Harper Audio presents Focus, written and read by Alries. After spending most of my adult life working in marketing and studying the practice of marketing, I've learned that the real objective of the marketing process is not just selling a product or service, it's finding the future. Focus is the future, in the sense that it makes a prediction about where the future lies and then takes specific steps to make that future happen. That's where the subject of marketing comes in. Any business enterprise has two and only two basic functions, writes Peter Drucker, marketing and innovation. Marketing is the distinguishing, the unique function of the business, continues Mr. Drucker. A business is set apart from all other human organizations by the fact that it markets a product or a service, neither church nor army nor school nor state does that. Any organization that fulfills itself through marketing a product or a service is a business. Any organization in which marketing is either absent or incidental is not a business and should never be run as if it were one. Now Peter Drucker wrote these words in The Practice of Management, a book first published in 1954. It's taken quite a while for Mr. Drucker's concept to reach the boardrooms of corporate America. After World War I, the emphasis was on manufacturing. The art of management was embodied in the time and motion studies of Frederick Taylor. Business success went to those companies that could get their products out the door faster and cheaper than the competition. After World War II, the emphasis gradually shifted to finance. The art of management was embodied in the portfolio concept. Business success went to those corporations who did the best job of buying and selling companies in order to put together a high yielding portfolio. Where are we today? Both the manufacturing and the financial aspects of management seem to have run their course. Today, the emphasis is on marketing. What about Bill Gates, Microsoft, Bert Roberts, MCI, Ross Perot, Perot Systems, Sam Walton, Walmart, Mike Harper, Canagra, Fred Turner, McDonald's, Michael Eisner, Walt Disney, John Smalley, Procter & Gamble, Robert Gozetta, Coca-Cola, and Roger Smith, General Motors, have in common. You might recognize these men as some of the most celebrated chief executives of the past decade. Actually, they are that. And also, according to Advertising Age magazine, marketers of the year from 1984 to 1994. What is marketing? Marketing is about focusing a company. Consider the laser. A laser is a weak source of energy. A laser takes a few kilowatts of energy and focuses them in a coherent stream of light.  When you focus a company, you create the same effect. You create a powerful laser-like ability to dominate a market. That's what focusing is all about. When a company becomes unfocused, it loses its power. It becomes a sun which dissipates its energy over too many products and too many markets. Wither corporate America. Are companies focusing themselves to develop the power of a laser? Or are they trying to outshine the sun? The sun seems to be winning. In the past few decades, an explosion of new goods and services have hit the marketplace. Computers, copiers, color television, radio cameras and recorders sell their phones, facsimile equipment. The list is endless. Existing companies responded by expanding their product lines. General Electric, a manufacturer of electrical equipment, got into television sets, jet engines, computers, plastics, financial services, and a host of other products and services unrelated to their core electrical lines. And so did virtually every company in the world from American Express to Zenith. Today the bloom is off the rose. It should have been obvious that a company cannot keep expanding its product line forever. Sample complete. Ready to continue?


Wow, okay. Yeah, the one time I forget to do my mic check is the one time it doesn't work go figure go figure Yes, sorry for that damn Okay, let's start with the ETH since we're already here on the shot pre-instring and I said well you guys didn't hear so I said it to To nobody that this is really heavy resistance. You can see that You see those longs here and these longs they decided to try fish those see if they can grab more but the fact that someone longed here was an insane sort of Sort of point and it just shows that misguided attempts always are fruitful No, they're not But you can see here sort of a very large sort of point here to take this sort of liquidity So we mark that out in your charts between 1570 and 1575 is a point where you want to look at We think we have that marked here as you can see already just slightly higher 15.67 76 yeah, whatever it doesn't matter numbers don't matter. You know what it just doesn't matter The only sort of saving grace is the fact that we have this area here But I think this is just falls on deaf ears, especially considering we're building up longs to say Say drop down because everyone sort of lured into a false sense of oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's buy. Let's let's buy this Let's buy this dip just before news. Let's buy this dip.  It can't go lower than this. Can it? No it can no Oh, no It's all like that Yeah But generally as long as it's sort of trading within here It sort of spells trouble especially trading under and that's sort of a theorem for today In terms of what we sort of feel for it very nice and short Okay onto Bitcoin so I was muted so we'll start again Pretty boring day yesterday. We expected it to be boring Yeah, right, but again here's the thing We I think we usually we usually like pricing predicted so if we They're about predicted. I think within a couple of for us if we meet predicted and predicted is and forecasted rather is 4% consensus 4% so if we go any number Lower than this so let's say 3.75. We're sort of we're happy with pumping If we're going any lower than I mean any higher than this 4.25. We're dropping faster than Well, you drop a baby. I Don't know But in terms of where we're setting up as you can see with this has been sort of a nice sort of Point to mark and and that's why we have these sort of bars here In terms of coming to it. We can see this our first point here second point We're making consecutive sort of lows and rhythmic is disconnecting My disconnecting no, I'm not okay. That's good. I don't know why rhythmic is connecting. Okay. That's that's an issue for a separate Me we have a daily balance balance balance up top you can see we work to it came back close very aggressively add it Then shifted away It's still sort of in the sort of territory. We expect it to be in terms of okay This is sort of a very sort of bias short And then we will buy a short from yesterday Well was it was the exception of price coming down into here and and potentially going higher and it did sort of but To a less extent and it just came into here. So I mean we didn't get the explosion There we go. So this drop matches with yes drop but not in terms of magnitude wise Yes, had our very if we were matching ears would have done. I think a lot further down. I think I down to two thousands 20,000 look 2000 Jesus So that's something that we have to know. It's just this has been held up aggressively So cryptos been holding up very aggressively relative to yes And that's and I think nothing easy calculation to do if we just do this divided by yes And I should know this is delayed But this is the only one that does it. Okay. Yeah, we just have to this is slightly delayed It's gonna be slightly off and you can see the Portional sort of pump and dump is as it's not really that sort of ever present It's crypto has been relatively stronger on the sort of push And if you go into daily Be that very very sort of weird movements, but at the same time It's just holding up and I'm not really coming into this point here And we keep this around and you actually know she's around ended there So it's in terms of Portional moves not really too fortunate if you look at again, I mean, yeah, sure It should be a bit lower again, you know, everything's gonna be one-to-one and that is Sort of the sense we're getting now But eventually because they're not one-to-one they'll start moving more aggressively or aggressively moving things around just because they need to play catch up That's when your fast moves comes in is when one thing needs to play catch up to another So definitely could spell some trouble again It did not get the same amount of height as yes, but the same time you didn't go as low as yes So again, it does sort of bounce out, but it could have just done this and I would have been happy Again, it doesn't matter if I'm happy just the only matters of the markets correct Damn, yeah, uh, rhythmic still Still why is this mick down?  Okay Why did it log me off? I don't know no one knows who knows It's been doing that lately Okay in terms of sort of where we are right now in terms of couple of days We have sort of a lot of liquidity short bias as you can see here Laura sort of shorts entering the markets not too many sort of liquidated I mean we've got some liquidations here So I'd say most of the charity of these are sort of slash this in half most likely And I'm just say I they're pretty much out But again most of their stops would have been around up at these highs here or even here so Tensure to say, you know what there's two liquidity points We can take on the upswing if we sort of whip so high and then drop down low Cuz we always bet some level of bits or on the news days, so There's always that sort of tendency to say Did risk that force close? Oh my god It did yes, okay back Funny technology always gives me issues Just doesn't want to work You can see where it's been giving me issues So over and over and over again incessant But we talked about the pre-market yesterday and this sort of top here This slow build up and this slow build up led to a beautiful short on the open You can see all that sort of sell just the pressure coming forward And you can see they just slowly trying to encourage them to buy so this is where things get a bit Dicy in terms of understanding where we're at in the market Yes, it's sort of within a comfortable position where it's elected very heavy sort of shorts Are sold off a lot of sort of shares at this area here But within Bitcoin where it was still we're still consolidating like this and we're just like Maybe I'll do something maybe I won't This is sort of already leading itself down and the thing is just preparing itself for his number And that's the thing charts will prepare for the consensus numbers and if the consensus ends up better Charts will start moving back to sort of mean And just say oh, yeah, this is where we sort of truly would be out if we were sort of at that price But if we get lower of Again continually go lower up into a point. I think We're gonna have a it's gonna be a fun day. I think that's that's that's the best way to call us a and classified today Hands on who you ask It's gonna be fun ask some random Joe don't say I know Today won't be bad man. I'm on lose so much money But yeah, considering you have this sort of heavy short bias It's very possible but that bitcoins pretty much was done out for today And it's just like really wanted to hold its own because they had no where else to go but looking at sort of where we're getting sort of spot sellers and We have that majority of that spot area here We're still pretty much holding on and it looks like they're just selling into sort of people willing to buy Which is always nice, especially this sort of volume and see that a lot of sort of absorption happening and a lot of sort of exchange exchange happening here From the looks of it as long as you sort of defend sort of this heavy sort of buy area here Because this will be market aggressors, but I think they've sort of offloaded to some someone else at this point So probably better off start zooming in and just saying, you know Any time you get here get a lot of sellers I get a lot of willing sort of people are buying that up And we get retail buying sort of this area here Do you think sand can do yo GD look similar pre-pumped config? Okay. Yeah, we'll have a look at sand sand And and and and and they call me the same man Futures or sport that's always the question But there's a spot it's going to daily see where we are at daily and sort of drill down To a bit hussy I'm sorry. I was on comfort Just drill down into this. So daily pretty wide You see this range here perfectly sort of encapsulates a nice little 50% that we can draw On this fit on this point from here to here. There you go That's the point here. There you go. Nice 50% line. Keep that for later I mean, we already have the white mark and you don't think really need this remove this just just nice note But as you can see it sort of trapped the awnings here Let's see if we can go down a bit lower hold a bit lower and sort of from the lower point We can just rise Because we did do that sort of here as you can see we came back on this this sort of reaction We came high trapped came lower Trapped shorts and sides to go and Now we've got a lot of sort of long inventory up here We need to get rid of and I think as soon as we get rid of those we can definitely look good It's just dependent on this sort of area here and just getting rid of them So definitely I think look for maybe seven double eight fourth two Bear high. I think they're trapping around here But ideally you'd want around this sort of figure just take out these sort of stops for one last sort of horror But then nice little sort of nice retail trap here They're pretty high up traps all the liquid to here and then just pulls itself down And we can see if it pulls itself down and just push itself back up and you're sort of trading between one number to another so from seven double eight to eight five double two And then maybe even higher from this point here Definitely could be decent especially after today definitely consider looking at it after today in terms of what the Numbers do for it if numbers do anything to it then It should put it into the right place and then put it into a place of trading It's off trading place where you can trade it And that's what you're looking for a place to that's what you look for today Mainly it's just looking for coins that are in positions that are able to be tradable So hopefully we gotta swipe down and it is just smaller or blip then we look bullish the rest of the way forward But yeah, it could be nice Since we're back onto Transpiler will have Bitcoin We can see that we tagged these double tops and we can call these double tops out and we just sort of Sort of moving into this sort of territory here. It's just a nice little mellow out here And I think it's important to pay tan Pay attention to The candle sort of formation as you can see here was sort of Closing higher and then closing sort of around the similar area here. We're just sort of holding this level up As you can see just it shows interest from this sort of From the sort of long point of view that maybe we like this area more than we Would normally those definitely something I would sort of say that it's just forming Potential to say maybe we stop hunt. Maybe we don't but ultimately maybe we look bullish Considering where everything is at the current stage. I Don't maybe it's the one of the rare times that I am bullish Maybe not Well, and truthfully I kind of want to be here I want to be here to sort of stay long and then move forward from there But it just all depends on the numbers and I think the numbers are saying that we might not get there especially with pretty high consensus and Even with a pretty high consensus, this is already priced this way in So if we the only way we're gonna go lower if we get a lot if we meet consensus or drop drop below Expectations so that means higher higher sort of inflationary numbers And that's all we'll get us to this mark and we'll get us to this zone here And we'll get us to this point that we really wanted to be One can hope one can hope So we're playing pressure on the spot market. You can see here Just if people decide to buy up they're trying to control this and then just trying to sort of choke these guys down So I already sort of spelling trouble for these long Longers the longest these buyers and the inverse is true for futures It looks like people bring this market down does look like there's some sort of catch in terms of long wise I tend to sort of like sort of spot in terms of reactionary not reactionary but Understand understanding which side You truly want to be on because spot is where I think majority would be focused on just because Futures for manipulation spot is for collecting So you want to see where they're collecting they're collecting if they're not collecting shares that means they're not interested They are that means they're interested. They'll manipulate back and forth. So you look at futures to trade But that covers the understanding that they're collecting long long term and you sort of on your merry way But we're tagging the view up here as you can see which falling lower But not really getting too much of a short volume. Actually, you know, while let's get rid of Majority of previous day you can see in these longs are pretty much Started to liquidate it hit liquidate here and then the entirety and start of today Now we start there around Yes Yeah, around there It's just majority of it is still just getting rid of that long inventory. So it's just a lot of sort of short volume here Which is which is kind of a bummer and puts a bit of a span in the works unless we just try to drop anyway I based on numbers, but again, we have we have the Entarity of the morning Session to trade however we want to trade. So maybe in the morning session we go high to sort of counterbalance everything and From there we can go low because we've got all this sort of Markers here that sort of tell tell sign of the option and these guys offload slowly So maybe we get nice little rise out of this and take it out at two o'clock. We sort of then then go lower In there are a lot of options on how we sort of a look to trade today Because there's a lot of sort of paths that can diverge just out of Out of what's currently forming So there's not sort of clear definitive sort of picture currently and in terms of holding You see how holding this these sort of areas are holding bit higher each time Always always sort of showing that we want to hold above sort of current sort of These long areas and we saw that on the spot where we had a massive sort of Spots by here where before the push here we've got aggressive sort of market buys Pushing it up And those market buys then it eventually led to this entire sort of motion here Then you finally got these longs buying into sort of shorts or stop hunts rather Then these sort of inevitable be down. So maybe we get a couple more that eventually lead into sort of a larger sort of Combination into a point there. So well, we got a lot of sort of Telltale absorption signs. So maybe depending on how low we decide to hit it Definitely look definitely look good So I wouldn't sort of count today out People to hold against a pump Same time. It's just very if you say right now With a hundred percent certainty You get you guys should get more certainty When we start reaching sort of around 9 30 10 o'clock is this when you start getting a bit more certain and is In terms of inter-day trading where we're sort of moving So, I mean we've stopped hunt London. We rise we if we stop on New York, we rise again If we go high on New York, we go down Then and then we continue to go down But it just depends on how large they expand the range and if they choose to keep below below 2500 for today Sort of mark that out There you go So as long as we keep below that we're still sort of holding him onto that short bias And it's sort of just because we sort of collect that sort of long really long sort of Points here and here. These are really heavy on the long side And the only reason to go above these is when these are totally liquidated So maybe we tap one two then go for a third then start That's all aggressively pushing higher We've got we've got a lot in terms of Timewise all the way until sort of here and and that's sort of a lot of bars sort of try and paint a picture for today and then it's sort of safer to wait it out and See what you see what you see at 10 o'clock and once you see a direction for 10 o'clock It's it's it's used to a clock to be into the or just before two o'clock You want to be in the opposite direction the most of part if you're not If you're not feeling safe to go in the opposite direction Just take the trade off and and just wait it out But normally you'd want to just flip The opposite side of the bias. So if you start building down want to start exploding higher if you start building up We're gonna go lower. It's pretty much the Point that we're looking at is Basically, we're building the inverse of what we really want Because we want traders to say oh do this do this do this be sure be sure so I can squeeze you Or be long be longer so I can dump on you And that's just how the cookie grumbles There's no ifs ands or buts So definitely definitely an interesting day Oh, yeah, I would say more long I Don't know. It's it's hard to say I Have to be with this wishy-washy because I can't give you definitive answers because I've been told I Can't say anything. I'll lead you into trading financial financial advice. I Don't know man Sometimes I just stay soft to say things So boring being trapped in this hole Let's look at Solana Solana sort of very much aggressively pushed down I mean when I say aggressively just push back into sort of this sort of 31 point could be a nice sort of pickup But pretty wide if you ask me in terms of where stocks would be getting you do want to sort of talk about it here We don't hold here. It's This is your way to stop placement because you'll probably go down to 28 for anything You probably can find lower stops targets somewhere else Generally, it's not too bad If we sort of hold here Definitely see a long scenario here maybe even Put your stop much closer and and just be a lot safer if you still saying that there Hang that there. Let's look at docks. See if that's looking interesting It still has sort of news coming out of it sort of felt sort of Go past this point, but I think we already knew that Trapped up high came back a little great a nice little Flag then trades high. This is when flag usually plays ours when trade high See that trap trade high people expect the flag to break here. They trade short They trade high people expect the rev they do the reverse here. They start buying here So, you know what the flag is not gonna pan out this time. Let's break it They break the flag and they just go down and say, oh, yeah, you know what I played out. Let's do something funny Let's try so you see a Yeah, okay Release the crackin. Oh No, no, no, I mean this has no liquidity anyway Yeah, I saw your message on discord cracker. So it's like out that Yeah, I mean this has very little liquidity anyway And you can see that Don't just press the sell sell all button Yeah, we go that low I Mean, this is again This is why you choose a very good exchange to trade on this is why I talk about spread on exchanges Spread changes that are from exchange to exchange and just depends on how many people are willing to pick it up Or how many people can pick it up as fast as as fast as they slack and allow them What do you say 300k sell that's nothing man 300k sell volume and it caused all this trouble that's Even even some old other sort of crap coins Held through 300k sells better than this man. Come on man rookie our man rookie our Yeah, it's it's proving a bit difficult. That's slowly slowly End of the week I don't want to promise anything, but hopefully end of the week for everything done Moving a lot of trouble than necessary So just enjoy what we have now. I mean it's a healthy selection right now They do decent But yeah, definitely gonna bring it back up when I have the ability to do so Okay, I'm to Adam So I'm very soft large deviation and think better looking at low time frames no, I Mean it doesn't always necessarily mean that other exchanges are gonna follow suit like I Pray not just means spread wasn't able to keep up Someone someone was probably looking somewhere else and saying, oh, there's enough liquidity if I sell 300k here I make 300k and they didn't realize oh wait, I'm looking at by now and sort of all the book I'm not looking at cracking all the book. Oh, it's falling through It was a dumb move basically to sell any sort of positions there There's more often that looks like retail selling on retail, but it looked like very Penet to sell Adam pretty interesting very sort of large sort of point. I mean they did a little bit very sort of large pump then decided how to hold For all of this.  It's high Slowly sort of finding its way back to the earth Now where would you want to see her hopefully it holds here, but I doubt it will in the looks of things I think it's sort of targeting 13 Or even just a bit higher from the sea looks of it But if you can sort of hold around here I Have a fair value gap in the discount market you see price coming to it. I have to trade it because Yeah, so The actually I need to I need my team brush for this I Valley gaps. I mean It's there's no sort of time limit on them. So like you can have you can leave a fair value gap open for a really long time Let's just say this is a fair value gap here and sort of discount and So let's say we have a fair value gap that's open you can leave that open for a very long time like I said Was discount markets is just understanding which side of the markets someone's potentially trading Let's say we have a large sort of discount market. Let's say our markets are from here to here This our range and 50% Slightly too high Yes, let's just say it's around here large averaging it And we're sort of trading here and we don't even close it. We start we start moving into it We don't really close it and that's a thing. We don't need to always close the a fair value Fair value gap and it's just there as a point of saying, okay, you know what this is price of inefficiencies What you start looking for is when you start hitting into a discount market you start seeing for telltale signs of Panic selling and the panic selling into absorption and if they let it go through If they don't see the right amount of volume They'll let it go through until they reach here and they'll start pushing up and you'll start seeing it on bookmap We start seeing large larger and larger larger dots until they sort of push out So we sort of trade it is you just understand You understand where I've discount then you start seeing a bear flag You start seeing a bear flag. They'll probably pin it down give your large dot pull it up Or if you start seeing sort of bearish retail patterns you start in You start immediately doing the opposite because Sort of makes sense to the opposite. I mean like for this Yeah, I mean like this this took a very long time to fill and then it eventually filled it So they filled it from here But your sort of discount market really happened much earlier You sort of grab the range high green range low So they could they could have been done pretty much somewhere around here But they pushed it here And then they pushed it extra because they weren't really getting the volume and if we look at it and we can see what's happening at this sort of Sort of point you can see they're not really getting the volume they wanted then and finally they get it here and Get rid of this Hammer into that sort of small consulate. You can see that they only really started to get in the volume they wanted at this sort of bar here uh Well this sort of area here so it's okay You know what then we can start pulling it back down. You can see that and they sort of came to that point So pretty controlled with it and then you can see we're a premium here. So we're we'll start How why why are you breaking? Ah? Can't be asked anymore. Okay. It looks like rhythmic is broken again But they came really high and into this sort of premium sort of market Then they pulled it back. I think they came about what six like fib number levels Uh He's back in Yeah, they came in sort of fib number levels of uh seven five levels These are nice numbers by the way. These are either front run or undercut uh the other fib numbers Well, these two do uh, this is just the mean of these two. So I think a lot of people use them. I just I've just been happy about using just normal sort of this Because really don't need anything else because I have an order book Uh, and that's the thing was forex and and worth it the sort of whole smart money thing comes from Like I've said before You guys heard it before is uh, smart money is just trying to understand the order book without having the order book available Uh Yeah, that's that's that's the only way I can really explain smart money Uh, so if you have an order book available, you have an advantage because again, uh on the Work side of things. There is no centralized order book. So it's hard to sort of get a real sort of Sort of read on it from the order book side So you don't know where exactly every all the local security is because there's dark balls and stuff like that There's a lot more manipulation behind the scenes Not less than anything else, but like I mean there is always manipulation everything but At least with uh stock side of things you can see the manipulation crypto you can definitely see the manipulation Uh, it's just a lot harder to see Um, because there's no centralized order book, but you have to just rely on Uh the pattern on behaviors based on the charts That's why it's not always a hundred percent successful but we sort of are having an that's that that's why it's an advantage of having an order book because Uh, you get to see if uh, you get you get to see if there's uh actual participants at that level there Or if there's this time this one's a skip and they're going for another sort of targeted level So definitely keep that in mind Back to the other boring. Actually, let's go back to all kinds. What other all kinds do you guys want to see? Come on. Come on. Don't be shy. Come on ladies. Come on ladies Don't be shy Balance that seems to be green today. I don't know why that doesn't make sense Finding above the six six level that we're finally been looking for a really long time Uh, now the only trouble is uh at this uh a very in a up the opportune time so It does probably look like it will probably back under Uh, as long as it sort of tries to hold this sort of region. We're sort of happy. Uh, again As long as we get a look at like a small bounce. Yeah For retest here, we're happy six is a very sort of A strong number or six six rather is a strong number for balancer I mean, it's pretty fast past where the next levels are As it's very sort of low because we did have a sort of very large pump up without little sort of affection Uh, it's it's his is hoping Doesn't look to I wouldn't say too bad, but at the same time it's just dependent on how it holds over Six one looks like a potential stop if we stop down. Uh fill out this area here Uh only sort of saving grace in terms of pushing high looks like it's coming to The point where it might start failing now Uh, we'll see if it starts failing or if it starts pushing higher No, let's have a look at something else. I don't know. What's it? What's we go? Actually, you know what I'm so asking you the doorbells. Let's ask, uh, let's ask someone else Let's ask mr. Mark. It's kind of Very good That's funny. Hello. Can you work? Can you work? We'll go down this list Uh traded for where is actually? Oh, no, there's crypto list Here we go. Uh, it's individual.  Okay, there we go. Uh, let's see we want finance futures m all futures UST T On this let's do this Hmm, let's try. Yeah, let's look for some retail patterns. Why not?  We mask off the scanner doesn't belong to me I'm using something that doesn't belong to me a recent golden crosses. I don't know that looks interesting Uh I mean there's a lot to go through triple inside consolidation Uh, why does it take time to do that? Hopefully doesn't mess up by look for something else I doesn't hey, let's go I got damn. Yeah, there is the hell's The hell is this one man? And why do I not have this charted? What? I have spot there charted. No, I have nothing charted for this. Yeah. Wow Uh, it'll probably end up stopping here I'm being honest Just by looking at it. You'll probably find itself stopping very shortly Very large sort of volume here You got very little here. I remember talking about this. I'm pretty short on about this. I don't know Too much PCP man. Joking. Of course. I'm joking I don't do drugs drugs for fools Mr. T pity's a fool Nothing. Ah Nothing interesting Did I scan? I think I scanned current candles That's daily. That's why. Okay. Uh, let's do inside consolidations daily Yeah, it's pretty much culminating to a point. This looks a lot more Unforgiving because they finally got a lot more people buying at this rate Or longing at this rate than they did here.  It's like zero coding knowledge.   I'm stupid, man. Okay Uh, I can't change anything if I have to create a new one. I can't be asked for this Yeah, it's just Oh, let's do T Let's do this This is something I like Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot within transpider.  Let's look up bearish current candle Wow, nothing's in a position worth scanning Oh, there we go a lot of things bearish. Hell yeah Doge Doge father. Yeah, we talked about this being a high high point for it. Yeah, we'll say we're right Uh, see bmb I haven't looked at bnb in a while, but a slight slow rise up on the daily metric Sort of coming to a point here. You can see where Sort of mellowing out and I might rather have these points here There you go exactly where I was going to put it Uh, as you can see, it just doesn't take a lot to realize where things are going to be It just requires some basic background knowledge like How many stars in the moon And how many moons around the sun Which makes no sense. I know Uh, yeah, pretty bearish. I guess, uh, coming to a point very sort of high sort of volume here But definitely be on the short list Hopefully sort of comes itself back into three nine, uh, two nine four rather XRM don't even know what that is. We'll check it out Oh, apparently I do know what it is Uh, yeah, it's very sort of poignant very much, uh Taking out the wicks on the high side could definitely see this coming down. Let's sort of see where the volume is on this Yeah, just very much trapping up here. You can see similar sort of trappings here here very much awning awnings for a point, uh Definitely be interested again adding this to a short list. Uh, we'll see if we can collapse Into itself or it just finds a catching somewhere here and then just Becomes happy with itself and uh goes up higher Definitely keep this, uh Definitely keep this somewhere uni let's go uni USTT Uh, it looks very disinteresting Yeah Pretty much. I don't think it's a short neither. I don't uh, it's definitely It's definitely come down, but I don't think it's a short as in it won't be too uh profitable short in that Okay, there's definitely room for improvement in terms of there's room for it to try and go higher uh You see that you see that previous range here where we came back higher came into sort of range here there you go Came into this sort of tube Consolidation tube and and then just collapse downwards now We're sort of bouncing in between here as long as it sort of bounce on this sort of six four level So potential downwards point then finds a sort of footing then pushes up could definitely be interesting from it Oh Definitely something to keep on your radar Uh lit Haven't I already done this? Ah, I don't lift There's too much shit out nowadays I didn't mean that I mean that quite literally too much Too much Similar sort of story and I think it's more bearish I should add the previous kinds and able to locate some nice bearish sort of areas here Uh, like where the volume is they sort of fish Sort of for extra sort of trades, but ultimately came down and decided, you know, that's where you're what the majority of people are finding this sort of breakout volume here So we'll keep that and we didn't get too much anyway from this So definitely keep that as a sort of side. This is a side note. Maybe get a retest somewhere here before another sort of pump Uh, I definitely know this is a another one of these pump and dump coins that they really like So definitely keep this up. It's up 15% today Uh, is there any potential for it to go higher? Ah, we'll see. I think maybe Uh, considering they they fish and then got really didn't get too much of anything But if we're sort of being, uh A true 4, so 0.99111 as a as a reference as a retest point Uh, maybe around there. I think it's a lot safer if we don't get it if you don't get it before it goes higher If we get it consider it Probably bounce from there Roger Roger roger Would you mind looking at yours? I don't know. I wouldn't mind Yeah, look at stodger then look at yours Uh, it's weird that this printing very bearish and even though it's so In this already sort of uh, place where it's it shouldn't really Uh, be struggling but it is that just shows the very lack of interest within this sort of uh All this sort of area but again, it's a pump and dump coin So keep that in mind it pumps on news So maybe pay attention to where the news dates are pick it up a couple of days before the news date and just sell When we get news coming from it But again the sort of slow sort of point To come into here as long as you sort of pull down and into a retest. We'll see what we get Could definitely pump off that so again another another one shortly to add onto a shortlist Oh, why am I using the spot here? I'm definitely going to double check if I have the spot charted I do double check the futures to see if it's charted Even better Better than there. I don't know if they had spot charted by a while ago. Okay Uh, let's see There's your point There's another point sort of locate 50 between the two Just call it a day In this and this just say there we go There's 50 you can see where it struggled lip 50 and it's sort of finding its way here It very looks very weak. So potential. I think it will probably just have an overbearing Top and pull itself back at some point If we can catch ourselves here could definitely be good for it Uh, and maybe even reach out to 1.6 but that's again hoping And that's a very wishful thinking I think Can you feel the old season soon? Can I feel? Well, how can you feel? Uh, I think also I've been all moving a lot better recently. Uh, I think there are a lot In fact, that is moving a lot faster than bitcoin is just the only alarming rate Uh, don't know. It's the only alarming sort of signal It's just like, ah, they're moving a bit further But me usually you'd like bitcoin to sort of guide the market and the rest of it Moves because then it's in a more comfortable position where everyone's feels Or everyone is lulled into a false sense of being Then moves from there. I mean, it's it's pretty much wide I think From it but again, Ethereum is more of your guide with Ethereum looking a bit overly overly, uh, cautious on its current sort of Axis, I think I think we can say potential for everything to sort of back on done and we'll see if then It can rise from there if we can rise from there. Yeah old season hell Yeah, as long as Ethereum sort of catches itself somewhere A worst case catches itself out all the way down back at 1350 But hopefully find yourself a bit higher if it can bring up all the old Then we start getting enough inflated sort of market and I think, uh, you know, it's not too bad It just shows that bitcoin starts losing a bit of its sort of dominance and Now back into bitcoin. Let's see what's what it's been doing while I've been lollygagging Uh, nothing Like always nothing man. It's just nothing It's just moving up into a point We can see if it tries catching itself back at this sort of view up again If it sort of catch yourself at this view up, it's a nice sort of position to say, you know What we'll get that further downwards movement after all Uh, and it's just the back end of this sort of nice point I think we're sort of looking for this to go up higher. See if it takes out the range high uh, we'll see if it uh If it before then it starts expanding the range and moving the range higher with it and then sort of just Pushes high And just increasingly higher and up until two o'clock where it just slams down and everyone just says, you know what? Yeah, that that's enough for today But yeah, definitely could be interesting I would want more down off of this. Uh, just looking at the daily uh And I think that's probably what I might get And if we do if we are expecting that then we are expecting prices to slowly reach higher And higher sort of numbers just so we can sort of lull everyone into a point of Setting. Oh, yeah, buy me buy me buy me buy me play me, please Then oopsie You know, I'm not bought me Uh, but yeah, definitely need to clear out this sort of short sort of stack here As you can see a very sort of large sort of point. So And I'm a pretty nice little even bottom as you can see from the candles and you saw from the candles that There were very sort of close together. There's clicks down below, but just relatively very close After that, so definitely could project this going higher at the sort of current point So we'll see what that leads into at 10 o'clock if 10 o'clock decides to give you a direction Just follow that and that's in the form of either a stop run or whatnot Okay, I think that wraps up today Thank you guys for putting up with my insanity One more day one more day crazier Oh No But by the way, like those things this act. This is not an act. It's actually how I am Oh, yeah, thank you Thank you so much for coming guys. Uh, I will catch you guys tomorrow And hopefully you guys have a nice trading session if not, well work on that And I will Ask you tomorrow. Peace


Up now we have Alex and Konark with Anonymous Rate Limiting with Direct Anonymous Attestation. Thank you and welcome everybody to our talk. My name is Konark and this is Alex. And we both work for a company called Klicks based out of Munich, Germany. For those of you who have not heard about Klicks, we are basically a privacy-friendly search engine which can be accessed through our browser and through our Firefox add-on. And apart from being a search engine, we also package the browser and an add-on among various privacy features like anti-tracking and ad-blocking. And we're also the parent company for CoStreet. Today we're going to talk about a system that we developed and use at Klicks which basically helps us prevent attacks on our data collection system. Although the examples that we will take here will be based on the events that we receive in our data streams, but we believe the system is generic enough that wherever rate limiting applies, the system can be used. Before Alex will talk about the system in detail, I would just like to explain why at first place we needed to build an anonymous rate limiting system and how it has evolved since 2016. Now, it's important to understand that data is important to build services and Klicks is no exception. To power our search engine, anti-tracking, anti-fishing, data is of the most importance. And yes, it might sound a bit controversial talking about data collection at a privacy village, but it's important to understand that when you talk about data and privacy, how that data is being collected is of the utmost importance. If you look at this table here, this is what most of the data streams in the industry would look like. Most of the data collection happens with an identifier that is sent back home with the events. The identifier could be a long-term identifier, an explicit identifier, like a cookie, which you see on the extreme right, or it could be an implicit identifier based on multiple parameters like IP and the user agent. The whole notion of sending back identifier is so that use cases like analytics could be solved on the back end. So for example, based on this data stream, we can easily solve the question, how many unique visitors visited facebook.com in a given hour, right? But also because of the presence of the identifier, you can link multiple events on the back end, which means not only can you solve the use case of finding out unique visits on facebook, you can also see that the same user also visited booking.com, twitter dashboard, and maybe because of some capability URLs, you can potentially de-anonymize the user itself, right? So when we started to design our data collection streams, we wanted to ensure that any data point that can link multiple messages on the back end needs to be dropped on the client side itself. What that means is in our data streams, there is no way you can link multiple messages together. That could be implicitly or explicitly. And in order for us to even prevent ourselves from linking messages based on network fingerprinting, we also want to route the data through a set of proxies. So that means the data collection streams are clean and cannot be linked with multiple events. That said, we still can solve the use cases that is needed to collect identifiers for. But for this purpose, for this talk, we will not dig deeper into how we do it. If you want more details, we can offline or you can read this paper and our approach how we do data collection anonymously and yet solve the use cases. Coming back to the motivation of doing this talk, now the problem is all the data collection systems suffer from the same problem that an attacker can spam you with multiple messages which are fake, which are not actually happening on the user's machine. And we are no exception. But because our, so if you take, let's take an example here. So for example, one of the most important data points for us is query logs. What that means is what is the query that user did and what result did the user select from our search results. And the query log powers how we rank our search engine and how we promote the content because that detects what's the popularity of a query and landing page, right? Now an attacker knowing that we do not have identifiers in our data streams can spam us with multiple messages, right? And once the spammer starts to send us multiple messages, it could be used for altering or promoting their own content at a different rank or maybe disrupt our services by promoting a bad result for a good query, right? To give you a more concrete example, just based on these two messages, these are two sample query logs, query booking, the landing page booking dot com, query booking, the landing page booking holidays dot com. Just based on the message content, we cannot detect whether it's a fabricated data or a genuine data, right? And because unlike other search engines, we do not track users, there is no way we can know what is the source of the message and what is the history of the source itself to use it for server-side rate limiting or for server-side rate limiting solutions, right? And this is a big, big concern for us because now at one point, we are doing anonymous data collection, but because it's anonymous, it can negatively impact our services itself, right? So one solution could be let's stop anonymous data collection and let's start tracking users, but that is not what we want to do. So we want to build a service wherein we can detect without de-anonymizing the user whether it's the same user sending us multiple messages or these are different users. You can think about this as a voting system where a trusted user can vote but can only vote once for a given period, right? Now think about this problem as the user needs to vote for popularity of a query but can only vote once in a given timeframe. In the context of this query log, we only want to receive one query per user, one normalized query per user in one hour, right? And if we talk about a general implementation of the system based on the message type and the content of the message, we want to rate limit the users, rate limit per user per timeframe, right? And that's kind of important for us and that's why the problem that we try to solve is without knowing the user, how do we enforce these rate limiting users or these rate limiting rules, right? So in 2016, we pushed a version to production which we call anonymous rate limiting version one and the idea was because we are already using proxies to transport data, we can actually empower the proxies without learning the content of the message but still perform deduplication for us. But what that meant was these proxies needed to run custom software which perform these deduplication tasks. Now this protocol was based on blind signatures and other standard crypto primitives but yet for this solution to work, we needed multiple trusted third party providers to run proxies for us. The reason we needed multiple third party proxy providers first was because they needed to run the custom application and second, we did not want that the users could collide with the proxies or the proxies could collide among themselves or clicks itself could collude among the proxies, right? But what happened was we tried finding these multiple third party vendors to run proxies for us and sadly in about two years we could not find any, right? What that meant was clicks had to run their own proxies which kind of defeated the whole purpose and because these proxies had to run a custom software to perform deduplication we cannot rely on the off shelf solutions like Tor or other trusted vendors. So based on these challenges that we faced in the first version earlier this year we started testing a new version which we call anonymous rate limiting version two and which Alex will explain in detail. So as Conor said I'll talk about our new anonymous rate limiting system which is based on the rate anonymous attestation. He already mentioned some of the benefits but just as a quick review this system has several benefits over the previous one. The first one is that now we don't need we remove the need for trusted third parties. Second, there are less interactions between the client and the server because in the previous system we required one blind signature per message so the client had to first get message blind sign then actually send the message so there was two interactions. The third one is now that we can use known solutions for network anonymity like Tor which in the previous system was a bit more complicated because of this custom third party proxies. So what is actually direct anonymous attestation? Direct anonymous attestation is a cryptographic primitive which is implemented in processors that follow the trusted platform module standard as well as other chips which follow the Intel enhanced private CID specification. But rather than focusing on the hardware that runs this cryptographic protocol we'd rather like to focus on the cryptographic primitive itself. So for our purposes, direct anonymous attestation has two key features. First, it allows for anonymous authentication. This means that you can prove that a trusted platform is signing a message but not which concrete platform is doing so. So in other words, the signatures can prove membership of the device in a group but not which concrete device is signing the message. The second feature that is important for us is the control linkability. So given, sorry, for this control linkability a device signs a message with respect to a base name string. In a way that two signatures from the same member are linkable if and only if they are done with respect to the same base name string. So for example, if a device always signs a message with the same base name then all the signatures will be linkable. So we'll be able to link all his messages together. On the other extreme, if a device would randomize this base name and sign every message with respect to a different base name then all the messages will be completely unlinkable. So we see later that we can use this linkability properties to achieve our rate limiting needs. But before that, we have to talk about the main four operations that are involved in direct anonymization because we'll need to refer to them later. The first one is called join and this is where a device gets credentials from an issuer. Typically a device is the client and the issuer is a server. And we can see this as the device becoming a member of the issuer group. Then once this device obtains credentials it can sign messages with respect to this base name string in a way that the linkability properties are fulfilled. The linkability properties that we talked in the previous slide are fulfilled. So then the verify operation essentially means that you can check whether a signature is valid for a given message and base name and finally the link operation which is especially important for us is it allows to check whether two signatures have been known by the same member and the same base name. Now since this signature linkability is essential for our purposes we actually need these link algorithms to be efficient. So let's take a look at how this linkability looks in practice. To achieve this linkability, signatures contain pseudonym which can be seen as a linkability tag and this pseudonym is computed as a one-way function of the base name and the user private key. Of course the user private key is unknown to the server so it's unknown both to the issuer and the verifier. The way this pseudonym works is like if you see two equal pseudonyms then it means for sure that the corresponding signatures were done by the same member and with respect to the same base name. So this means that the link algorithm is efficient because the server just needs to store all the previously seen pseudonyms and then whenever a new message comes just extract its pseudonym and see if it has already been seen before. Now that we have explained how the Red Anonymous Attestation works let's see how to use it actually in practice to achieve the real limiting our real limiting needs. So the idea is quite simple it's basically enforce these base names to be computed in a very specific way so that the concretely limiting rules for the system can be enforced. So this means that the client will compute the base name according to these rules and will never send two messages with the same base name pseudonym because of course they could be detected very easily at the server side. Then the verifier which is a server will drop messages either if this base name has computed incorrectly according to the rules or if the pseudonym is repeated. So this would be the structure to achieve our rate limiting purposes. So it looks like a couple of four components the first one is a message type which can be used to have different rules for different kind of messages the second one is a time period which is actually a time stamp truncated to an hour or a day depending on the need the third one is a message digest which is an arbitrary function on the message and is used to introduce some message content into these rules and the last is a count which is an integer between unit E1 and N and can be seen as a multiplier so given a fixed message type time period message digest then you can send up to N messages so we found this base name structure to be expressive enough for our needs but it doesn't mean that this is the only possible structure to do this kind of rate limiting now revisiting the previous example that Konark show the query logs we could have a message that would look like this first the search query and this case booking the landing URL and the timestamp and we would like to enforce the following rule we only want one message per user per hour per normalized search query to be accepted by the server to achieve this rule and following the previous base name structure the base name would look like this first we will have the message type which is constant in this case query log type the second one would be a truncated timestamp to the hour so instead of 6.56 just 6 the third one normalized query and the last one just 1 because in this case that's the only option so essentially the strategy is to not let the user choose more than one base name for a normalized search query and for a given hour another example that we might want to enforce is let's say we have a different kind of message which we only want to accept three messages per user per day so for this kind of message we could call three daily type the base name would look like this first the message type then the date and then the message digest which in this case would be empty because the rule is independent of the message content and then account which in this case could be chosen so a client at the start of the day would like to send the message then it would see that it can choose out of three base names and it would choose one at random it would mark this base name as used and then in the next message that would want to send it would pick from the two remaining base names etc and essentially when it runs out of base names there is no way that the message is detected and there is no way that the user can send an additional message without being detected at the server side now if TPM was available like in all the devices 100% of devices we could basically end the talk here and say ok we leverage on the TPM because it runs this direct anonymous attestation protocol and we showed how to use it to rate limit but in practice this is not the case first TPM is not available in all the devices like it might be available in this laptop but in general it's not and then even if it's available for example in our execution environment we want to run this real limiting service in the client which is a browser extension so even if the TPM might be available physically in the device we might not be able to access it so at the end it's not realistic to assume that the TPM is available so what we did is we implemented the direct anonymous attestation protocol but without the TPM, so software only now this opens the possibility for a new problem which is basically ok in the system we showed we protect against a single user from sending too many messages so we kind of ok for a given user this user has only a limited set of boats let's say to contribute in the system but if we remove the TPM then it could be quite easy for an attacker to create many identities and then obtain credentials for all of them and then essentially bypass the whole system so not that this would not happen with the TPM because if we would enforce the TPM then actually get hold of many TPMs devices which is not so easy so at the end if we cannot limit the number of credentials given to attackers then the whole system will be useless now this has a name it's called Civil Attacks and we actually need to prevent them so the good thing is that we can pretty much focus on one operation of the system which is the join operations this is the operation where the clients get credentials and the good thing is that it does not need to be anonymous so this is because according thanks to the protocol properties there is no way to link this join to any other of the user interactions with the server so essentially the join is decoupled from all the other interactions so since the joins do not need to be anonymized we can leverage standard techniques but just on this join operation for example the simple one would be just to rate limit on the user IP we believe that would already add some protection then depending on the use case of this rate limiting system we might have email user accounts paid user accounts subscriptions so we might be able to use this for the join operations to give the credentials now as an extra measure we also rotate the issuer public keys this means that every time the issuer public keys are rotated all the credentials that the issuer has given are invalidated so the clients need to join again this is to avoid an attacker to potentially accumulating many credentials over time and using them with any extra effort so at the end as a summary of this part we believe there are ways to mitigate these civil attacks and that the rate limiting is useful even without TPMs so as a summary for the key parts of our system first we rate limit joins using all available information that we have user IP email if it's available etc then rotate issuer keys periodically and last use the direct anonymous attestation linkability for doing the actual rate limiting on the messages now we have to mention some possible the anonymization attacks that we might be able to do given that we control the servers so given that we control both the issuer and the verifiers the first attack would be trying to make each user join a group where they are alone so essentially each user would join a group which is unique for them and then essentially each signature if this was the case would contain like a user ID so this would pretty much make it very easy for us to build user sessions this is quite easy to detect because the user fetch the issuer public keys periodically and then the user would detect that the issuer is changing this issuer public keys when it should not and then basically could decide to ban the issuer and not send any message anymore or to report it or depending on the system the second attack is a little bit more tricky and we call it denial of join is that the issuer has the power of deciding who gives credentials to them so in an extreme case the issuer could only give credentials to a single user and then since since only this user would be able to send messages it would be trivial to track this user so this is a bit more tricky to detect from the client side because the clients would need to cooperate with each other in order to know that a single part of the population is not receiving credentials and then react upon it but in practice this is not so easy to implement but in our concrete use case since we have the incentive of receiving data to run our services we have more incentive on receiving data than on trying to track users and since to track users we have to drop messages proportionally to the granularity that we want to track so it's not reasonable for us to try to do this attack okay so we thought it would be a good idea to compare similar systems that are used in production one is called privacy pass and it's used in cloudflare and the way this work is basically a user solves a token, sorry a user solves a captcha and then receives end tokens that can redeem later to avoid solving more captchas right so these tokens skip the captcha the captcha pass and these tokens redeem anonymously so we couldn't use this even though we could use this in some specific use cases of our system we cannot use it as a general solution for our needs because the main reason that these tokens can be redeemed at any point of time in the future and we cannot frame it to redeem it at specific time periods as we require then the second one is called anonymize and is implemented in a brief browser it essentially consists in the server being able to set up anonymous surveys for a subset of users in a way that only one user can vote once per sorry in a way that users can only vote once per survey as far as I know this is used for payments to decide the popularity of websites we couldn't find a way to use it directly if our needs because our trade limiting rules needed a little bit more of complexity it needed a time period for some matches to the query logs to include part of the content to do the remit so we couldn't find a way of using this but still the systems are similar to our in some way so for the implementation part we implemented a paying based cryptographic protocol which is used which is defined in a FIDO elliptic curve data anonymous attestation and since it's users paying based cryptography it's not so easy to find well at least the choices for libraries are a bit reduced eventually we decided to use a library called Apache Milagro Crypto Library which is in C so we implemented the protocol in C using this library and since our client runs in a web browser we compared it to WebAssembly and built road bindings to JavaScript for that and then for the server side we used the same C implementation but road native bindings for Node.js as our server now the benchmarks especially the most important operation is the server verify because these actually influences how many messages per second can the server process so right now it's 4 milliseconds per CPU core so this means we can process 250 messages per second per CPU core even though this is not surprisingly fast we believe that it's fast enough to be used in practice to be used in production so this system not the whole system is open source yet the server side is not open source but the crypto implementation of the direct and normal of the station it is as well as the client part in this repository so thanks for watching see you next time bye