is Ben Breard on the product management team here at Red Hat. I've basically spent the past five years kind of operating in between REL and OpenShift, kind of covering all of our immutable operating systems, container runtimes, image offerings, and things in that kind of world. And now, really focused on Edge and what it takes to be successful there. Yeah, so I just hit 10 years at Red Hat. So it's awesome. I have the greatest job in the world. I get to play with all the fun stuff and work with all these super cool use cases from customers. So it's absolutely great. And yes, I at one time had an RHCA one day in the future, I hope to update that. But we'll see how this goes. OK, so what is Edge? Well, for everyone's edification, that's terrible. Yeah, anyway, we'll keep moving here. Basically, we now have the situation where we have sources of data all over the place. And there's all kinds of use cases to capitalize on this data quicker, faster, more efficiently. And in some cases, we've reached the limits of where we can actually ship data to a cloud or data center environment to process this. And so putting compute closer to these sources of data, sometimes those sources could be humans. Sometimes it's sensors. It can be all types of use cases. But that's typically the combination of what we're talking with Edge. And so of course, you guys can probably imagine all of the things that we take for granted inside of the data center or cloud environment are now luxuries from an infrastructure side that may or may not exist at the Edge. So that's kind of a key thing. And another point I would make is depending on what industry you're in, Edge is going to look completely different. Sometimes it will kind of look and feel like a remote office, maybe. It's totally different for telcos and content providers and so forth. In the industrial manufacturing space, it looks quite different as well. So every industry kind of has its own take. And so it's good for us to look at this from a holistic view, not really just from one industry and realize that it does vary quite a bit. If we step back and kind of look at common challenges here, we do see that scale is often associated with these in a data center. Pretty common for us to look at the tens of thousands, approaching hundreds of thousands, types of deployments. In Edge, though, it's often that these numbers start in the millions range. And you can just imagine trying to perform a task on a million devices, we start hitting limits of what you can do with protocols and things of that nature. And so we have to look at the scale problem very differently in this world. In terms of just interoperability, I think of right now we're kind of seeing the West as kind of the West. Excuse me, the Edge is kind of like the Wild West in a lot of ways. In terms of just what hardware is available, what accelerators are being used if any. Oftentimes, there's kind of an existing legacy footprint and how newer systems are interacting with that. Or maybe they're interacting with hardware systems talking to PLCs on a manufacturing line that they can't stop for safety protocols. And it's just a lot of moving pieces that's going to continue evolving and adapting a lot over the next few years. But how these protocols work at a very low level, sticking with the manufacturing case, is there's not a lot of commonality between the vendors and types of communication that we see at a very low level. So it's a complicated matrix of layers of technology that intersect here. And of course, from a consistency perspective, basically keeping things updated, we oftentimes talk about the convergence of operational technology with IT networks and systems. And that right there creates sometimes organizational tension, but also creates huge opportunity for us to solve problems and really work with customers to make sure that we can meet basically requirements and have these systems kind of converge over time. All right. And we look at kind of an application lens here. You guys are going to see that all the traditional cloud native and a lot of the AI and ML stuff, this slide should really say open shift and rel on it. Because these are really the types of applications that we see being super relevant in the edge space, there's already a lot of traditional footprint out here. Like I said, rel specifically has been doing edge computing long before we had that word or that label as an industry. And so there's already a sizable footprint out there for that. We do see most of the growth happening on the cloud native side could just be repackaging of existing applications as well as literally forklifting workloads from other environments and putting those out at the edge. And then of course, the AI and ML side is obviously growing really, really fast. And whether you're training models or just executing them close to sensors, for example, or doing inferencing on a webcam or these types of things. We basically see the OS as being a rel specifically being a great fit for a lot of these use cases. All right, so I'm going to put this in context. And we've got a lot of cool deployments for open shifts in an edge context. We can now do smaller 3-0 clusters. The remote workers landed in 4.6 or much, much more progress has been made there. And then the single-node work is coming, is on the way. But today, just to put this in context, we're talking about just what can I do with Linux? And so you could think of this. I've had two people come up with this term. We know we have K8s, and there's kind of K3, which is like the Slendown Kubernetes. Kind of think a lot of this is like K-0, right? Like what can I do with container run times and the OS? And it turns out you can actually do a heck of a lot here. And so just again, kind of going back to the trends that we see happening, a lot of times you'll see edge computing connected somehow with some type of digital transformation type of initiative. Could be the IT OT convergence is another huge, huge things going on, or really people just trying to make better use of analytics on top of data to either make them smarter from a competitive standpoint or improve customer experience, or really just increase operational efficiency. All of these tend to be the bigger trends that people are going after. It's not a little bit about the verticals already, so I'm not going to rehash that. But what can you do with kind of a standalone OS? At this point, really just a container host that where the concept of a cluster actually doesn't add value. And so these independent systems that just once you put them in motion, keep going, that's a really, really common use case here that we can solve really well, particularly on smaller footprint devices, either just edge servers or a gateway to where we're really just passing packets back and forth. I talked a little bit about computer vision a second ago where we're doing inferencing on a feed of what's coming into the system and trying to identify what's happening on it and make decisions from that. The kiosks are still a huge thing, particularly for like in the transportation space, that's still we see huge investment happening there. And then of course, we see the classic kind of IoT use case rolling up under edge as well. All right, so with rel in the next update, which will be 8.3, we are on a time-based model now. So the November release, we kind of have these four things landing, which represents our first step in the journey of kind of adapting rel for edge. We're not finished with this release. Again, this represents kind of that first step for us. And effectively, what we have is this tool called Image Builder, and we'll go over this in more detail. But basically, we can generate these pretty small footprint operating system images that can need to be purpose-built for a particular piece of hardware, use case, workload, or kind of a generic container host. And then we get a whole bunch of benefits because we're using RPM OS tree in the background, which makes it super easy to update, super easy to be really efficient with those updates over the wire, and then we have some cool technology that will help us roll back if we need to. And we'll take a look at those in more detail. But before we get into kind of some demos and some other things, I want to kind of talk a little bit about running containers with traditional workloads. I mentioned earlier that there's pretty sizable legacy footprint in a lot of these edge use cases. And basically, there's no technical reason why we can't just drop in containers next to traditional damons running on our Linux system. It works great. Now, depending if you need to orchestrate and do fancy things with those containers, you will probably hit the limits of that pretty quick. And that's obviously where Kubernetes has a massive amount of value. But if this is more of a static workload type case, this is pretty simple to do. It works really, really well. Again, one of the things I do want to point out is that in REL 8, we make it easy for just regular damons running on the system to really present the same kernel primitives that give you container isolation to services installed on your system. So it's something I find in talking with people that a lot of people don't know that we can easily add all kinds of namespaces, like sec.com, these types of things are really easy. And there's really a list of kind of like eight line items you can put into a unit file that starts an app. And it will just basically give you that very, very similar type of isolation, which is super cool when you consider kind of how connectivity is increasing and how important security is, and will continue to be in the future. OK, so we are from a container run type perspective. We are talking more about the Podman side of the house right now. Hopefully everybody here is kind of familiar with the differences of CRIO, which is meant to talk to the Kubernetes CRI and Podman, which uses basically all the same underlying components, but it's kind of standalone in terms of it has a CLI, now has a Docker-compatible API in this version that's going to come out in 8.3. It's just super lightweight runtime that works incredibly well. One thing we like about it for this use case is we have much, much better integration with Podman and SystemD than we ever had in the Docker world. And so again, this makes it super easy to just, again, going back to kind of that static workload model, half-container images that can auto restart, they just, the system knows how to run these just like any other service. So Podman is really great for that. So again, we've got the new API coming in in 8.3, and then another thing that makes this whole model really, really nice is this auto update based on the tag on your images. So this is something that's technically going to land as tech preview in this release. But if you're managing container life cycles at your registry, which you should be doing, everybody should be doing that. And if you want to have a certain tag land on a certain set of boxes, maybe you're going to phase in or have your whole, all of them are going to pull the prod application. Basically, we can have timers on these ends and now check that tag at whatever interval is appropriate and just kind of auto pull that image and update as new ones are made available on the registry. So again, little features like that make life super simple and again, easy to scale because these are all client-initiated actions. That's nice. OK. So let's talk a little bit about what we're getting in 8.3. So I mentioned Image Builder is kind of the front door of this tool. This is made available via the Cockpit UI. There's also a CLI and an API for this. But really log in and approximately four clicks, you're going to get the default image. If you need to customize it with RPM content, you can. Here I'm going to include CRUN as I really enjoy CRUN because I like using SecretV2. It's super fast to instantiate containers as well. But here we'll just go ahead and we'll commit this to the blueprint. Again, you don't have to do this. By default, we'll give you everything you see here with some slide, a small app core install with our container tools as well as some goodies that we'll look at in the next couple slides. But you see, I just select the image content, rail for edge, commit. And this is going to generate an RPM ministry commit that we can then serve out from the central place. And just again, this is going to give us that remote update capability. That's it. It's going to kick off the build right here. We can see this going. It happens pretty quick. On my junky laptop, this will complete in, I don't know, seven, eight minutes if you're running on good hardware. Expect faster results. All right. So let's talk about the mirroring and providing these updates. So again, we create the initial image the way you saw. We are going to create updates for these images using that same process. So it's one thing you have to understand that you are now driving these boxes and you're driving that update cadence and how you have fine grain control over everything that happens on these systems. And again, once these updates are created, we can put them on any type of web server. So if you want to just a patchy box or host a container somewhere, if you're going big on a prod environment, please use a CDN of some type, just depending on what type of load and number of nodes you have. And then these last two, we've kind of itemized a couple of the configs on your systems that are going to control where they're looking for this web endpoint. And then the last one is one of my favorite things where we can, if a new update is published, we will automatically pull that down on the nodes. And I'll pick that up in a couple slides on how we actually take the update and accept it. But it's super easy to stage these updates locally on the system. OK, so let's take a look. I am using the terminal on the web console. And I wrote a little script so I wouldn't fat finger things for everybody. But if I check the status of that image build, I can see node zero is finished here. And this compose image is really just going to download it and give me an artifact that I can work with here. And this happens super fast since it's local. But I now have this tar file with that commit of the RPMO history locally. And now I'm going to build a web-based server to host my commit. So I'll spit out the file here. You can see it's super simple. I'll just give me a patchy, extract this tar ball that I made an image builder, and then go ahead and serve that. So no magic at all is needed here. So just go ahead and build that image. It's going to happen quickly because it was already built on this node. And then I'm just going to bind it to port 8,000 so I can run this particular one's root list. There's no, again, no requirement to do that again. But it's a good proof point that you can host these any number of ways you want. And then once that's going, I'm just going to curl the latest ref of the commit. If you guys have used RPMO history or looked at it, you'll know that it's kind of modeled after Git. So a lot of those same ideas and concepts that you probably are familiar with from Git, RPMO history basically leverages those. All right, so once you have made an image from image builder, that is a good way you can easily serve that up. And let's talk about the updates themselves. So day one is pretty simple updates. So a lot of edge environments, some of them have amazing data center style networks, which is super fast. And efficiency at this tier is not, it's nice to have, but it's maybe not a requirement. But in some environments, we have just horrible connectivity, like microwave links that make modems or old dial-up modems look really fast. Retail, we still see fractional T1s and these types of things. And so what's cool is even if you have constrained networking, this now makes it possible to update those devices. Because it's much, much more efficient by only sending that delta of the update over the wire. If you generate what's called a static delta, you can actually pull it over a much, much less TCP overhead, which is just great. And again, it increases that efficiency. But even if you have really, really great connectivity and bandwidth isn't like a nearest scarce resource, you still probably want to be using that for your applications of workloads, not OS updates and these types of things. So having that efficiency really helps regardless of what type of infrastructure you have. And again, this is just a great side effect of using RPMOs tree natively for all this stuff. Now provisioning here. If you're familiar with our cost, you may be wondering, why is this not ignition? Well, we're looking at ignition. And we may include that in the future as an option. We're certainly open to that. But right now, a lot of these devices have like, we just see this gamut of hardware that has all these weird requirements. So Anaconda works incredibly well to fit this RPMO history commit onto those systems. So Anaconda is, again, just makes this really, really easy today. And so this little example just has a kind of a bare bones top section. And then really, instead of having a percent packages where you would normally list out all the content to install, we're just going to use RPMO history commit. And we're going to point it to your mirror. If you point it to your production mirror, once you deploy the system, it's going to know where to look for updates automatically. So that's probably a good thing to do if you can. And that's all you need to do. You can do any customization stuff and percent post if needed. Pre is still there. But kind of a good rule is to keep these as simple as possible. OK, and so that's how we can easily just get the commit onto your devices. And now a little bit about RPMO history. This really gives us this great kind of the best of both worlds if you think of a traditional like embedded type firmware, like your router that may have an AMB partition on it. So we kind of blend that AB update model with the benefits of a package-based distribution. So it's nice. So if we ever need to make a change to what's on a system, because one of the key things here is to be able to adjust for change that happens in your environment over time. And so this model is super easy to adapt over time, which is really powerful. So again, we get the benefits of this AB model where we can fail back if necessary, as well as kind of that flexibility with the packages, which is great. So really everything of the operating system that lands under slash user gets swapped out with the, or at least in each commit, there's the full OS in there. And then once you pull that into your repo and clone it locally, we're only going to send a delta, but you get that full commit locally where you can go to either state of the device. We do maintain state in slash bar in Etsy. So the whole operating system is not technically immutable, like from the strictest definition possible. And that's not a bad thing because true immutability often requires a significant amount of infrastructure to be available. And that's not something that we can count on in these environments. So again, maintaining your configs and container images and these types of things is generally a really healthy and convenient thing to do. So that's it. And we always get this known state that we're operating in on the system, which is powerful. So I mentioned earlier that we can automatically stage these updates in the background. And so that's a great way to approach it. That's probably what I would do, but it depends on your environment and what you should do. And then whenever an update is staged, typically you may want to align to a maintenance window. Again, a lot of these systems are responsible for like critical infrastructure and can't just accept reboots like free form, like we would expect in a cloud environment. And so it's pretty easy to schedule reboots with a timer or there's a number of ways you can use any type of a management system. But once you have a scheduled reboot, when they come back up, they'll be at the next update automatically. So that's how that works. So updates will cost you a reboot. However, as long as you time that, typically accepting a reboot should be less than, less disruption or potential unknown disruption than updating a live running system and making changes on the fly. This is a really good model. Okay, so last little screen shot is to kind of give you guys a look if you haven't played with RPOS tree on a system before. I'm going to SSH into, this is a bare metal system I'm running. And again, I'm using the web console terminal to do this.  And I checked the status. I'm running a single commit. So this box has just been provisioned from Image Builder. That is the commit of the update. And I'm manually triggering an update because I don't want to wait for the timer to do it automatically for me. And this particular one just pulled in new, kind of the container tools packages have been rebuilt for this one. And we can see when I check the status that I have a new deployment here that is staged and not running on the system. Of course, my workload has not been interrupted at all. It's still going. Now I'm forcing a reboot just to move into this really quickly. You can see how I got impatient and tried to SSH before the system came back. And I checked the container runtime. And of course, my application is running as expected because it is being managed by system B. And we can see here the asterisk has moved up and I'm in my new update. Now again, this model is familiar if you've been using like things like atomic hosts in the past or maybe silver, blue, and fedora. Rail CoroS does use this model as well. So hopefully this makes sense to everybody. Now, this last thing is kind of what's new and unique to what we have in REL. Basically, this technology is GreenBoot. And it's the first time that I'm aware of where we can have custom health checks for applications running on the system. So let's say my node has like three critical things it needs to do. I can basically write scripts in GreenBoot gives us this framework to run those scripts that integrates with the boot process of the system. And if they fail using a counter system, so it's not strictly like, well, it's as flexible as you need it to be. If an update causes one of the critical roles of that node to fail, we can revert the state of the system and go back to where it was working, right? So super, super powerful here. And yeah, we're basically really excited to have that linkage again, between the workloads and operating system update level. One of the customers we worked on on this capability really closely with, their feedback to us is basically the combination of RPM, OST, and GreenBoot is gonna save us millions of dollars with our deployments. Once these systems get provisioned at the edge the goals to not go back and revisit them physically. So you can imagine how having this type of safety mechanism in place is a big deal for a lot of people and living into this space. All right, so with that, basically, again, I mentioned 8.3 as kind of the first step in our journey of kind of meeting the challenges of the space.  In fact, that challenges we talked about earlier in this talk, I would say all of those challenges kind of live on top of the security concern, right? Because again, in the data center, things tend to be physically protected. You know, we have cages, we have badges, systems and may or may not have any of that for the edge. And so being able to promise that same level of security without physical protection is huge. And so REL has a huge value proposition there today and one that's gonna get even better in the future. And the other thing around edge in general is, we see complexity as being a huge challenge for really any IT project in general. And we see REL in particular at solving a lot of the complexities in this space. So hopefully kind of the little example in these features we've brought through in 8.3, hopefully you can kind of see that if I need to put these applications that's relatively static on some smaller devices, maybe they're big servers, it doesn't really matter, and just keep these, maintain them steady state, make sure they're updated. This is a super simple way to just go meet that need and be successful. And then of course, why not do that by leveraging kind of the existing investments in people skills and technologies, right? That people know and love from Red Hat. So that's a key value prop in everything here. And so at this point, I guess everybody's probably going crazy thinking, oh my gosh, I've got to get my hands on this and try it to go conquer edge in my environment. And so one, you've come to the right conclusion. Two, it's super easy to go do this and get your hands on it. If you go to the OS build GitHub repo, we really have kind of this whole thing documented out here and you can walk through it. It's super simple. You can just do it in a couple of VMs if you like. Really, however it makes sense, but it's, you know, it'll take you anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes depending on your setup, super simple. And of course we'd love to get feedback from you guys, hear what you think. And again, this will GA pretty soon when 8.3 hits the streets and we will update this demo to reflect that. And with that, I guess that's our look at how we are adapting Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the edge and I appreciate everybody's time and being here. Ciao.


I have always found a lot of really fun creative people and I eventually end up working on some kind of passion project and then in a paid project. Here's an example of a Facebook group. So if you are, let's say in Atlanta, you can try searching Atlanta non-union actor casting calls. Some of them are non-paying. Some of them can be scammed. So please, please, please be very careful on what you do submit to. If you want to do theater, background work, voiceover, there's a Facebook group for pretty much anything. Instagram. Of course, you can follow different casting directors and here's good faith casting. They're based out of Arizona, New Mexico, and LA, and this casting director often gives a lot of tips. So this is a great page to follow in general for tips from a casting director. The pages for different films, if you follow them and they need a last minute replacement for an actor or they are posting their open casting calls, you will be the first person to find out. See what they're up to. See if they're holding any current audition.


So my name is Ed Tang. I'm one of the co-founders at DigiNutal Labs. We're a small design and dev studio that we focus on making social good mobile apps and web apps. So that's what I do in a nutshell. And we are here today for me to give you a quick intro to crypto currencies. I'm not gonna make any assumptions about the level of information or knowledge that the group has. So I'm just gonna try to keep this as simple as possible is gonna be a lot of like techno jargon and stuff. I'm just gonna try to make this all simple to understand. But I will look at the Q&A stuff. So I may answer questions as I go, but we'll say most of them to the end like you said. So crypto currencies, what's all the fuss? It's all over the news right now, right? And you hear people are getting rich by the minute buying crypto currencies. But aside from all the crazy speculative talks and news around getting rich and whatnot, there's also an underlying technology that's really important to talk about and to understand crypto currencies themselves are not the technology. They are run by something called the blockchain, which I will explain as we go through this talk. You're also gonna notice this just hodl it meme. For people who don't know, hodl is simply a misspelling of hold. Somebody tweeted a while back to hold their crypto because it's going up in value. You miss type hold type hodl and now it's becoming a thing because the internet does that. So if you hear people saying just hodl it or hodl it, that means hold your crypto. So that means, so what's all the fuss? Cryptocurrency is basically the centralized cryptographic currency. If you're not familiar with those terms where I think the central, what is all this stuff? So cryptocurrency is built upon some three major pillars. There are some minor pillars, but the three major ones are that there's no central authority, meaning that no one government or country or financial institution can control the currency. It's completely decentralized. So to kind of give you an example, why that's important, imagine like during a depression or a recession where there's like a run on banks, then the banks all of a sudden decide just cut you off from your money. You can't take anymore out of the ATMs. That can happen under central authority or governments can devalue their currency in order to try to increase exports economically. Governments do those kind of things, inflation deflation. With cryptocurrency, none of this stuff can happen. These shenanigans can't happen because no central authority can manipulate the currency that way. So that's a beautiful thing. There's full transparency with all the transactions going on through the crypto community. Again, like take banks for example, if I wanted to call them up and ask them, hey, there's something kind of weird going on with the transaction in my account. There's two things going on here. I have to trust that the bank is gonna give, tell it to me straight of what's going on. And I also have to trust that their servers and all their data is true. That it hasn't been hacked, that it's completely secure. Now we know that hacks can happen. They don't happen as often with the bank industry, but they do happen. And tellers and people who work at banks do make mistakes. Human error comes into play. And sometimes they may not tell you the whole story. So with cryptocurrencies, the transactions on the blockchain are fully transparent to the public. And that's a beautiful thing too. And third, if not most important, is that crypto as a currency is available to everybody. It's a secure global accessible financial system. This is really important in places where people don't have easy access to banks, for example, even here in America, we're a rich nation, but even here there are some people who don't have easy access to banks. For instance, if you're living paycheck to paycheck and you almost have zero balance in your bank account every month, but the bank requires a minimum balance. So there's like a fee that they deduct out of your account. All of a sudden you're looking at negative balances every month, which can curb penalties. And these things can kind of bloom out of control. And so people won't open a bank account because of that. Or if like in another country, let's say you're a refugee and the government will recognize you're a citizen, so you're not allowed to get identification and without identification, you can't open a bank account, therefore you cannot participate in the financial system. You're just in this weird catch 22. You don't have these kind of blockages with cryptocurrency, everybody and anyone has access. And that is also another beautiful thing. So because of these pillars, it's a decentralized system. And what that is is just saying that it's a distributed system without one single authority. So kind of imagine like again with a banking example, like with my bank Chase, which I use for other purposes, all the data resides on their servers, their backend servers, it's all kind of one single house but with cryptocurrencies, the entire transaction ledger is on every single different computer that is participating in the system. And we're talking about thousands upon thousands of computers around the world. No single one computer can dictate what's happening with the crypto system. So it's distributed and it's decentralized. And there's so many benefits around that and we'll get into that as we go. So that's the decentralized part of it. The cryptographic part of it is the underlying technology that runs cryptocurrency. And you may have heard this in the news, it's called the blockchain. The blockchain was created by a person or a group of persons called Satoshi Nakamoto. To this day, we do not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, who or whom they are. It might probably remain a mystery till the end of time unless they decide to help themselves. But the mystery is kind of beside the point, it doesn't matter. Satoshi Nakamoto created a white paper on blockchain in 2008, then in 2009, the very first implementation of blockchain occurred. So it's been around for about 12 years now. Still a very, very new technology. So what in the world is blockchain? Blockchain is essentially a chain of encrypted data. The way this works is think of blocks of data that are essentially chained together and it's called the blockchain, pretty simple. The way it fundamentally works is, I'll give you an example. Let's say you have the first block that's ever created. Maybe that is just a company that has a project and they're issuing cryptocurrency. So they create the very first block, the Genesis block. Now, what happens is there are these things called hashes. Hashes are basically just a totally long, random string of numbers. And let's say the first three of those numbers are applied to this first block, the Genesis block. Now let's say somebody buys a coin. That transaction is gonna be recorded in another block. And that block needs to be attached to the original block so that they're chained together and secure and kept historically forever. In order to chain that block together, you would verify with the original block that first that the hash is correct, the three numbers that it has, let's say one, two, three in this example. And then the second block gets added to this chain, picks up that one, two, three hash and then adds three additional numbers, say four, five, six in this example. And then if you wanna add a third block, the third block would check the second block and say, does the second block have a one, two, three? And then you go to the first block. It's the first block, one, two, three. If everything matches and then the third block gets added to the chain, third block takes on one, two, three, four, five, six and adds three more numbers, seven, eight, nine. And this just goes on forever and ever until you hit the maximum number of blocks that are given in any particular system. So for example, Bitcoin, which is built on its own blockchain, there are other coins that are built on their own block chains. For Bitcoin, there's 21 million allowed blocks on their block chains, which is they estimate the run out of blocks somewhere in 2040, the year 2040. So we have long ways to go before we run out of blocks. So that's the easy answer to how blockchain works, but there's a little bit more to it. You don't just add blocks because if you do it just based on the hash numbers, it can still be hacked. You can falsify hash numbers and then start creating these branches that look like the real blockchain but aren't and then you start abusing the system. So what happens is, is that there's an additional step called proof of work. Proof of work, imagine every time you want to create or attach a block to the blockchain, there is a mathematical equation, a very complex equation. It has to be solved in order to allow that block to be added. And what happens is to solve that equation, computers around the world, which are called miners, they compete to solve this equation. The reason why they compete is because they are incentivized. The first computer to correctly solve the equation gets awarded a certain number of coin from that block along with transfer fees and whatnot. So the community is incentivized to compete against each other because everybody wants to get their own coins. They're not incentivized to collaborate, which would spell disaster for the blockchain because if everybody collaborated, they could try to hack the system through what is called a 51% attack. I'm not gonna get into that but it would be disastrous for the system if there was collaboration going on. So there's a lot of game theory used to make sure that it's a competitive environment that people are competing against each other to mine these blocks and get the reward from them. So how does proof of work work? So all the computers are competing to solve this mathematical equation. The first one that solves it gets a proof of work. And what happens is the rest of the computers see that the equation was solved and then they look at the proof of work and there has to be a consensus with all the other computers, all the other miners that say, okay, yeah, you did this correctly. The proof of work is correct. Once that consensus is agreed upon, the miner gets the reward and the block is added to the blockchain and it just keeps going on and on like this at Nauseam. So every time somebody buys, sells, trades, exchanges, coin, this is the process that is happening through proof of work, all right? Now there are other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. These are the two major ones, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the original one. It was built on the original blockchain. Ethereum is built on its own blockchain. And like I said, Bitcoin works on proof of work. There are advantages to proof of work and there are disadvantages to proof of work. The advantages are that proof of work is highly secure, highly immutable, meaning it cannot be changed, almost impossible to hack. Ethereum is similar, but it works on something called proof of stake. I'll get into proof of stake in a second, but there is a huge disadvantage to proof of work being that there's a massive energy cost. In the early days, when there wasn't a lot on the block, the computational power of a computer to try to solve the equation didn't require too much energy, but as the block has grown, the equation gets complex, more and more complex with every block that is added and it takes more computational power to solve these equations, which creates a ton of energy use around the world. It's estimated that the blockchain right now under a proof of work, the annual energy use is equivalent to about Argentina. And Argentina is a pretty big country. So you can imagine how much energy is being used on an annual basis. Ethereum's proof of stake uses way less energy. It's about seven times less, six to seven times less. So proof of stake is an alternative to proof of work and that's why you're seeing Ethereum becoming more and more popular. And getting back to, so let's talk about proof of stake for a little bit. Why is it different from proof of work? Proof of stake is based on not computational power of one computer. So it's not just all these single computers competing with each other to solve the equation. It's based on how much coin I own in the entire pool of coins. So let's say just hypothetically there's 1,000 coin. There's like millions of coins, but let's just say 1,000 to keep this example easy. And let's say I own 100 coin. That means I have 10% chance of solving this equation and it's not necessarily built on the computational power of my computer. It's built on my ability to solve it and also my stake in the pool. Now, if somebody had 200 coin, they have a better chance of getting an opportunity to solve this equation. They have 20%. So that's at an individual basis. I could compete with other individual stakeholders if we own a lot of coin, but let's say I only own one coin out of 1,000. My chances of getting a reward from completing the equation or adding the block is almost minuscule. It's like 0.1%. So I could join a pool to stake, meaning like let's say somebody has 10 coins, somebody has 50, somebody has 60, and I have one. All of a sudden we have, what is that? 121 coins together and together we can compete against the other percentage holders. So proof of stake is another interesting way to basically secure the blockchain and verify the blockchain without as much energy consumption as these massive computer rigs that are trying to do things on proof of work. So if we look at it from an energy consumption standpoint, proof of work is not very good.  Battery or the environment generates a lot of heat, use a lot of energy, Ethereum is better, but in the grand scheme of Ethereum, still uses about as much energy as let's say Ecuador. And that's still a full-sized country of energy consumption. So there's other proofs, like proof of time and space, there's proof of authority, not even gonna get into all these things, but there's all these different proofs of methods that are being tested to try to bring down this energy cost and make transactions more efficient and whatnot. So, but that still doesn't tell you whether or not Bitcoin is better than Ethereum. Ethereum has something called smart contracts. The Bitcoin blockchain does not have smart contracts. So what are contracts? Well, it would be good to start off with what's a basic contract. So like in the world, when we draft up a contract, the parties agree on something, and oftentimes there's a third party that makes sure all the conditions are met and then the result of the contract is executed. So for example, let's talk about the real estate transactions, for example, in California, there are escrow companies and title companies that service third parties to the real estate deals. The seller and the buyer agree on a contract, everything goes through this third party, this escrow service and these title insurance companies or even mortgage lenders and all these kinds of things. Then once all the conditions are satisfied, the key is transferred to the new owner and the money is transferred to the seller. Now that can be cumbersome and there's also room for a lot of human error. We kind of talked about human error and all that kind of stuff earlier with the central authority problem. Thankfully, human error doesn't really occur too much in these older systems, like real estate transactions, they happen so much that people know how to do them really well, but the errors do happen. In fact, I used to work in the real estate industry, so I've seen the errors happen, I've seen fraud happen, so it's not a perfect system. Smart contracts, on the other hand, they get rid of the third party basically smart contracts are programmed contracts to execute perfectly when the conditions are all followed. And it's highly trustworthy, you don't have to worry about the contract being hacked because the blockchain itself is highly secure. You can't change the contract. If you don't suddenly like the terms, you can't hack it and change it. So let's say with the real estate contract, once you know that you've programmed like all the inspections have been done, the loan is in place, you know, you have all these conditions in place, the contract can then execute and say, look, time to turn the keys over, here's the deed, the digital deed, the money gets transferred to the seller's account, done. You don't have to go through all these intermediaries. Now that hasn't happened yet in the real world, there's still some barriers to implementing smart contracts at scale. A lot of it has to do with the cumbersand of blockchain because it's not fast. Like all those equations that have to be solved take time. And the reason why they take time is actually part of the security measure. If those equations were easily solvable, then hacks could happen more easier. But because they take time to solve and energy to solve is really to try to hack the blockchain, there's zero incentive to try to even do it. That's why it takes time. But that time also works as a disadvantage in the real world where things need to kind of happen faster. So for like, for example, a Visa card, they process, I think something like 50 million transactions a day or something like that. We could be wrong in that number, but it's in the high millions. Blockchain transactions, crypto transactions don't even come close to credit card transaction volume yet. So that's something that does need to be solved. So to kind of give you a little bit more in-depth understanding of smart contracts, it's all about trust. And why do I have a picture of a Lego vending machine? Well, because first of all, I'm a huge Lego geek and I had no idea Lego vending machines existed until today, which blew my mind and that's awesome. But the vending machine also serves as a really good example of an example of a basic contract. You're probably wondering, what are you talking about? So a vending machine is generally it's a trusted thing, right? You feed money into it or you slide a credit card and you expect the machine to just spit out the item that you bought. Now, there are problems with vending machines. Sometimes things get stuck. It could eat your money. What if the credit card machine's broken or maybe the machine is just trash, somebody just trashed it and you're never gonna get the item. No matter how much you shake it, it's just not coming out. So there are problems, but generally it's a trusted mechanism for a contractual transaction. The contract being I give you money, you give me my thing.  All right, first of all, that's crazy. Who would do that? That's a great vending machine that does that. But it would immediately make you question all sorts of stuff. Like, is this true? How can I trust this crazy idea of somebody willing to give me $5,000 if I give them a thousand? Like that's a lot of money to put at stake to trust this machine, to do what this thing proposes it's gonna do, right? I have no way of verifying that it will do what it'll do. There's no service person around here to verify that if the machine breaks, I can get my reward. So as you scale, when you put more at stake in a transaction, you have to have a lot of trust in this contract and how those contracts are being executed. And that's why smart contracts as a technology are super important. They can basically make it 100% trustworthy. You can go to a vending machine that says, if you put in $1,000, I'll give you $5,000 and go, okay, I understand how smart contracts work. So I can 100% trust this is gonna happen. Even though it is preposterous, I just know it's gonna happen. Here's my $1,000, gave me my $5,000.  But smart contracts essentially create high amounts of trust around any complexity of a contract, a digital contract that can be executed. So that's smart contracts in a nutshell. And again, smart contracts run on Ethereum or Ethereum's blockchain. Smart contracts do not run on Bitcoin's blockchain, so which is why you're seeing Ethereum gaining in popularity than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still very popular. I think one coin's at about $55,000 right now. Last night it was like $59,000 plus the $60,000. But Ethereum has recently jumped from around $2,000 to $4,000 just in a few days. So Ethereum is gaining steam and it's projected to be more valuable than Bitcoin in the future because of its smart contract technology. So you might be wondering, with all these fluctuations of cryptocurrency, like I mentioned Bitcoin is like at 55 or 57,000 right now. Ethereum's on 4,000. There are hundreds of other coins that are fluctuating constantly in value. So why hasn't crypto been used for buying goods in the real world? A lot of it is because of this crazy value fluctuation, but does the constant fluctuation of cryptocurrency values affect the value of goods bought or sold with crypto? You might have seen like online or like in tweets or whatever, people saying, oh my God, 10 years ago I bought a shirt with one Bitcoin that was worth, and Bitcoin was worth $10. And so my shirt was worth $10 and now Bitcoin's worth $55,000. So my shirt must be also worth $55,000. That's not how that works. So I just wanna talk about this real quick to dispel that myth. I'm gonna give you a really simple example. Imagine just hypothetically one Bitcoin equals $1. Let's just say for simplicity sake that's what that is right now. And let's say you're at the grocery store and you see a candy bar also for $1. That candy bar, you can be bought with one Bitcoin because it's all equal to about one, all equal to $1 and it's an even exchange. So now let's say Bitcoin goes up, is now one Bitcoin is worth $2. Does that mean the candy bars are also worth $2? No, the candy bar is still worth $1 because it's based on a physical economic market. And basically you would be able to buy that candy bar for half of Bitcoin because if one Bitcoin is equal to $2, half of Bitcoin is equal to one. The candy bar is equal to one. So you get half of Bitcoin to buy the candy bar. The candy bar isn't suddenly worth $2. And let's say I sold you the candy bar, I have your one Bitcoin, at the time one Bitcoin's worth one. So as a seller of the candy bar, once I get your coin, I want the value of that coin to go up. So if I held on to that coin for many years and now it's like worth $55,000, suddenly that one coin that, you bought my candy bar with so many years ago, now I have $55,000 because of the value of the coin, not because of the value of the candy bar. So and the person who bought the candy bar couldn't hold on to that kind of bar and then a few years sell it for $55,000. It's still worth maybe a little bit more than $1 because of inflation or whatever. So maybe it's worth $1.50 or something.  But I think you know what I'm trying to say here. So to dispel the myth, just because you buy something for Bitcoin at one value and then the value goes up and the coin, the physical good does not go up in the physical value. The physical good is still tied to the real life market value in the economy. So based on some of the information I've given you and the craze around cryptocurrencies, should you or shouldn't you get involved? This is a good question. I personally love the technology. I also, there is a lot of speculative stuff going on with the valuation of crypto. There's a lot of money to be made. It's kind of like the stock market. You can buy stocks, speculate on the stock, whether or not the stock will go up or down and make money or lose money. However, you shouldn't look at cryptocurrency just from a speculative perspective when you think of should I or shouldn't I? Like I said, in regions that don't have financial access to banking systems, should you or shouldn't you becomes a very different question. It means if this is the only choice that I have as access to a financial system, then yeah, you should because cryptocurrency currencies are democratic. They equalize the access to finances and they're not like identification dependent. You can be anonymous. You don't have to go through central agencies, central authorities. So that's a very different question depending on your situation. In rich countries like America or other parts of the world, the should or shouldn't I is more based on should I put my money in to maybe make money or lose money? So it just kind of depends on your perspective and where you are in life. Also, I think should you or shouldn't you is tied to do you believe in the technology? You know, cryptocurrency, the blockchain itself as a technology is gaining in strides, gaining in adoption. You're starting to see corporations except that as payment you're starting to see governments consider creating their own digital coins. China just made their own digital coin. So governments are getting in on this too. I don't know whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'll leave that for another discussion. But if you believe in the technology you probably should get into it because as more adoption happens throughout the industry the value of cryptocurrencies will just grow and grow and grow. Even though the values fluctuate violently right now that's on the short term.  Again, I'm not a financial advisor so kind of take all this and I'm saying with a grain of salt but this is just what I believe, okay? But you should do your own research and probably consult with other people if you really want to treat it as a money making mechanism. That's something you need to be comfortable with. So if you do decide to get into it bitcoins worth $55,000 or whatever it is right now and you're not rich, how can you get into it? Well, fractions are your friend. You can buy coins in fractions. So even if you have $100, $10, whatever it is, $1 you can buy a Bitcoin. You can buy a fraction of the Bitcoin and the value of whatever your own will coincide with the value that is currently happening with the coin. So you can buy Bitcoin, you can buy Ethereum. I own different coins like sand, Cardano. There are hundreds of coins. So you need to do your research and understand the differences between these coins. Every coin is built on a different blockchain technology by different companies. So do your research. I own the ones I own for different reasons, personal reasons. And you can feel free to ask me about those if you want. Oh, real quick, I see an interesting question. Can a government ban cryptocurrencies? They can make it illegal. They can't, it's very, very hard to ban because in order to ban cryptocurrencies you would have to essentially shut down the internet. You have to shut down every computer around the world that is part of the cryptocurrency decentralized system. So you can't ban it from that sense. You can't just shut it down.  It's still happening around the world. So they can't effectively ban it completely but they can try to cut it off from their citizens but there are so many ways around it. So you can't really ban it. You can make it illegal. So if you catch somebody taking part in it you can send them to jail. Does that work in favor of the government? I don't know. You know, back many, many hundreds of years ago they tried to make it gold illegal because it was challenging the monetary system. That failed because gold wasn't going anywhere and people invested so much that they could so they made it legal again. I feel like that's pretty much it's going to be the same thing with cryptocurrency. Some places are going to try to make it legal, try to ban it but you're just going to realize this is a fight they can't win. So I just kind of want to answer that question real quick because that question popped out to me and I'll answer the other questions later. So if you buy crypto, how do you store it? Well, you can get a crypto wallet or you can go through an exchange. So there are things called custodial wallets and non-custodial wallets. If you buy your cryptocurrency through an exchange, exchanges are like, you might have heard of Coinbase or Gemini or Binance. These are the three major ones. There's a bunch of minor ones but these are the three major ones and the most secure ones. When you buy through an exchange, private key is created for you, the digital private key. And that private key basically proves that you own the coin and that private key is held with the exchange. The exchange is a custodian of your private key. So the exchange is essentially a custodial wallet. Now there are downsides to that, meaning that exchanges do get hacked occasionally. We've heard of this happening in the news and you don't have control over your private key. It doesn't reside with you, it resides on the exchange.  Now non-custodial wallets are not held by the exchange. You take the private key or you take like a software app or a hardware like USB wallet and you move the money that is being held at the exchange, the crypto being held there and you move it to a wallet like on your phone or onto a USB key. And these are called non-custodial wallets because the exchange is not the custodian of your private key. And in non-custodial wallets, you are the owner of your private key, you are in control of it, so it gives you more better security around the private key. As mentioned, there are hot wallets and cold wallets. So non-custodial wallets fall into these two categories, hot wallets are basically software based wallets like on the web or on mobile apps. They give you high access to the funds, you can transfer at will with exchanges or between wallets very quickly just on your phone. It's always connected to the internet but they are vulnerable to phishing and hacking.  So it's kind of like a password to your bank account. You don't ever want to give away that password. So if anybody ever asked you for your private key, it doesn't matter who they are, do not give it to them or else you're just kissing your crypto goodbye. And phones can be hacked, right? Like to access my wallet on my phone, for example, I set it up to accept the other password or my face ID or touch ID, but let's say somebody circumvents that on my phone, now all of a sudden they had access to my wallet on my phone without needing to know my private key. It's very rare, but it can happen. Now there are cold wallets. So it means you're transferring all the crypto you hold in the exchange to let's say like a USB dongle. There are companies that make these Ledger and Trezor are the main two companies that make cold wallets. They're extremely secure because they're physical hardware. They're not connected to the internet all the time. So hackers can't just access it online. They'd have to literally have access to your physical USB dongle. But they have less access to the funds. If you wanna transfer them, you have to reconnect the USB, plug it into your computer or connect your Bluetooth to a software app, mobile app and then transfer the funds that way. So it's not as fast as hot wallets. And it's not connected to the internet all the time, which is a good security measure. So cold wallets are more secure than hot wallets. Hot wallets are more secure than exchanges. So that's a good way to think of how to keep your cryptocurrencies. Now, I mentioned private keys. Well, let me talk about private keys last. When you're considering a wallet, you're gonna wanna consider what coins those wallets support. Not every wallet supports every single coin. There are hundreds of coins. So for example, with my stuff, just as an example, Cardano and Sand, the two different coins. I have to own two different wallets to hold those coins because one wallet supports sand, it doesn't support ADA, which is Cardano. My other one supports ADA and it doesn't support sand. That's kind of ridiculous, but it's just kind of the name of the game. So when you're choosing wallets, it kind of depends on what coin you wanna buy and that'll help you base your decision on what wallet to get. If you're just focusing on Bitcoin or Ethereum, every single wallet supports that. So you don't need to think too hard about it. But when you start going into alternative coins like Cardano or Dogecoin or Stellar Lumens or Neo or something like that, then you do have to start thinking about does your wallet support the coin? Can I actually hold it there? Even the cold wallets, Ledger and Trezor, they support different coins. They have a lot of intersection with what they support but they also support things that are just native to their wallets. So it's not a unified system, kind of a pains sometimes, but wallets are secure and you should definitely hold your crypto in either hot or cold wallet. It's highly recommended. So private keys, as mentioned, keep them secret, keep them safe. As Gandalf says, do not ever share your private key. You're literally giving away your money if you do that. Okay, it doesn't matter what excuse anybody gives you. I don't care what anybody says to me. I will never give it away, okay? Unless I put it like in my will or something and I trust the executor. Even then, I'll probably do that right before I die. And if you lose your private key, guess what? Your coin is lost forever. Hackers won't be able to get into your wallet even if you lost your key. Like if I'm a hacker and I'm gonna try to hack your wallet, the amount of time it is predicted to try to hack a crypto wallet is approximately 650 million years based on current modern computing power. So you can see that it's impossible to hack a crypto wallet unless you start having the advent of quantum computers and whatnot, but that's a near future technology. So we don't have to worry about right now. But if you lose your private key, guess what? You lose your crypto forever and that cryptocurrency is taken out of the pool overall pool. So to give you an example of how devastating this can be, there's a story where a guy held his private key on a hard drive. Back in the day, Bitcoin was worth maybe $1, $2, $5 or something like that. He was just like, this is never gonna be worth anything. So he threw his hard drive away, got a new hard drive. Years later, suddenly Bitcoin hit $10,000 and he had millions of dollars worth of crypto saved to that private key on his hard drive. Now that hard drive is sitting in a landfill somewhere and he's out tens of millions of dollars right now. In fact, he's so desperate that he started paying people to help him look for this hard drive in the landfill. Good luck to him. It's probably worth it if you have tens of millions of dollars at stake but he's probably never gonna find that hard drive. So need to keep your private keys safe. I keep mine locked up in a safe which I'm not gonna disclose where it is but typically private keys are a string of 12 to 24 words that you have to input into correct order and it's very, very hard to hack. The downside to the private key is because you do have to keep it somewhere secure and it is something that's really, really hard to remember. People already have a hard time remembering simple passwords to try to remember a string of 12 words in the correct order or 24 words in the correct order. It's very hard to do. So that's one of the barriers to adopting cryptocurrency or for people to come into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. So that's also something to consider when you ask yourself, should I, shouldn't I? Can I deal with the private key issue? I personally think it's worth it. It is a big barrier but it's a secure barrier. So that's why it's worth it to deal with it. But again, I'm gonna reiterate, if you do get into it, do not lose your keys, okay? So I wanna talk about some other stuff that's in the news. You're hearing a lot about NFTs. They're all the craze right now. NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens. What is non-fungible token? Again, like random words, strong together. Non-fungible simply means that it's unique. It's irreplaceable. And at NFT, right now, the craze all around the NFTs tied to artwork. NFTs represent the digital rights tied to artwork. So you're familiar with Niantcap. It's been around for decades. But somebody recently sold, the original creator of Niantcap recently sold the digital rights for Niantcap for $580,000. Not the art, the rights behind the art. So whoever owns the NFT, whoever this person is simply has bragging rights to say, look, I own the rights to the Niantcap. It's kind of silly because Niantcap as an art has been shared millions of times over the internet. So it's not like this person can tell everybody to take the art down. And he doesn't actually own the art itself. He just owns the digital rights to it. So that's what an NFT is. Some people think that when they buy an NFT, they're buying the art. Just wanna be clear, you're not buying the art. You're buying the digital rights to the art. Anything that can be digitized can be turned into, the digital rights can be turned into an NFT. So music can exist in a digital realm. You can have digital rights to that. There are trading cards, digital trading cards like Top Shot, NBA cards, even tweets. Jack Dorsey recently sold his first tweet that he ever made for, I think around $3 million for digital rights, some absurd number. And other NFT examples are like Sandbox. I own Sandcoin, which is based on the Sandbox game. Within the game, people are selling digital rights to the digital land that they're creating within the game because there's only so much land you can buy in the game. It's got its own real estate ecosystem. It's kind of neat just to kind of think of how the NFT ecosystem is growing. I kind of wanna talk about real quick about where the art is held. If you own an NFT, like I said, you don't own the art. So let's say all of the Nyan cats in the world were suddenly taken down from the internet. Do I have access to the art anymore? Even though I own the NFT? No, because the art isn't hosted online anymore. It's just gone. Now hopefully I had downloaded a copy of Nyan Cat for myself, kept it on my computer on my phone. Otherwise, if I didn't, if it's not hosted online somewhere, I have zero access to the art. So that's something to just keep in mind when you think about NFTs, again, they reiterate it's the digital rights, not the actual art. What's great about NFTs is that it's created an entire economic ecosystem for artists to make money in different ways. And it's opened a lot of doors for independent artists to make money. Not all of them are selling things for like $100,000 or whatever. I think there was a GIF recently where an animation sold for $69 million. That's absurd. So there's a lot of craze in the collector industry right now around NFTs, but generally you can sell things for like five, 10 bucks. Whatever, if you're an artist. I'm creating my own NFT. It's like a digital sticker. That's just something fun I'm doing. NFTs are based on smart contracts, which are based on Ethereum right now.  So think of like NFTs for real estate transactions later on, they can be very important. So there are other uses besides art, but right now the craze is all about collecting art. So what does the future puddle for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology? You know, the sky's the limit. We're just starting to find out. Corporations are just starting to accept payment in crypto. We're starting to see the energy costs come down a little bit. So we're gonna be able to start seeing implementations of blockchain. I'm very excited for people who are in more desperate states who need access to financial systems or even digital passports to create highly secure and trusted identities that aren't controlled by governments that could exist on the blockchain. That's super important. But what does the future puddle? Who knows? It's up to everybody's imagination, but I'm very optimistic about the technology. And I think you should be too. So that's my talk. Thank you so much, Eve. That was so interesting and really fun. There are many, many questions. I know you can see the Q and A before we also have some questions from the chat and some from our friends watching on YouTube. So before you kind of get into those I wanted to hit you with a couple. So people would like to clarify. So there's a finite amount of each cryptocurrency that exists. Yes. And is there a way to find out what amount that is? Like, can I look up how many doge coins there are in the world? Yeah, you can look it up. There are market caps. It's all public knowledge. Like I said, for instance, Bitcoin, there is a finite amount of 21 million blocks that can be created. I think there's actually more crypto coins compared to the actual blockchain, but it's all public knowledge. You can just look it up. And then some general questions like you can purchase crypto without a social security number, right? You can. Yeah, that's the beauty of crypto coins. Everybody has access to it. If you don't have any of those things, social security identification, you still have access to it. It does leave room for nefarious stuff that can happen, but the nefarious stuff that's happening through the crypto community is nothing compared to regular fiat money, like US dollars or whatever. So I don't really worry too much about that stuff. If I purchased 10,000 in cryptocurrency, do I need to report it to the IRS? I know you were not an accountant. I thought I was bowing anyway. I'm not an accountant, but the IRS is starting to crack down. They're treating investments, them as investments. So if you cash out your coins, there are different rules. Don't quote me on this again. I'm not a financial expert, but I think if you cash out your crypto over a certain amount under a year, it's taxed at a certain rate versus if you cash it out over a certain amount after a year, it'll be taxed at a different amount, a lower amount. It's just like stocks, actually. Stocks operate the same way. Capital gains taxes. So they're trying to apply capital gains taxes to cryptocurrencies, but if you're doing it in small amounts, the IRS usually isn't gonna think about it. It's only those who are doing it in like large, massive amounts where this matters. And then this is interesting. What data is the blockchain behind the cryptocurrencies whole day? The identities of all the owners of coins and someone asked if I'm mining crypto with my computer, is my computer part of the blockchain? No, your computer is not part of the blockchain. Your computer, your computer, can't even talk. Your computer is just there to try to solve the equation and help usher along the adding of blocks to the ledger. The one thing I didn't say is that the entire ledger is the copies of the entire ledger are kept on each computer, but your personal information on the computer is not on the block. What is in the data blocks is the transactional data. Like my coin went from this wallet at this address to this address on the exchange, but it doesn't give my name, doesn't give my social security number, none of that stuff is kept on the blockchain. It's just a public ledger of how the transactions sorted themselves out. And then some people would like to know what are some of the factors that influence the value behind a particular crypto and or currency, and what kinds of things should they look into when they're researching what they might wanna hold? That's a really good question. That is like a million dollar question actually. People to this day, they think they know what affects the value. There are some like easy answers to that. Like, for example, like last year when PayPal suddenly said they're accepting cryptocurrencies, accepting Bitcoin, all of a sudden Bitcoin jumped in value. That was tied directly to somebody in the market space saying, hey, we're gonna legitimize this technology. So you can kind of predict value that way, but there are other crazy things happening in the space that you just can't predict. It's kind of like the stock market too. There are things that are predictable with stock market and there are just things that are happening behind the scenes. I would say that if you believe in any particular technology, then you should look at this over the very, very long-term. When I'm talking long-term, I'm talking five, 10, 15, 20 years out. Don't think of this as a short-term thing. If you do it as a short-term thing, you're gonna drive yourself insane trying to figure out how to calculate the value of coins. But if you believe in the technology, let's say I believe in Cardano because Cardano is a blockchain based on proof of stake which is a competitor to Ethereum. I believe Cardano will become important as a competitor to Ethereum the next five to 10 years.  I'm just gonna let that value sit there for five to 10 years. It's fluctuating a lot right now. I'm just not paying attention to it because you're gonna drive yourself insane thinking about the short-term valuations. You covered this a little bit, but we have a lot of questions around sort of tools or platforms to buy and sell and how do you spend crypto? The main tools are through exchanges. Now let's say you can't buy through an exchange because you do have to have an account, a bank account. Actually, that's not true. You can use credit cards, you can use gift cards, you can use prepaid cards to buy crypto. So if you don't have a bank account, you at least go to the store and get a prepaid card and buy your crypto that way. Now there's something that I understand that when you buy crypto, there are fees involved. So take that in account. Just because you buy, let's say $100 worth of crypto, it doesn't mean you're getting $100. Typically getting anywhere between $90 to $80 to $90 worth depending on the fluctuation of the transaction fees. But let's say you can't buy crypto. There are projects that do give away crypto for free. Those cryptos aren't worth as much, but they are creating its own financial ecosystem. So you have access to a financial system. You can also ask people to just transfer crypto to you if they're willing to say, hey, can I borrow some crypto or can you just donate some? Now I have been advising a lot of nonprofits to accept crypto donations. They shouldn't be leaving money on the table. They should accept all donations. And so if a business is accepting crypto, how do I spend the crypto? Well, let's say for PayPal, for example, if there was actually a button that says pay with crypto. And what you do is when you say you wanna buy this with crypto, you go into your wallet, which has a public key versus a private key. The public key is for transferring, or no, the public key is for like, let's say somebody wants to transfer money to you, you can give them a public key. So if PayPal would have their own public key, I can transfer the money too. So I would insert the public key, say this is how much I wanna send to this public address, and that's how it's sent. Now your private key, it's used for other things. Like if I want to send money elsewhere, in order to verify that transaction, I have to be able to verify that I am the owner of the private key to send gobs of money between wallets and so on and so forth. But to receive crypto, that's based on public keys. Thank you. And then how do you see blockchain expanding into markets like healthcare or other verticals, given that they create a distributed secure ledger? Oh, I think it's a great use. The only reason they haven't been adopted right now is because of, first of all, the speed I mentioned of how blockchain transactions proceed and also the energy costs around blockchain. So once those two things are solved, you're gonna see mass adoption. It'll be probably the most secure way for your data to be secured. And that's really important with healthcare data, for example, or even like password data or any type of financial data, anything like that. So hopefully we can get over the energy hump and the transaction speed hump to see mass adoption. I hear the question, can you speak to crypto funds? Is there a mutual or an index fund for crypto? And there are pros and cons. Yeah, well, if you go on the stock market, there's already funds, people, mutual funds investing in cryptos, you can take part in those. You're not actually buying cryptocurrencies just so you understand you're investing in the fund. So you have to trust the fund. There are ETFs and stuff like that being created. So just remember that when you take part in ETFs and all that stuff, again, you're not buying the coin itself. You're trusting these people that are buying the coins themselves to be custodians of that transaction and you're basing your speculation on the fund itself, not the crypto. Okay, now I'm jumping around a little bit here. This is interesting. How does the cryptocurrency like chia function based on proof of space instead of proof of work or stake? I hope I read that correctly. Yeah, I kind of alluded to proof of time and space. So proof of work works on the combination of power of one computer. Proof of stake is based on the pool of ownership of your stake in the entire crypto pool. Proof of space is based on how much space you have on your hard drive that can be dedicated to mining the crypto. So if you have a lot of space, you have more priority in terms of your priority to get the reward out of mining the block. It's kind of like proof of stake just with space on your hard drive, I suppose. It's a little bit more complex than that, but that's what it is in much no. People would like you to talk about Dogecoin. Do you have thoughts about Dogecoin? Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about Dogecoin. So Dogecoin is what's called a meme coin and it's based on nothing. The person who created Dogecoin had no intention behind the blockchain behind Dogecoin being used for anything. He just created it for the sake of creating it. So people who are speculating on Dogecoin are only doing it because right now it's the thing to do because Elon Musk was tweeting left and right about it. And so suddenly it just blew up when Elon said, invest in Dogecoin. And then recently on SNL, I think it was SNL, Elon said Dogecoin is a hustle. And then we saw Dogecoin plummet in value. So again, it's just there for the sake of being there. If you want to gamble like pure gambling, get in it. I don't do it because it's just silly to me. In the long term, my opinion is that you're just going to lose all your money. A couple of questions about PayPal's involvement. PayPal's offering to sell you crypto and hold it for you. Is this a good idea? What do you think about PayPal? I mean, I think it's great that PayPal accepts crypto for purchasing stuff. I think it's awesome. I think there's also other places that are something to adopt crypto payments. So that's beautiful. Whether or not you should buy crypto through PayPal, I would not trust. Again, that's custodial. And that is the least secure way of holding your crypto. I don't know. I have to do more research on this because I don't use PayPal for buying crypto. So I don't know if you can actually transfer out of PayPal. I think when they first started doing that, I read that you could not transfer to a wallet. So it had to be held with PayPal. I'm not going to personally do that. Because again, like I said, that's the least secure way. It's custodial wallet. If you're going to buy crypto, look into the exchanges because you can easily transfer to a wallet from the exchange after doing that. Thank you. And how do you think all this is likely to affect real currency? Or I should say traditional currency? I don't know. I can speculate. I'm not a financial expert and I'm not an economist. I think digital currencies are the way of the future. Maybe not the immediate future because you're seeing a lot of pushback. Governments have put in a lot of time in maintaining their fiat currency. Like is the US just suddenly going to give up their dollar? No. But they might consider creating digital versions of the US dollar that run on blockchain. In fact, I know they're thinking about that. China just rolled out their first digital point. So it's happening guys, everybody. It doesn't mean that the value of like the US dollar or the Chinese Yuan is going to go down just because they're starting to create digital currency. In fact, what they're doing is by creating these digital currencies that are run by governments, guess what? There's a central authority. It's not a decentralized currency. So they're going to attempt to try to create the own digital currencies, which will tie into the current value of their physical currency. So whether or not the two ecosystems will affect each other's valuations, only time will tell. I can only speculate. I think if the global population decides fiat currency sucks, banks suck, we're all going to live in the cryptocurrency world and yeah, you're going to see upheaval in the financial markets. But I think it's going to happen slowly. I don't think it's going to be like an overnight switch. So governments will have time to kind of react and figure out what they want to do with this. All right, as a librarian, I love this question. Is there a book you recommend to understand cryptocurrency more? I'll top my head, sorry, no. I learned everything I know by just getting involved in the cryptocurrency world. Like I mentioned, I'm trying to create my own crypto wallet for NFTs. To create something like that, I've had to do a lot of research on the side and try to understand what's going on at the technological level. I didn't do that through books. A lot of it is through, like my partner works at a cryptocurrency company. So he's very knowledgeable and he's taught me a lot about this. I'm sure there are books out there. If I find out, I'll send you guys books. Okay, thank you. And then how, back to sort of technical questions, how would someone transfer crypto from a custodial wallet to a non-custodial wallet? Oh, very easy. So you go, let's say you buy crypto through Coinbase, which is the custodial exchange. To transfer to your wallet, you just give them the public key, like I mentioned. And then you enter that key and then the transfer takes place.  It's not instantaneous. Usually the fee scales with how long you would like the transfer take place. So like, let's say you want the transfer take place within an hour. The fee is going to be higher where you can set it to 24 hours. Sometimes you even see people do like a week because they just don't want to pay the least amount of transfer fees. But it's very easy to do. Just enter your public addresses and it's easily transferred. Thank you. And then I think a lot of people with the understanding that you are not making recommendations for purchase, a lot of people would understand how you decided what crypto you wanted to hold and what were some of the factors that you evaluated. I'm always looking at the underlying technology. Like for example, we talked about those coins, for example, it literally serves no purpose. So I'm not getting into it. It's a short-term fun coin to get into. There is money to be made, but because I've seen no future for the technology itself, I completely just ignore it. Now I look at something like Cardano, for example, the coin is called ADA ADA because I believe that Ethereum is awesome and I actually do own some Ethereum, but I believe there's always room for competition. We live in the free market, and Cardano is positioning itself to be an Ethereum competitor. Now if it becomes the number two or the primary competitor to Ethereum, there's a strong case for the rise in value of ADA, ADA, the coin. And also I think the technology is solid because the person who created Cardano, technology is one of the co-founders of Ethereum. He left Ethereum to create Cardano. So I do a lot of research in terms of the technology itself, whether or not I believe in it, and that's why I get into it. In the beginning, I bought some Bitcoin and some other stuff. I was kind of naive and just kind of getting into it because people told me to do it, but the more I look into Bitcoin, I don't think it makes sense for me to get into it right now, even though Bitcoin will probably hit 100,000, maybe even 500,000 in the future, but I think the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin is gonna become ancient compared to like Ethereum or Cardano and all these newer technologies coming out. So I look at the technology. Thank you. And then what happens if the people or the platform with the company behind your crypto just folds? Well, that would suck. I mean, it would basically fold the coins that I'm invested in because the technology is not running and the coin is based on technology, it's worthless. So that could happen. I mean, there's always risk in any type of investiture into these type of things. So you have to really believe in the company. Like before I invested in Cardano, I had really looked at them and was like, do they have staying power? Do I really, really believe in them versus like, let's say like some random company like Neo or something like that where I don't really understand the technology. Do I think there will be mass adoption at scale with Cardano? I believe that. So I am investing in it. On the flip side, Cardano could just go out of business. They could just say, this is not gonna work. And yeah, all my money's gone. It's just worth nothing. So that could happen. But if you stay on top of it, they should be able to get out. If you feel like a company is about to go under, they should be able to get out. Thank you. Does the SEC have any involvement in cryptocurrency markets? Yeah, of course. They're trying to crack down on all sorts of stuff. Weird things going on in the crypto markets. You probably heard of ICOs, initial coin offerings. There was a lot of scans that happened and not too long ago around ICOs. You got all these startups all of a sudden creating their own coins to raise money illegitimately instead of going through traditional investors and stuff like that. So ICOs were the way to do that. And ICOs are used for money laundering and stuff like that. So you have to be careful with that. So the SEC caught wind of this and they started cracking down on ICOs to make sure that the legitimate and that they follow true investment structures. And I personally think that's a good thing. It shouldn't just be that big of free for all. It's too dangerous for the public if they're not educated or not. So the SEC is always gonna look at weird things like that. I wouldn't ever count them out. Thank you. I want to acknowledge that I know we are over time and Ebb is currently staying a few minutes extra to answer some more of these very good questions. I think that people might like to hear the name of a couple of crypto exchanges. This is the biggest one. They actually recently went public with their stock. Gemini is the one I use because I think for me, at least I've noticed they have the lowest transfer fees. And then there's Binance. Binance is a little bit of a pain to deal with, but those three are the major exchanges.  I haven't explored them because I just don't feel like they're secure or worth knowing about. So I recommend just dealing with these three primary exchanges. Okay, great. Thank you. And then lots of technical questions. Like what, we sort of talked about the pros and cons of custodial wallets, but are there any that you would recommend or that you think are better than others? Well, first of all, yeah, I recommend non-custodial wallets. I do not recommend holding them at your exchange. Again, like I said, it depends on what coin you want to get into. I guess if you're concentrating on Bitcoin or Ethereum, the two major ones, every single wallet supports them. Most wallets are functionally the same. They might just have better design or UI design. So you can go to the app store and click around. There's like BitPay. There's, oh man, I could just go on with this. There's BRD. That's one of the first wallets. Coinbase has their own wallet, which is not the exchange, but it actually a non-custodial wallet. There's Lumi. I use that for my sand coin. There's Yoroi. I use that specifically for Cardano. In fact, Yoroi was just made for Cardano as a wallet. For the cold wallets, there's Ledger and Trezor. Those are the hardware wallets. So those are the main players. I highly recommend looking to Ledger and Trezor if you're going to buy a ton of crypto. You want to hold them in cold wallets. They're the most secure. Okay. I think we kind of did it. I apologize if I did not get to your question, you guys, but we did cover an awful lot of this. Thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight to go over all this. It's an exciting and interesting world. Yes, it is. It's crazy.


LLCs are optional for the housing process. There are several options available, each with their own. We recommend that you review the LLC page on the housing website. This red link will take you there to determine if any of the LLC communities are right for you. For the purposes of this demo, I will preview the Business Honors mini-application process. Note, if you are unsure, you can return to this page at a later date to complete the LLC application. You'll simply leave the drop-down box blank and continue with your application process. Lender Business Honors. This page will give you a full description and overview of the Lender Business Honors Living Learning Community. It also includes the requirements for this community and the essay question required for acceptance. You'll then acknowledge that you understand and accept the program requirements by selecting the box below. And then hit save and continue.


The follow-up section is dedicated to describing the impact, dissemination and evaluation. In this section, you should list the expected outcomes for participants, resulting from their planned learning and active involvement and participation in the project. This may include knowledge, skills, changes in attitude or behaviour, impact on the employment status, ability to access further education, well-being or lifestyle. Consider the most relevant and realistic outcomes. For participating organisations, you must detail how the activity may generate organisational learning or specific skills for staff. Describe the influence the project may have on future work. You should also consider if this project will develop the participating organisations or participants' understanding of a certain issue in youth work or train them in any new methodology that can be implemented in their local community. Highlight any activities you plan to involve the wider community in and the benefits to them. Given that dissemination should be considered throughout the project, you should ensure that dissemination activities are focused, relevant, well-described and with clearly identified target audiences. Dissemination activities may be in the form of local meetings, workshops or discussions and you may use handouts, reports and media products. You may also plan to get press coverage or invite local councillors or decision makers to dissemination events. The Erasmus Plus marketing team is always keen to hear about interesting case studies and there is an Erasmus Plus dissemination platform which can be used. It is called the Erasmus Plus project results platform and we encourage using it for sharing project outcomes. For youth work or mobility projects, each individual that participates in the project is expected to cascade information across the formal and informal network upon their return. Dissemination should take place across all partner organisations. You are also expected to include a final evaluation of the project in which you assess whether or to what extent the project has been a success. This evaluation should highlight the learning outcomes of all involved. This section should detail how activities will be monitored and what methods will be used for evaluation. In addition to the final evaluation, we also encourage making evaluation before and during the activity. This helps with establishing baselines and identifying any implementation improvements. Consider involving partners, placement providers and participants in the evaluation stages. Identify how you will evaluate activities during the project and the participant satisfaction with the mobility overall. Think about how you will evaluate the management process, make a longer term evaluation of the project and use the findings. Budget Summary This page provides an overview based on the activities entered earlier and allows you to add any additional comments. Each section is displayed on the Budget page. It is important to be aware that if the project is approved, the application organisation will receive the grant and will be responsible for distributing it amongst the partners to ensure effective delivery of the project. Here, you see a breakdown of your budget and any comments should appear over here. Remember, the Erasmus Plus grant is regarded as a contribution to your project costs and may not cover the total cost of your project. The National Agency cannot award any funding over the amount requested, so please ensure that you check your budget thoroughly before you submit your application. When it comes to the budget, there are two types of budget headings and they're based either on unit costs or the actual costs. So you have the following budget headings. One, travel, which is a contribution towards the cost of each participant's return journey from the place of origin to the location of the mobility activity. Travel is calculated on a unit cost basis and is based on the travel distance calculated by the distance calculator. Two, organisational support is also calculated on a unit cost basis and is a contribution towards costs directly linked to the implementation of mobility activities. It excludes subsistence for participants and the funds are expected to include preparation, monitoring and support and validation of learning outcomes. Three, special needs support is only applicable if you plan to involve participants with special needs or disabilities, which will result in additional costs. This component is based on an estimate of the likely actual costs relating specifically to the needs of participants with disabilities. Ensure you provide a clear and detailed justification for the amount requested. It will be assessed as part of the overall assessment of the application and if the request is not reasonable, it may be reduced or removed. Whilst there is no limit to the amount you can request, the balance will be payable on the actual costs evidenced at the final report stage. Exceptional costs are calculated on an actual cost basis and applicants must detail how many participants the funds are requested for and provide a breakdown of the costs in the narrative. Specifically, exceptional costs can support the following visa and visa-related costs, costs for providing a financial guarantee, expensive travel costs and travel for participants from outermost regions and overseas countries and territories. Please note that in the budget comments, you must demonstrate that the standard unit cost for travel will not cover at least 70% of the cost of the journey and that you can only claim 80% of the total cost. Further down, exceptional costs can also support participation of young people with fewer opportunities, costs in support of reinforcement or ship, which, as I mentioned before, is just for volunteering projects for young people with fewer opportunities and lastly, accommodation and board costs for advanced planning visit, which includes a maximum of two-day activities and three-night accommodation. Project Summary section Ensure you provide a well-written, comprehensive summary of your project. It must be written in plain and clear language, free of any jargon. It is important to be concise and clear. Mention at least the following elements, context or background of your project, objectives of the project, number and profile of participants, description of activities, methodology to be used in carrying out the project, short description of the results and impact envisaged and potential longer-term benefits. The summary may be used by the European Commission or the National Agency in their publications and it will be published on the Erasmus Plus dissemination platform. The sub-sections that you have are summary of participating organisations and summary of activities and participants. Both of them are pre-populated tables based on the information from earlier sections of the application. Once again, you have a chance to check if everything is correct. If all of the organisations have been included, if the number of participants in your activities is correct and if you have all of the activities included. Again, if you need to change anything, you must go back to the activity section and change it flow by flow.


నిదహkräMic16 neol నినట్తర్షలిండ్wటిఎá  exchanges likes to block it, both synthesizers and tractors  dramatize it.    the hassle has gotten a trigger in the CCTV  the trackators.  That caused two traps to rush to keep track to take advantage of it's Mister HORT.  John, Chauhan raol, ༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀༀ  NV内, 時 în  complete  beslut now is not being taken  nansabh bha , but it is not tot  manifestations at this time  你 nd heighten by a Temperature Но in P it has been taken the car has been dialled 2000 AC goes to mining it would be very inefficient and carefully neglected  cannon the trains two nd cars can be infected ఎరిఱతోొదిలీ నిప� сమావరిండిanut�రిροికావదఊనిండిక్నా఍లిగాకన౿ంని. మావరిలామి�о�ూ …


Good morning from this beautiful truck stop in, uh, Kingman, Arizona. You know, I think if I do another bus, I need to have more space for messy dudes like Arya here, who turn my bus into a tornado. Hey, hey, hey, no, no, no. This is just from last night. We get a clean up every single day without fail. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Looks like some teenager's room right here. I'm going to have to be her mom. Cleaner room! All right, we see a fellow traveler here. We're going to give him two bananas. Have a good morning, man. Another guy over here. Watch out for cars. Just feeding people left and right here. Like I said, this is my first time here. Don't really know what to expect, but we're going to hang for a bit in the area. And we are going to, wow, we're going to take some photos and hang and edit and everything like this. Check out where I am walking.  Literally, right on the edge of the Grand Canyon. It's hard to express or it's hard to convey how far down this goes. This isn't even the bottom. The bottom is in the middle up there where the river is. Yeah, I'll have to read some stats. It's definitely possibly a mile deep right here. I'll have to double check or maybe you guys want to just ask Google. But wow, and per, it's cold. This is a Desert View Watchtower. We're going to have a look here. It is golden hour, sunset time. I'll just take a medium format photo of this gentleman. Crazy, man. It's incredible. I would say definitely get here for sunset or this area or sunrise, but I know most people aren't really sunrise kind of people. But look at this. You can just have a seat and watch the main event, which is the Grand Canyon. What do you think?  Except for five minutes ago. But not like this, you've got the river running through. I know. Isn't that nice? A little rapid's way down there. Goodness gracious. Yeah, that'd be cool. It'd be cool to go down the river.