(upbeat music) - The story of Bitcoin
began more than a decade ago when Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin in response to the 2008 financial crisis. With more than a decade passed since then, in all these years, Bitcoin has given rise to a huge ecosystem of what we
now know as cryptocurrencies that can be used as a medium
of exchange and storage and potentially replace
or augment fiat currency. Now, different industries are looking at implementing blockchain and potentially using
cryptocurrencies to do many things. This includes paying
vendors, receiving payments, creating efficiency within their industry. My name is Ian Khan. My love of Bitcoin started
almost five years ago when I directed my first
documentary "Blockchain City". In "Blockchain City" I spoke about the emergence of blockchain
as a viable technology to change how cities function. In my work as a futurist, I encounter a lot of
different technologies and emerging ideas that can rapidly change the world we live in. In the Bitcoin dilemma, I'm bringing to you different perspectives from the cryptocurrency
industry, investment community, well-known experts,
inventors and influencers to help understand the
role of cryptocurrency in our world today and its
potential impact on all of us in the future. You'll also learn a lot
about the future of finance, asset management and a simple way of understanding
decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens. This documentary is meant for everybody and is not a technical documentary where you need to have a
huge background or knowledge about finance or cryptocurrencies or blockchain or technology. In fact, the less, you
know, the better it is. This documentary is
suitable for school kids, university students,
professionals, homemakers, business owners, employees,
leaders in every industry you can think of that. We've approached this
documentary with the simple fact that everybody will be
impacted by cryptocurrency at some stage in the next few years. The more we understand this
era of cryptocurrencies, the better decisions we
will make about our lives. This in turn will benefit
all of us collectively. I will introduce you to all
the guests in the documentary as we encounter them. And with that, let's begin
with my friend Kim Komando, a Hall of Fame broadcaster radio host, whose show is America's largest radio show about technology and more. I ask Kim to help us
understand what Bitcoin is. (upbeat music) - Let's say that you want to
send your friend John $10. You could give him cash. You could write John a check. You could send him the
$10 using Venmo or Zelle, or you could use cryptocurrency. Now, cryptocurrency is the
broad term that describes when two parties exchange
currency over the internet. So you would send John
the equivalent of $10 in United States dollars,
but in virtual currency, that goes by these
crazy names like Bitcoin and doge coin and Ethereum. And when you do the transaction, there's gonna be some small
fees associated with it because after all nothing's free, not even when it comes to cryptocurrency. - Well, there we heard it from Kim. To understand cryptocurrencies
it's really important to have different perspectives and I couldn't think of anybody
better than Leeman Baird, inventor and creator of a
cryptocurrency called Hashgraph. Lehman is a globally recognized authority, mathematician and scientist who's working on the
future of cryptocurrencies to his invention of Hashgraph. Let's hear about what
distributed ledger technology is all about. (upbeat music) - [Leemon] Bitcoin was the first distributed ledger technology. The first DLT, the first ledger, it gave us the ability
to have a kind of money that isn't run by a central bank. There is no single person controlling it. It is distributed across
a large number of people, running computers and as long
as most of them are honest, in the case of Bitcoin, as long
as you can estimate exactly how much computing power,
then you can trust it. And so the whole idea of these ledgers are that we take things that
were done by a central party, and we distribute them out over a group so that you can trust it. No one person can hurt it. So, you know, money
right now is paper money, but most of the money in the
world is not paper bills. Most money in the world is just ones and zeros on a computer but it's the ones and
zeros in a single computer. Your bank account is
held by a single computer and the bank could cheat
and change the numbers. But with a ledger it's ones and zeros, but it's distributed across many computers in a way that no one computer can cheat. Even a small group of them cannot cheat. And so you can trust it. - So, ask anybody who knows
anything about cryptocurrencies or blockchain or DLTs, trust is a fundamental pillar of what this entire technology stack is bringing to different industries. And in fact, to the entire world. Blockchain technology that
forms the foundation of crypto is all about trust, eliminating
mistrust and the challenges that we face with the
current financial system. I spoke with Bobby Lee, a board member at the Bitcoin Foundation. He's also author of "Promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and
How it Can Work For You". Bobby is one of the earliest pioneers in the cryptocurrency space and
has seen the rise of Bitcoin from its very, very early days. - [Bobby] Prior to Bitcoin,
we never really had a tangible digital asset of value. Everything digital was belonging
to some centralized entity or corporation, whether
it's movies, music, artwork, photographs, and stuff like that. We never had a truly native asset class that was worth money. So even though today we've
called Bitcoin digital currency, I'd much rather describe
it in more technical terms as a decentralized digital asset. What's an asset? An asset is a vessel,
a container for value. And the idea that people hold
assets is for two reasons. Number one is they want
to preserve the value. This is what they call store
value or store hold of value. And the other reason to
hold an asset is hopefully, maybe it might even appreciate in value relative to other assets. - As we get deeper into
learning about Bitcoin and everything that goes on with it, I wanted to bring in more of
an entrepreneur's perspective. I spoke with Ben Way. Ben started his first
company at the age of 15 and went on to raise 25
million pounds in his teens, making him one of the world's
first.com millionaires. Today, Ben is an entrepreneur,
author and investor. - [Ben] Cryptocurrency revolution has been an incredible journey. I mean the only analogy I
have or experience I have, anything like it in my life
was the internet revolution. I was there right at the
beginning when people were telling me the internet was a fad and domain names would
not exist in a few years. And my father laughed. I said to him, dad, one
day people buy things on the internet and he was like, son you're definitely
barking up the wrong tree. It's actually an
interesting predictable path these revolutions take. They have a kind of
beginning where everyone's just in the industry talking about it and then it starts to build into some kind of snowball effect and then it transitions
into something dangerous which is the hype cycle. And the hype cycle is very
dangerous because it's generally where you have big crashes and because it's become general knowledge, that's also when moms
and pops lose their money and people get really hurt. So having seen these cycles, the crypto cycle is very similar. - I wanted to also bring
in a critical element to understanding the whole
cryptocurrency world. And I spoke with my good
friend, Daniel Roberts who's the editor-in-chief off
a publication called Decrypt. He has spoken in covered
cryptocurrencies since 2011 and is a highly recognized
journalist and writer covering the crypto space. Let's talk to Dan about
the realistic foresight on cryptocurrencies. - At the very least, I think
it has proven itself over the course of 10, 11, 12
years to the point where it's not going away. It's not going to collapse
and disappear tomorrow. There are tens of thousands
of other cryptocurrencies altcoins, what have you. Some of them have real projects
and purposes behind them, some don't, many will disappear, but at the very least, I think Bitcoin and then also Ethereum which is a separate blockchain
network are here to stay. And in the last year and a half or so, there was kind of a
perfect storm of narratives that converged. The COVID-19 pandemic really reiterated for a lot of people the appeal
of Bitcoin as an investment, as digital gold when governments are handing out stimulus checks and when the fed is
pulling various levers, that's a reminder that
Bitcoin has a capped supply and there will only ever
be 21 million coins. Even if you have no interest in it fine, even if you think it's stupid, fine. But I think that what
the consensus has shown is that it's here to stay. It exists, it's gonna continue to exist. And in addition, amid the
last year and a half or so, you had not just traditional
wall street investors, but some publicly traded
companies also buying it and showing that they
believe it's here to stay. PayPal, Square, Tesla. Of course the Tesla one
has been very controversial due to Elon Musk, but sort of all at once, multiple parties embraced
Bitcoin like never before. And the difference from 2017,
which was the last mania, is that that was really a retail driven. That was just the regular folks. Now it's kind of multiple
parties at once jumping in. - Now, you may think of
everything that's happening with crypto being really
different from what we know about the financial world and how's the supply and
demand really impacting how do we work with cryptocurrencies? Do you think this is stupid? Let's hear from a crypto analyst. Scott Melker is a cryptocurrency analyst and well known crypto advocate. Here's what he has to say. - I think there was a grand
awakening since COVID hit that the policies of central
banks and governments were failing the people when
you saw stocks continuing to rise and endless money and printing and quantitative easing. I believe people started
to look for a solution to store their value
in Bitcoin solves that. You know, in the cryptocurrency space, we're building an absolutely
new global financial system that allow people who are
unbanked and underbanked access like they'd never had before. - Multiple Time's author, Michael Casey is going to help us understand a lot more about the rise of cryptocurrencies. Michael works as an educator and advisor at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Sloan School
of Business Management. He is the acclaimed author
of five books on finance, social media and cultural history. His latest book, "The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the
Future of Everything" is a must read for anyone
who wants to know more about the future of blockchain. - [Michael] It's an
integral part of the way that we see the world now. That the crypto sort of,
blockchain mindset, if you like, and therefore I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna pull it out and
put a flag in the ground and say that this is the
age of cryptocurrency. (upbeat music) - I also wanted us to talk to someone from a really strong financial background. Someone who does this day in and day out. I could think of nobody
else but Mark Yusko who heads Morgan Creek Capital Management and is an authority on anything
related to investments. Here are Mark's initial comments. - [Mark] If we go back in time
throughout most of history, assets were bare assets, right? If you go back to the history
of money in the olden days, you had cows, I had chickens and we would bring our
cows and chickens to market and we would trade. And then that got to be too cumbersome so you printed little
coins with cows on them and I printed little coins
with chickens on them, and we would exchange those coins. Well then, carrying those sack of coins got to be really heavy so we
deposited those coins at a bank and they gave us pieces of paper, currency that we could exchange. And that's how commerce
and money was created. Now, there was a time when
money actually had backing. Like you could exchange a
physical note for gold or silver. In fact, a pound note 380 years ago would get you a pound of Sterling silver. The problem is because we went
away from the gold standard and the silver standard, today, it would take you 174
pounds of Sterling silver to get a pound note. So we've devalued
currencies around the world, in the fiat that world. So fiat means the government
can issue currency at will, at fiat and we've
untethered from backing. So quickly, currencies have
never had anything behind them. Money is simply custom and belief. In the old days, you
had your coins with cows and I had my coins with chickens and the only reason those had value is 'cause you and I were
willing to exchange them, or you can go back to the Roman empire. They had the Denarius because
people customarily accepted it in exchange for something of value. Why are my dollars in the United States, green pieces of paper, in China they're red pieces of paper and in Israel, they're
yellow pieces of paper. They're just pieces of paper but they aren't backed by anything, right? If I turn my green paper
money into the US government, I get zip, zero, nada. I don't get gold. I don't get silver. I don't get a share of tax revenues. And in fact, it's worse than that, currency actually is backed by debt. The only real money in the world is gold which has no associated liability, which is why for 5,000 years, one ounce has bought a fine
person suit from a suit of armor to a Zoot suit in the 20s, to a fine man suit on Santoro today. And why Bitcoin as digital gold, all the properties of
gold but digital form, has no liability associated with it. But all currencies, US
dollars, renminbi, euros, all have government debt
associated with them and that's why they are de-valuing. In the last 12 months, the US government printed 40% of all... Actually they didn't print, they hit a button and now
we have ones and zeros you know, have paper money anymore. it's all electronic, but 40% of the outstanding money supply in the history of the Republic, which goes all the way
back to 1776 in 12 months, which means the value of
that currency is going down in terms of purchasing power and that's unfortunately
the nature of currency. So what a real money, right? Gold or Bitcoin, the
reason its prices rising is not necessarily that that
asset is getting better, is that the cross, the
dollar is getting worse. (upbeat music) - Now I'm sure you'll agree
this is getting so exciting because we're looking
at the history of money, where money actually started and the impact that
it's been having on us. Let's hear more about what
fiat means and get deep into the simplest explanation of money that I have ever encountered. - Yeah. There are two types of exchanges, fiat to crypto and crypto to crypto. And I know what you're thinking, hey, I thought a Fiat was a car. Well, not in crypto land. Like most industries,
crypto has its own lexicon. Fiat money is government issued currency. So if you're in the United
States, that means the US dollar and you have many exchanges to use. One of the easiest for beginners to use is something called Coinbase. You pick an exchange
and you open an account. The rest of the process
is really, really simple. You verify your identity, you deposit US dollars into the exchange, and then you can start sending
and spending your crypto. Most cryptocurrencies
are created by something that's called mining. Computers mine coins by solving
these complex math problems. The powerful the computer,
the faster it can think. Now, if your computer is the fastest one to solve the problem,
well, bingo, you're great. You just won one unit of
whatever cryptocurrency that you're mining. And in some cases that
could be $500 or maybe even, I don't know, $50,000. Way back when around 2009, you could fire up your home
computer and start mining. But today mining is run
on specialized chips, known as an ASIC or an Application Specific
Integrated Circuits. Yeah, anytime you talk about technology, there's always this acronym. Anyway, they have up to
a hundred billion times the capacity of PCs. These systems cost thousands
and thousands of dollars. And mining's now big business, it's just a ton of competition. If you're thinking about
getting into mining, only spend money that you are
prepared to lose on the gear. I mean, you could buy tens
of thousands of dollars, worth of hard drives,
graphic cards and processors and not get one coin. But in the meantime,
your electric bill sores and those computer parts will
wear out in no time at all. Now, remember these computers
are working at full speed, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. - [Mark] We have currencies,
we have commodities and I think now we have digital currencies and digital commodities, eventually we'll also have
digital stocks and digital bonds and those are the four asset classes, stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities and if we think of Bitcoin
as potentially digital gold, and we think of other cryptocurrencies potentially as other forms of currency that are more easily used for
transactions, take a dash, for example. - [Bobby] So Bitcoin, I actually liken it to a league of its own. There's been many other
cryptocurrencies that have come up, the likes of Ethetium,
Litecoin, Dogecoin is very hot, very popular. However, these other asset
class are just copycat. Bitcoin is fundamental digital money whereas these other asset classes represent something different. Even though you have a
lot of people pumping all these other alternate coins
or shit coins, if you will. What comes with Bitcoin
is also the speculation. I see it. A lot of platforms on exchanges cater to the so-called investors. Some of them are almost like
degenerate gamblers, right? People liken them to unregulated,
unlicensed online casinos. So that's the sort of ugly side of the Bitcoin speculation trading but legitimately I had looked
at for people to invest, to hold Bitcoin as a long-term asset, that will appreciate
many, many times in value because I think the world has yet to wrap its head around it. - Now that we have a
foundation of finance, we know a little bit about the background of cryptocurrencies, let's talk about some more
advanced and related concepts of cryptocurrency. Some of these are tokens,
non-fungible tokens, and other asset classes. Let's hear back from Mark
and also Stephen Stoneberg who heads a cryptocurrency exchange and also my friend, Steven
Ritter, a crypto security expert, all of whom will help us
understand a lot more about the whole idea of trading crypto
exchanges and tokenization. - We have digital commodities. You know, we have the
NFT boom in digital art. - [Stephen] There's two kinds of tokens. and there's what most people
would refer to in the industry, a utility token. That just means it's not a security. So it's this new asset class
which is called a token, which never really existed before. And so you have some of these tokens are called cryptocurrencies
or utility tokens. I mean, there's lots of like
lingo that's thrown out there. I think if it is a two by two matrix to make the market make sense. So you have utility
token or security token, the security token is
just, it's just a token, but it's considered a
security by like the SEC or somebody else. You know, it has to be sold that way even though it trades on a blockchain. And then there's two kinds of those tokens in the other axes, it
would be fungible token, that's a Bitcoin where
you take a dollar bill. You don't care which one you
have, they're all the same, and then there's non-fungible, token NFT, which is you care which one
of those token you have. And you can have an NFT
that's a utility token or a security token. The same thing with a fungible token. They can either be a utility
token or a security token. Now, as an exchange,
we have utility tokens. That's what all
cryptocurrency exchanges offer and then we are also
offering security tokens on a limited basis. You're selling securities. So you have to do that
under the right regulation. Or maybe not, it depends
on the exchange we follow, we follow the regulation. - NFTs right now, look like a cash trap. In many cases, they are
a stunt or a celebrity or a pro athlete to make a quick dollar while also they would say strengthening their engagement with their fans. And that's okay, but that's
not necessarily that exciting to crypto purists. You also have to understand the politics and the context here,
which is that most NFTs are built on the Ethereum
blockchain separate from Bitcoin. So, you also have a lot of people who just want nothing
to do with that space. The Bitcoin maximalist. They believe there's only one God, and that God is Bitcoin
and they have no interest in all the other stuff. Now, Ethereum is really interesting because it's a blockchain
that was specifically designed to support smart contracts. And there are all kinds
of business applications that open up because of that, NFTs are one of them. There are multiple
industries embracing them. I think right now the media
has been interested in NFTs because of those eye-popping prices. In many cases, the most
expensive NFTE sales have been to existing
crypto VCs and rich people. You know, MetaKovan who is an NFT person was the one who bought the
$69 million Bitcoin FT. So does that one sale
demonstrate that NFTs have gone mainstream? Not really. - Now, if you've been following
cryptocurrencies at all, you probably would have
heard that many celebrities and influential people talk about different types of cryptos. The names of cryptocurrencies,
including Dogecoin come to mind. In fact, celebrity
CEOs, such as Elon Musk, who's a big advocate of
some cryptocurrencies, I spoke with Chester Spatt who served as the Chief Economist at the US Securities and
Exchange Commission, SEC, I asked Chester about the
role of celebrity influencers and is this something that
should really influence the price of crypto and the rates at which
cryptocurrencies are traded? I guess this was my initial
question on really the hype versus reality of cryptocurrencies and what is real and what is not? - [Chester] Elon Musk, he's a genius in the broad aspects of society across the political spectrum, they recognize him as a genius, but as a by-product of how
the society doesn't expect the same types of norms and behaviors from him that the society
expects from most individuals. I can bet Musk making
misleading statements with little factual basis and taking those
statements super seriously. And I would have thought
he would have learned from his experience several years ago. I think unfortunately the SEC
only slapped in on the risk. They probably needed to slap on the wrist a little bit harder. And so he probably didn't learn so much, but you look at the recent events where first he's really
taunting the Bitcoin and also Doge on the side, but (indistinct) those too, and he says, oh, we're
gonna take this at Tesla. And he doesn't say, oh,
and what are we gonna do with the Bitcoin? Well, we'll probably convert it. He doesn't say, well, we'll probably
convert it into dollars. I presume that's what
they would probably do because their costs
after all are in dollars. But then within a matter
of weeks, he says, no, we're not gonna accept this because the Bitcoin is
made from fossil fuels. Well, wake up, Mr. Musk, you know, the tech, this didn't change. This didn't change over a few weeks. Did you not do your due diligence? And obviously the market
swings are dramatic. Well, you have a responsibility... I mean, maybe not a legal responsibility, but you know, if people are
gonna move on every word that you say, you need to be
thoughtful about what you say. It would be different if
suddenly the world discovered that fossil fuels were being
used to mine the Bitcoin and people had no idea before
but that's not the case. It was no change. I think there was very
little change at all on what people knew about. (upbeat music) - I also wanted to ask Chester
about big tech companies, such as Amazon, Google,
Microsoft, Facebook, and others that have gained a
tremendous amount of power on our lives because of the
amount of data they control. - Big tech is very, very big. The problem with that is that
the decisions that it makes have such broad implications for society. So is the answer to split them up? It's not clear that that
serves society's interests. You know, ultimately the problem is how do they become so big? Well, because there's such a scale economy in forming networks. So the scale of economy
in Facebook for example, is tremendous or even the
scale of economy in Google in terms of the absorption
of all the information and putting all the information together. The scale economies in these
activities are humongous, but there were huge responsibilities that these companies have. And there's issues on the
one hand about competition. I mean, you look at Amazon
and the impact of Amazon on all kinds of different endeavors, not all for the good, by the way, you look at the impact, arguably
in suppressing free speech. Now, that's not to debate the
merits of individual decision, but I think on at least
some of the decisions, some of which have been shown to be wrong with the passage of time, you
know, even in the broad domain associated with COVID-19, the vaccines seems to be
incredibly important of course, but I also think that some
of the kind of judgements and what's permitted to be
said and what's not permitted, these are top issues, okay? But the question is who decides, and how does power vest in the society? There's too much smugness
among the leadership in the high-tech community. - I guess one of the questions that arises is when it comes to digital
currencies and crypto, is it really a good thing to invest in or should we all be very
pessimistic and cautious? - Everything moves at
the speed of technology and digital currency is the
next natural step for money but that doesn't mean that's a good thing. That's a good thing if
you're invested in Bitcoin, which is outside of those
centralized systems. That does not mean a central
bank digital currency is a good thing for the people. If you believe that central
banks are bad actors, and that governments don't
have your best interest in mind then a central bank digital
currency is actually their wet dream because
it's a more defined control of the money supply which is
not what your average person probably wants. But I believe as far as mass adoption, that we are extremely early, we're only seeing the beginning
steps with institutions starting to adopt it as a treasury asset with the PayPals and Visas of the world starting to look at it
as a legitimate payment and even seeing banks in the United States starting to look towards
custodying Bitcoin and other crypto assets and
to adopting stable coins as new payment rails. - [Michael] Really, it's not just about whether or not cryptocurrencies
and blockchain technology have infiltrated the economy, but how much it is now
driving policy decisions and a broader agenda around
where the world is gone. And you've got central banks looking at central bank
digital currencies. You cannot separate that,
that change that shift. And that is a very profound, potentially very disruptive approach to the way that our monetary system works from what Bitcoin and
the rest of the sort of, crypto universe brought to bear in terms of the ideas
and new ways of thinking about how we represent in trade value. Things like NFTs are now
an element of the way that pretty much every media
company is thinking about what that future holds for it. And even some sort of
questions about, you know, data security in this
environment that we live in with ransomware is being
brought to bear on, you know, centralized honeypots
of data and so forth. All of that is also something that I think is now being questioned in
ways that weren't before. (upbeat music) - One of the things we all want to know is how safe is Bitcoin and how
safe are other cryptocurrencies. What about exchanges? And what about the vulnerabilities when it comes to investing
in crypto and feeling safe about it as well. Imagine putting your hard earned money into a crypto investment and the next day you
hear that your exchange or your crypto wallet was hacked and that you've lost all your investment. Is that really possible? - [Leemon] We've all lived in a world where some people are not trustworthy and we've always lived in a
world where you need trust. Part of the reason that it takes
days to send someone a wire and you're charged $20 is
because it has to go through so many intermediaries partially
to try to build up trust and make sure that it's
not being done incorrectly, no ends up stealing the money. But it's just once the
zeros in the computer. You can send it across
the world in one second. Why does it take days? With ledgers you actually
do it in a few seconds. You can actually have finality and have your wire transfer
in just a few seconds. So trust makes it more efficient. If you don't have this inherent trust, then you have to bring
lots of other people into the equation to make it trustworthy. You have to have middlemen. And if I wanted to sell you some property, maybe I hand this middleman the property, and you hand them the money, and then they swap and
give you the property and give me the money. Just to make sure you and I
don't steal from each other if we're strangers. With ledgers, you don't need that. You just had this
instantaneous swap of my value for your money and it just works. And so we've always had a trust problem. Ledgers are addressing this trust problem in a way that makes it more efficient and faster and cheaper. - [Bobby] Bitcoin itself
has been very secure. Meaning the Bitcoin, the
integrity of Bitcoin, meaning if Bitcoin is sent to an address, it's irrevocably in that new
address, in the new account. So that, in that sense, it's very secure. Bitcoin has not itself been hacked. The second thing you talk
about is smart contracts. So smart contracts, decentralized
finance smart contracts built on public Ethereum. Now, unfortunately, these
defy smart contracts are all new software programs. They've been out only
for less than a year, for a year or so. Many of them are immature. Many of them are still buggy and we've seen many, many
examples of BFI contracts themselves getting hacked, where projects and BFI sort
of, fundings get diverted by hackers. So that's unfortunate, which
is why I don't advocate for newcomers, for people
who are not knowledgeable about this to touch any device stuff. I think it's way too risky. It's not worth it. But that's a very different conversation than Bitcoin itself. So if you had an account on
some exchange that purports to store your Bitcoins, I would say, don't leave
it on a custodial platform. You got to take it out because
you have three different types of risks, right? Where one is the exchange can get hacked and you only get pennies on dollar. Number two is actually
your account can get hacked because people steal your email address, they find out your password, they log in pretending to be you and steal all your cryptocurrency. The exchange might be
insolvent to begin with. They don't have the
cryptocurrency, the Bitcoins that they claimed they do. So that what you see
on your account balance is really just a figment
of their imagination. - A cryptocurrency wallet is an app or a physical storage
device that lets you store and use your digital currency. Wallets can hold multiple cryptocurrencies so you're not limited to just Bitcoin. You can use an app or a physical wallet. The currency itself isn't stored there rather the wallet store, the
location of your currency on the blockchain. And that's super important. Blockchain is the technology that stores the record of your crypto transactions from the day, the coin
was mined to, get this, every trade sale or other
moves that it makes. There are two different types
of wallets, hot and cold. Now, a hot wallet it's
connected to the internet. You move your virtual coin and spend it wherever it's accepted. Hot wallets, they have big risks. They can get hacked. People forget their
passwords, that sort of thing. So the most secure way to
store your cryptocurrency is with a cold wallet. It's not connected to the internet. These are usually specially
designed USB drives that directly store your cryptocurrency. Physical wallets provide
you the most protection from the hackers in the long run. Now, for beginners, a wallet
app is a great place to start. If you bought into
cryptocurrency using Robinhood or maybe PayPal, good news,
those apps work as wallets do. (soft music) - Some of the things that come
to mind when we talk about cryptocurrencies and crypto as an asset is monetary policy and regulations. Today, we're seeing that across the world, many different countries have a different response towards crypto. Some countries are totally
banning crypto mining, the usage of crypto, crypto investing and while others are fully
adopting cryptocurrencies as a legal tender, El
Salvador comes to mind. Let's understand where crypto adoption is and how regulations today can pave away to other economic
aspects such as taxation, physical policy and the
legality of crypto based rules. - [Chester] I think it's clear
that many of the regulators are concerned about these currencies. Now, maybe part of it is that
this reduces their control. It reduces the ability to do
a traditional monetary policy. You know, when countries announced
much tighter regulations, you see that in the
movements, in the price, even when our secretary
of the treasury, you know, makes negative statements about the future regulatory
environment, the market reacts. The tax issues I think also
may prove to be important, and interesting. If somebody, in effect,
invested in a cryptocurrency, and then they plan to use
the money, so to speak, whether to buy a Tesla, when Tesla decides to take
the cryptocurrency again, when they go to spend the money, they're gonna pay capital gains, they're gonna first
have capital gains taxes upon their, their appreciation. - The biggest obstacle
for Americans right now is the tax code. Cryptocurrencies are
taxed very aggressively like property and not like money. So anytime you transact
in any digital currency in the United States
you have a taxable sale of the asset that you
just use to buy something. So if you own Bitcoin and you wanna buy a cup of coffee with it, then you've sold your Bitcoin
to buy that cup of coffee and have a taxable
transaction and capital gains based on that sale. So it effectively raises
the price tremendously of anything you're doing and
forces you to make a decision of whether it's worth taking the taxes. There's plenty of places
in the world where Bitcoin can be used as money. Other cryptocurrencies
can be used as money, and you don't have to
be concerned with that. But right now, anyone in
America has to think twice before spending their cryptocurrency because of the tax implications. - [Mark] I think the regulators to this point, to their credit, have done a pretty nice job. They have been measured. They have been reasonable. They've been diligent. All the things that you
would want in a regulator, they haven't been brash, they haven't been reactive. Perhaps you could argue
that they're a little behind in the sense that maybe
they could have got out ahead of some of the things
that happened in the ICO world. But I think they've done a
very good job retrospectively going back and saying, yep,
you guys broke some rules, so we'll be coming after you. And Hey, you didn't break
the rules so you're good. Unfortunately, incumbents
try to use regulation to slow the speed of competitors. And that's been true throughout history and I think it's true again today. So you know, about this
time in the bull market, in the previous cycles in 2013 and 2017, you heard rumors and this FUD, this fear, uncertainty and doubt about banning Bitcoin or
banning cryptocurrencies. And the reality is you can't
ban a decentralized asset. It's like squeezing the air in a balloon, it just pops up someplace else. And what the internet did to
media and telecommunications and commerce, blockchain
technology is gonna do to financial services and clearly there needs to be regulation around that. - [Stephen] Just because you're
creating a new technology and you have these tokens,
et cetera, on a blockchain, they're still subject to laws. So I think it's a bit gray and
people are subjecting these to interpretation or assuming
there's a whole camp of people that just think these don't apply to them. And I would say they absolutely do. If you're trading a
security token, you know, then those definitely and
derivatives of security. So if you're doing a
derivative of a Bitcoin, if a Bitcoin is considered
a utility token, a derivative of Bitcoin, so
like 10 times levered Bitcoin, or just outright like futures
or options on Bitcoin, those are securities by definition and then fall under the securities laws even if it's just another
variation of a token on your exchange. And I think that's where the technology can move much faster. The regulations are there, not everyone is sort of
following them or understanding that the rules apply to them. Unfortunately, that's not how
it works with the regulator. They'll say, well, lack
of knowledge of the law doesn't justify breaking a law. This happens in any sort of new industry. I think the stakes are a bit higher and I always make the analogy, you look back to the 90s when
the internet just got going and Amazon was just selling books and they wouldn't charge sales tax. You know, you sort of evaded them and everyone knew they were doing that and eventually they imposed,
you know, they figured it out and there weren't these
horrible penalties. But if you're breaking securities laws, that's a much more
severe type of infraction than the type of stuff that
went on in the early days of the internet. - Over the past few
years, one of the things that has really increased
in frequency and in fact, in precision as well is hacking. Hackers have been really active at holding organizations
hostage, stealing data and selling information on the dark web. What role does cryptocurrency
play in all of this? And does crypto create a
way for cyber criminals to get away with crime? - One of the big, I
think consumer features of cryptocurrency is that
it is anonymous, right? That you don't have to
share as much information about yourself with the business or the person that you're
doing business with. On the flip side of that, that is also a very
powerful characteristic for criminals and fraudsters. We have seen this, I
think throughout history where criminals will use
the newest technology trends to help with the scale and
reduce the risk of their attacks. The general, you know, pattern of attack and the general theme of the scams, those get recycled quite a bit, right? And, but what changes is the
technology used to deliver them and the platform and environments
in which they attack. So moving away from, you know, email-heavy and text-heavy things
like discord and telegram and Instagram, that general
nature of the scams themselves, hasn't changed but what really has changed is the scale at which attackers can attack and the relative impunity with which they can perpetrate these attacks. The centralizing entities
in the world today, the governments and the big
businesses and the banks, they provide a certain safety net, right? 'Cause they provide certain insurances that things are gonna be
done on the up and up. So when you're going in and deciding to use a
certain crypto exchange, I still think the
reputation of that exchange is incredibly important, especially when you consider that they're going to be installing
digital wallet technology typically on your mobile device
or maybe on your desktop. And because they put the software there, you're putting your faith in them that the software is legitimate
and doesn't have back doors and that sort of thing. But I think some of the
biggest losses we've seen have just been because, hey, if you lose your wallet or if you lose your private keys, then there really is no recovering that. And I don't know what
the current status is, but I know there's an
awful lot of, for example, Bitcoin out there, that's
essentially not claimable. (upbeat music) - [Leemon] Bitcoin was revolutionary. It really did start a new thing
that hadn't existed before, but it was, you know, the
version, one of how to do it. And so they said, well, to
stop people from cheating, we'll force them to use
locks of electricity on these huge supercomputers. And so, you know, Bitcoin uses more energy than Ireland does right now. You know, every year, it's
using more energy than Ireland. And it's slow, you can only
do a half dozen transactions each second across the
entire world put together. You can only do just a handful
of transactions each second. It's also insecure in various
ways and slow in various ways. You never really know for
sure that your transaction has gone through maybe after
six different computers have confirmed it, you would
believe it, that takes an hour. And even then, there are rare occasions when one hour wasn't enough, you really needed to wait a
little bit more than an hour before you really knew
that it went through and you never know for sure, it's just, your probability
goes higher and higher. And so there's a way of doing it, where you get the same kind of trust, but you get finality. Where you actually know the
transaction's gone through, for sure. And instead of taking an
hour to be pretty sure, in four seconds, you know, for sure. 100% guaranteed you reach
finality in just a few seconds. And instead of maybe doing
six transactions each second, right now we've slowed ourselves
down to 10,000 per second. So, you know, you go from
six to 10,000 that helps. And 10,000 is just what we're
currently slowing it down to, inherently can go far faster than that. So the whole point here was that we wanted to
use less electricity. We use about 1/5 millionth according to one published report I saw. Those are good things, even
have fairness for markets, but it's still just
taking that original idea and bringing it to the
world to be able to use. And the original idea is continuing to build momentum over time. And Bitcoin itself is
building momentum over time. So not only are cryptocurrencies becoming more and more like fiat, there's also a lot of talk about fiat turning into a cryptocurrency. These are central bank
digital currency cities, whole countries are talking about, hey, we're gonna create a
cryptocurrency of our own and our actual fiat
will be a cryptocurrency just because it makes so much sense. You can have so much more trust. You can have so much more speed. You can have so much lower costs. All of those reasons are
reasons why the whole world is moving towards this thing. - We looked at some
really important aspects of cryptocurrency. Right from the basics of what crypto is, to implications on finance, investing and other areas of impact. One of the most promising
sites off cryptocurrencies and fast gaining traction are tokens. We learned about tokens
just a few minutes ago, and there's more to them
than we can understand in this documentary alone. The idea of non-fungible
tokens as an asset class or an investment can help
other industries flourish, including digital art, creative economy and intellectual property in general. Let's hear a little bit more about the tokenization revolution that's powered by cryptocurrencies. I asked our guests, Mark
Yusko, Chester Spatt, Dan Roberts, about this
emerging area of tokenization and the possibilities that it holds. - Every stock, every bond,
every currency, every commodity, every piece of art, every
piece of real estate, every private business, every fine wine, every collectible car,
every asset in the world, will be tokenized. It will all be digital. And this is a natural progression that has been going on for decades. From analog, right? We used to have physical
pieces of paper, money, that we exchange for
physical pieces of paper, stock certificates. Then we turned them into electronic form. We trade QSIPs with ones and
zeros from our bank account. and eventually we will trade
them on digital blockchains where we have a public open source record, and we don't need trusted third
parties, financial services, in the middle charging fees. So every asset, and
art is a great example. Digital art is just a digital commodity and NFTs are a way of
creating scarce assets in digital form. And Eric Schmidt had the
best line about this. He said, what Satoshi Nakamoto,
whoever he, she, they are, did back in the gold financial crisis is basically found a way
to create a unique asset in the digital world. I think that's pretty valuable. I think some really big
businesses will be built on that. And, but it says, oh no, it's a bubble. Can't you see, you know, the
Beeple sold for $60 million. Well, let's be fair, I'm not
a big fan of Beeple's art. I don't really like it. No accounting for taste,
that's not the point. I respect the fact that
he did something every day for 13 years. I'm pretty sure even I haven't
brushed my teeth every day for the last 13 years, but he created a piece of
art every day for 13 years, put it into one unit, could
never be replicated and sold it. Yeah, I think that's really valuable. - [Chester] So, in art work, we often have these numbered lithographs. and so, you know, often
you have the situation where a painter paints
his original painting and obviously the original, the one that has the (indistinct) that has the big value, but then there's something
in between the original and a poster. Now, in some cases, the numbered edition might involve the artist
actually filling in the colors on the individual piece. So that is really kind of in between because been there in fact,
the artist actually worked on your piece but in
some cases it's not that. In some cases, it's just that
the artists committed that we're only gonna make, let's
say 300 reproductions of this and they number them and that's it. And in a way, NFP strikes me as a little bit of a cousin of that. - There are interesting examples now of decentralized blogging
platforms and publishing, writers are tokenizing novels. The idea being, I'd rather
write or create directly for people who I know are
interested in my stuff. And here's a way for them to
buy in to what I'm creating and demonstrate their fandom and then maybe even
they'll gain financially from buying into what I'm creating. Really the tokenize
all the things movement is the same value proposition
and idealism of crypto, and really a Bitcoin since
the beginning, since 2009, which is no one person
or entity in control, no one central bank of Bitcoin, no company that you have to go through that gets a cut of the deals. Now, of course, there are
a number of leading players that do get a cut. There are centralized
exchanges like Coinbase that charge high fees but
that's why crypto purists are so excited by
decentralized exchanges, Dexis, and other forms of players and protocols where it's all just about the code. So that's what we really mean when we talk about tokenizing things, is just put a digital,
put it on the blockchain, NFTs are the same way where a
lot of people look at people who have paid a lot of money for an NFT and they say, I just can't understand that because I can't even hang
the thing on my wall, but everyone by now understands
how to use online banking. And you log in and you see
here's how much money I have, even though you can't touch and hold it but you trust that it's
there and in many ways, that is simply now
translating to memorabilia, digital collectibles, art and music. I mean, if you look at
Spotify and streaming, it hasn't actually been
great for musicians. I mean, they earn pennies
for their streams on Spotify. If you ask some musicians or some artists, they see some real potential
to give back a bigger cut of royalties to original creators. And that really is interesting. So you just kind of have to
get your mind over that hurdle of understanding that in many,
many cases, value is digital. - In this documentary, we've
seen a lot of different things about cryptocurrencies
and one of the things I wanted to talk about is crypto
as a solution to challenges the world is facing right now. On a daily basis, we see
economic instability, war, inequality, and many social political and economic events that are
shaping the lives of people and communities across the world. The question is what role
can cryptocurrency play in a world full of
turmoil and unstability? Is crypto able to bring
peace and prosperity to nations that are torn by war, or is crypto away for the dark industries to keep on functioning? - I believe that we're
very near where we have a full global financial system
based in cryptocurrency, not that replaces the current system, but that runs parallel
that will allow people who are underbanked or unbanked,
which is most of the world, people don't realize, to have access to the same kind of systems that people in first world countries and who have acquired
wealth will have access to. - [Michael] The smaller
economies, tend to get buffeted by the effects of what's
happening in the United States. It's an inherent misalignment
between the interests of those smaller countries
and those of United States where the US is pursuing
its own monetary policy for its own mandate (indistinct) So, and that's perfectly legitimate, but because the dollar is the currency that basically sits on the assets of all of these different
banks that use it as the means to then lend against, whether
it's in a smaller economy or in Europe or anywhere, what happens to the
dollar and what happens to interest rates in United States profoundly affects those places. And this has been a
problem now for 20 years because of the quantitative easing that came out of the financial crisis, had huge buffeting impacts
on emerging markets. It's all hot money inflows and outwards. And this is a constant thing, right? That as the backdrop gives us, I think, the motivation for a lot
of these smaller countries to start exploring some of these options, especially right now, when
there is a legitimate concern that US monetary policy is
going to have yet, again, that sort of impact on the world. We've already seen
obviously a massive amount of expansion, dollar issuance, but as we move into a period
where people are starting to get worried about US inflation, where there is a massive debt overhang, both at the governmental
and or the corporate level, the prospect that the US
will just go even deeper down this path of essentially inflating its way out of its problems, creates real problems
for these small countries who are caught up in the big
waves that are set by that. So the idea that you would then seek out some other alternative is
actually I think, a legitimate, certainly a legitimate option to explore. Let's put it that way. You're seeing these
smaller countries saying, you know what, maybe I can opt out. Here are these options. I'm not using a crystal ball here no matter how many of you go, there'll be a lot of
pressure brought to bear on the not to do so by
those who have interest in them not doing so. But I think that there's certainly a trend that is worth here - [Chester] And there's
interesting issues too, about traceability, accountability. Is this gonna facilitate
bad behaviors, you know, in the extreme terroristic activities, because payments can be easily made? And it's not clear to
me which way that cuts, because on the one hand, you know, it's always struck me that cash is inherently not very traceable, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
are kind of interesting in a way, because on the one hand, they're viewed as anonymous
but on the other hand, there's a whole record keeping trail. - [Bobby] So we are now 50
years into the chaos of money. What I mean by that is
in 1971, President Nixon actually took the US dollar
off of the gold standard. And this is something that happened. People know about it, but
people don't realize the impact. By taking the US dollar
off the gold standard, we're now unhinged. The printing press is
just going full speed. It's happening in the US,
it's happening in China, it's happening in Europe, it's happening in many, many countries. The central governments are
almost in a unspoken race of seeing who can print their money faster because with more money printed, the more the currency is devalued, the more the economic growth. This is convoluted, right? Think about that. The more you have your
currency de-based and de-valued relative to the other countries, the more competitive your exports are and the more the growth, and
you have better GDP numbers, you have better stock earnings and that's where we're entering. - [Mark] All governments
in the history of mankind have had inflationary fiat currencies because it's the nature of
governments to overspend, right? That's what governments do. That's what empires do. And the only way out when you
get overly indebted, right? Once you have all the
debt, you got four choices, you can pay it back, you can restructure it, you can default on it or
you can inflate it away. There's not enough taxation power once you get to a certain
level to pay it back so you can't do that. You can't restructure it
because to restructure, you'd have to have
somebody accept the deal. No one's gonna accept
a deal on a bad asset. You can default, but then
you get kicked out of office and politicians don't like that. So the only choice is to inflate it away. And in the history of mankind, there've been 775 paper currencies. Three quarters of them disappeared off the face of the planet because they were inflated to zero. Now, we've done a pretty
good job with the dollar from 1776 to 1913, a
dollar was worth a dollar. A couple of wiggles around two wars, but it's basically worth a dollar. There was no myth of inflation. Inflation is just theft. Inflation is theft by the
government on the masses and the middle-class to
make the rich richer. It's all it is. (upbeat music) - We are almost headed towards the end of our journey together today. We're now on the brink and
a really larger evolution. that's not just financial,
but also social and economic. We're also headed towards an era where money, as we know
it, is changing its nature and becoming decentralized. We're looking at technology
becoming a dominant player and the role of big tech
and innovative companies that can create new
offerings and solutions become prominent. Is it time for a new revolution? - [Michael] Ultimately
we are at this moment where climate change is the
biggest threat facing the world. And contrary to the kind of
rather shrill particular Bitcoin that it is sort of on
destined to fry the planet and also contrary, by the way, to the rather naive perspective
with lots of Bitcoiners, who think if we just let it all go away, it will naturally become green, there's a middle path here that
I think is a strategy option for these smaller countries
to actually use Bitcoin as a funding mechanism for the development of green infrastructure. And that is a really powerful concept, not only from the perspective of how do you get renewable
energy system laid out, but actually how you
empower local communities. Because if you've got not
only a local source of energy through, say, a solar micro
grid built into a community, but also a local source of funding through the Bitcoin mines that
would be attached to those, you get this really
interesting new way of thinking about sovereignty. Sovereignty is as access
to energy and money. We can create mechanisms
with these powerful new means of essentially creating
value that are attached to energy sources. And that becomes a form of sovereignty, a form of empowerment. (soft music) - [Mark] So I was sitting at lunch today and there was this big, giant armored car, big diesel engine, black smoke sitting out in front of the grocery store and it was out there for 10 minutes while they collected the money. I think the lesion of those
trucks around the world collecting physical coins, is probably worse for the
environment than Bitcoin. I can't prove that yet,
but I probably will. But here's the thing, is it more efficient to do a money market with
code than with lots of bodies at a banking network
system around the world? Of course it is. (upbeat music) - [Leemon] In the
first-generation Bitcoin said, hey, we could make money be
something that you can trust 'cause it's distributed. And then after a while people realized, well, the record of the money could actually be a record
that stores other information. You can have things
like NFTs being stored, which is just a way in the
computer of representing value in the real world. So you can have tokens that
represent houses and dollars and gold and anything
else you can imagine, you can turn it into NFTs to represent it. Even weird things like your
time or your future income. You could turn into NFTs
and sell them today. It's just amazing. Stocks in companies can
be turned it into NFTs. And so the second generation was realizing if we're gonna have this
ledger remembering money, well, it could also remember
everything else of value. That was kind of the second generation. And then the third generation
was, well, no, wait a second. If we have money and we
have things of value, if you can have some money on the ledger and I can have a house on the ledger, then why can't we do a
transaction where we swap them and you get my house and I get your money? And maybe there's rules built in that's enforced by the ledger itself. And this is what smart contracts are. Smart contracts are just
any kind of computer program that's running that lets
you do arbitrary rules and the rules are enforced by the ledger. You don't have to trust any one
person to enforce the rules. As long as a super majority
of the network is honest, then the rules are enforced. And so you had smart contracts. And then once you had the ability to do transactions like that, the next generation was
why don't we build markets? And now we're starting to see
that distributed exchanges and things that are markets
that are just automated and in a stock market
or something like that, can be incredibly fast and efficient. We had people building markets
for say, carbon credits, and that allows you to lower the bar, make it much cheaper and
easier to trade carbon credits, which lowers the price
makes it more efficient. For that you need fairness. You need to make sure that the ledger puts the transactions in a fair
order and we have that as well. And so these are kind of the generations, you start with money
and then you add value and then you add the ability to swap these and to enforce complicated
rules and then you have markets so it's not just two people interacting, it's groups of people interacting. And it's just following
the way the real world works outside of ledgers. And the reason it's
mirroring the real world is because pretty much
all of the real world will have tendrils reaching
into the ledger world or vice versa. Ledgers are gonna become part
of every part of the economy. - [Ben] Companies shouldn't
be looking at crypto like an investment. Crypto overall, even though, you know, a lot of people are speculating
in Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto, and the blockchain are tools. They're tools that business can utilize to allow their customers
to make transactions in easier and more flexible way. Everything in the world
on a fundamental level is built upon something else. That's how we innovate. There's no truly unique idea. So all these things are
just stepping stones to an entirely digital life. You may end up spending more
time in your digital life than you do in the real world which is a sad thing for humanity but it is where we're going. - [Bobby] We have
government, we have society, we have orderly, you
know, business, right? So regulation is a must. Meaning that if you have a country, if you have a system of government, then regulation is just
a natural part of that. The reason regulation for Bitcoin has been so hard is because
every country so far has tried to have a certain
agency to regulate Bitcoin where the existing
regulatory AUCs all deal with traditional assets, tradition world. Whether it's housing, whether it's stocks, whether it's futures,
whether it's commodities like gold and precious metals. So you have these different
regulatory agencies that try to figure out
what to do with Bitcoin but the reality is none
of them are capable because Bitcoin is a different beast. I call for, you know
what I call, Crypto czar. The idea is for a country,
any country can do this and every country should do this, which is appoint a new
department to regulate cryptocurrency, crypto digital assets. That person, that team, that department, should then set all the rules for cryptocurrency and digital assets. And I think that's the way
forward because cryptocurrency, it feels like a foreign
exchange, foreign currency, it feels like a stock,
but it's not a stock. It's not an equity. You know, what is it? Is it a commodity? You know, as a property like
real estate or what is it? You know, different agencies
treat it differently. So I think it's time for
there to be a crypto czar to really look at it wholeheartedly. - I hope you've been able to gather the role of crypto on
our finances, economies and the world in general. Here are some final
recommendations and thoughts to consider from everything
that we've heard so far. You may take this as
guidance or recommendations, but please do not take this
as financial or legal advice or a prediction on where
the industry is headed. Please do your due
diligence when investing in new technology,
investing in cryptocurrency and use all your resources, advisors to make the best decisions
for you personally, and your business and organizations. - I would tell everyone, do
your homework and your research. There's so much out
there before jumping in and going down the crypto rabbit hole and putting a lot of money in, do extensive reading and
homework and self-educate. - [Chester] They should be cautious. They should be open-minded, but I wouldn't put all one's assets in it. You know, and probably for many people, I would probably recommend
that they put little or maybe none of their assets in it. - [Mark] Zero exposure to digital assets is the wrong number. You have to have exposure. You don't have to have all your assets, but you have to have more than zero. You should have a little
bit, one to 3%, three to 5%. The younger you are the
higher the number in Bitcoin as digital gold store of value. Should you own some Ethereum? the www dot of the internet of value? Absolutely. Should you own applications
on top of that? Absolutely. Are they compound? Absolutely should own those. Should you think about
what's gonna be in the middle of the stack, things like Polka dot, things like Solano, things like Cosmos? Absolutely, right? In the old days, there
were 80 internet protocols. Today, we have five TCPIP,
SMTP, HTTP, FTP, and www. In the future, we'll probably
have five core protocols for the web 3.0 the internet
of value, the trust net, as I like to call it. Bitcoin as the base layer like TCPIP, maybe cosmos or Polka dot, on top of that maybe file coin for FTP and then Ethereum is the www. You gotta own those. And then applications, the
Facebooks and the Amazons of the digital age, you
wanna own those too. Definitely look at technology, definitely look at
management, but get off zero. - Don't try to call the bottom. Don't try to sell the top just buy slowly, regardless of the price
and wait a very long time. That's how people have
acquired generation wealth since the beginning of markets and I don't think it will
be any different in this. The trend is clearly up and I think it will continue to rise. - There are kind of social
motivations for why consumers are opting for these types of solutions that are based on this
decentralized technology, right? Consumers want to work digitally. They want a lot of convenience
and you have to find a way to provide that convenience interaction with your consumers in
a very low friction way. So yes, you need to put
security measures in place but you need to do that in
a way where it's transparent to the consumer. So it's a tricky place for businesses, but I think for the
forward looking businesses, they're able to meet that demand for these decentralized digital solutions but also create highly
secure trust environment in which people can do business. Those businesses are gonna win and the businesses that
can't provide that, they're going to lose. The ball's in our court, if you will, in that we as technology
providers and service providers, we've gotta step up and make this happen. And I think governments
have a huge challenge in front of them as well
because the governments are service providers, right? And I think the way that the
public looks at the services they get from the government
is changing rapidly. - Okay. Just thinking about this. When the IRS gets involved,
you know that it's real, the IRS will require all
cryptocurrency transfers of $10,000 or more be
reported for tax purposes. The United States Federal Reserve Bank is developing its very own digital dollar. Unlike all other cryptocurrencies
America's digital dollar will be backed by the
full faith and credit of the United States government. Now, the downside, any
transaction you make is instantly known to the government. But if you think about it, very few legal transactions
are done with cash. So the government already
knows when you buy something. So the big question is, when
will this all take place? - [Leemon] We're in the very early days where there's lots of
fads and lots of scams and lots of volatility
and be aware of that. You know, if you buy a cryptocurrency, it's gonna go up and down
in price a lot right now. There are people starting to use it for really real-world
important applications. Read about those. If you have a company look into it. Maybe there's a way that
your company right now could be using tokens and
crypto and all the rest in order to solve real business problems. And in previous years, it was only the cutting
edge people doing it but now pretty much every company is realizing we can be more
efficient doing this stuff. So for consumers, get some apps, a wallet, play some of the games
that use this stuff. And for businesses look at how now it really can save you money and truly can make you more efficient
and faster and better. - With that friends. I must say goodbye. I hope you've really
enjoyed this installment of our Emerging Technology
Documentary Series. Some of my other works
include, "Blockchain City", "GX Now", "The Future of
Work", "Bitcoin Dilemma", "AI the Next Frontier" and other titles. Please make sure to visit my website, iankhan.com or a futuresy.com to learn more about our
work and the opportunities for us to work together. Sign up for updates and exclusive content at iankhan.com/exclusive. Thanks again for your time and
being with me on this journey to understanding
cryptocurrencies and the future. Goodbye for now. (inspirational music)
4:15, 31:09, 43:10, 59:30
Leemon comes in around 4:15
Fun, thanks for sharing!