Transcript: Supporting Your Employees While You Return to Work

we're not a home building company. The day we plugged up our email system to the internet was a game changer. And I think you're going to see the same thing kind of happen with blockchain, especially enterprise blockchain technology. And so I look at probably cryptocurrency is even counterproductive for legitimizing how blockchain can contribute to business use cases and even cryptocurrency can too. But there's so much flash and guys with big chains, there's too much glamour stuff around it.

So, because there's very, very legitimate and serious use cases for blockchain as a technology. And uniquely, this ability to have a immutable ledger that crosses organizational boundaries. And construction happens to be, I think probably one of the best, if not the best use case scenario, because I compare it to like supply chain. Well, we might have five or six organizations involved in a single package shipping overseas. And it provides a single record, single source of the truth for that package as it crosses through five or six different hands.

Well, on a construction project, that could be 50 organizations involved in a single project. It could be a hundred organizations involved in a single project. And there is no common ledger. There is no single source of the truth that serves across organizational boundaries. And I think when that gets fully realized and fully leveraged, it's going to be a big game changer.

I think all this reconciling, with the internet, I mean, we could send invoices from one company to the other, but it didn't eliminate reconciliation and disputes. And everybody had their own data silo, right? Everybody had their own, the vendors record show this and the general contractor's record shows that. You still had the reconciliation and dispute scenario, whether the internet was there or not. Well, I think with blockchain, that's gonna go away.

And that's where a lot of the frictions and a lot of the productivity gains are gonna be realized. So to that topic, kind of middlemen, it was pretty interesting that the FBI got their hands on the keys of the ransomware. I speak to the middleman. I mean, maybe, yeah, I missed something, but to me, that seemed to be a significant milestone. I'm assuming those keys were held by a custodian because if they were kind of cold, the FBI would not have been able to get those keys.

So anybody know more details on how that all went down? Because I think it's about middlemen, right? I think you're right. It's the things that had to respond to a court order to turn over the keys. And there must have been a custodian in the middle.

I thought the same thing, Kurt. I don't know what the answer was or how it happened, but I had to think, well, they must have used an exchange because if it was done in a fashion in a fashion where somebody was storing their keys offline, I don't know how the FBI would have ever been able to crack it. Bitcoin has never been cracked because it's too, proof of work is, it does burn a lot of energy, but it does also make it very uncrackable. So there must have been a custodian that must have, and you would think the party receiving the funds would have been aware of that, but I don't know.

This is not the first time, this is not the first time the FBI has figured a way to track down people who were being bad actors on the platform. I forget where I saw all this, but it was, I think Netflix had actually a documentary about that. Mel, do you remember most of that? They've tracked them down, right? Silk Road and stuff like that, but as far as actually getting their hands on the keys, maybe that's the thing that I hadn't seen, so curious.

Yeah, no, several thoughts going through my mind, but I would say for the non-conspiracy piece of it, it's a very accurate and more than likely scenario that there was some custodian involved, or even if there was not a custodian involved, and say they were using one of those wallets that you can download, and maybe they didn't know that, however they were backing up the key to the site that maintains the wallet could be decrypted by the FBI. That could be another way where they thought they were using something private that wasn't custodial, but just the act of backing up the mnemonic and so on and so forth to whatever servers and infrastructure that wallet provides also puts you at risk because I know from experience that we structured our servers and things like that for that very scenario that different governments might want to come and get access to their

constituents financial information, and we will be obliged to give it. And so one of the pieces in passing that audit was making sure that we had different regions and different cryptographic keys organized for the regional databases that we were storing that information. And then Don, I think this is Melvin again, just to address Kurt's point, I just wanted to recap the topic of last week when we said middlemen aren't dead, and in any other setting, that would be like a no-brainer, right? But one of the biggest hype pieces in the last week but one of the biggest hype pieces in the whole blockchain space, even from the start was this idea of a utopic vision where you wouldn't eat middlemen at all, and you'd have this completely trustless framework that this intermediates all institutions, right?

And I don't think that was necessarily what they were attempting to convey, or it might have just been part of the marketing hype to get people excited, but in any deep analysis of how people work and play and of just technology itself, we started to discuss the idea that there's no such thing as non-human assisted technology, and all technology is human assisted because it's made by humans for humans. So just wanted to just kind of recap that piece of it. Well, let me jump in here real quick, Melvin.

I think you're exactly right. As long as a middleman provides value, like credentialing, there's still gotta be a verification process, and a certain amount of that's gonna be automated, but there's always gonna be this, I think, need to have a human stamp its credibility. That there's somebody behind the credentialing process instead of just an abstracted computer process. And I remember even back in the mid 90s when the internet was happening, it was commonly quoted, there was gonna be this tremendous disinmediation of all these middlemen and wholesalers and distributors and everything, and it didn't happen.

Because there was still a lot of value being created, and the internet did not address that. It gave us the biggest. You're exactly right. Now what I do think will happen though this time around is people that aren't creating value but are collecting money just by being in a position, which I'm gonna say banks are like that, but banks are kind of like that, where they're not really creating that much business value besides just moving funds around. Then I think we will see some disintermediation around this time, but I could be wrong.

But I think it may be only 10 or 20% impact and still 80% will be there, delivering some kind of unique value that these people have provided in the past or a modern way in the future. And if nothing else then I think, especially in the case of banks, it will draw out the real value of what the banks have been providing all along. So it kind of will force them to show where the value is that they provide and maybe have to share that more.

There's a reason why you're hiding is because you're able to do a whole lot more with the resources that people entrust you with, then they know what to do with themselves. And so we're seeing a big conversion into the kind of self-awareness and self-indulgability through these robo advisors and things like that to invest in markets, invest in ideas and things and so forth and be able to connect those financial infrastructures in a way that feels like point and click and plug and play. So that's huge and that's putting the, ever since Simple Bank, right, before this blockchain stuff came out, that has been putting pressure on banks to improve their interfaces and to do things that show more value to their customers.

And so I think that's a... Right, I think exactly. And is that any different than how capitalism has always evolved ever since the invention of the steam engine and moving forward? So there's always been this having to re-evaluate the value proposition based on how the landscape has changed out in front of you. Whether it's, and it's almost always technology driven because even the steam engine before it was, and then electricity and going forward, this is probably not anything new now.

I didn't think this is gonna be kind of a hypersteroid change and things are gonna change much more drastically. I do believe there's a logarithmic curve to this stuff and we're not on the flat side of the curve anymore. We're getting closer to the sharp bend upward and then we're gonna see the curve and we're not on the curve anymore. We're getting closer to the sharp bend upward where it looks almost vertical. What was interesting is that in 2019 blockchain was dead.

I don't know if you guys caught that, but it died. And they said, oh, it's flat. There's no more investment or innovation in this. Same thing happened in the year 2000 with the internet. It was dead.

Yeah, it's hilarious. It really is. I think they may have been wrong. Just speculating here. Brynn, you had something to add from a comment that we got.

Can you guys hear me? Looks like it's coming through. My little face is lighting up. Yeah, so we've been getting some commentary. It was a little bit ago when we were talking about how Bitcoin blockchain had not been crackable.

Christopher Churchill, PMP said, it is crackable. Look back to when Google announced its accomplishments in quantum computing 2019. On that day, there was a huge precipitous drop in cryptos. Quantum computing is here. So I just thought it was an interesting comment given the quantum computing trajectory.

I'm curious as to whether there's in response to that comment. Well, I've had this conversation with me and I guess there's no such thing as something's impossible, right? But I think there's an economic equation that has to enter it. Because when it costs more money to crack the code than it's worth, than the transaction's worth, the use of quantum ceases to be practical even though it is in theory possible. So if somebody's making a...

But if somebody's trying to crack a $1,500 transaction, at least for now and at least the next five or 10 years, I gotta think it's not economically feasible even though in theory it's possible. But I don't have any real stats or studies upon that, but I do know there's an economic diminishing return scenario. Yeah, I think that's a great... Another point that someone pointed out to me a while back is even if you have the power to do it, once you do it, everybody knows that you have the power to do it.

So you probably don't wanna do that in such a public way. You might go for other targets, right? That gets you access to the same information just not by hacking the Bitcoin protocol itself. Yeah, and let's say there's a $10 million trends transaction where you just send out 50 transactions like that. So you break it down where each transaction is small enough that it's not economically feasible at a lower rate.

So even if you get up to a $10 million transaction and it looks like it might be worth cracking it, you just start to transfer in the funds in smaller amounts. So it's almost like warfare. So there's this constant battle between strategy and counter strategy, right? And I think people will figure it out. You know what I mean?

And like I said, it's not like regular money isn't vulnerable too. There's no such thing as perfection including our own, including fiat currency isn't perfect either. So they had to worry about people using copying machines to copy it. So everything's relative to what's its alternatives. Yeah, and just again, a good point of recap is why we introduced the whole concept of middlemen aren't dead is because you need some subjectivity in the process for instances where hard, let's just say really rigid processes don't account for say the humanity that's involved in rectifying a situation.

So we were talking about it as the word insurance, right? And this is a perfect example of such. If you do get hacked, right? And you most likely will some way somehow even if it's not by a quantum computer, where's your protection in that case, right? How, even when you buy a brand and I gave the examples of like the Model T and my brand new Subaru which is supposed to be a safe car and all these things.

And it went to the shop twice last week. And I just got it back this week today. So we were talking about the difference between having that Model T and having the Subaru because I had to know how to fix that Model T myself. And even though it's the same concept, same technology, four wheels, steering wheel, move fast on the road and gets me from point A to point B, hopefully reliably. Now, if something goes wrong with my vehicle, I have a tow truck that'll come and get it.

They'll probably bring over another car for me to a loaner to drive in the meantime. And obviously I pay an extra premium for that service but that insurance policy. And so we were saying that if not just for the simple fact that we're doing more and more of these tightly coupled, very rigid types of logical transactions, you're going to need insurance of some sort to cover