Income tax 2023-2024. Are you self-employed? Get ready and some coffee so that you don't find income tax preparation to taxing. Most of this information can be found in publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Business for Individuals Who Use Schedule C Tax Year 2023, which you can find on the IRS website at irs.gov, irs.gov. Looking at the individual income tax formula, basically mirroring the calculation on the Form 1040, the first half of which is kind of like a funny income statement. Most income statements having income minus expenses resulting in net income. This income statement having income minus deductions resulting in taxable income. When we're thinking about a schedule C, we're focused on line one income of the 1040 income tax formula, which can be deceiving because the schedule C itself is basically a business income statement where we have business income minus business expenses, which are basically business deductions resulting in net business income from the schedule C, which will in essence roll into page one of the Form 1040 being represented here by our formula of line one income. Here's going to be the first page of our Form 1040. We're focused down here on line number eight, which is additional income from schedule one line 10. Here is our schedule one. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually, we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't want to be seen with us.  Like our Accounting Rocks product line, if you're not crunching cords using Excel, you're doing it wrong. A must have product because the fact as everyone knows of accounting being one of the highest forms of artistic expression means accountants have a requirement, the obligation, a duty to share the tools necessary to properly channel the creative muse. And the muse, she rarely speaks more clearly than through the beautiful symmetry of spreadsheets. So get the shirt because the creative muse, she could use a new pair of shoes. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. An additional income and adjustments to income focused on line three, business income or loss, which is coming from the Schedule C. Here's an example of the Schedule C, which is a profit or loss from business which has two primary categories to it, like an income statement because that's basically what it is, income minus the expenses. Okay, so first question, are you self-employed? So this seems like a fairly straightforward question, but there's actually a lot of gray area with regards to this question. The IRS being quite opinionated about whether or not you are self-employed. Note the kind of incentives that you might have if you were basically the IRS. The job of the IRS is to try to track everyone and make sure that everyone is paying their taxes and try to basically be able to double check that people are paying their taxes. What's the best strategy to do that if you are the IRS? You're going to lean on the payer of every transaction to try to pressure them to give you the information about the recipient of income. Why? Because every transaction has two sides to it. You've got someone paying for something and someone that's getting the goods and services versus paying for the goods and services. The one that's paying for goods and services, if they are a business, is going to want to get a deduction for it. And therefore the deductions are good and the IRS therefore has leveraged over the person that is paying in any particular transaction by being able to say, hey look, if you want that deduction, you have to tell us who you paid and possibly make withholdings paying us on their behalf. And you can see this most clearly with a W-2 employee. So if someone is categorized as a W-2 employee, the IRS says to the employer, if you want that deduction, we want you not only to tell us about the money that you gave to the employee as income so that we can go after them giving us not only the employee but the government the W-2 form and we want you to actually physically take the money out of their paycheck before they even receive it in the form of withholdings. So you can see that would be ideal for the IRS. So they're going to lean towards people wanting to be categorized as employees rather than self-employed because as employees, they can pressure the employer to do the work for them, collecting the money and doing the reporting. So then the question is, well, do I want to be self-employed as an individual? You might ask that question, would it be beneficial for me to be self-employed or not? The IRS will try to argue that it's not because, again, they're kind of skewed towards wanting people to be in an employee or situation. The answer, of course, is that it depends. There's going to be sometimes it might be good, sometimes it might be bad. What are some of the pros and cons? Well, if you are a W-2 employee, in theory, the employer is paying for the expenses that you are dealing with and it should be easier to deal with in that regard. If you're self-employed, you're going to be basically paying for your own expenses. And you might say, hey, look, when I'm in an employee, I still pay for things that are expenses that I use for business and I should get a deduction for it. Whereas if I was self-employed, I would get those deductions. That's a benefit. You can write off the business deductions more easily as a self-employed individual than as an employee. However, on the downside, the net income that you receive as a sole proprietor could be subject to both self-employment and self-employment tax, which includes the employer and employee portion in essence of payroll taxes, social security and Medicare. So there's ups and downs, of course, to being an employee or being self-employed. It's not really cut and dry as to which you would be prefer if you could pick one. But the IRS, of course, is going to try to make it not cut and dry. But be able to say, you either qualify as an employee or you qualify as being self-employed. Obviously, in reality, there's going to be a lot of gray area where you might fit in either category. But that's what the IRS is going to try to do. And you can imagine that they're going to be tilted towards having someone categorized as an employee. All right, given that, are you self-employed person if you carry on a trader business as a sole proprietor or an independent contractor? That's the definition of basically being self-employed, right? You're self-employed person if you carry on a trader business as a sole proprietor or independent contractor. Now, note for taxes how easy that is to do because for taxes, if you generate revenue, any revenue is generally thought of as taxable income to the IRS unless they have an exemption for it.  We're your silent partner. We want you to report that on a schedule C and give us our bit or part of that income. You might have all kinds of other questions like, well, what if I do I need a license for it and so on and so forth? Well, those are state questions typically in terms of what you need to do to be able to sell hot dogs in a particular place. But whether you qualify or not, if you did sell hot dogs and you make money from the federal government side of things, they want the money. Like even if you were in an illegal business, you're doing something illegal, then the government will still say, if you're Al Capone, the government will still say, we want our piece of your profits even if it's illegal, right? So the fact that something is legal or not doesn't stop you from, again, if you had income, then the IRS is going to say that you should be giving them part of the income, right? So caution. So you do not have to carry on regular full-time business activities to be self-employed. So you might be saying, okay, what if I only do it part-time? I have a W-2 job and I do some other stuff on the side. Well, the question is, are you doing it for profit? Are you making money with it? If you're making money with it, the government's going to want a piece of that. And basically if you're making money, then the government, you're probably going to see it as a profit-making thing. However, you might be saying, well, maybe I'm not making money. Maybe it's running at a loss. In that case, it is questionable. Maybe you do photography on the side and you're able to sell some of your stuff because you're good at it. Well, then the question is, if you write off all of your photography equipment, you might end up with a loss. The government doesn't like losses because when you have losses, you might be able to take those against other income. They want to be your silent partner when you earn money so they get part of it. They don't want the liability when you lose money because then they have to pay you, right? So that would be a problem. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're not a business if you have a loss, but then you have the question that will come up of, is this really a business activity or is it a hobby? If it's a hobby, you might not report it on a Schedule C, but rather report it as other income unlike a Schedule 1, for example, and be highly limited to the amount of deductions that you can have. If it's a business, however, you can take those deductions, possibly even have a loss that you can take against other income, but you need to be careful of that and make sure that you qualify because the IRS could come out and audit you and say, no, you're not a business, you're a hobby in that case, which would cause problems. So having a part-time business in addition to your regular job or business may be self-employment. Trade or business. A trade or business is generally an activity carried on to make a profit. So that's the idea. We're doing it to make a profit. Most people will bulk at that. A lot of people will say, no, I take photography because I am an artist and that's why I do these. Look at how beautiful this PowerPoint is. This is art that I'm doing right here. I'm doing this for money. Okay, I'm doing it for money. But some people might argue that they're not doing it for money. I like what I'm doing too, but okay. But the idea is that if you're doing whatever you do and you're also generating money with it, you're trying to do it well, people actually want to pay you for it, then of course the IRS is going to say it's a profit activity and they want a piece of the profits. If you're doing it at a loss, then again, from the IRS's perspective, it's a hobby, right? And we don't want to pay you for losses. You deal with your own hobbies. But if you make money with it, then give us a piece. So the facts and circumstances of each case determine whether or not an activity is a trade or business. So you do not need to actually make a profit to be in a trade or business as long as you have a profit motive. So that's where the question comes in on the loss side of things. If you have a loss, you don't want to be too scared of taking the loss against other income because that might be perfectly legitimate if you have a business objective of revenue generation. Most businesses have losses in the first few years. It's just that if you have like multiple years of losses, more than like three years, you can see why the IRS would then say, well, now the shift of needing to prove whether it's business or hobby goes to you possibly at that point in time. And in the event of an audit, then you'd have to make the argument, make the case that this is a profit-seeking business that I'm in. We just happen to have losses. We're going to make money possibly next year. It's going to happen. It's going to happen, man. So you do need to make ongoing efforts to further the interest of your business. So Limited Liability Company, LLC, and LLC is an entity formed under state law by filing articles of organization generally for income tax purposes. A single member LLC is disregarded as an entity separate from its owner and reports its income deductions on its owner's federal income tax return. Okay, so this whenever you get into a Schedule C type of business, you're going to have these questions that will come up as to whether someone should incorporate. Now, typically most small businesses aren't going to want to go to a C corporation, separate legal entity that pays taxes on the corporate level in part because there's double taxation. But you could go to like an S corporation or to a Limited Liability Company. Now, a Limited Liability Company is basically usually set up kind of like a partnership. So the idea of it would be if you had a partnership, for example, then you're going to have to possibly file a separate return usually unless it's like a married couple or something like that because in certain circumstances, which we'll talk about later, because then you're going to have to file a separate return so that the income will flow through from the partnership to the 1040s. So that becomes like just a technical thing that has to take place even though the partnership might not be thought of as a separate legal entity which will give some barrier hopefully or is the thought process of liability protection to the individual's assets. When you look at a Limited Liability Company, that's the idea usually of taking kind of like a partnership flow through structure but then also giving it some benefit of being a separate legal entity even though it's not taxed on the partnership level or the corporation level, it still flows through it. So they're trying to get the best of both worlds. But you might say, well, what if I don't have a partnership? I'm a sole proprietor. Well, then you might have a single member LLC and then it's like, well, if I have a single member LLC, do I need to really file a separate tax return which looks like a partnership tax return because the partnership tax return is usually a logistical thing I need to do so it flows through from the partnership tax return to the multiple partners. But if I only have one partner, what's the point of doing the separate tax return? So that's why you might end up with a situation where you have a single member LLC which basically is reporting things in a similar fashion using like the schedule on the normal income tax return possibly on a schedule C. So those are kind of questions that you want to ask in your particular state as well because some of these entity structures like an S corporation, an LLC, a partnership and a C corporation will have different pros and cons possibly depending on the state laws that they're incorporated in and that's why you'll often find different entities in different areas or incorporated basically in different states and what not and incorporated in different ways or using different taxable entities based on the industry but that's a little past the scope that we're going for here. So for example, if the single member LLC is not engaged in forming and the owner is an individual, they may use a schedule C. Okay, sole proprietor. A sole proprietor is someone who owns an unincorporated business by themselves. So you are also a sole proprietor for income tax purposes if you are an individual and the sole member of a domestic LLC unless you elect to have the LLC treated as a corporation. So once again if you have the LLC you could elect to have it treated as a corporation which is uncommon because that's what you're trying to avoid typically with the LLC because it could result in double taxation. So the sole proprietor is someone who owns an unincorporated business by themselves. Independent contractor. So people such as doctors, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, accountants, contractors, subcontractors, public stenographers and auctioneers who are in an independent trade business or profession in which they offer their services to the general public are generally independent contractors. Auctioneers. That's what I was trying to say. That's what I was trying to say. So however, whether they are independent contractors or employees depends on the facts in each case. The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the person paying for the work has the right to control or to direct only the result of the work and not how it will be done. So when we're thinking of the category of independent contractor, we're focused more on these service items, right? Doctors provide services, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, accountants, contractors, subcontractors. So if you think about something like a lawyer or an accountant for example, if they're doing work they are providing their labor. The question could come up then, well if they're providing labor are they an employee to the person that they're working for or are they an independent contractor? You could have gray area in many cases, but the general rules that they lay out and we might go into some of these more rules in more detail later, but the general idea would be if you're working for someone and they have control over how you're doing the work, the more control they have, the more it looks like an employee-employer situation. If on the other hand they give you a job and a deadline and you do your own work and achieve it on your own time, on your own schedule using your own resources, you would think you would be more likely to be an independent contractor categorization in that case. Also remember when we're talking about employees, we could be an independent contractor with employees of ourselves. The question here is whether we are an employee of somebody else. Being a Schedule C or someone that reports on a Schedule C doesn't mean that you don't have employees. You could, if you need help then the question is going to be, there's a couple ways you can get help. You can try to get a partner or some kind of equity interest or something like that, which takes up resources in terms of them being able to have some say in your business or you can hire an employee possibly, in which case you have more control and they don't have the say of what you're going to do within the business. You might be able to take a loan if you need financial, just financial help. That's another resource to it or you might be able to hire a contractor yourself, in which case you run into the same problem here with someone that you're hiring. The person that you're hiring, do they qualify as an employee or as a contractor? The earnings of a person who is working as an independent contractor or subject to self-employment tax. For more information on determining whether you are an employee or an independent contractor, you can see Publication 15A Employers Supplemental Tax Guide. The IRS tries to make this kind of like a black and white decision as we saw. If you're in a situation that you don't know if you're a contractor or not, then what you want to do is think, would it be beneficial for me to be a contractor or not, what would be the pros and cons of each, and then set up your situation accordingly, making sure that you understand the rules that outline whether or not someone is an independent contractor or not. Also remembering, when looking at IRS resources, they will tend towards saying it's better to be an employee because that gives them more control. It might be better in your circumstances to be an employee because of benefits and so on and so forth, but it might not as well because independence is nice as well as being able to deduct expenses and whatnot. So are you a statutory employee? So a statutory employee is a check mark in box 13 of Form W-2 wage and tax statement. Statutory employees use Schedule C to report their wages and expenses. So this is kind of a hybrid or exception situation noting that if you're a W-2 employee, one of the downsides is you don't typically get to write off your expenses. That's the problem, but possibly in this situation you would be reporting on the Schedule C. So that's somewhat more of an unusual situation. So if you fall into that situation, you want to dive into it in a little bit more detail if you qualify as a statutory employee.


Hello. Hey, this is Mike Schwartz. Hi, this is Mohammed. Hey, just a couple more minutes for everyone to get on the call. I'm just gonna paste a link to the attendance list. So anyone that's, oh everyone's already familiar with the drill, if not, or if you're new here, please just add your name and if you don't want to be called upon just please put no update and parentheses next to your name or if you're new, just leave it blank and we'll introduce you during the check-in. I think there's a couple of folks that are having some trouble with the new login system for Zoom. Sorry, what was the last bit? They're having a problem with the login? Yeah, it's now, I think it seems to require a Zoom login to actually join the call. I guess it makes sense. Yeah, I had a problem with that. The article two weeks back on pranksters going into public meetings that weren't secured. I had a problem with that a week or so ago and opened an issue to have us move away from Zoom, hopefully. For lots of reasons, not just this, but I recall that. I think you also put together an issue in the tracker there in GitHub, right? Yes, yeah. Is it something that, I was debating this myself, like do you think it makes sense from your perspective Zoom for public stuff that we don't mind sharing? I mean, the only time I think we'd ever have to change anything in a public meeting is if for some reason we had to edit a video because someone accidentally drops an F-bomb or something. So, do you think that Zoom is still acceptable for public stuff and then any private correspondence we get a WebEx or Slack instance? Well, I mean they've there's a lot of other concerns like anyone who's using the Zoom client on their system. I hope is doing so inside of a virtual machine or some other contained environment that make me fairly nervous about Zoom in general. And there's also things that, you know, there's a nice report by Citizen Lab talking about some of the privacy and other concerns with Zoom in particular about how they've gone about doing things and providing keys to, you know, on servers in China for reasons that you can probably guess and so on. So, I don't feel, I think it's not just something where there's like the one tiny potential, like the one tiny thing that happened that is the reason why you move away, but I think there's just a whole litter, you know, like just a massive number of reasons to perhaps not use Zoom, especially since we're SIG security. Well, the way you drive to get to running a PM or a box, then that's pretty concerning. It sounds like basically malware. Well, Apple pushed something that removed functionality from Zoom's client as part of like an update that they did a year or so ago. So and that's like unprecedented for them. They usually only do that to remove malware. So I'll let you draw whatever conclusions you want about it. How did they do that? Do they sandbox it or some sort of security policy that locks down syscalls or something? The way some people paint it is that like, do you recall entering your administrative password to get it installed? It kind of miraculously arrived on your system which is why it's so popular because it's so easy to start using it. But you can actually, you know, it raises some questions like how it's happening. You don't like to put your root password to get it installed. Well, it can do a lot. This almost feels like it warrants a review itself.   You know, it just doesn't play well. Well, Justin made a good point and this runs a bit against the one you brought the previous meeting on. Let's go, you know, get on the same ship as everyone else within the CNCF versus let's be the vanguards of security, given it's in our group's name. Do we have a point of contact for say whoever which individual set up the automated, say YouTube uploading and stuff like that, because if that's a process that's easy to replicate with another software stack, I'd be happy to at least get started with that and act on this. That's automatic inside of Zoom. Yeah, but it's not a, I don't think it's exclusive. No. I'm trying to remember which one, whether it's Yeah, I'm trying to remember whether it's BlueJeans or WebAX or something else I've used has it. And there are definite pros and cons to really all of these systems, but we should I think I think it makes sense to at least consider alternatives. You know, especially now given so much more is known, it was Zoom was always something where there was a fair amount known that it was problematic, but it was I think you could have made an argument three months ago that that Skype and WebAX are worse And now I think that would be a pretty hard argument to make They feel pretty equal to me now In terms of reliability, security, usability, adoption, or In terms of embarrassing security vulnerabilities that have been recently published comparing things like the WebAX RCEs and various Zoom vulnerabilities that people have been talking about Well, Justin's comment there on how it might be warranted to run into VM already like that immediately is a red line for me So I'm actually going to start reading more of what he posted after this meeting But these are all really good points I'll just get on board with the the agenda. I should stick to I think everyone's had ample time to hop on board And if not, I'll just keep an eye on the roster there So let's see attendance. Um Is there anyone that we could volunteer as a scribe slash meeting minute taker today? We could use up to two if possible Seems we have at least one person starting to type in the scribe role there. So I'll take that. Thank you, Ray And if someone else is able to ah ash Thank you, Ray. Thank you ash. Perfect. All right. Let's get this underway attendance check-in here Are there any working groups or CIGs or partner groups that have any check-ins today or anything to bring up? I don't see anything in the attendance thus far So we got Campos and uh, michael sports Okay, look like they have uh Updates, okay. I'll just go from the top of us down. So good day, Justin Floor is yours. Hey, uh, yeah, great. Just have a quick update. So um as I I wonder if I didn't check to see if Andreas is on here Whether he'll give an update or talk or anything about the harbor assessment, but that's going along well one thing I wanted to just kind of mention in general that um, I think I'm going to be adding a little more clarity to in the assessment plan documents like the way which you do a security assessment Is to make sure that groups are being very explicit about Like uh, how they handle security compromises and failures I I don't literally mean like a zero day Uh issue here. I could mean this could be something like um an administrator makes a mistake and accidentally discloses a private key Or um, you know, somebody steals uh, like a login credential for a party or things like that And uh to talk about not only sort of the potential damage one can cause in those cases, but also The ways in which you you mitigate them um, because I think that that Needs is one of the most important things and I think can can be missed with our current process So I will add some text to make that more explicit Um, that's all I really wanted to say for the update, but things are going well with harbor and they will likely present Um, I think in something like two weeks if if we're open for them Um, given the scope of the project and things and the fact they've presented a bazillion times to the toc and everywhere else Um, we may send out have them send out something ahead of the meeting To indicate to people. Hey like watch this five to ten minute primer on harbor So you have at least some background. Um, so that we're not spending all the time answering Like very very basic questions about like what is this thing? Um, that's it for my Thank you, justin just justin just a clarifying question. Um, I see in the issue that Um, it's noted for next week. Um, do you expect it to need to you know another week? Okay, no, um, I don't think so I'm not trying to make that that uh that judgment. Um, I had I wasn't remembering whether it was The upcoming week or the week after so I that's why I left it big not because I have I want to Make any uh claim so on the issue, um, you know got it lined up for for next week and I want to make sure we you know kind of Um, give it enough visibility and uh get that lined up It'd be great if we had a presentation since we've had a couple working sessions back to back actually I had a question on that. Uh, justin this is vene Here, uh, you know, what is the exit criteria? I mean, uh, so I think michael had also asked the same question Uh, so at what point does do do we conclude this? Is there some kind of guidance as to Resolving all the comments, etc They're working on resolving comments and they have been pretty diligent about it. Um, one thing that I said in that working meeting on monday and uh, we'll repeat again here for the record is, um Like this is a process that's done kind of when it's done And um, we're not, you know, it's not something where um, there's like, uh, there's like a game clock and we have to Just, you know, stop at that specific time on the other hand because they're being so responsive and have been You know helping us. I think it's reasonable to expect that Um, at least the parts of the document that we've had a chance to see Uh are in reasonable enough shape that they're that they're kind of ready to go that we can make a recommendation and And um, you know sort of say our thoughts about there's some things missing. Um Those actually revolve around the things that I just mentioned Like understanding kind of the blast radius when things go wrong and how to recover and what the implications are um but I But presumably we'll be able to finish um You know, if they continue at the pace they have for and get a set information in the next 24 hours or so I think um, we probably will be able to to wrap it up, uh, but we don't have a We have not yet, uh in the ones that we've completed the two of them that we've completed. We haven't yet had a firm Uh timeline in part because we're still trying to um, you know figure out And different groups have different amounts of time they take to do things as you know, things come up for the security Um assessors and so on so Got it. Thank you Are there any other questions or comments for Justin? Okay, we'll send the mic over to michael schwarz. Good day, michael Yeah, hi guys. Um, can I share my screen?  Okay, let me try sharing. I got it. You have to drop the video just the little share thing Takes over. Gotcha Yep, we see your browser with cncf So so this is just um, I guess the first time I'm I'm presenting to the group I um You know, it was inquiring about Contributing the core glue technology to cncf and I was directed here And I put together these slides. Um, I also I know that there was some formal questions I I address those sort of at the end, but if it's okay, maybe I'll give some background about where we're coming from and You know, some of the some of the goals of glue and then and then maybe at the end or or later We can we can dive into the the questionnaire. Is that okay? Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm just checking here the presentations was this part of um Um Okay, yeah, sounds good. Please go ahead I can send it weirdly. It's not seeing I'm showing in my whole whole screen here Huh, I don't know why so weird zoom thing Um, I'll just stay on the slide doc. Um, so um, so so you might know glue We've been around will be 11 years in may We have the team is very globally distributed. Um, we're on every continent basically except Antarctica The counting the deployments over the years, you know, we're estimate around 3000 deployments and The business model for glue is we sell support on the glue server And we have serving mostly large enterprise customers around the world. So there's 50 enterprise customers um good partner network And anyway, so that's a little background about us um The glue server so what can be confusing to people is differentiating the glue server from its components So the glue server I tell people it's a little like red hat You could think of red hat as a distribution of open source components Some of which red hat wrote some of which they didn't but they're integrated together Given a version supported for years. So it's productized and the glue server is like that So it consists of a number of different products Um, and that's our commercial product the glue server And I'm not proposing that now that product some of those products are You know conducive to be made cloud native some of them aren't but I'm not proposing that we make the glue server That we contribute that to cncf what I'm proposing is that we contribute What what is really the core technology of glue, which is the oauth Open id Fido part of glue. So really the the cutting edge part of glue As as a new project at cncf So this isn't where we are today, but this is where we're moving to So the the core oauth service Um The phytoservice, which is currently integrated into the oauth service, but we think we can break that out um a skim service, um, which which is currently in our admin component, but we think we can break this out and a config service, which is also currently in our admin service, but The basic idea is you know different components for um, but the oauth service is really the one that drives most of the functionality and the performance So just sort of a high level vision And now now the glue server If you look at the the market for access management There's a lot of solutions out there and we have very specific segment that we're serving and It's always been the high end of the segment We felt like the low end of the identity segment is well served by SaaS services like octa and So the design for the glue server was always to be really fast Horizontal scalability was an important design goal from day one Low operating costs So customers or who deploy the glue server They'd probably rather use a sass like octa, but they can't But given given that we were even though They might prefer a sass we want to focus on making it as easy as possible and keeping their long-term costs down Because operations just goes on forever and it ends up being the biggest portion of your total cost of ownership So we always focus on low operating costs Flexibility was really important to us It turns out that you'd think authentication is like everyone does the same But it turns out that everyone's authentication business logic is a little different And we wanted to make sure that you could implement your business Rules without forking the code forking the code means makes it hard for for end users because They have to merge their codes Merge their updates and it makes it hard to keep current with the latest version So we created sort of interfaces that allow you to customize the behavior of the glue server Without having a fork and there's currently like 14 of them. We're adding a couple more Um, we have a loose persistence to to the persistence layer So a lot of the performance of glue is driven by the database that it connects to Um, initially we built glue around LDAP like most of the other access management platforms out there um Two or three years ago. We decided to implement another database. Um, we chose couch base In the future. We actually on the roadmap this year. We're looking at supporting amazon Maybe dynamo db is is what we're thinking But but basically there's an abstracted persistence layer and caching layer so that we can implement different persistence backends We've always had a test driven development strategy So you have to you can't submit features unless you submit the the corresponding tests And as a design goal when glue started in 2009 There was probably like 20 other companies or organizations that had a SAML product So we always said we wanted to be the best in the next thing which in 2009 was oauth and open id So we've made a big investment in sort of um being on the cutting edge and really being innovative In in the oauth area Um, so a little bit of a spoiler. We just put out this press release yesterday And it's showing uh, we basically did a benchmark where we started one morning And we spooled up enough servers to to to show a sustained rate that would get us to a billion authentications per day And when our competitors do this they tend to do You know, they tend to hit the back channel endpoint and send the username password and call that an authentication But what we did was actually show how do you scale the web tier because in open id You're talking about presenting a web page Processing the you know returning the code trading the code plus client credentials Getting a token hitting the user info endpoint. So we looked at the whole web-based open id flow not just sending the username and password and calling that an authentication and how do you scale that to A sustained rate of a billion authentications per day. It's a pretty hard problem I did benchmarking for rack space We were trying to achieve this. We never could with LDAP based infrastructures Or if we could it was only by using proxies Which were really hard to scale up and required a lot of operational expertise in terms of how do you manage the database We were able to do this test basically because of advances in cloud native technology and Advances in the persist in scaling the persistence But there's no other I don't think there's any other commercially available system that can do this Other systems tend to show how they could maybe scale But they can't scale like they can't autoscale to get to this rate I'll go more into the benchmark results later on But but just to give you an idea So in terms of the quality of the implementation glue has always been a leader in the Interop testing Before there was open id certification. There was the interops These are results from interop for that shows that glue. This was from 2013 january So glue was actually leading the interops in open id connect Before companies like ping and ford rock even had a server So we were pretty early on leaders in open id Today you can check the certification page and see that you know glue 4.0 We submitted all the test we're passing all the tests We are also we have login tests which happens to even be published. We're ready to pass those and submit those We submitted glue We to the there's a fappy open id provider set of conformance profiles and glue 4.2, which we're about to release is Passes both of those so clues a very comprehensive open id connect implementation I would also say that these tests are like the bare minimum of what you should be doing You could drive a truck through what's not in these tests There's a lot of missing negative tests also So I would say in my opinion these tests are the bare minimum of what vendors should be doing We're also the only implementation to recertify four times It's important that when you make a new release you're according to the terms of service. You're supposed to recertify and we've done that But we're the only implementation to actually recertify four times I think we'd be the only one to recertify three times even So going a little bit into what's in there In the open id connect we implement basically all of all the different You know features including Dynamic client registration Which is actually a pretty important feature For automation of managing clients Discovery is the configuration endpoint Front channel back channel logout Siba is a new open id profile that is used for call center push notifications to mobile devices So if you call at your bank and they want to push a notification to your phone There's a new the new open id standard for that. That'll be in 4.2 There's also a certification that we expect to pass in 4.2 for that Quick question michael sorry to tell you I should ask this at the beginning Do you want to tackle questions as they arise or do you prefer to shelve them all for the end of the presentation? um Let me let me Feel free to put the compressions in the zoom And I'll tackle them at the end because they might be answered along the way Got it. Um We implemented actually glues the most comprehensive implementation of this profile called uma user manage access um It's actually um, we're one of four implementations that that supports this profile But we're the only implementation that implements the authorization endpoint In oh, there's two endpoints. There's the authorization endpoint and the token endpoint Token is back channel authorization is front channel Glue is the only one that actually implements the front channel endpoint, which is critical For use cases where you want to get consent Like in gdpr the european privacy regulations. You might want to get consent from a user To call an api on their behalf You might need there's also use cases in the health care industry for consent to medical records Stuff like that. So we like uma especially where Consent of the user is needed After authentication happens and you need to go back to the to interact with the user We love fido. Um, we've built a fido into the glue server. Um, including u2f and and fido too We actually um, maybe this is a little bit of a non sequitur, but we um implemented a skim endpoint endpoint for fido also Because one important question becomes okay. What happens when you lose your fido token? You need some way to to unassociate that fido token from the person So in addition to the fido endpoints that are defined in the spec We also have a skim profile for fido. Um, that is conducive if you want to enable user or A user self service portal um to allow users to say okay those tokens are really small Eventually, you're going to lose the thing you need to handle that Um, I mentioned skim Um, we have a very comprehensive implementation of skim Um, we did interops with sale point and paying and others Um, this has been in production a long time skim2 is actually pretty standard if you don't know what skim is It's basically there's a slash user's endpoint and you can post to add a user Put our patch to edit a user But glue has a database with user information in it And this this is one of the ways That you can get user information in there and probably the most scalable way Um, so a little bit about the architecture. Um glue the glue server is written. It's built with the weld platform We we like the stability of this platform And um and and glue has a lot of code So we're we're using it extensively Um, let me just say a little bit more about um, well I think I have some another slide later, but so we actually are I mentioned it Somewhere, but anyway, yeah here. So we're we're looking at other platforms For the smaller services the phytoservice the skim service the config service for those services We can use lighter weight Like corkis is what we're looking at but there's for for these smaller services. I think it's okay But there's some for the for the core oauth service Even though it might be You know larger than we might like We still feel that the stability is really important for us for this kind of product We we need the stability And we think it's been serving us well. Um, there's been a lot of features in here that we like We deploy in a jetty server container. Um, so we don't require An ejb even though it's weld. Um, we don't we don't need a An ejb server like wild flyer or something like that And we're we're actually using the amazon JDK Is what is what we're using? We've you're probably all familiar with those issues, but Um Okay, so persistence glue does a lot of persistence. Um, you wouldn't think so but users clients Some types of tokens like um, like long live refresh tokens Those types of things need to be written to a disk and those And and that ends up being the barrier for performance Um is write operations and replication ends up being really an important driver for When you want to scale and so We have a and as I mentioned an abstracted interface That allows us to maintain different different back ends LDAP and couch base for us supporting back ends is a big deal because it's not just doing the mapping It's also, you know, doing enough performance testing to make sure that we have the queries optimized and Everything else about it the operational replication. There's really a lot to it. So before we take on a new database It's not a trivial undertaking We're targeting dino db dynamo db The We know a lot of our customers don't want to be in the in the database management business at all They really just rather like use a cloud database So we're looking at that rdbms has been a no-go for us We'd actually like to see an rdbms for smaller applications But because of issues with replication And scaling it hasn't been a priority for our use case which is performance and horizontal scalability Caching is really important also actually So we support a number of different cache models Couch base has memory buckets This is good when you need multi data center replication of the cache We also support redis and in memory We support database caching which might sound like an oxymoron But it it eliminates the need for the cache because we can use the database for replication So in cases where maybe performance isn't needed and you want to simplify the number of components You can actually specify the database instead of instead of the cache Um But um, but man, but there's some data where it would kill your performance to write it to the disk like the code and the authorization code flow It's only you should be used one time. So there's just no point in writing it to the disk Um, so for those types of like short lived objects, we need to use the cache Um, there's pre authentication state. There's a number of cases where it's not just the persistence You need to think about but also the caching Um I mentioned the interception scripts before as a way to an upgrade friendly way to implement Um business logic. Um, the scripts are written in jython um, the we we we are um Have shied away from java Having worked, you know for 10 years before I started glue. I work with every SSO platform out there that was available at the time And I felt like java was a big barrier to system administrators And so our goal was even though we love java glue Was to expose an easier interface for customization. We chose python as the syntax We could have chosen javascript or groovy, but we chose python partially because i'm a big python fan We used jython because that's that was the java implementation of python that made it easy for us to implement In the future, I think we might actually Enable in these interfaces in pure java We're that's on our feature wish list But these jython scripts have served us well and have enabled our customers to implement lots of crazy like You know use cases that we never thought possible Like i've never heard any customers say I need to do this with a glue server and I can't We've seen all sorts of like very creative implementations Of glue to get to get various use cases done Out of the box, we still have a lot of two-factor support social login inbound SAML phyto authentication, which I mentioned one time password sms x509 certificates I have a link down here to even more Reset your password after 90 days. You know try these two LDAP servers on the back end call this api. There's basically like lots of Different ways you can implement How the user gets authenticated There's lots of other interesting interceptions grips introspection Oauth token introspection is one that's used a lot when you want to add scopes or otherwise stuff other information into the oauth token client registration If you want to use software statements To as an alternate trust model to lock down dynamic client registration Maybe it's too open for you.  It's not just rfc 6749. It's actually the whole a whole bunch of these related rfcs that have come about to promote best practices and also to mitigate certain vulnerabilities of oauth that have been discovered over time Glue we we implement pkce. That's a really important one And anyway, I don't want to get get go into the weeds too much, but it's a pretty good implementation So One of one of the important directions we're going at glue is to align with cloud native design principles And in fact, we currently have two products one we call community edition, which is based on vms That's actually going in the direction of snap We currently have a churrut, but we're we're beta testing snap, which is a new distribution packaging strategy For customers who aren't ready or don't have economies of scale to go cloud native But for our larger customers, especially consumer and citizen facing applications We're really pushing customers towards our kubernetes helm distribution of glue And anyway, we did a quick chest checklist to see, you know, how we're aligning with some of these principles You can maybe I don't want to go into too much detail here, but you can you can check it later We have a huge effort on kubernetes year years long effort in In and and even before kubernetes was out. We were looking at how to Use orchestration for example, some of you might remember juju We tried that we were we were trying basically we knew we had this autoscaling problem Before juju we were looking at platforms like puppet and other configuration manner We we knew we had to figure out some way to autoscale kubernetes really solve those problems for us Once and for all But not without a lot of work Years of work Partially because as you know the platform itself was changing a lot as as we were innovating there'd be new versions of everything It was really a lot of work but after after You know Two and a half years or so. We really have a pretty solid kubernetes Helm distribution of the glue assets each service running in its own container All of that is open source And if you go to glue.org slash docs, you'll see there's kubernetes installation But this gave us really the the autoscaling we could not otherwise achieve no other platform enabled us to do it The the automation the failover you guys are already drinking the kool-aid. So you know the the advantages Um So I mentioned before on the benchmark results actually in the press release there are our instructions on how to replicate our benchmark And um, and we actually we we actually did benchmark both the resource owner Password credential flow. This is basically where you're just sending the username password to the token endpoint and asking for a token Um, we also benchmarked the authorization code flow but this is um Again, um in the press release. There's a link In the glue docs. We actually documented how to achieve these results. I believe that for the for the code flow It took almost 500 glue server 500 servers. There's no way you're slowing up 500 vms to do this so So you really need the scalability and we do think that actually this scalability What was previously only available? Like sure google and microsoft and octa and ozero. They can do this Um, but you can't license their technology stack for authentication Uh, or not even license. You can't deploy So we really feel like this is the first Sort of stack where you as a cloud provider can say I need to authenticate Like google at that scale and here's a recipe for for how to do it um, so in talking with um, some of my friends at linux foundation um If we were to contribute the core glue technology it has to be rebranded um, now we actually have a separate open source and um Um and commercial brand so the the the the open source stuff at glue we've always we've always had prefix at ox So there's ox off. There's ox trust. There's ox d But we decided actually we can go we can go further and maybe break and just come up with a totally new name Um over the years. I've gotten complaints about ox off being impossible to say for french speakers um, also I'm not sure.  We're named after racing pigeons the fastest racing pigeons on the planet Um, we're bred by these guys janssen. So janssen racing pigeons are Are sort of the known for being the fastest pigeon in the world. I'm proposing that as a new name um, I have some more, um Um, I have some more comments that specifically address. Maybe I'll just leave these For people who are reading offline because I don't think I want to read this much text. And let me take the questions um, there was just actually a Um, a release for jython Um that um, so there is a there was a new Jython release that we're integrating into 4.2 You know, we are you know, as I mentioned, we are looking at other interfaces For example, just exposing pure java as an alternative We try not to be paternalistic at glue and realize that our customers have a range of security requirements Some of them are very paranoid like the the navy is a customer of glue the us navy um, and and well others of them are In other areas and using the glue server for other things where maybe they're not quite as paranoid and so So I think that um, it's important to remember that um securities about mitigation not about perfection and the extent of mitigation That we want to leave that up to um, we want to make good default choices for the customer, but we also want to leave You know some Flexibility to the customers to find the right security Profile that that meets their needs Um, this is especially true in open id Where there's lots of signing and encryption options and we're not saying you have to use them all We want to make them available to you and then let the customer choose So the question about jython and python 2 7 You know potentially you could map other scripting interfaces You could do jute groovy or javascript. We had that idea in the past I think for the for how these things are exposed and compiled I I think it's okay I'd like to see what is the attack, you know that we're mitigating. What's the likelihood of that attack? So I think that just just saying sort of need jerk We should get rid of this But um, yeah, thank you. Those are the slides. Um, you know, it's maybe premature It's something we can look at but um The other question is let me just read it. How many enterprises are in production with the core aspects being discussed today? So Well, I said around 50 I mean almost all the glue customers have to be using this core feature You can't use glue without using this open id connect component The SAML components are chained. So when you do a SAML authentication, we actually redirect you to the open id connect Provider to be authenticated and send you back to the SAML idp. So there's no way to use glue without using this portion of glue And so we do have a commercial product called cluster manager But this isn't a cloud native product. This is only for VMs. So there's two cluster strategies at glue There's kubernetes and helm which is open source And then but it's what some of our customers aren't ready for cloud native or they don't have economies of scale Or they can't they don't have an elastic kubernetes service available that to them and they don't know how to build one And so we have another distribution of glue using Linux packages And if you're using these linux packages, we have a commercial product called cluster manager Which is a deployment tool that helps you that makes it easy for you to deploy A highly available topology of glue servers It's not used at runtime. It's just a deployment tool. But that tool is commercially licensed We actually document how you can cluster glue In the documentation. So there's no secret about what cluster manager is doing But I also say, you know to the open source business people out there Just because your product's open source doesn't mean that everything you write has to be open source and this tool we figured saved customers a lot of time Created commonality across cluster deployments for this VM distribution and we felt like it was fair game to license it But so there's no I wouldn't say that clustering is commercial kubernetes clustering is is that's built in and free You can cluster it. You just can't use our you know cluster deployment tool to cluster it That makes sense Let's see I think there's still A bit confused about which parts of our Software is commercial or not kubernetes in general The the setup of kubernetes with glue is not commercial the cluster manager Is is using VMs. It's nothing close to what kubernetes does On the cloud side. So it's it's not even They're two different tools kubernetes and that deploy and the deployment that it brings to glue is all Open source and you can you can just follow the docs on how to install that There's nothing commercial about that and that's what we use in the press release. That's that's how we reached the scale We didn't use cluster manager for that right Also, keep in mind that what we agree to support like the software the the binaries The documentation that's all open source, but that doesn't mean we have to support you Glue does a lot of community support You can look at our support forums and we have a whole team that does nothing but community support We find that actually supporting clusters is an enterprise requirement And and plus we would need to expand our community support capability and we feel like We can't support the world, you know, we can give you everything we can document it, but But we are what we choose to support commercially The community can answer other community questions about clustering, but But we don't feel like we have an obligation to support And it support is what we sell and and so there has to be a business model that's our business model and We we we want to support. I always say, you know open source. We're not a charity for big businesses We give a lot of free software. We do a lot of stuff for free We also have to figure out some way to fund all that good stuff And and the and what we sell this support There is no So glue is not open core There is no enterprise version Or or community version. There's just one version of glue There's one specific tool cluster manager that's licensed And as as we said about four times that tool only relates to vm deployment. It's not you would never use that if you're using kubernetes So everything at glue we don't believe in open core because we believe that that creates A bad incentive or it creates a conflict of interest with the developers Where developers are saying well, what should I work on the enterprise features or the open source features and the enterprise features End up having more priority So we didn't want to create that bifurcation of of motivations at glue. So there's only one version of the glue server But um So it it might not be as clear on the marketing but There's really If you look at glue not only is the glue server open source But glue gateway or our api gateway based on con community addition. That's open source our plugins are open source Super glue our mobile app is open source also our client software oxyd and one of my missing Casa our two-factor credential of application all open source However, we're just we're not talking about those those projects. Those are separate projects. We're really just talking about The core oauth open id service in glue, which we think is the most relevant to the cloud community I like this last question about What do we want to get from cncf membership? Well, we want to build the community for glue That's that's the main reason is So we've done a good job. I think getting the product to where it is today Um but in order for We think it would be hugely advantageous to us if we could attract a bigger community to collaborate with and the cn and by Aligning with the governance model of cncf and making Glue is pretty stable at this point. You know, we've implemented a lot of features. So At this point we we think that if we could formalize How features get added to the glue and create a more consensus driven approach to to that process We see collaboration opportunities with other cncf projects In particular, we already have an integration with opa In our gateway product, but we really are big fans of the declarative security model of opa Also, we like falco A lot of our customers Need a multi-tiered security approach and having falco To monitor sort of the kernel level Events to detect anomalous activity. That's really interesting to us So we're excited about some of the other projects But the main over our writing goal for us is, you know There's actually a number of large organizations that we're working with today that would Like to collaborate on the glue server more closely and moving Glue the the core technology out of glue the company and and into a foundation Would provide some assurances and every once in a while I mean, we've been committed to open source for 10 years But every once in a while we still get, you know Questions about what if somebody buys glue, you know, what if you decide to unopen source? So we think that moving the core technology to a foundation would eliminate some of those questions and also Enable some of our partners Like idemia who's mentioned in the in the press release They're a very large publicly traded identity security company So the glue is very tactical for them Evernote who's I mentioned in the slides later on is one of our customers They're they're deploying glue at that scale And also service Other companies who want to launch their own octa So we have a number of partners globally Who want to launch a hosted identity service based on glue and so moving moving glue to cncf We believe would create a more Would create the governance structure Which would enable us to collaborate with a larger ecosystem of developers I'm going to jump in just quickly michael 1054 i'm just going to call it up in one more minute just for okay Thank you, michael. Uh, we Got a number of questions that michael's gone through here if there's any additional ones We can just post them or reach out to you afterwards presumably With the last michael Yeah, um Just a clarification on jensen versus glue Um, you know as you're going through this, uh, I'll be honest disentangling glue the company glue server and all the various components You know to you know figure out, um, you know which aspects we're advocating for You know lots of setup And i'm not sure you know besides you know just being able to say, uh, it's the oos part You know not having a Uh a focused project to focus on Is really hard. Um, so, you know, is it is the correct understanding that jensen would be That circumscribed oos componentry That you're considering Uh, you know bringing into the cncf or is that uh, you know the glue server that Is open source, uh And you know the name going forward. Yeah, so so the closest thing that we have is really ox off Um, that that's our core oos Fido component today. Um, so we're really talking about renaming that jensen Um Breaking out the fido and fido is only like a couple of end point It's not a really big part of the glue server But we don't want to hold back innovation of fido for new versions of of the oos server because fido is Perhaps on a could be you know if we have a new fido release Maybe we should don't have to wait for the next release of oos. So we want to decouple these things Um Really you need a config service. We already have a config api, but we're breaking that out Into a separate lightweight config api and the skim service likewise also exists, but we just want to break that out So these are the four you need the skim service because you need a way to add edit delete users in the glue server You need the config service so you can automate not just deployment, but also configuration of the glue server And fido and oos we see as as as core services So this is really this bundle of services is is what jensen would be But oxoth today has oos and fido And our ox trust has skim and config so we but So basically we're we're actually doing this right now is we're breaking these guys out And we will bundle this all as one new project called jensen Thank you, michael We have a couple minutes left for open floor. Does anyone have any additional topics they'd like to bring up and If there's any additional questions for michael michael, can we reach out to you via the ticket number 366 associated with this presentation or Absolutely. Okay, perfect Does anyone have anything else they'd like to bring up in the last few minutes before hard stop? Okay, 10 seconds of cricket says no No, they're from mike. Thank you mike and thank you for putting on this presentation today and With that I think we'll call it a stop and hope everyone stays happy and healthy Thanks, everyone. Thank you Thanks. Thanks Matthew. Cheers


Taking the wild out of wildfire, presented by Science at NASA. Wildland fires in the U.S. torch an average of 7 million acres of land each year. The Western U.S. is one of the worst wildland fire hotspots on Earth. In the Western states, drought and heat are the perfect ingredients to make wildfires wilder. The hot, dry conditions make bone-dry fuel out of plants and trees, and winds can sweep a fire along as fast as 14 miles an hour. A new NASA-funded tool is taking some of the wild out of wildfires by making it possible for U.S. fire managers to better spot and track fires. The new tool uses high-resolution data from a special sensor on the Sumi National Polar Orbiting Partnership, or NPP, satellite. Past satellite images of wildfires have shown where fires are burning, but except for the largest fires, they don't show clearly where the devouring flames are headed. Images from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIRS, on NPP are almost three times more detailed, about 1,200 foot resolution versus 3,280 foot resolution. This means officials can detect and map even relatively small fires and track their progression in much finer detail. Fire managers can better target their attack before a fire morphs into an out-of-control inferno incinerating everything in its path. The VIRS data can be used with a state-of-the-art weather fire model to predict 12 to 18 hours in advance of how a fire will shift direction based on weather and land conditions. Within minutes of the satellite overpass, users can pinpoint active fire locations and anticipate sudden blow-ups and shifts in a fire's direction that could help keep firefighters out of harm's way. The Meraka Institute in Pretoria, South Africa served as an early adopter of the new fire product, putting it to use during several large wildfires in South Africa's Kruger National Park. Meraka's Philip Frost said, we had some serious wildfires in September 2014 and the VIRS 375 meter data performed excellently. Wilfrid Schroeder of the University of Maryland College Park said, we hope that by infusing the higher-resolution detection data and fire behavior modeling outputs into tactical fire situations, we can lessen the pressure on those working in fire management. Schroeder leads the project team that developed the weather fire model, along with Janice Cohen of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, in Boulder, Colorado. The new VIRS fire detection product was developed with support from NASA's Earth Science Division, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Forest Service. Active Fire Maps of the United States are available online at activefiremaps.fs.fed.us. For more hot science news, stay tuned to science.nasa.gov.


C-FI and D-FI will actually merge over time. You don't want to rely only on ETH because that means you're too exposed to ETH's movement in the market. You have this massive portfolio of assets that is spread across the world, that has no critical reliance on any single entity. Hi everyone, my name is Giovanni. Today we are going to interview one of the biggest names in decentralized finance. Make it our founder, Rune Christensen. Rune, thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. On March 12th, the price of Ethereum crashed by over 30% and MakerDAO experienced a protocol failure which left the platform with over $4 million worth of bad debts. Also, around $8 million worth of investors' funds got lost in the incident. Rune, what are the main lessons you learned from the MakerDAO meltdown on Black Thursday? One thing is, the protocol actually worked as intended and even went ahead to recapitalize itself completely like it was designed to do. But I think the other thing to look at is how the governance responded. So the MKI holders and the Maker governance community responded to this because what became clear was that with basically the amount of keepers that were in the ecosystem, which wasn't as many as I think most people would have expected. And then with the possibility of this kind of extreme congestion and crash and liquidity issues and die happening all at the same time, the first reaction that the governance community had was to increase what's called the bid duration of the auctions. So the auctions that had initially been running relatively fast in order to be as efficient as possible and that way potentially attract more keepers to the ecosystem. Instead, Maker governance changed that so that they lasted six hours and really became very slow auctions so that there's plenty of time to react and even with congestion and technical issues or anything like that, there should be a lot more time for the keepers to actually bid. But one of the other major actions that the Maker governance community took was to onboard a new collateral type, so the USDC stablecoin, because the other issue in addition to the congestion was the lack of access to die liquidity by the keepers. So they simply couldn't access die to bid on the auctions with because nobody wanted to generate die, because nobody wanted to hold the ETH during this crash. So by adding USDC, which is an asset that's completely uncorrelated with crypto, right? So when crypto is falling, when the ETH is falling and so on, USDC is $1, right? So it actually means that even if people are not willing to generate die with Ethereum during a crash like this, they'll still be willing to generate die with USDC because it's not exposed to the same correlated risk, basically. And what that meant is that that created a source of liquidity for the keepers that was reliable even during a crash like this and then also helped to stabilize the situation and prevent the zero bids from happening. You adopted the stablecoin USDC as an additional collateral in order to stabilize the price of die after the accident. Don't you think that relying on a centralized stablecoin contradicts the idea of decentralization at the foundation of MakerDAO? Yeah, so I think first it's important to point out that the entire point of the Maker protocol and the die stablecoin has been to evolve upon the original quite simple decentralized stablecoin model of a single collateralized stablecoin, right? So stablecoins backed by only a single asset and moved from that and then into a type of stablecoin that has many different types of collateral that are all uncorrelated with each other. Because the problem that we actually saw like that everyone, you know, the community in the whole world saw unfold on March the 12th was that there are some serious limitations to having only one type of collateral or even just having only one, you know, sort of a correlated collateral that all behaves the same during a crash, right? So it's always been the plan to add other assets. And it's always been clear that if you want stuff that is uncorrelated from crypto and doesn't all move the same during a crash, you have to move on to real-world assets. You can't just rely on decentralized assets that all have essentially the same business models which is to run a blockchain transaction network. Like the best way to deal with risk is to diversify, right? So, and so the way you would apply that to a decentralized stablecoin like die is that you don't want to just rely on one type of collateral basically, right? So you don't want to rely only on ETH because that means you're too exposed to ETH's movement in the markets and so on, right? And even potentially you're too exposed to the fact that ETH is maybe too reliant on centralized exchanges in the future restrictions. Yeah, basically you're saying that the more diversify is the collateral die depending on the better for the old protocol for the old community. Yeah, exactly. And the way you extend that is so, so if you add USDC, then okay, well now there is one more point. Now there's kind of like an extra point of failure, right? So it's not just Ethereum, now there's also USDC. And given, I mean, and of course, USDC is still it's reliant on custodian, it's exposed to the US legal system. So actually an even better next step would be to then add even more stablecoins, right? So why not also add, you know, three or four other centralized stablecoins so that you don't just add one more point of failure but actually add an extra five points of failure, right? So you even further spread the risk. And then from there it's just going further in that direction, right? So the next, I mean, so the endpoint is thousands of assets, right? It's thousands of real assets that all have different custodians with different security models and that are based in different jurisdictions so that you're not too exposed to one particular political or legal system. I think that the endpoint is very much a form of decentralization, right? We have this massive portfolio of assets that is spread across the world that has no critical reliance on any single entity at all, right? In fact, it can handle a lot of failure. It can handle custodians running away, you know, jurisdictions cracking down and all of these things can be handled actually in the same way that the protocol was able to handle the March 12 crash, right? Which is basically the protocol simply accepts that there is risk, there's always going to be risk and when that risk sets in and you have a loss, the protocol has a way to basically have solved the last recapitalized system and then earned back what was lost during the good times where there isn't a crash. The Black Thursday meltdown was partly caused by the fact that some maker users participating in the liquidation auction managed to buy Ethereum, giving zero die-in returns. These were maker users who preferred to pursue their self-interest against the interest of the community. Don't you think that this is still a vulnerability in the maker system? Well, I think you could say it's a failure of the keeper ecosystem in that it simply wasn't mature enough. There wasn't enough actors there because they're supposed to pursue their self-interest but they're supposed to do so competitively and as a result, you should approach market prices, right? But the problem was that there was no ability for them to compete because most of them were completely went offline basically from just the extreme conditions during the event. And like I said earlier, one of the solutions to this that maker governance immediately put in place was to simply change the duration that an auction has so that there's just more time for more people to participate in a given auction, even though there's always trade-offs with these kind of changes. And I would also expect that in the long run an even more sort of future-proofing solution would be if the community takes a look at the entire auction design and basically redesigns it based on the understanding that these kind of extreme events are going to happen. According to a research from a company called CredMark, the amount of loans that have been given out by centralized platforms like BlockFi, Salesforce, these kind of centralized lenders is still far, far bigger than the amount of loans that are being given out through the centralized platforms like MakerDAO. So the market for centralized lenders is still much bigger than the one occupied by MakerDAO. So why do you think people still prefer to trust in a way centralized entities instead of going for the decentralized path? Well, I think on one hand it's certainly familiarity, right? It's that that's what many people are used to. I would actually expect that over time, once DeFi fully matures and the protocols and platforms fully matures, you would see that what's currently known like the C-Fi and DeFi will actually merge over time. And what's currently known as C-Fi will more become the front-ends and sort of the access points to the various protocols that then allows, you know, that gives people the best possible rates and basically all the different financial options that they want to have access to, right? And that's another of the key aspects of DeFi, right? The composability and the ability to build on top of the protocols that lie underneath and then add whatever features you want, including, you know, making it more user-friendly or adding, I don't know, insurance or what they're just like combining them together in various ways so that it appeals to specific types of end users. And I think overall, the way the ecosystem is shaped right now, it's very well positioned to go, you know, to move in that direction over time and ultimately bridge that gap between the people that prefer the use of friendliness, even if they have to take more custodial risk and use C-Fi right now and then the people that prefer to use decentralized protocols but then obviously the long run would love to have even more user-friendly interfaces as well. The DeFi space is still at its infancy. What are the main milestones that Macadal and DeFi need to achieve in order to mature and onboard the mainstream public? It has basically three core pillars that the foundation has, the Maca Foundation has laid out. So the first one is what we call elected paid contributors. So that is the protocol hiring experts kind of, you know, similar to how the foundation right now hires developers and so on to work with the protocol. In the future, the protocol will itself hire experts to work directly for the protocol and can pay directly for the protocol. And then these experts, these elected paid contributors can cover all the, like all the different day to day operations that are needed. And then the second thing is what's called Maca Improvement Proposals. So Maca Improvement Proposals is a way to codify and structure agreements in the community around how governance should run and how technical upgrades to the protocols should happen. And then finally, there's vote delegates. So a system that allows MPI holders to delegate their MPI voting power to others that may be more active in the governance process and may be more deep into the technicalities. And this will make it a lot easier for regular MPI holders to participate in governance without having to fully understand every single aspect and, you know, consider every single decision instead they can just decide which delegate do they want to attach their voting power to in order to sort of get the change that they would like to see in the system over time. So I think if the community is able to fully integrate these three core pillars into running the Maca protocol for the long run, then the only thing that's in the need from there is just scale and specifically onboarding a lot of tokenized real-world assets into the Maca protocol so that the protocol can reach the scale that it needs to reach and become very diversified, very stable so that it becomes possible for regular people around the world and institutions and small businesses and so on to really trust the stability of the die stable coin at the same level that the fiat currencies are seen today. And maybe even beyond that because you will have that additional advantage of total transparency into exactly what assets are backing the die stable coin and where they're located and what risks they're exposed to. We just pointed out that people are not used to rely on decentralized entity because they kind of, they are more used to and trust their funds to centralized actors. So probably they need some time also to adapt to this new way of thinking. Otherwise it's gonna be very difficult to onboard a massive amount of users. I agree and I also, like I said, I think that a model that will prove to be very popular is this hybrid model where you have centralized entry points into the decentralized finance protocols. So maybe even you will have a custodian that you trust as a user and then that custodian interacts with the DeFi protocols for you so that you still don't have, let's say, you don't have the entire protocol is in custody. It's only your specific custodian that you're exposed to and that allows for these, I guess you can say, kind of like a hybrid approach where you can get some of the advantages of DeFi and you can get some of the advantages of centralized options and maybe when you combine it together then you end up with something that is preferable to a lot of users. That was Rune Christensen, founder at Make a Dow. If you enjoyed the interview, don't forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel. See you next time. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe and hodl.


Hi everybody, welcome back to a brand new season of Art of One Dojo. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and new year, and today I thought it would be appropriate to talk about New Year's resolutions or getting back into training. This is the time of year where people tend to set new goals for themselves. It's a clean slate. It's a new year. Time to start over. And especially for martial artists, a lot of us can feel like, oh, I want to up my training this year. I have some goals I want to hit. So today we're going to talk about, you know, if you've been on the training for a while and you want to get back into it, what are some things to keep in mind? So stay tuned and we're going to get right to it. So this episode is not necessarily for people who have never trained in the martial arts and they're looking to get into it for the first time. We've actually covered this topic before in a few different episodes, specifically what is the best martial art and why your art sucks. So if you're just starting the martial arts for the first time, I recommend checking those episodes out. You'll probably get a little bit more insight on that and how to choose. Today we're going to specifically talk about you did train at one point and you've fallen out of it. And now being a new year, you're promising yourself new goals, oh, let me get back into it. Or you want to up the ante and add new milestones to what you're already doing. First of all, let's ask what made you stop to begin with? Were you a child? And maybe you trained for, you know, a year or two at school and then you went to college and you just kind of, it kind of went to the wayside and you're getting back into it. Or did you get an injury? Was this just a hobby? Sometimes people just do martial arts as a hobby. And then they stop for a long time and maybe they pick it up later. Did your school close? Does life get in the way? You know, did you get married? Did you go out of state? Any number of things that can happen in your life that can prevent you from training? Were you disillusioned with your school? Did you have a bad experience that made you step away for a while? And also, let's not lie, was money a factor. You know, training does cost money and not everyone has the luxury to do it. So first of all, ask yourself what made you stop to begin with and maybe from there you can use that to help guide yourself how you should get back into it. My number one piece of advice, at least I personally feel right now, if you're just getting back into training, don't push too hard. I know you might have this motivation to want to just jump into things and go ball to the wall and you know, be the best you can be and that's great, but you also want to be smart about it. So don't just go too hard at the beginning. One, you risk hurting yourself, two, you also risk burnout. And there's also a big difference in how long you've been out.  There's going to be a different acclimation time. It's going to be a totally different experience between the two. One thing you're going to notice is to say you trained as a child or in your early teens and now you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, you want to get back into it. The first thing you're going to notice is your body doesn't feel the same as it used to. You're not going to move the same way. You're not going to have the same speed, the same flexibility, the same reflexes. So don't expect to jump right in and feel the way you did 20, 30 years ago. If your body's changed, you have to acknowledge that and change with it. But that being said, that doesn't mean that you can't do stuff. I'm saying that you're going to have to make some modifications. You're going to find your comfort level. You're going to find what you can do and what your body's capable of doing and follow that.  Again, you don't want to just jump in and go too hard and make it another bad experience for yourself that you don't ever come back to it again. Obviously, I don't feel the same way I did when I was 20. You know, I started when I was 14. Back then I was jump spinning kicks. I was doing all the flashy stuff. I was super bouncy over the years. My legs don't feel as springy. I'm heavier than I was before. And also like your attitude changes. I don't focus so much on the spinning and the flashy stuff is I'm more focused on being grounded. And I want, you know, when I was a kid, speed and flash and hit the guy 20 times versus now it's more like, well, we'll make one time work. So set new expectations for yourself. So, okay, you haven't trained in a while.  What can you expect? One, it's probably going to feel good and horrible at the same time. It's going to feel good to be moving again, to get back into it. The motivation is going to be there. But like I said before, you're not going to be at the same physical level as you were before unless you've kept up physical fitness throughout all this time. If this is the first time working out in a while, you might not feel so great at the end or you might feel sluggish and you might feel like, oh my God, this was a lot harder than I thought it was. That's normal. And that does go away. I've noticed after my time out, when I get back into it, my first class sucked. Like, I would do kicking drills on the pad. I'd get winded quick. I wanted to throw up. I'm like, where is my energy? That does come back after a few classes. You'll see like a surge come back to the point where you can keep up in class and at that point, you'll hit like a plateau and little by little, you'll build up your endurance more and more. So, if that's your experience, when you go back for the first time, just try to bear with it, the endurance and energy levels will come back if you are out because of an injury. Granted, this is going to be a wide range of severity here. You could have just a small injury that knocks you out for a couple of weeks or a lifelong injury that maybe disabled you for life and then everything in between. First and foremost, my number one recommendation is, before you start training or when you get back to training, follow your doctor's orders. Tell your doctor or physical therapist, depending on what your injury was, what you want to do and how you're going to start working out and follow their orders, listen to them. And also, don't assume anything about your recovery. When I had knee surgery at this point, like 10 years ago, it was kind of funny because I was anxious to get back to class. I had never been out six months before. It drove me nuts not training. When I went back, I was allowed to go back in stages. My doctor said I could go, but I couldn't kick for X amount of time and I was starting to feel good. And I asked him, I said, look, my knee is feeling pretty good. How about I just do some light kicks? Just with that leg, I'll just do some pushes wherever to get the motion down. And my doctor said, actually, that's not what I'm worried about. He goes, you can kick with that leg. He didn't want me bracing with it. So in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, the problem would be the impact. And his mind was like, no, he didn't want me to put an extra strain and pressure to brace, but I'll kick with my other leg. So just because you think you might feel good in one way or you might think why you're not allowed to do something, talk to your doctor. Don't make any assumptions about your recovery, especially if you have a physical therapist. Always listen to a physical therapist. I know people who had surgery and they were right back on their feet, working out the next day. And guess what, they now have, they've worsened it and they now have lifelong injuries because they did not listen to the doctor's orders. So if you have an injury before you train, follow their orders, don't push yourself, but it's not worth a long-term injury just to get some immediate gratification. All right, this one's tougher when life gets in the way. First and foremost, your family comes first. You have obligations that come first, often job, responsibilities. Sometimes training doesn't take the front burner and you have to decide what's important to you. A lot of people get married, they have kids. Having kids is gonna take away a lot of training time. So you're gonna have to find time on your own. If you're really serious about getting back into it, you are gonna have to dedicate the time. You know, maybe you can work out with a spouse, trading off times, watch your kids, or maybe you can do a work schedule. That's gonna help you do something you work out, but if you really wanna continue and set realistic goals, you're gonna have to set some time on your own. If you have a dojo you're gonna go to, try to at least go once or twice a week at the minimum if you can. Try to work your schedule where those time slots fit. If that doesn't work out, if your time is all over the place, find time on your own to work out. Online program, your own home course material, maybe get up an extra hour early in the morning, stay up an extra hour later. Whatever you can, try to set a dedicated time, a day or a week that you can say, okay, this is my training time and you're gonna fit whatever you can in that. That regularity is better than saying, well, I'll get to it. I'll just do a better longer training next week.  So get some regularity in your schedule, even if it's small. If you can't find time to physically work out, again, like if you're on your lunch break, read about the art at the very least. Again, your home material, or look up the history of your art, get the mental simulation going. At least think about it so you've got some sort of cognitive thing in place there. Even if you're not physically working out, you're still training your minds that when you do work out, concepts are fresh, ideas are fresh, and maybe even get a new perspective that you wouldn't have had if you hadn't taken the time to read about it. So yes, life can be really hard to schedule, but the bottom line is, if you wanna make it work, you're gonna have to find the time yourself to dedicate to your training. And as I've said before, again, keep all your notes and references in classes. So that way, if there is material for you to buy, manuals, DVDs, I recommend getting it. You have that resource. If your school does not offer that, write notes, go home at night and write down what you covered in class. So at least you have that. Disillusionment. A lot of people stop training in the martial arts because of a bad experience, or they became disillusioned with either the art or the process. So once again, ask yourself, what made you stop? Was it a bad instructor? Did you really have a poor experience with a particular instructor? I have known instructors who were abusive to their students, and their students left them. I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to go back to that. I've seen it, it's horrible. Did you have a bad experience with the school, with your colleagues, with your classmates? So maybe another school is just a better option for you. Did you not like the art? That's a very big possibility. I can't tell you how many people I hear from who said they tried one art, and they liked it for a while, and they realized, eh, it's not for me, or it's not really getting the goals I wanted, or I had this expectation, it didn't meet it. So if you didn't like the art, if you stopped because you were disillusioned with the art you were training, please, I encourage you to at least try another one. Identify what it is that you want to do and look for arts that kind of fit that mold. It doesn't hurt to give it a try. The other thing too is, did it not work when you needed it to? Did you train in self-defense? And when the day you needed it, it wasn't there for you? That is an unfortunate reality too, and that can come down to a bunch of different reasons. Whether were you in it long enough? Was the quality of material taught well? Were you at the right school? Was it a tournament school versus a self-defense school? There's a lot of questions to ask there. That's a traumatic experience. If something didn't work when you needed to, I understand if you stopped, but I do encourage you to try to identify why didn't it work. If you can do that, then you can find a solution as to where to go next. If training is what you really want to do, and if you're watching this video that's far into it, something tells me that you are interested in getting back into the martial arts, so I do encourage trying to find why it didn't work, or at least go talk to some other schools, tell them your experience, they might be able to guide you. So I really hope a bad experience doesn't sour you in the martial arts in total when there's a lot of different realities and options out there. And in the spirit of New Year's resolutions, what are some realistic goals? That's the key here is to set realistic goals for yourself. It's easy to be like, okay, it's January 1st. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get five more belts this year. I'm gonna go train five days a week. Make it realistic. It's easy to be gung ho and motivated at the beginning. It's a lot harder to actually walk that talk. And so I discourage doing too much too soon. When you go gung ho, and I've seen this in countless people who are people who try to get back into, even just going to the gym, they start going, I'm gonna go five days a week. Yeah, they go five days that first week. Maybe the second week. The third week, you're like, okay, I'm gonna go a couple of days this week. Then the next week, they're burnt out. I need this week off. And the next thing you know, it's tapered down, it's tapered down, it's tapered down. And about a few weeks in, you're done. You've burnt out on it. Too much is too much. So don't push yourself too hard. Again, we're not the same at 40 than we were at 15. You're gonna have to respect that, like it or not. I don't like it, but I have to respect it. I can't do the same things I did when I was younger. So instead, I focus on different areas and different strengths. That's something we all have to do. And honestly, sometimes in the end, you find more fulfillment doing that because you can find better purpose and you can find better tactics that way. Keeping track of your progress is important. If you have milestones, especially again, a resolution, your goal setting, nothing keeps you more motivated than hitting milestones and hitting goals. So instead of saying, oh, I wanna get five new belts this year, look at your curriculum and say, you know what, this week I wanna master this technique or at least understand this technique. The next week I wanna master it. Set smaller incremental goals because I'm the type of person I love making to-do lists just to help me organize my thoughts and it feels so good to cross something off. So break your goals down into smaller pieces and just keep track of your progress.  You do it in smaller pieces and you'll find that you get further that way. Like I talked about before, you have to make the time for yourself. We run this channel full time. Work two other full time jobs.  There's a lot of times I come home at night. It's midnight, I'm like, I'm not working out. Or I have to be up at six a.m. the next day. I'm not getting up at five to work out. It's a reality.  This day I'm doing this. This day I'm doing this, blocking times out because you have to take responsibility. You fell out of it for one reason. Don't let it happen again. So take responsibility. If you are serious about your training and getting back to the martial arts, the burden of the work is on you. But there's a lot of options that you have and I wish all of you so much great luck and hopefully this is a great new year for all of us. We're gonna keep exploring. And our goal here, again, our resolution for the channel is to continue to be a resource, positive resource in discussion group and networking for all of you guys out there. You've been fantastic. So good luck with your training this year. Set those resolutions, stick to them and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you so much. So as always, thank you guys so much for watching. Please be sure to thumbs up this video, subscribe to our channel if you haven't yet and please support us on Patreon. The more support we get there, the more we can do. We've got a lot in store for you guys this year. So please help us bring this material to you. Again, thank you guys for all your support and we'll see you in the next video.


In terms of losses, is there something that you've learned from your biggest loss that has carried on to help mold you into a better trader? Yeah man, it's awareness of what's happening internally. Once you have enough losses and once your body feels enough of those losses and enough of that pain, it already knows, right? So when that loss comes or when it's about to come, the instinct starts to move. Your body already starts to move. It's already sending you those signals.