist we've ever talked to has said that they wanted with their fan base, both for communication, for monetization, for other things, and where platforms get in the way. Right now, the way that most musicians work, as far as getting their work on to other people's platforms, is by using companies that effectively you pay them, you know, like 50 bucks a year or $10 an album or something like that, and they go to the 150 biggest platforms out there, and they put your music onto everything.

So in a lot of spaces, that doesn't happen. A lot of spaces, you know, someone will pick a platform, and then that's the platform. that they use and you go there to find them. But in music, that's not how it happens because it's so fragmented. So we don't really have to convince people that our service is the best and it's better than Spotify. We just have to convince them that it's better in some way or even if it's not better, that it's another revenue stream, right?

And then once you've got them on there, then our system actually pays 20 times better per stream for the artist that they do. And so there is actually a rather large incentive for them to do it. So that's the thing. It's like the $7 per month fee, right? Like, that's with paying the artists 20 times better than Spotify does. If we weren't paying the artist 20 times better than Spotify, then you could, you know, obviously get that number much higher.

But we think that it's really an important part of the value proposition to basically what we're trying to do is create this platform in such a way so that it's where artists take their fans who they want to engage with most and want to monetize most. And we enable them to do that. Right. So I guess that the real challenge for you guys is going to be to get enough. musicians on there so that as a listener I'm like okay I'm okay with paying $7 here even though there's something like you know Spotify right where you can pay $10 and

there's everything on there right so I think that getting over that hurdle and I guess the only way to get over that hurdle is going to be by somehow making these tokens or this extra interaction with the musician just like such a good experience that you can't have elsewhere, right? That you say, okay, even if the selection is much smaller, I'm still, I still want to do that because, you know, my favorite artist is on there and this is a special thing I can do there.

Right. There's, yeah, there's definitely that side of it. We think that that's important. We talk about those as experiences, which has become sort of a buzzword in the space recently, is it's not necessarily just events or things like that. It's experiences, unique, personalized experiences, things like that.

So, yeah, so the token.comfm platform ties together with our e-commerce platform, which is called token markets, that allows for people to create different types of, you know, events and different types of things. There will be graphical perks inside, like I said, private chat rooms, direct messaging, paid messaging. So like on Facebook, except the artist is actually the one that gets the pay as opposed to Facebook taking the pay and just like deep permission systems. The other thing that's really interesting, though, is that, again, And this is mostly based around the token technology. The platform and the front end is just there because, well, we need a front end to kind of show off all the stuff we're doing on the back end.

But where we really see this going is both to artists' websites. So the artist doesn't necessarily have to send people to token.fm. They could just have them on their website. And because of the way the content licensing is handled, it's not handled at the platform level. It's handled at the user level, right, with tokens. So if a person is using a front end on an artist's web page, then they can still access all of their token collections. They can still do the paid streaming and the artist can actually make money by running their own basically a little streaming service there for people who want to interact with them on their website. The other side of it is applications.

You very rarely or never see a band come out with their own branded streaming application. And if you do, they're huge because, again, the licenses are held at the application level. So that artist would have to then have licenses to all of this other music. But if you've done what we've done with token.fm, we've separated the licenses from the platform. So now an artist can build the application. It can be branded however they want. It can have all of their music in it, highlighted up front and all of that stuff. But a person can still exercise their other licenses and just basically enjoy their music collection through this application,

even though the, you know, Beck or whatever doesn't actually have any of Metallica licenses, right? So long as they've both issued tokens that represent these things, then they work in each other's applications simply because there's no forageability. I think another reason maybe why there's not that many band-specific applications is because, I mean, as a music listener, you want to listen to a lot of things and not just one specific band. And now when that becomes interesting, when it becomes interesting to create a separate application, like let's say Metallica has their own app, I don't know if they do, it's because they have enough content to feed that app. So not only music content, but exclusive content and, you know,

like videos and like tour dates and all that kind of stuff. If you're a small band and, you know, or maybe even a relatively successful band, maybe you don't have all of that. Maybe people will listen to you, but it's really just your hardcore fan base that may be interested in getting all of that extra content. Well, but I mean, I think that's the thing is that in this type of paradigm, you don't need to convince people that your music is the music to listen to. You need to just say, this is our application. If we're your favorite band, use ours because the selection is the same, regardless of what application you're using. That's the thing that, like, it's like people talk about game tokens and like say, oh, Blizzard is a good, you know, they have all these games, right?

It would be so good for them to connect them together. But Blizzard actually has the least incentive out of anybody because they already have a platform that connects their games together without. using an extra layer. So what they get from it is really much, much less than if you were to say take 10 different indie studios out there that each have one game and connect them together, now they've got something that's really valuable. They don't have to trust other people, but they can play together, they can have interoperability. So what you see is that it's not that there's no advantage for people who are already big and successful. It's that they already have most of it. So it's a level playing field in that somebody who's independent and small has all of the same advantages in

opportunities that somebody already has who is big. That doesn't take away the advantage from the guy that's big, but it does mean that there's more competition, which is good and bad depending on your perspective. Okay, fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Adam. It's been a pleasure. And thanks so much for a listener for once again, tuning in. So we are part of the Let's TopiCon network, or soon be the Let's Talk Network, and you can

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