The Pomp Podcast - Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of IOTA: How DLT Will Make Data Privacy a Reality

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

This is episode #1 in the Automation Series. You can learn more about the Automation Series here. You can learn more about IOTA on their website. Dominik Schiener is the Co-Founder of IOTA, a disruptive technology that enables machines to store and send money frictionlessly between one another. In 2017, Dominik co-founded the IOTA Foundation and established Germany’s first nonprofit foundation that enables and fosters permission-less ecosystems powered by distributed ledgers. Dominik is highly regarded as one the leading innovators in the global blockchain community.  In this episode, Anthony Pompliano and Dominik discuss: privacy and data ownership, what is needed to make DLT a reality, the future of data privacy, and the eventuality of a machine-to-machine currency built on DLT.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. The following episode is part of the Off The Chain automation series sponsored by IOTA. The goal of this special series is to explore the intersection of distributed ledger technology and automation, specifically around digital currencies, digital wallets, and machine-to-machine transactions. My core belief is that every stock, bond, currency, and commodity will eventually be digitized and distributed ledger technology will empower the full potential of automation to be realized. IOTA is the sponsor of the automation series. Their mission is to support the research

and development of new distributed ledger technologies, including IOTA Tangle. The IOTA Foundation encourages the education and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols. You can find out more about the Automation Series and IOTA in the show notes. Dominic Shiner is the founder and co-chairman of the Board of Directors of IOTA. In this conversation, we discuss the future of machine-to-machine transactions, how automation will become pervasive throughout our lives, where distributed ledger technology fits in, and how IOTA is building solutions for this new world. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm sitting here with Dom. Super excited to do this episode. He is one of the folks who's probably thought even more than I have about how machine-to-machine transactions are going to evolve over time. So thanks so much for coming in and doing this. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, for sure. Let's jump right into your background. You've been around crypto for a really long time. So what did you do before you got into Bitcoin and crypto? so before I got into crypto I was big into gaming gaming yeah exactly a Call

of Duty and all kinds of ps4 games and then I realized that with games you can actually start making money and so I kind of started getting into this whole entrepreneurial career where was trying to figure out how can I actually make money on the internet because I really realized that the internet is not Facebook it's not Twitter it's really how you can educate yourself and build something great and i had this whole hustling period and what i settled myself down to was an advertising platform because i realized with cost per action paper action and so on and so forth you can really start making a lot of money and so i went on this quest to set up my own

advertising platform i tried to get some advertisers on board and that is actually what got me into bitcoin in the first place in 2011 wow what what was the kind of so as you're building out the advertising platform you're working on getting advertisers on how do you go from that to bitcoin yeah it was a very simple problem actually so how can i pay my developers to make the platform because at the time i was too young to have a paypal account and so my friend introduced me to bitcoin for the first time i just started utilizing it and it really started becoming really and encompassed by this vision of permissionless innovation meaning that you can really utilize this new technology bitcoin to transfer value globally and so it solved a very

simple problem for me how can i pay my developers and uh i i kind of got sidetracked with school and stuff and so then in 2012 i really got full-time into it i started reading up on the technical concepts behind it and really fully understanding the whole the whole scale of this and what is what is actually possible and then i became fully convinced that i really want to do something in the space and so what happened then is i started figuring out that bitcoin is not the only uh cryptocurrency out there but there's a lot of potential also in all coins and so i started out with mining all coins uh the first one that i did was proto shares which was created by the infamous daniel larimer and so i started out with that and i made a bunch of money with it and but

then I realized that this is not the end there's so much more and and the biggest potential that I saw back in the day is how can you solve this problem of going from fiat from the fiat world into the crypto world and so I went on this quest to set up a cryptocurrency exchange okay which even back then was a huge huge drama to set up because you had this whole risk with the regulatory side with the legal side and most predominantly with the banking side it was impossible to get a bank account back because the banks just said we're not working with any crypto companies yeah absolutely like i reached out to banks in isle of man i even flew there sweden malta and so on and so forth and every time it was like please never contact us again bitcoin is against our

internal policies and this is for money laundering and so on and so forth and that is actually what attracted me to the crypto valley in zoop in 2013 charles hoskinson actually invited me to be there because back in the day he was a ceo of ethereum he said we are setting up this whole hop in duke and maybe you want to join us in setting up a self-regulating organization with the idea that i'm going to solve all of my problems banking legal regulatory all solved in one suit yeah which obviously didn't happen and i i lived in switzerland i was living in the in the ethereum house back then what was that like what was the the ethereum house in zug switzerland in 2013 like so it was a bunch of guys there was like two girls the girlfriends of mihai and some other guy and

they were just having fun right you you could see them create a website and be amazed oh my gosh it's gonna be big you could see charles recording the video that he's gonna put on youtube talking about his grand vision and back then i didn't really fully understand the full scale of this I think nobody really understood the full scale of this, where this would go. Because at the time, they were just working on a project like everyone else. No one realized that this one specifically is going to go be worth tens of billions of dollars. Exactly. They didn't even do their ICO.

So there was just like eight to ten people in one apartment put together, sleeping on mattresses. So it was pretty crazy, but it really taught me a lot, right? Was it fun? It was a lot of fun. Yeah. So, we didn't do a lot of partying, but everybody was simply wake up, go in front of your computer, drink a bunch of coffee, go out to eat or order something in. Somebody cooks. Yeah.

And it was it, right? That's awesome. All right. So, you're there in the house. And then where do you do from there? So, what I did from there is I still was in school. So, I had to travel between Switzerland and Italy where I was born. And then the first crash came in 2013, end of 2013.

And I ended up losing all my money. which which sucked at the time so I had really this hardship with Switzerland because I had an apartment there trying to think through how I can really bring people to Switzerland build up my huge company and everything blew up just like that right but then I continued and I really got more involved on the technical side and then it was flown in by Fimbushi capital to Shanghai which was back they invited me to the back then largest blockchain hackathon in the world with $100,000 prize money and I ended up winning that hackathon really

yeah what did what did you build I build supply chain transparency concept with trade finance so you can really automate the entire process of shipping and pain and you had a background in computer science or how did you learn to code I taught myself because I got screwed over a few times I developed a few times my developers that I hired was like fucking I'll just learn myself uh-huh was it hard no it was a fun challenge and I realized that the only way to really build something is if you can even know how to build it so you need to teach yourself and so I won a hackathon and I told the guys I want to price in

either so we tell it gave me like 30,000 either Wow for for winning the hackathon all right so you win the hackathon you get 30,000 ether what's the price is that pennies back then it was like one or two dollars per per eater mm-hmm as it was a pretty pretty good deal yeah yeah absolutely do you sell more yeah yeah of course because then when I flew back to to Europe we really started getting serious about iota and so I invested everything back into into a okay so if you had 30,000 ether today that would be worth a lot of money yeah But obviously, when you get back, what was the kind of genesis?

So you win the hackathon, but you don't move forward with the supply chain and the trade finance. Why did you choose to kind of leave it as a concept and not pursue it? I saw it more as a seed funding opportunity for myself because obviously I was broke. I had no money. And back then, I also realized that the whole application layer on top of blockchain is simply not there yet. and it's really on the protocol level where you have the biggest opportunity and that is why why i got much more involved in iota so i helped build it all and and that is where we really realized the potential that iota had back in 2015 end of 2015 and that's why i focused full time on

it and then also ended up moving to berlin got it okay and so uh what was the original idea for iota so it all comes from the iot space we we are all focused on automation how can we make our devices smarter how can we really start connecting them with each other but the vision of iota goes beyond just automation it goes towards autonomy how can we make it possible for one machine to actually independently decide what it does with the value that it creates meaning data or services and at the end of the day what you get out of that is really a machine economy One machine transacting with another machine and creating their own economy, which has tremendous potential for this vision of autonomy and of automation. And we realized that the only way to really realize that machine economy is to introduce a distributed ledger because you want to remove the trust layer.

You want to introduce a trust layer, and you also want to really enable it for machines to have their own wallet, to hold their own assets and own them. and that is why yeah so let's talk for a second about the machine to machine transactions because i think this is something that people may hear that terminology a lot they actually don't know what it means right so we're specifically talking about is one machine is going to transact value with another machine so literally machine to machine transactions but this is not necessarily just something they do for fun right it's part of this larger automation story and so maybe start with just like what are some examples of where two machines would transact with each other in an automated world yeah absolutely i think the best iot example is really the car the car is

has become incredibly smart we are talking about autonomous vehicles we're talking about cars that are collecting gigabytes of data when you drive around and all of that is because we want to make smart decisions with our vehicles and the car itself cannot collect all of this data and so it maybe want to collect data from a traffic light, from another vehicle of what the traffic situation is like. So the most simple machine-to-machine transaction is really where one machine sells data to another machine, really inside, so that the machine itself

can start making smarter decisions based on the data that it gets. So take the car, it drives around, right? So it has all of the GPS data, right? In terms of like, where has it actually gone? It has all of the car's information. How many miles has it drawn? What was the mileage per hour, right?

You know, all that kind of stuff. And then it also has, I'm assuming, any sort of inputs into the car, right? So that could be its interaction with sensors. It could be interactions with the passengers who put information in the car, right? Those kind of, that type of data, who would you be selling that to, right, if you're the car? Yeah, I think the most important data buyer of the future will be governments. Because governments need to protect their citizens. They need to provide better services.

to their citizens and a good example is a simple parking app knowing where when and how a parking spot is available is hugely valuable because it really eases traffic congestion for example and it really introduces new business models for those that operate those parking spots but today so and i think this is going to head down a direction those things that that you and i have talked about before today we have parking apps right there's things that say hey i'll show where the parking spots are etc i can go to the app store and download them for free yeah why would why would that app want to buy data versus just use the the free users that it has today i think this is so this is an excellent question really goes into this broader vision of an open

permissionless ecosystem okay the problem that we have today with those smart city apps is that we're simply fragmenting the entire ecosystem we have the uber app we have the train app we have their airline app. But the entire user experience is very fragmented. I need to have an app for each point where I'm traveling to. And the same with data points in the future with this traffic app or with this parking app. They are all not able to get the entire data set within the city. They're only able to get those data sets where they actually have access to. And as such, we are now really limiting the user experience itself because now you don't get all of the data points within the city and now the vision of iota is to really create an open and permissionless way for for

everybody to start selling and participating in this data economy with the idea behind that apps that are building on top of it really have the holistic picture where where something is available where something is not available and the idea here is really to break down those barriers and at the end of the day what is a smart city for who who are their main customers it's the citizens. They want to make their user experience, the services that are provided to them as easy as possible and as secure as possible. And so as that's occurring, right, that car that's driving around and it's gathering data, today, what would be the way that somebody could purchase the data from the car? Like, what does the legacy model look like where a human would be involved, right,

and saying, hey, I want to buy the data that's generated by your car? What does that look like? So it's simply not possible today, especially for the end users to actually purchase or sell their data. It's simply part of the entire user experience itself where the corporations simply take your data and just start selling it. Best example is Facebook. And we're also seeing this with some of the car manufacturers where they're really selling your data as you're driving around. What's a good example is in the airline industry where the plane operators don't even own the turbines. but they're the data itself that is generated from the turbines gets back to the manufacturer so they can really do predictive maintenance so they have like

a service level agreement that is part of the entire acquisition of the turbine mm-hmm and that means we are not really having enabling data economy it's not there yet today because really what you're saying is there are people or organizations that are generating incredibly valuable data right and right now that data is just being taken by an organization and that organization is monetizing it. But what should happen in the future and what is likely to happen in the future is that the person who creates the data will understand the value of it and will actually monetize it themselves. Yeah, exactly. I think one of the most exciting parts about this data economy is how it will

actually impact our products that we purchase today. Because the data component itself can, for example, offset the price of the product that you buy. You can go and say, hey, you can have access to my data for a lifetime but i want to get a cheaper product or you can for example get the product itself for free and you submit the data best example is a weather station that you get for free but you sell the weather data and so it'll be very interesting how companies in the future will start competing with each other on this data component but what needs to happen first is that we really have this awareness that our data is hugely valuable and also what value it actually has meaning the price of your data for sure well and for me the part that is interesting

so let's go to an extreme example right one of the hot topics in the united states right now is universal basic income so this whole idea that the machines are going to displace a bunch of workers those workers won't have skills necessary to make a living so we should step in and we should just give these people money in order to provide some base level you know affordability of life there's an argument to be made right i see the logic that somebody's using for me i'm probably more in the camp of those incentives seem a little off right but the way that i it would make sense to me to get the same impact where people have money to live uh would be this data monetization so i said for a long time you know there's a lot of people who would love to buy

how many steps i take what my heart rate is right you know did i work out today did i not how did i sleep what uh mobile applications did i open what content did i consume what music did i listen to where did i go from gps like all of this data that my phone itself is able to track or generate i'm giving it away to all of those different service providers right but if instead i was able to somehow hold on to it or retain it bundle it up in different things right so here's all my health data here's all my exercise data here's my sleep data here's my content data here's my entertainment data whatever and then have people basically come and purchase it from me right so whether it's uh people want it for research people want it for uh marketing people want it for you

know whatever it is you know walkability in a city whatever i could probably actually if i had the demand and i had their uh ownership of my data i could probably generate a living just by simply is selling the data that I'm already generating. It's just that that mechanism isn't there and the culture of monetizing data doesn't exist yet. Yeah, exactly. And this is really what distributed ledgers are there for, to give people the freedom to decide

what should happen with their data and what should happen with their identities and who actually gets access to that. And you can then decide if you want to start participating in this data economy and you can really decide which part of your data you can actually monetize. And when it comes to UBI

I and these kind of concepts, I definitely think that the whole vision of automation and autonomy is to make our lives easier, to really move forward into a much brighter future where machines start taking off some of our hard work and hard labor today and making much better and more individualized products, because that is the big vision of Industry 4.0. We want to make machines that are not products that are not mass produced, but really products that are individually fit. Yep.

And there's a very interesting concept and also studies in Germany where, for example, those cobots, meaning robots that work together with humans, that they find it very… And they're called cobots, like C-O-B-O-T-S? Yeah, exactly. So, collaborative. They work together with the humans in the factories and they create a much safer environment for them. And they really help them also be more efficient and also be more productive. So, how does that work, though? Like, give me an example of a cobot in a manufacturing facility.

The most simple example is a human simply giving a metal piece or something to a cobot who's then processing it and going really from the raw product to the produced product. Got it. So really the cobot, if you will, it's very similar to a machine, what we used to call a machine, right? Where maybe we had an assembly line and somebody took something off the assembly line and handed it to the machine and the machine stamped it or something. The person took it back and put it back on the assembly line, right? That type of interaction between machine and human, the cobot you're describing is really similar. It's just that the machine now is smarter or could do more things than just it's a single-use kind of stamp or something. Yeah, and it really creates a much more safe environment for everybody at the factory. A good example is also in supply chain where you, for example, don't have suction cups today that can help you with delivering a product from one factory floor to another factory floor.

So you still need humans that are involved in this entire process. And Tom Lee from Fundstrat made a very interesting point that automation is really a reaction to a labor shortage. Interesting. So that means we need to start innovating in order to make up for this labor shortage because else we have some serious problems. The best example is what's happening in trucking. We have a real shortage in the gas with truck drivers. And now we really need to start figuring out with autonomous vehicles how we can solve that problem. And the same is true with IOTA, right?

We are moving towards a future where these technologies really start to converge. AI, IoT, DLT, and they create these new systems of systems that will really make up our future. And we really just start figuring out how we can actually enable those. And I guess as you start looking at the machines interacting with each other, right? Go back to that, the Cobot example. Really, if we can get to a world where an entire factory is autonomous, right, and the factory can make decisions, the factory can produce things by simply just sending it instructions, you know, whether it's remotely or on site, that world is going to require a lot of innovation to get there. Like we are nowhere near being able to do that today. Right.

What do you think are the biggest challenges between where we are today and like a fully autonomous kind of automated world? I think a lot of this has really more to do on the philosophical and social side, because what we really need to create is a future that is future proof. Something that is not going to fundamentally disrupt our society, but is really something that is going to alleviate us, is going to really help us move forward into the future. So that is why we really need to start thinking about what kind of impact will AI and DLT and IoT really have on this future? And how can you make sure that we have this autonomous world functioning with our human world? And that is why we are also going to see a much bigger rise in the social sciences in universities to think about these problems. And the other problem is obviously we need to start upgrading our existing infrastructure with these new concepts. That is also one of the things that we've seen while we are working together with bigger corporates is like, how can you actually integrate the distributed ledger on a very old system that is currently running at the big corporate where they still use old IBM mainframes and stuff like that?

So it's really about how can this new world really be integrated into the old world? Yeah. And so one of the things that you and I have talked about previously that's very interesting to me is the way that the machines interact has various levels of complexity. Right. So there's the physical interaction. Right. One machine is touching another machine. One machine is handing something to another like a kind of a fully robotic world. Another component of this is how they communicate with each other. Right. So in terms of I'm a machine in the same room as another machine, I tell it what to do. And then the third is they transact with each other, right? So I kind of think of it as there's physical things to interact with, there's information to interact with, and then there's value to interact with, right?

I think that what you guys are doing is going after the value interaction. But let's talk about the first two first, right? So physical interaction between two machines I think is pretty self-explanatory. Sending a physical item between the two can happen in all kinds of different formats. If you've seen the videos of like Boston Dynamics robots, they can do all kinds of crazy shit, right? In terms of information, I think this is what most people think of as IoT, right? It's the refrigerator saying, hey, milk is getting low, order more milk, tell Amazon to send milk, right? That to me seems like we're actually making a lot of progress so far in terms of where we are technologically.

Do you agree with that or disagree with that? Yeah. I think IoT is no longer a buzzword. It was a buzzword 10, 15 years ago, but now it really is starting to bear its fruits, meaning it's actually being productive. It's actually having an impact on our lives. That is sort of how I always measure success for technology. Can you really feel the impact of it? And with IoT, especially in the industrial world, you can truly feel it. And talking about the communication side of things, the most ironic part about the Internet of Things is that it's not about the Internet. Because Wi-Fi, TCP, IP, and so on and so forth are really too energy consumptive for machines. And so you need to come up with new protocols that make it actually possible for one machine to connect to talk with another machine. And that is why we really saw the rise of new communication protocols like ZigBee, LoRaWAN, and so on and so forth that make it possible with little amount of energy to actually transmit that data. And it also brings us into this whole world of mesh networks where a machine is no longer connected to the cloud, but it's really one machine connected to other machines in this fog and edge computing environment.

And that is where you need to start now introducing the third layer, which is this transactional part, so that the machines themselves can really start creating their own consensus in this network, can start securing transactions and data, and can start transacting with each other from that. Yeah, and because to me it feels like as you see more and more machines come online that are, quote, smart, right, so they have this connectivity, if you will, the systems get smarter and they better understand how to empower this and they can also make better decisions, right? It's kind of a true machine learning in that the more data you put into the system, the better decisions they can make, the more they learn, right? And you just kind of have a compound effect to all of this, which then the incentive would be, well, let's get as many smart machines onto the system as we possibly can because it makes overall improvement. So whenever I give a presentation, I always have this slide where I define these three steps of IoT. Okay. So the first one was dumb decentralization. Dumb centralization.

Decentralization. Okay, dumb decentralization. Explain that. So think about your old washing machine that had a simple job to do. You press a button, it starts twisting around, it cleans your clothing. It was not connected. It could not talk with other machines. It was not smart.

Most people don't even know how to talk to their own washing machine, let alone talk to other machines. But all right, keep going. Exactly. So where we are today is smart centralization. That means we have those devices that actually have more computing capacity. They have connectivity. They can transfer data, and most importantly, they can really start transmitting that data to the cloud.

Really, they're connected to your local Wi-Fi network. So now this washing machine example is your washing machine can really start figuring out when do you actually want to have your clothing washed, what temperatures, what are your preferences, and so on and so forth, and it can make smart decisions. Like your thermostat, Nest Thermostat is a good example. Everything becomes automated because of the cloud, not because of the devices themselves. The devices are only a small component of this. Now, the big problem here is, and that is why distributed ledgers are so exciting,

is in the smart centralization world, we really have a single point of failure, which is the cloud. The cloud is a smart component here. Now, if the cloud goes offline or we have no connectivity, we have a very expensive device that is super stupid, that cannot really automate my life and has actually made it more difficult because sometimes there's complete service outage, meaning I can no longer control my temperature in my home. And that is why we need to move to the third step, which is smart decentralization. Okay, so just as a recap, the first step of dumb decentralization is I have a system in my home, let's say the washing machine, the thermostat, whatever. It's decentralized because it's not centrally kind of aggregated with everyone else's washing machine, right?

So it's decentralized in that nature. It's a single node by itself that has no connectivity. But that's also why it's dumb, right? Because it's unconnected. that's step one step two is what you just described as smart centralization which is now the machine actually has data capabilities and some intelligence but the way that that was accomplished was by connecting them all to a central point right which is the cloud so nest is nest hq if you will is the central point that all of these uh nest smart devices are connected

to and there's benefits to doing that because i can push updates i can do more around learning and and improve the software whatever the downside is that there's that central point of failure and you know like smart centralization is also about ownership do you actually own your device if it's actually connected to the cloud and can only really function with the cloud and a very important question is also do you own the data that is being generated like today i think there was an article that said nest owners should tell their guests that they should be aware that the Nest device can start collecting their talks, their conversations. And it's kind of a scary future, and that is exactly where we are today, where those

large corporations actually own the devices, they own the ecosystem, and they make decisions of what happens with the data and with the machines that are part of this ecosystem. Nest tomorrow could just decide, hey, we want to discard this product because we no longer want to maintain it, it's too expensive. And now you as a customer are completely screwed. You cannot do anything about that. And that is exactly why we need to change this ownership structure of our IoT ecosystems towards this smart decentralization. And we at IOTA, we are really big fans of biomimetics, meaning we want to imitate nature in our technology.

Biomimetics? Yeah. Okay, imitating nature. Okay, go ahead. So a very interesting example is how ants work. Arms? Ants. Ants.

Oh, ants. Okay, yeah, yeah. The European accent is going to throw me off. Ants. A-N-T. Sorry. So, think about an ant as an individual IoT device. Okay. It's dumb. It doesn't have the visual capacity to really figure out where to go, where's the threat, where's food, and so on and so forth. But the exciting part is when you have a collective of ants. And what they're doing is they're sharing data via pheromones. So, the more ants are going in one direction, the more ants are starting to follow. because they start to understand like over there is food or we need to help them and that is why

an anthill is one of the most intelligent environments out there right because they can really start building up their own local ecosystem i even saw some pictures of ants building boats and driving around in rivers so it's really crazy how a dumb device a dumb being can create a collective intelligence it's funny because there's humans that don't have boats but the Ant's got boats. Yeah. Absolutely. And really what you're talking about here is that collective intelligence, right?

This is pretty non-controversial at this point, the power of the crowd, right? And if we can actually use sensors and machines and all this kind of smart hardware to better collect than to analyze and then eventually implement the learnings from this data, the world's going to be way better off than if we couldn't do it. Exactly. And not only that, but you also become much more resilient against attacks. So today we live in an environment whereby we should be really worried about hackers and how they can have an impact on our mission-critical infrastructure, which is really the most vulnerable part that we also have today, like our energy grid system. And with this concept of smart decentralization, of edge and fog computing,

and of making decisions locally in the mesh of devices and simply sharing data between devices with a much more secure and much more resilient environment that cannot be taken down, meaning we removed a single point of failure that we have today. All right, so I'm going to use an example that I think illustrates this. We haven't talked about this, so you've got to tell me if I'm wrong or not. And I want you to be honest.

the apple iphone to me just is a great example of what you're describing in the sense that take the biometrics so the the facial recognition the uh the thumbprint right all these things they're locally stored on the consumer device so if apple the company gets hacked nobody can get my facial recognition or my fingerprint but my device is smart in that it uses all the biometrics locally right and there is now connectivity to my uh mobile carrier right there's some sharing back to date of other data back to apple etc so it's almost like you can uh pick or permission what data gets shared with apple what data stays locally um some of that's determined by them in terms of how they build the device right so there's just no connectivity to send your

biometrics to apple but some of it is at the user level i have control over the privacy of my data Does that generally make sense around this kind of smart decentralization? No, that's a really good example. I can give you a better example and also transcend into why you need to create an open ecosystem with this intelligence. Okay. So the best example that we have today of a network of devices that is using these similar concepts is Tesla with their autonomous vehicles. So what Tesla does is each node, each car in the network is collecting data as it drives around. And what they do know is they start sharing this data with Tesla HQ, not with the other Tesla vehicles themselves, but with the headquarter.

And now the exciting part here is really the entire network, the entire fleet of Tesla cars become smarter, meaning that I really become more resilient and I can actually really utilize with 99% failure rate my autonomous driving. But here's the problem. Tesla is a gated community. They're their own ecosystem. and there's millions and millions of cars out there that could actually really benefit from the data that tesla has but tesla has so much more to benefit from them as well and now here comes the vision of iota in how do you break down those barriers so that the tesla vehicle is going to share data with their renault car with volkswagen car the way you can go about this is

two ways the first one is you do the traditional way you create a new consortium you know corporates they're they like creating consortiums consortias but i think now they're starting to realize that this entire permissioned environment is just creating too much friction for them because now when you want to join this consortium you have to sign a contract you actually have to make sure that there's no conflict of interest and what will most likely happen is that the other competitors are going to create their own consortium and now though we have them competing you have full fragmentation of the exactly now you really fragmented and now uh the ones that benefit don't benefit are the end consumers because now the data is not being shared so how do you break

down those barriers you simply introduce an incentive mechanism every every company wants to make money that's their that's their goal right and data yeah and a very good point that that was made recently is data should be part of your balance sheet of a large corporation and now what happens in this in this in this vision is that tesla is starting to sell data to volkswagen to renault to peugeot and so on and so forth and they start transacting with each other so they start to benefit from each other by simply selling data and through that you start to get this intelligence out of that so what are you guys doing in the space right with iota like what what is the vision of what you want to build and then we can get kind of get into what the components

But ultimately, when somebody says, you know, what are you building? What exactly is that? So we are focused on the value layers. We really want to be the trust layer of our digital economy, meaning that we are the open permissionless protocol that everybody can go to if they want to secure data or if they really want to enable payments, which obviously require trust, that you can trust that it's going to be submitted and it's going to be confirmed and it's actually secure. and so we are really sort of the middle layer here that enables this vision of a machine economy so in our in our future that we envision is that every device has their own wallet and they can really start transacting through iota so going back to that example of kind of there's physical objects that can be transacted between two right so machine hands something to machine there's

information right which is more kind of the iot and smart device and then this third bucket is really what you guys are attacking which is the the transfer of uh value or transactions that you can can make how is that being done today right is this simply something where um you know i walk into starbucks and i have to have a qr code and my device which is my smartphone that i'm physically holding hits the scanner and then there's a payment made in the back end is that kind of the the smartest version of how a quote machine to machine transaction works today and when it comes the value transfer yeah yeah like that's that's a good example and we we also have our own wallet where we really focus on those more consumer payments but fundamentally what we are doing

is how can we integrate our our software into the car into the machine itself on the hardware that is why we also developing our own hardware for example to accelerate the algorithms and so on and so forth because that is the big vision you want to remove the trust barrier here and the machine itself should be a full node it should really participate in the network and it should be able to easily transact with another machine and you know the exciting part about micro payments is that it's actually a mechanism to remove trust so now if you start charging with the with the charging station in the future how can in this autonomous future how can the charging station actually know that the car is there unless we really have an identity protocol the only way

to remove this trust is by making it possible for the car to pay the charging station and as soon as the payment a micro payment is done the charging station will release the energy flow and now the car can able is able to verify hey i'm getting electricity i should release more payments and through that you start you have a very interesting mechanism to remove trust in our society so okay so so let's talk about let's use a car as an example right because i think that's one you guys have done some work on and i've thought about uh there's a lot of payments that a car is involved in we don't think about today right a normal human i go to get gas i get out of my car i put my credit card in the machine i plug in the gas right pump and then i start pumping

gas into my car i physically as a human had to get out of my car and do the credit card a toll i drive i gotta stop my car i gotta reach out i gotta put change in or i give them some kind of you know pass etc yeah uh charging parking right i mean there's a lot of things you do with your car a speeding ticket right i i went too fast i gotta pay right all stuff um what you're really talking about is removing the friction of the human element of those transactions where the end results the same i get gas i paid for it right or i get electricity i paid for it in terms of car uh i drove on this road i paid a toll right i went too fast i paid a penalty but what you're really talking about is just as you remove that human it becomes more efficient on how to do that

because the machine the car itself is able to directly transact with whoever the recipient of the funds are yeah yeah exactly and and this is what i mentioned before this is really the next step of automation which is autonomy and that that fundamentally frees us humans up from from some of these very mundane tasks like getting out of your car getting a parking ticket and stuff like that you can really start automating all of this by by simply introducing payment mechanisms or data transfer mechanisms and that is what we are fundamentally focused on and that is why also so many corporates and governments are super excited about this future because for them they also understand that these are new business models for them and new revenue

streams and they make their their cars so much more appealing to purchase as well for example we have an exciting work together with Jaguar Land Rover where they introduced that their car can now have an iota car wallet that we're working on and now I can really start also selling data as it drives around okay so let's make sure I understand this in this partnership that you guys have with jaguar land rover you're going to put software on the car itself that allows them to have a digital wallet that digital wallet can do two things is my understanding one it can hold money right digital currency and then it can pay that to certain sensors or or um kind of

counterparties for certain activities so whether that's gas tolls electricity whatever but the second thing is there's also the ability for the car to sell the data it's generating and in return receive payment into that digital wallet for having sold the data that it was generating is that all right yeah exactly and this is what the machine economy itself is about the machine store are not just consumers they also become prosumers and they start generating data so much data that is hugely valuable to other machines best example is the Waze app Waze as it works today is that you as a human you have to manually manually enter here's something here's that blah blah blah blah right and that creates friction because i think 90 of people do not want to do

that because there is no incentive but now the car itself is the best autonomous vehicle or like autonomous machine driving around because as you drive around you generate data and you can start selling that you have a pothole you can sense that and then you can submit the data you're stuck in traffic you can submit the data and that is really the exciting part about this future right how how can we make it possible for these machines to just start functioning like ants start transmitting data so i want to play devil's advocate right there's a lot of people who are listening to this who are going to say uh you're full of shit right and and not in a uh you know um what you're saying is wrong of the world that we're going into but uh there's other ways to do some of this right so

So I'm going to throw out what I think are the arguments, the detractors, and then you respond. So the first is, yes, we're going to an automated world. Yes, there will be machine to machine transactions, but we already have a digital currency. We have Bitcoin, right? And the machines are going to use Bitcoin, not something else. So why don't you just go focus on Bitcoin? So I think the first answer to the question is that we are not competing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a very different appeal to holders and to investors and to users.

Now, the focus of IOTA, and that is exactly why we actually created IOTA, is to really be a machine currency that removes the friction, that has a technology as its backbone that is actually capable of running in an IoT environment. Okay, so a machine currency, I've never heard anyone talk about that before. What does that mean? Simply a currency that is in particular designed and built to enable these machine-to-machine transactions. Okay. And like from a technical standpoint, what is the difference in how machines transact versus how, let's say, you and I would send Bitcoin back and forth? I think the biggest difference is simply in the size of the transactions. Us humans, we want to send around hundreds, thousands of dollars in Bitcoin for remittances purposes, right? Now, a machine wants to do a simple micropayment for a data set for a certain service that just takes a few seconds to complete. and so you want to be able to transmit a fraction of that transaction of that value of a normal

value of the transaction and now with iota what we are really focused on how can we make it possible for these micro transactions to actually happen without any fees so that is why we introduced iota in 2015 with this new technological concept called the tangle based on a dag okay and what is that so it's a directed acyclic graph oh my god these big words from smart people all right it's directed a cyclic okay graph graph and what does that mean so if you think about the blockchain it's just sequential sequential chain block of the block of the block hit that in certain intervals ten minutes for example gets confirmed by a smaller subset of the network which is the miners so they're

the ones that are good that are responsible for the consensus fundamentally now with iota instead of having the sequential chain we remove the blocks and remove the chain okay so what do you replace them with with? Transactions. So if you execute a transaction in IOTA, it doesn't get bundled into a block. It simply gets attached to this tangle. So that means your transaction references two transactions in the history. And now where the consensus comes from is that the more transactions confirm your transaction, the more secure it gets. So you have a similar principle. And obviously the complexity is how you get that confirmation. But that is why we publish a lot of white papers. And that is

also why we are right now working on removing the friction that we have today, meaning the coordinator, meaning really having a protocol that is fit for IoT. So our big goal is for next year, 2020, to really be production ready and to enable thousands of transactions per second and to start onboarding some of the bigger corporates that we already have as partners today onto the network, meaning that they will actually utilize the permissionless network and will actually utilize the IOTA token. Got it. And so before we get to the token component, one of the things that you said to me before that I don't understand as well, so it would be helpful to understand, is most human-to-human digital currency transactions happen on the internet.

Yeah. A lot of machine-to-machine transactions don't actually happen over like TCP IP, right? So maybe describe a little bit about what the difference is between how some of these machine transactions are occurring versus how, like, let's say Bitcoin transactions are happening on the internet. and how you guys are addressing the machine-to-machine side of this. Yeah, I think a good analogy to this is also what you want to achieve with sharding. So that means that you have a global ledger, which is the ultimate settlement layer, but then you also enable shards in this network. And one shard can be a participant of devices, meaning a cluster of devices that build their own mesh network.

And the reason why you want to do that is because sometimes those devices are offline, sometimes those devices use a very different communication protocol like I mentioned before but you still want to enable the business model to them meaning transacting value and this is what we are at the Yoda are really focused on is first we want to get the base layer right make that fully scalable and then the next iteration is really to enable sharding so that we enable those cluster of devices to restart transacting with each other and you know how difficult sharding is with with with blockchain because it wasn't

really possible yet and so we we we we've been working on this for the last five or six years on sharding and nothing has really come out yet and so so why do you think it hasn't been there's been no progress yet i think it really has to do with building on the wrong principles and when we started iota or like we still say that everything is a proof of concept bitcoin is a proof of concept iota is a proof of concept ethereum is a proof of concept We need to actually prove that those technologies have real world impact and are scalable. And that is why we need to focus first on scaling these technologies and getting them production ready. We're not there yet.

And with sharding, there's a lot of interesting research around, but I've not really seen anything being concretely implemented yet. And if it is, some of the bigger projects like us or like Bitcoin and so on and so forth will hopefully start implementing those. got it so let's go back to the game of devil's advocate right so there's bitcoin and then you've got the iota system um a lot of people i think would say hey you don't need a token right the iota token itself um you could do all this without a token you say what so so there's four different uh answers that i think maybe five or six okay just thinking it through uh the first answer is very simple we don't have digital identities and as i mentioned before digital identities remove the trust barrier but we know we are not there yet and as such we need to have a

token so that the machine has a wallet is able to remove the trust and the friction by transacting with the other machine and making sure that the value is actually being transferred like their energy flow as I mentioned before so that is the first reason no digital identities the second reason is IOT is not about the internet and we need to make it possible for these machine to machine payments to actually happen in the future we're not going to envision machines sending an API request to to a bank and saying please transfer money from my bank account to another bank kind of a machine that simply doesn't

work and it's not scalable especially if we talk about billions of devices transacting we're simply gonna have network congestions well and also I think it's a time so one of the things I always joke about is you can't have an instantaneous or automated system if you wait a day for the bank to settle the the payment. Yeah, exactly. And that's just ridiculous. The third reason is micropayments. I don't know of any protocol or any traditional financial instrument that enables you to do micropayments in a trustless way, especially. And as we discussed, IoT, machine-to-machine transactions are all about micropayments. And the exciting part about micropayments is that you get

this fine granularity of what you're actually paying for, meaning you don't have a monthly a subscription service but you only pay per usage unit per minute that you use this robotic arm and it really unlocks so much more capital as well and now the fourth reason is what actually got me into this whole dlt space is permissionless innovation we want to have an open and permissionless network that is not owned by a single entity where no consortium makes decisions but where we have an open way for people to participate and to and to benefit from this ability to transact value and so another question that um i think comes up is uh this isn't a blockchain right i think you kind of already answered that with uh it's the dlt components

are there it is not a chain of blocks of transactions yeah yeah and we we were the first ones to truly introduce dax back in 2015 and what is it a deck okay what directed a psychic graph okay yeah and we've seen many projects now also start utilizing DAX so it's really a confirmation and by the way just so you know my co-founder come from beyond was also the first one to develop the full proof-of-stake blockchain well he was really pioneering this space since 2011 2012 so we really have this deep technological knowledge of the LTS but really now our our goal and our job as a project is to cross this technology chasm as i mentioned before everything

is a proof of concept today how do we actually make sure that those technologies are ready and i think when it comes to making sure that these projects are ready there's like three ways to look at it first obviously technology it needs to be scalable and it needs to be validated that is scalable the second one is governance and i think governance is one of the most underrated concepts in this space because you don't want to have a for-profit entity owning this this protocol where we envision billions of dollars to be transacted with I just think there's a huge conflict of interest because they also benefit the most from it and governance is really where we make sure that the

protocol itself is not going to be developed by one entity but it's being hosted in the vendor neutral environment meaning that corporate startups developers everybody can start participating and making collective decisions on what should be the future of the protocol similarly to how TCP IP is being further developed or the Linux kernel there's a hugely valuable and pieces of technology where we need to have a proper governance framework around that and it's especially important for protocol where value is being transacted and as my governance is really what many more projects in this

space should look out for and the third one is always the ecosystem we need to You have people built around and built on top. And so talk to me about two, three, five years from now. What are some of the applications that come on to the network that you get the most excited about? So we talked about the car, right, and kind of the digital wallet in a car. I could see that happening very quickly, right? Yeah. What are some of these other applications that you see that you're like, look, we not only are excited,

but we think that they're they're viable in the kind of two to five year time frame yeah so as you mentioned i think the machine wallet itself is going to be the biggest application because now we can really make it possible for these machines to actually start providing the service like manufacturing on demand will be huge in the future where large corporates no longer need to have huge capital expenditures on acquiring the machines but they simply lease them on demand so that will be huge. But I think there's many other very exciting concepts like the data economy part where we are also really thinking about AI. And so one of the most exciting concepts for me is really federated machine learning. Okay, explain that. So federated machine learning can be explained quite simply.

Instead of sending the data to the algorithm, you're sending the algorithm to the data. That means the devices are no longer transacting their gigabytes of data to the cloud where the cloud is now the smart engine but the edge itself the devices start collecting the data they start analyzing the data and what they do then is they start sharing the insights with each other oh interesting so rather than me be the car that takes all the data i have send that data somewhere it's analyzed in the cloud and then basically i get the insights back and then everyone else gets insights. Instead, all of that computation and analysis happens at the car level. And then all I'm transacting is the final insights to whether it's a central party or another, you know,

decentralized node in a network. Yeah. And the exciting part is that you can really make a data privacy preserving AI application, meaning your sensitive data does not get shared. Your Fitbit is actually smart on its own but it also becomes even smarter from all the other fitbits that are around because people are sharing data but no sensitive data gets shared and that will really unlock so much more potential for the future whereby ai which as everybody agrees is here it's having an impact but ai today is really something that is there just to get as much data from you as possible that is why google and facebook are really dominating it today now with federated machine learning you're really starting to solve these

problems of data data gathering and data collection and make it possible for these machines to also start selling those insights with iota tokens so they start paying each other and they collectively get smarter and then there's a high probability this is the world we're moving to right I think that we kind of both agree that an autonomous automated world it's more a question of when not if what's the ethical concerns or the potential downsides of doing this right I think you know as technologists we always get excited about oh look at this world we can go build and create all this benefit what's the downside

that people should either be aware of or thinking about as we move towards this world the downside is really on building something that is not future proof what do you mean by that so one of the most interesting books that I read like a a year or two ago was called the master switch and it talks about how does very exciting technological advances start out in a decentralized way but then they start becoming more centralized so it's really a cycle a good example is what happened with the telephone system where initially it was very decentralized you had those farmers operating the switches and then AT&T

came aboard they started building up those huge mess and everything and it started owning the network itself owning the ecosystem and now we have their their ridiculous price policies and the same happened with the internet whereby now we have those huge conglomerates that own the internet and they also own you and own your data and that is why the internet has become this double-edged sword we talked about we want to connect as many people as possible but now we're starting to realize damn like the internet is actually having an impact on our democracy which is what fundamentally protects us as well from

bad decisions and now we are really in an environment where the internet is having a negative impact and with technologies like AI and distributed ledgers we also need to think about how can we make the system future-proof that we don't have a similar situation again that a few monopolies a few large companies are owning their respective ecosystems and are owning the protocol itself and they're making bad decisions on our behalf and so can we prevent some of that stuff or do you think it's something that we just have to be aware of and it's a necessary evil with the progress that that that it comes with sadly i think it's the latter because

really yeah because that's that's why we have coinbase right it's just too much of a pain in the ass to store your own tokens and you're worried about losing it now we start going to the centralized providers and those centralized providers are really there to solve the entire ui and ux problem that we have so i hope that we can figure out a way on how to resolve those issues but i think the the only way to really resolve that from ever happening is to make the right policies and the right regulation and that obviously assumes that we have the right people in place to make those decisions and that's why i always say is that we cannot do this alone we need to bring the old world with the new world together to really start

building a framework to make sure that this is something that will last decades and will truly bring prosperity to all of us. And only by bringing the nerds and the policymakers together, we can make that happen. Yeah. And I guess what do you guys do as you're building out kind of the connectivity, right? It's really how I think, but you're building the network where you can transact value on for these machines. How do you interface with the corporate partners? How do you interface with like industry associations, just people who are working on similar types of problems and want to see the same world, but they're just not focused on this part of the technology stack. Yeah. So I think that IOTA is really one of the top three ecosystems in the

space in terms of corporate adoption and also our community. And since inception, we always said is that we work for and with the industry. We are really building a technology that solves industrial problems. And we have some very big corporates that we have as our partners that are really starting to develop together with us like jaguar land rover like st microelectronics like energy net and ng and so on and so forth all of those really large conglomerates that are starting to realize they need to invest now into a technology like iota to start building business models for the future who are the other who are the other two that you think are are just as big i think hyper legend ethereum really not bitcoin i think in corporate adoption oh in corporate

adoption yeah yeah you got it okay no general adoption i think bitcoin is definitely the biggest yeah when it comes from a user standpoint got it but really from like a partnership standpoint etc yeah it's a bitcoin's business development department is is lacking yeah we should call up the ceo yeah call the ceo exactly by the way one of my fun one of my favorite jokes at all crypto but um all right so as you guys are building out the um this corporate partnerships etc where do you see those people today in terms of their receptivity right So some organizations obviously are like, hey, we'd love to work on this now. I'm assuming there's still some who are just, ah, we're not ready or we kind of are skeptical of this stuff.

So I think especially after the bust of 2018, we saw a little bit of less responsiveness and less interest. But I think those companies that are truly committed, they have started investing more resources into this. And they have also shown much more commitment. And the stage that we are at right now is that we have a self-sufficient ecosystem, meaning that corporates come to us and say, hey, we've actually built this on IOTA. Do we want to do a partnership announcement and stuff like that? So that's really the stage that we are at right now where we're starting to see this snowball rolling faster and faster. Also, because we are part of some large industrial associations, we're starting to work on standardization and corporates start to realize we need to get into this now. and also this entire space has matured a lot we we got rid of all the bullshit from 2017 where

companies were bombarded by moon boys they were bombarded by ico projects and now it's really about value creation because what is what what distributed ledgers were really invented for and what bitcoin was invented for is to truly change what is wrong today to really change this this trust level that we have today and improve it significantly and also introduce this new open trust layer to this to society that starts benefiting all of us not just the corporates but also the citizens and individuals that live up in these cities for sure when uh people who are listening to this leave what's the one thing that you want them to um to kind of walk away with right when they think of viota they think of what you guys are building kind of what's that you know

one or two sentences just hey here's how i want people to view the world through our perspective i think that iota is not just a cryptocurrency it's not just another speculative asset it's really something where we are focused on what are the fundamentals and how do we get those fundamentals right and how can we make sure that the currency part in in cryptocurrency actually comes back because today all cryptocurrencies are speculative assets and we want to make the jump and actually have something where machines start transacting with each other where we have an economy that is starting to really make up our future as a we are we as a non-profit foundation are really focused on building towards the future and and we don't see ourselves as competing with

other projects we don't want to get into a fights but we focus on value creation and i think other projects should focus on the same and you think cars and kind of this machine wallet is the first place where the adoption really is going to take off and also on the data security part having an audit trade of your vehicle and like the the telemetry data is a good example or supply chain data those are the areas where i think we will see the first adoption and then it will start really going and growing from there when it comes to smart cities smart cities are themselves are very interesting because what is a smart city smart city is transportation it's a supply chain this energy and we need to start combining all of these different verticals and industries into

one machine economy that is why i'm also very much against utility tokens because they serve no purpose because you start just creating more friction and more barriers what um before i wrap up each uh episode i always ask kind of rapid fire questions what uh what's the most important company in crypto other than your own um most important company in crypto i definitely think right now it's these type of exchanges that take regulation seriously and that are starting to build for the future because when i have when i have a big partner speaking with a big partner i'm not going to send them to a corporation hong kong to do kyc so it's really about those exchanges that are built to last as well and take regulation take data protection everything very

seriously yeah it's kind of you have to provide value to your customers right yeah exactly that definition is changing depending on what customer is kind of the desired customer what um what's the one regulation that you would change or improve if you could change any of them in germany or in anywhere in the world you pick you you're you're more global than i am so you pick what which jurisdiction you would choose i i think really data protection laws i would start introducing much more data protection laws globally because that is what's really required for us to also start speeding up the adoption of distributed ledgers as a whole but we are actually seeing that in the united states where california is really leading these new data protection acts

and i think those are really those type of laws that we need to focus on right now what's the most controversial thought you have in uh in all of uh bitcoin crypto iota world the most controversial thought is probably like can you talk about other specific projects you can do whatever you want that some of the major projects in the top 10 top 20 are planned pump and dump schemes do you want to name any of them no i don't think so okay i thought i was gonna get you to name one all right i don't know if that's controversial I think a lot of people might agree with you. I think if I would name them, it would be controversial.

Okay. What is the most important book that you've ever read? The most important book that I ever read was probably one of the most interesting one was The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Okay. That's a recent book, right? Yeah. Relatively recent? Yeah, exactly.

Dan Zimmerman from my team is shilling it everywhere. Okay. But it brings a very interesting perspective of how these ecosystems evolve and why these companies actually make those decisions and how they perceive you. But other than that, I read a lot of research papers in this space. But right now, what I'm really focused on is less about the future, more about the present, meaning I'm starting reading a lot about management books and how to lead a big team. Because we are in the foundation, we are now 120, 130 people. Wow. 120, 130 people.

Yeah. That's a lot of people. In 23 countries, so it's very decentralized. Yeah, that's a lot of people. Where do you find them all? On the internet. Just that different job recruiting website? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah, we grew quite a lot, and so you need to focus on organizational structures and so on and so forth. So that's also what excites me, being a leader of this and figuring out how we can really also start building new ventures in this ecosystem and being a CEO-type person. yeah that's really really cool but in general i want to read more but like during during the stressful year of the last two years uh 12 30 months i wasn't able to read much yeah just jump on twitter twitter's always got an opinion about something um before we end you get asked me a question but first we talk aliens believer or non-believer let's put it this way if aliens exist i hope that they're not going to come right now on earth because the world is pretty fucked

okay you hope that they don't come interesting why why why do you hope that they don't come i mean the world is is in a pretty bad shape right now and we need to get our act together especially on on misinformation and how easy it is to spread it and you think if the aliens came they would tell everyone that they're not here and then we would all believe that they're not here yet i would probably shake their head and fly back you guys are idiots yeah we actually we actually want nothing to do with this forget we were ever here see ya all right what uh what one question do you have for me what question i have for you is like how do you think that this space is going to evolve over the next year what what what really excites you yeah um so when most

people ask me what does the space need i say time so i get more excited the longer the timeline is right so one year away it looks pretty similar to where we are today right yeah maybe you know there's some prices move there's some more companies that come in and start building with um you know bitcoin and blockchains and and uh different uh technologies there's more startups for sure that kind of you know start creating things um so you get progress right there's only 12 months there's only so much that can happen in that right you said to me how excited am i about five years from now i'm getting pretty excited right you say to me 20 years from now i'm really fucking excited right and yeah and it's just because uh with more time comes more opportunity

right and ultimately i have a deep conviction in um kind of where that world ends up uh and so it's just the more time that that we're given the more i think that gets done and even if you look at you The easiest example is if you were to look at the number of companies, the number of people operating in the industry, and then the number of people who are signed up at exchanges or using some of these products through 2018, the numbers usually actually went up. So even when prices were going the opposite direction than where most people wanted, the usage and a lot of this stuff was actually going in the other direction. Right. You know, the Bitcoin one is the one I see people cite the most on Twitter of the hash rate. So price is going down. Hash rate is 4xing. That's a pretty interesting counter signal, right, in terms of what's going on with price. And so that's happening in the, quote, bear markets.

Well, what's going to happen when we go back into the bull markets? Right. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of excitement. And I actually think that the next bull market will make the last one look pretty small. right and so when that happens like let's you know hold on right because i think it'll be pretty exciting stuff no i think it will be very exciting and i think now people really understand that there's a lot of potential and we are here to stay and that is what everybody should understand that this is not going away absolutely um where can people find you on the internet and find out more about iota so they can find out more about iota at iota.org iota.org and you can follow me

on twitter at dom sheener d-o-m-s-c-h-i-e-n-e-r awesome man well listen thank you so much for doing this i think that um you know you you and i have talked in the past and obviously this conversation around just automation and a kind of autonomous world that we're heading into uh where machines are transaction with machines is uh it's going to happen right it's very exciting it's just a question to kind of um you know who are the players and and then um you know what's kind of the sequential rollout or adoption of this, but I don't find very many people who argue with the idea that automation is going to happen. Yeah, exactly. The only thing we really need to focus on is to do it the right way. Yeah. Make it future-proof. I love the terminology future-proof,

so we'll have to bring you back on at some point in the future and kind of get an update as to where you guys are and then get a lay of the land when it comes to machine-to-machine transactions. Yeah, thank you very much. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review

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