Okay, I'm going to drop a link to the YouTube livestream in the chat. Feel free to share this with anybody on your end. Just one note, there is also a chat on the YouTube page, so I'll keep an eye on both places. People are welcome to ask any questions during the presentation. You can either raise your hand, unmute, or put a note in chat. And the same on the YouTube page, I'll keep an eye on the chat over there. People are welcome to ask questions. This is going to be a discussion. So we welcome any questions, comments people have. And with that, let me just introduce the Telecom Special Interest Group. If this is your first Telecom Special Interest Group meeting that you've joined, welcome. This is an open call hosted by the Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group. This is a group that's focused on helping people adopt blockchain and distributed ledger technology in the telecom industry. We welcome people to join the group, bring ideas, comment suggestions, collaboration ideas. And so the group is structured with calls every other week, and we also have a mailing list. I'll drop links to the place where you can go to find out more about pass calls and mailing lists. We encourage you to subscribe and introduce yourself. We welcome you if this is your first time to be here. And with that today, the group sometimes has guest presentations. So today we appreciate the time from GSMA is going to come and talk about their vision for a blockchain and digital telecom industry and to talk about how the GSMA and our group may be able to collaborate. So with that, thank you to Monique and Shemit for your time. And I will hand it off to you. So Shemit, do you want to share the slides? Sure. Just give me a second. Super. Okay. Are you seeing the right screen? Because I've got these things here. I certainly am. Yeah, I see a slide that says, yeah, the shared vision. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Go ahead. All right. So thank you very much on behalf of the GSMA and crew to actually, you know, present here to the hyper ledger telecoms user group. We're very, very excited about doing this. I am Monique Morrill and I'm from Cinevors, but I am a co-chair of this particular group along with my colleague, Shamit Bhatt and who represents the GSMA. We're going to go through the vision, the shared vision as we have been articulating it within the GSMA and externally. And so we'll just let you know how, how this goes. And certainly we see a very strong future here together. If you can go to the next slide, please. So from a shared vision perspective, the way the GSMA specifically around DLT or distributed ledger technology sees it. We see it as evolving along these, along these attributes. One is that we believe that the DLT cannot be taken as a silent business. That is, it involves other technology enablers. I think we would all agree to that. One other point that we're very, very strong on is that we will also believe that the, the tenant here is about bringing 80% of business and 20% is technology focus. It has to, the narrative is it has to bring value to, to, to, to our businesses. Else it's just perceived as, as an experiment. So this has been the tenant in terms of how we speak with one another, how we present with one another and how we actually socialize the opportunity. The, we also believe that the ecosystem is very multi-staker holder, shareholder. It's, it's built basically about building this ecosystem, which includes the OpCos, the wholesale carriers, banks, mobile players and enterprise policy makers. And the most important point of all is really about showing the masterful of proof points to, to the evolving opportunities. So the next slide, please. Is it just, is it possible to show the slides just full screen? Yeah. Because I think what's happening is that what we're seeing is, thank you, Michael. Familiar voice, Michael. Hello. Okay. Yeah. Next slide. Let me try and do it. Yeah, because what we were saying, are you seeing the notes? That's, that's what I was trying to do. Yeah. Okay. So let's, let's just go this way. Yeah. That's fine. Fantastic. We can just go to the next slide. Yeah. I mean, look, the way we, we have captured is blockchain is, is has a big opportunity for the Ter, telcos and carrier business. We don't need to define it. I think we all have a common understanding of what that is, but we see the revenue. This could be anything in the all along the continent, about $1.8 billion. All the 19.9 billion to 2024. And spread across several business opportunities here is one is in the payment rail. The other is in wholesale settlements, identity and access management, supply chain, blockchain, as a service in fraud management. So we are seeing more and more within the telco carrier industry use cases along this continent. The next slide, please. So let's contextualize a little bit about what this means from a use case perspective. You know, what we have is operator specific to what we see as collaborative on the horizontal horizontal line. The vertical is green field and legacy. So if we look at the upper left quadrant, you see spaces that typically we start in as a carrier industry, which is device listing and personal identity. The lower quadrant, which is operator specific has been around fraud management, fraud litigation. Very, very, very important to, to the carriers. If we go to the right lower caught quadrant, we're talking about a collaborative space, you know, and here we see this is where we're picking up a lot of roaming Wi-Fi roaming international voice settlement. What has been footprinted in the, the carrier space as, as in its, within its DNA from legacy grant to Greenfield, but really the sweet opportunity as we, as we move forward in the industry, as we see it in the industry from a compelling business perspective is to the upper right, which is really around global identity, quantum secure distributed ledger technology, network information sharing. This could be interpreted as network slicing, edge settlements, bandwidth on demand, and perhaps even a telco coin, like a stable coin kind of example. The next slide, please. So, you know, we, we see that in terms of gardeners for face blockchain spectrum versus the GSMA focus areas, what we understand is that everybody, not all of the organizations are within a particular spectrum, they're, they're actually either starting, get it or move or have services or develop services per se. So, what you will interpret here is that it's no longer hype. We see that, you know, again, it's a wholesale settlement as a starting point has been very much in development as well as fraud management payments and identity pretty much of what I stated before as common, common service themes that are being picked up by the carriers to actually develop services. What we also have to pay attention to is that there was some cross, cross domain integration here and they cross in terms of, you know, they're very, very key in terms of disciplines because blockchain is not just silos as per se, but we're looking at edge computing. We can call it artificial intelligence machine learning and quantum. Whether it's quantum computing, maybe a better term here would be quantum services, whether it's networking or security. And then, of course, anything that we look at what could be defined as future because we see the opportunities evolving more and more. Okay. Next slide, please. So, the way we have defined a process in terms of collaboration and this is around a discipline process around concept to actual delivery. So as a group of participants within the GSMA, within this particular group, we look at how we prioritize the use cases within those focus areas, the examples that I've articulated, how we prepare for the concept per se, and how we look at it from trial, you know, look at proof of concept to rolling out to, you know, MVP. This is about testing the thesis in the market, right? The hypothesis in the market. And then, of course, getting a GSMA board support for this group as a priority and then create the MVPs with interested operators and vendors. It is operated, I would say it's operator and vendor or solutions delivery focused. And then, of course, you know, it's around how you standardize and commercialize the launch. And standardization is, you know, when we think about standardization, one way to think about it is also looking at it for those who have participated in the IETF. It's like running code, right? So it becomes a market standardization per se. Go ahead. Next slide. Yeah. I mean, here, what we are looking at is how we take these examples of, this is an example of wholesale. And wholesale is probably one that, you know, we have been focused on. It's a blockchain for wholesale roaming. And if you, if we look at the way it's been run here is that you have the settlement cost. This is really about what is the opportunity, understanding it from an evolutionary perspective to the opportunity. So it's about optimizing your services, optimizing your processes. So you look at from, you know, disputes in terms of shared smart contract logic to eliminate these sort of processes and discrepancies. Of course, contractual management. And then you can see how we step it up to payments, payment integration, cross-border payment support, fraud prevention and identity. So this, what, each step of the way in terms of the way we look at blockchain for wholesale settlements is that we're actually creating more and more and more opportunities. And it's a, we have proof points to actually articulate that to the next slide.  In fact, they went fairly quickly here. And you know, from a concept, from meetings that occurred in 2017 to actually, you can see what occurred in terms of other meetings, in terms of the board being reviewing it and actually asking for more, you know, proof of concept efforts and discussing that to break out sessions, to actually delivering examples of MVPs. And so we have seen about 60, there have been in the course of this, these from 2017 to the 31st of March, there are about 60 blockchain for wholesale roaming meetings with the MVP deployments. I think it's going to be scheduled a little later, but anyway, you can see these groups of participants, these leaders have been actually participating in that and actually rolling out products. Okay, next slide. So, you know, as we see the examples pretty much in articulation of what I've stated before, it is a GSMA, blockchain for wholesale roaming, is a GSMA initiative and it's really to evaluate the hypothesis out there, the benefits of blockchain to the carrier and the tech to the, you know, the business. And I'm looking at efficiency gains, you know, for the wholesale roaming and clearing settlement business. You know, we see it from automation, fewer disputes, faster, it's about optimizing, optimizing the business per se, to reduce fraud and cost savings. And so the group of work streams have been broken out to a technical group, a commercial group, a governance group. And so the current MVP focus is discounting settlement. We are using hyperledger fabric and this will be completed that April of, well, coming up now. And then the future, well, where it's upon us and the future MVPs are looking at, you know, TAP, BCE, interledger, interoperability, being ledger agnostic, whether it's hyperledger, Ethereum and Corda. And then of course, looking at even more, I think what will be interesting opportunities, which is an inter-networking interoperability or one could actually translate it to interledger interoperability. So the modality here is that all GSMA members are welcome to join. This is actually, you know, an example of what's happening with the blockchain wholesale roaming initiative going, breaking it away to MVP to actual product and to bring your own skills and resources and funding. And this is about hands-on development and specification development, as well as, you know, looking at how you have your reference industry implementations and your sourcing models. Here's the summary really about the tenant. It's really being very pragmatic. It's really about the business. It's really about bringing your skill sets together. And, you know, it's not just learning, but actually doing. Okay, next slide. Okay, this is my last slide before I hand over to you, Shamit. So, look, you know, you can have a vision but and you can show the monster will prove points. And, and, you know, but what's very important is to think about the success factors and how we're going to measure and how we want to measure ourselves in the industry. One is around, you know, the interoperability, how we keep track of the solutions in the market, you know, adapt to the standards being very pragmatic. Examples as polka dog, for example, IBM has come out with a relay protocol. The scalability, again, it's about starting small, but also looking and learning, proving out your thesis, your hypothesis and actually developing and, you know, the MVP itself to sustainability, security and privacy. And then, of course, you know, looking how we map, making sure that we're very, very conscious about these particular success factors. You know, we go down to regulation and one of the things that we say is most regulators are regulators are going to have to be our part of that. They have to be part of that ecosystem. That's our assumption from the very, very beginning to how we promote it, to how we develop our ecosystem further and looking at commercialization to legal. So these are, these are examples, poignant examples of the success, success pressures as we see it and how we plan, how we believe that, you know, map to the implementation where we will hold ourselves to, to that single source of truth. Over to you, Shamit. Okay, thank you for setting it up really well. Now that, you know, I'm just about to present, let me see if I can fix this. Just let me know if you can see the full screen and screen share mode. And if it doesn't work, I'll come back to this again. Okay, can you see the full screen now? Yes, we can. Yes. Okay, great. So just, you know, leading on from where Monique left in terms of the success factors, let's just build on this and see, you know, how this will all play together. And the starting point for that is forming of an ecosystem because, you know, unlike some of the centralized applications wherein, you know, one entity could just take a lead and make things happen. In the case of blockchain, it doesn't work that way. So the first effective step is to identify the key stakeholders and identify these ecosystem players and also look into the various different use cases, which the network once it's built or the ecosystem once it's set up is going to facilitate. And for our industry, what we've identified is that there are operators, there are equipment manufacturers, there are various different partners, suppliers, and there are some other wearing stakeholders who might not have had an automatic access. For example, the tax men, the legal representatives or the regulators. And with a blockchain ecosystem, we do have an opportunity to bring them within the realm of the ecosystem with having greater access for them and also enabling greater transparency. And the other aspect is how do you orchestrate this network because that's really the key in order to have a successful and thriving ecosystem created. And within that, you want an interplay within all of these ecosystem partners. And to see how this would look like, and I'll take an example of what we are referring to within GSMA as a shared blockchain network, where in all of these, you know, ecosystem partners come together. And this is an example of how a single network could look like wherein you have some of the network management aspects which are, you know, governed through a governance committee. You could argue with how many components of that governance committee are centralized and how many are decentralized. But we see that initially there might be more central facing governance and eventually that might lead to a completely decentralized governance as and when the technology and the ecosystem evolves. And this, you know, network or governance which is, you know, facilitating various different services to sit on top of the network would also have all the ecosystem partners, you know, collectively take the responsibility of bearing the fruits of this, you know, ecosystem once it gets scaled, once it gets, you know, used heavily within these ecosystem players and you could have various different use cases which are mounted on top of the same network. It could be related to identity. It could be related to IoT, fraud, clearing and settlement. So the idea which we have been dabbling with within GSMA is that how you could use common network infrastructure and that could be utilized for multiple different use cases. And one of the primary reasons for us to take that approach is to see how we can reduce the cost and the overheads for mobile operators to utilize technology like this wherein, you know, the cost of entry might be very high and this is one of the ways by which you could reduce those entry barriers. Now, we do acknowledge that this might not be the only network. So there might be multiple networks with different USPs and different focus areas and there might also be different networks who might be, you know, be used for similar use cases. Therefore, there's a need to interoperate between these different networks. As you can see on this diagram, we've identified that there might be some interfacing needs between each of these networks and that might be for varying reasons. For example, there might be a global identity network which comes into picture so that would perhaps make it redundant for each and every network to have a separate identity piece, but there might be some, you know, back and forth in order to collaborate, in order to identify an individual or an entity on another network. But there might be some other use cases wherein each and every entity, you know, has a choice of deciding which network they participate in and through the interoperability mechanisms, it's enabled for them to have that choice and work seamlessly both within the network they've joined and also with the other networks and that's where, you know, the network of networks you know, they are soon. Right now, there might be a lot of different networks or consortias which has come together which aren't necessarily interacting with each other, but eventually, you know, that would go away and this would look more like the internet wherein, you know, you're not looking at individual networks. Now, as I said before, we want to enable this sharing of infrastructural elements and in tune with the name which has been given to blockchain-based application wherein we see a lot of commentary which refers to it as the Web 3.0. We came up with an architecture within GSMA and within the membership we are calling it as blockchain 3.0 reference architecture. Now, at the root of it, this is not very different from any of the blockchain architectures you will see because they aren't that many different ways wherein you can put it together. However, we've tried to make sure that we've identified the key components and grouped them in a way that it's as modular as possible and it's enabling usability across different use cases. So as you see here, we've got different layers in the architecture and the bottom most layer is more about the BLT technology and it enables support from multiple different. Now, in this example we are only showing three ledger technologies which includes hyper ledger, CORDA and Ethereum but eventually this could be any ledger technology and then we have a layer which we are referring to as the blockchain proxy layer which has the responsibility to enable a proxy layer which makes the ledger agnostic or inter ledger interoperability possible and through that it communicates through the middle layer which is the core services layer and the core services layer has a adapter which helps with interpreting the information from the bottom layers which is the main blockchain piece and helping communicate with application APIs which sit on the core service which is more like a bus we have which enables the interaction between the north bound and south bound APIs and within the core services we also have things like usability access and certification authority and some of the core network governance elements and as you see the top layer is all about applications it's completely up to the operators or the network participants to decide which applications they are going to support and how they can use the common elements throughout the architecture in order to support those applications and as we saw in some of the use cases we showed previously or Monique mentioned previously some of these applications might need collaboration with different ecosystem partners some of these applications might just be run individually by an operator for their own network but the important point is that if most of us adapt the same architecture interoperability and interworking would become much much more easier the other aspect is how do you interface with the legacy services and that's again really critical and we do acknowledge and identify that this would be a very important environment and we'll have some kind of oracles which would be decentralised and which would ensure that there is decentralised interoperability with the legacy infrastructure so it could happen at an op co or an entity level with their own legacy systems or it could happen at the more network level where there are network related legacy systems and processes which need to be linked and we are making most of these components open sourced all the blockchain based layers will be completely open sourced and what Monique was showing in the previous slides the blockchain for wholesale roaming initiative has actually already created a lot of these you know the components and we are continuously working on evolving them and we would be making them open sourced through Apache 2 the topmost layer we only have the roaming settlement piece based on the scope of the first MVP we are about to complete but this would also be made open sourced via a GSMA licence so the idea is to make sure that everyone who has a genuine legitimate interest in accessing this architecture and related source code has the opportunity to do so and also has the opportunity to contribute and work with GSMA in order to further proliferate the benefits of having this common understanding and common infrastructure arrangement and as I said before the architecture is highly modular and the idea is that we foster transparency we foster more trust and it enables a network effect because the success of any of these initiatives which are being put together in order to implement blockchain based applications depends on a key tenants that more and more entities join the same network so there is an economies of scale impact or effect that takes place and it's important that we set this up in a way that it's easier for us to achieve that network effect so how do we measure success together so we have identified a few KPIs and we are holding each and every use case implementation to these KPIs and we've kept it quite high level but then each of the use case implementations have their own success factors based on a problem they're trying to solve and they have their own KPIs which get defined but this is something which would be common across most of the implementations the first one is that you need to move really quickly from POCs to MVPs to commercial offering and for that we need to measure success throughout and make sure that this is not just another test and that's where the 80% business focus comes in we want to make sure that we see through each of the POCs into a commercial offering at some point and we provide the right support and wherein it doesn't make sense we don't waste too much time and that's where the demonstrable proof points which Munique was talking about comes into picture at each stage we are making sure that we can prove something before we fail to prove what we had set out to prove something we just stop right there for that use case standardization is another very important aspect wherein we see that we have to collaborate across the industry so this could be a BLT based standardization or it could be use case based standardization and we've got various different forums both internally and externally wherein we'll be looking to actively collaborate in order to both identify those standardization gaps and plug those gaps so we can progress forward then in terms of adoption of blockchain 3.0 reference architecture this is extremely important as I was explaining in the previous slide we would be actively promoting this to make sure that we all do things in a similar way so it reduces the burdens particularly for interoperability into working policy partner now GSMA would like to make sure that through our regulatory and policy partners globally we work in tandem with them and ensure that any of the regulatory and policy related matters are put together in a way that it helps to create a thriving ecosystem we recognize and acknowledge that regulations are really important but we want to make sure that they don't come at the cost of stifling innovation so there has to be a balance which gets found and we would be actively playing a role in that area to make sure that we help the regulators form that balance we keep them informed about what's happening and everything is transparent and lastly the capacity building now even though the blockchain space is moving at a very fast pace we realize that a lot of the industry doesn't have the right skill sets at this point and might not even have the bandwidth to support a blockchain based implementation particularly some of the telcos who might not have as many resources as the bigger operators do so in recognition of that we would be having more and more educational sessions and try to close the gap between their level of understanding and what is required for them to make that leap of faith you know more and more sessions like these wherein we inform and communicate with the larger community and tell them about how great the technology is where it works and where it perhaps does not work okay so the role GSMA plays in this there are lots of discussions around this and you know there are some potential areas where in GSMA can help of course we have the membership wherein we facilitate a lot of the governance based discussions and standardization based discussions we obviously continue to do that but essentially at some point there would be a network which would be formed and once the network forms there is a dual role there is a standardization activity which happens in order to make sure that the right infrastructure is in place the reference implementations are getting implemented the open sourcing community is thriving but at the same time there is an operational aspect wherein if we set or when we set this up as an operational running network it has the necessary support from GSMA side so there are various different things which we see GSMA could potentially do the first one is help scale the network because as I said before that's quite critical we need to put together you know governance infrastructure and for that we have to define the rules with the help of mobile operators and the larger ecosystem players you know play the facilitator role and make those rules and principles we would also potentially be administering the operational network when it gets created we would also be managing participants both in the standardization activity and the operational network and there might be some specific services which GSMA has been providing since you know since a very long time which would basically make the leap over to the network as well some of them may be used as is some of them with some updates or there might be some new services which we have to provide to the ecosystem so we spoke a lot about the different ecosystem you know players and how we would engage with them so this slide is basically trying to build upon that and try is our attempt to identify the key stakeholder groups and just a caveat here is that this has been written with the GSMA so if you do a similar exercise you might put yourself in the center so we've done something similar it's not to say that someone is less important or more but it's just to identify how GSMA would be communicating with each of these stakeholder groups so we recognize two key tenants before we do that the first one is that the DLT ecosystem is very dynamic and it's contextual and the second one is that because it's dynamic and contextual we cannot just stick to the plan and expect it to work we have to be agile we have to be ready to make pivots we have to be ready to act or react to the context which gets created and keeping that in mind the stakeholder engagement has to be of the highest quality and keeping that in mind we also have identified these different groups the first one is standardization bodies there are plenty of them all around and they are all doing a great job and they are a key influencer in this space and I see or GSMA sees that they have governance responsibility likewise there are various different blockchain consortia which are set up in a very similar way to a standardization body again they are key influencers and they also mainly take the governance role then we also have some operators who are essentially the key beneficiaries also the MVNOs and we see that both of them would be playing a central role in this and they have a central player role then the next stakeholder group is the future of 5G private networks and we believe that they would again be beneficiary in this area at this point we don't know how they are going to shape up and what they are going to look like that's why we didn't mark them as a central player however that might change in future but we do recognize that they would have an active role to play then of course there are the blockchain experts some of you guys in this group and some of the ecosystem partners who would evolve themselves with learning about blockchain building the skill sets and as we were speaking about capacity building so essentially they all come together to provide solutions and they again have an active role to play in this space NSMA has its own working groups who are functional experts in different areas in the telecom industry and again they have an active role to play in this ecosystem now this just the last two slides now so this one is how do we see the current ecosystem and where do we position all of these different actors we identified and on this particular slide what we've done is we've tried to understand from our perspective and this you might have a differing view and again keeping GSMA as the center of the prison we basically look at the interest levels as per our understanding in DLT whether that's low to high and how much influence that stakeholder has on the GSMA ecosystem and again that goes from low to high if you look at it vertically now within that we've identified these four quadrants which is the passive observers active participants key participants and influential observers now we expect that at some point everyone would actually either be an active participant or a key participant now passive observers are operators or the ecosystem partners who at this point really delved deeper into the technology they perhaps are aware but haven't done much in this space or haven't demonstrated enough good points for us to see that they are really keen in this area and there might be some other communities or standardization bodies who again being discussing but haven't shown enough interest compared to some of their other activities and then there are some active participants on the bottom right quadrant which are all the consortias which are coming up which are alliances such as the Hyperledger which are basically doing a lot of work in this area and are actively working in this area and then on the top left corner are high influences within the GSMA space of course the operators and the working groups the projects GSMA board they have a huge influence but they still need to see enough proof before they actually move towards the key participant and then there are some key use cases which are shaping up in GSMA for the last four or five years identity is one blockchain for wholesale roaming which we spoke about is again another internet group which is one of the groups I lead is another one wherein there is a lot of good work happening and it's been a consistent effort and there are lots of operators who have been shaping and involved actively in this work and that's where they are the key participants right now and in terms of action we obviously keep engaging closely with the key participants we keep the influencers or the high influence satisfied and hope that they can make the transition we also keep the passive observers informed we monitor their progress either to a key participant role or an active participant role and we obviously would actively engage and keep the active participants informed so that's how we see our engagement with these different stakeholder groups and this is our hope that we have everyone in the right quadrants rather than the left ones okay so this was everything about the GSMA vision and this vision has been approved within the GSMA and it's been also shared with the GSMA technology group which is the group which this DLT group reports into now we've been having a lot of different activities within GSMA and a consistent demand over the last 3-4 years from the membership has been that we need a dedicated blockchain group in GSMA it's great that different working groups different projects and different task forces have been discussing but there needs to be a dedicated standardization group within GSMA which focuses on DLT and this also came through from our recent survey where a lot of the members said blockchain is their key topic of interest and GSMA needs to do more in the area and I think the fact that blockchain discussions are here to stay these would be permanent we agreed within GSMA recently to create a formal group which is called as the DLT group the distributed ledger technology group which would be responsible for essentially all the DLT related activities in the GSMA and you all are welcome to join we are currently setting this group up and we are discussing what should be the key responsibilities of this group of course we take a lot of inputs from the active initiatives within the GSMA and active participants of these initiatives within GSMA and try to understand their key requirements and make sure that the group is structured in a way that it sustains over a long period of time and it becomes the highly desired standardization group for the telcos within the GSMA community so that's actually everything we wanted to share for today and at this point I'll just take a halt and see if there are any questions thank you thank you Monique and Samit for sharing these different initiatives in DLT and telecom domain and also this whole cylinder carrier settlements whether it's identity and access management or that's what we are also working on can I share my screen so that I can also share what we are working on please do, I'll stop sharing go ahead okay so as David already told what we are doing I want to add that we are supported by Linux Foundation Networking and Linux Foundation Edge as well we have collaborators from academia, industry and other open source communities as well and these are subgroups we have two solution brief in intercarrier settlements and internet of things and this intercarrier settlement is like wholesale intercarrier settlements and internet of things we are working on identity and access management these three are Linux Foundation umbrella projects, we have different solution briefs and as well as we have hyperlateral labs as well where we started contributing to this board as well so this is what I saw is we following something like same architecture so we follow reference model then we talk about reference architectures and at last we talk about reference implementation so this is what I want to add like we have the same backgrounds like how we are working and how GSM a DLP group is working I was looking into this BWR participants in intercarrier settlements so this is a good thing that we also have like a twice telecom telephonic over the phone AP inputs in our solution briefs so this is like one of the solution briefs from ours like we recently released this for decentralized IDN and access management so this is like a brief introduction like VNF, CNFs can be managed through these blockchain kind of things so this is our reference architecture which looks like this and I also want to share like this is I was looking into this architecture that you showed for intercarrier settlement so this is our intercarrier settlement solution brief so here we also looking into this kind of improbability kind of things and how we manage at the top layer so this is like when I was looking into your presentation it's like looking like we are on the same page working like same way and what I know is like I think Linux foundation networking and GSM may also collaborate to make some reference architecture in 5G for CNPT so it will be great if these two groups can collaborate and can build up like the same reference architecture so that like efforts can be reduced and the community can be in a better way and also we also want to know that where we can find these kind of port that you talk about like Shamit told you that told us that you guys open source some code as well so thanks for your talk and this is like a very deep introduction what we are doing in technology telecom and really really if we can collaborate together as a community partners and then it will be really cool for us as well. Thanks Thank you Thank you Yeah So we have some questions We have some questions the first question is from Ahmad he is asking like so in hyper ledger we have internship projects so it's open for students and he is asking like can we have like the possibility to get access to roaming agreements templates for a hyper ledger internship project that he is mentoring that looks at how to digitize roaming agreements and negotiation and he is specifically talking about WAS. Okay so I am not sure if I can share the templates but if you can send me an email I will point you to the person in charge and you know if that's feasible to share the templates then you can do that although they are readily available in the industry and through IC2 which is our internal share point tool and you know I will be happy to help Yeah Thank you and in that way if like this is like an open project like if you guys someone from GSMA wants to participate mentor something for us that will be really helpful that as part of the BWR initiative we have actually dabbled a lot with roaming contract digitization and automation in fact what Munique was showing as MVP one one of the biggest components in that actually is an automated contract management piece which is the starting point of any roaming deal and we have actually done a lot of work at the time when we can we open source some of this code you would perhaps have the ability to play with that and then try and see if it can support some of the work you are trying to do of course if you have some proposals in terms of how you want to shape the activity feel free to share that with us and we can guide you we can support you as much as we can Thank you Thank you Shambak and another question from Tal why no participation from cloud service providers in your ecosystem player or IOP systems So in the attribute slide which Munique mentioned we do identify cloud participants as key stakeholders now so they are obviously involved or like them to be involved however not all of them might be GSMA members but that's not to say that we would not like them to participate a lot of the architectures we are seeing are cloud based and there are some architectures wherein there are options to you know either do it on-prem with the hardware on premises or where an operator wants it that way I would say that okay let's just do this on the cloud wherein you might use an AWS or you might use an Azure completely depending on the choice of how a particular operator and entity wants to set it up so we do see that there's a lot of value in you know engaging with the cloud you know players and that's bound to happen we recognize that in our presentation but they might not be necessarily involved at this stage purely because they are not members but they are welcome to contribute and get involved and another question from Tal is can you articulate which MNOs are jump on board your GSMA DLD program okay so I think we had a slide but you know wherein for the BWR initiative they were there are eight group operators who are involved and I've shared the slides with David so David feel free to pass them on and you know that's the likes of Orange, Vodafone I think I see some of the participants on the call as well so you know there are all the big group operators and then different initiatives have different participants so I can fairly you know assume that at least we've got some of the other operator groups involved in various different initiatives and besides that there are other ecosystem partners who either might be participating in the internet group which is the committee Monique and I co-chair maybe participating in BWR initiative or the identity supply chain initiatives which are happening in different groups and that's where you know in the last slide I mentioned that these activities are shaping up in their respective forums or the traditional forums wherein we which are responsible for those initiatives and we see the need to have a DLT focus forum and that's why you know we've created one now Thank you and I want to ask like how we as a telecom can participate or can help or in your initiatives like is there any platform or can we have like a common initiative program like CNTP or that already like LFN and GSMA is doing so is there any ways we can collaborate because as you can see the reference architecture look like like most of the things are common most of the participants or industry partners are also like same input so is there any ways these two can work together I realized that Munik hasn't said much so Munik you want to take that from your perspective and then I'll chime in as well. No no I think so it's a great question this is why we're here right I mean the answer is yes and I think this is the start where we what we want to do is harmonize one of our architectures we can see that we are very close and that's a great thing in the industry so we do believe that we can collaborate together that's been the tenant from the very beginning of course now we look at how you can get onboarded through GSMA and vice versa I think that's the direction we're taking together and by the way the industry benefits overall for this harmonization because otherwise when it's too siloed it just takes away from you know the 80% business value that we're trying to unlock together as an industry which is really where it goes I mean every one of us works at organizations and companies where business value has to be clearly articulated so yes the answer is yes and if you want to add anything else show me you summed it up perfectly thank you so the only thing I would add is that we would obviously like to see what the objectives of the collaboration are and basically formalize it so you know we are put together a collaborative infrastructure and organization structure so you know we can all benefit from that engagement exactly yeah thank you thank you Monica and David you want to add something I was just going to say real quick we have the room if people want to stay on past the hour but if people do need to drop I did put a link to the telecom SIGS mailing list in chat if we want to continue the discussion there that is a good place to move so everybody is welcome to ask questions subscribe, introduce themselves propose collaboration ideas so do feel free after this call to make use of that mailing list yeah so yeah so hello thanks everybody I got a jump sorry guys yeah thank you for for the talk and I'm a telecom SIG as well I'm Nima so I was I was just adding to what Wipen mentioned about our collaboration so to my understanding it seems that the focus of SMA is mainly on really building that telecom oriented blockchain consortia and kind of making sure that it's going to be interoperable and also kind of it's kind of work essentially and kind of standardizing in this zone but our focus here has been since the beginning has been mainly the use cases so we've been trying to find out what use cases our industry members have been interested in and we've tried to kind of work around that so I think that's and I looking at this presentation a little bit from before it doesn't seem that GSMA is really digging into what particular smart contracts you would be using or what particular data types you would be having on the on a blockchain solution that you're kind of discussing and we are doing pretty much the opposite as we like if you look at our solution brief the latest one we're actually looking into exactly what's going to be the blockchain assets that we have in an IOT identity solution on blockchain what exactly is going to be the contracts that we'll have and so on so I think that's a good place to start to find what is missing in your architecture and in your work in general and what is missing in ours and kind of compliment each other's work could somebody address the ESIM issue because believe it or not it's quite critical on the consumer and the industrial side thank you can you just articulate what the issue is you are referring to so if you want better if you want better let's say global carrier billing cross-border billing and things like that I think the ESIM plays a very key critical role but the ESIM technology in the United States is really not complying to the global standard of the remote SIM provisioning program from the GSMA that's what I mean okay so again this is a very broad question in terms of compliance to the standards right so I think we to an extent expect everyone to comply with the standards but it might not always be within our influence to force anyone to comply and there might be various different reasons why a particular entity might or might not want to comply but I think if you would like to know more about the ESIM we have an entire team like you pointed out they would have very well aware of ESIM I was pitching it five years ago so it's important for security aspects when discussing on the edge the security let's say smartphones accessing HTC has a blockchain enabled smartphone with its own node number one, number two IoT module vendors are trying to add ESIM because they want to add something that you're also promoting which is IoT safe right actually I think you're missing the key point which is ESIM security before you access the blockchain is the most critical anyway we can talk later I got your email sure I think there are various teams which are responsible for ESIM security we have the fraud and security group which is basically responsible for exactly that and all the other security related elements and they have been looking at this now from blockchain perspective because we aren't really there yet when we are looking at various different security requirements and privacy requirements as well from operators and I think one of the biggest learnings in blockchain for wholesale roaming initiative was how differing these are from operator to operator so there is no common understanding or commonality or there are lesser common elements on the security requirements of different operators and finding that sweet spot is extremely hard but the good news is we are working towards it we started small with the blockchain for wholesale roaming initiative we are trying to streamline between the eight operators or eight operator groups we've been working with and now the effort opens up for a lot of the other operator groups to join in and slowly we would make the progress on the security aspects as well having said that feel free to send out more details and then I can point you to the right team to further into it. Thank you Shamit, an unrelated question I thought was very interesting you put a very heavy emphasis on MVNOs I'm just wondering why MVNOs in this whole program There is an equal emphasis on both MVNOs and MNOs recently we had a change in membership structure wherein MVNOs have been identified as one of the membership categories and we see that a lot of MVNOs have been joining the JSMA off late in that category they were always members in different other categories and we see that they would be equal partners and we want to recognize that Thank you Wad, thank you If we have no more questions I think then Thank you, thank you Thank you Shamit, thank you everyone Thank you everyone I appreciate the Q&A, the discussion and as you could well understand this is just the beginning so looking forward to even more deeper collaboration Thank you everyone Thank you everyone, thank you for that Thanks everyone Bye


it back to Gary Jones, my goal for goal from distance. It skids awkwardly with the goal, give it to Thompson, that makes it terrific. So for the second attempt, Zabham Hine plays it back into the down throw, it's clean away, by Burton Defender, low opportunity for Bradford City. Ball is played in, they're going to score again, they know it's headed off the line by Gary Jones, the Lions has given a goal on the far side and Burton Alden have got their second, this one's from Alan Webster, corner swung in from the left hand side, Webster is there, Jones tried to head it away off the line for the Lions when David, it's Bradford near Burton too, Jones has it again, another long range effort from Jones, the goal for Spills it again, nobody following up on this occasion and he can just stand up and pick it up on the edge of the six yard box, does well and Zabham Hine's Matt Nick in here and he can quite do it now, it's for Thompson into the area, goes around the keeper, protects it too far as he tries to shoot from an acute and he puts his straight back across the six yard box and Burton Albin survive once more, he brings it down well and skips between one defender, goes around a second into the penalty area, pulls it across, shot comes in on the turn from Nakie Wells just now, inside his own half of the field, Kyle Reeds waits but that's a good ball forward to find Nakie Wells, Wells goes for goal, Nakie Wells left footed shot, Bradford City are back in this one, we've still got six minutes remaining, they need one more, 61, 32, once again the big men have gone forward, once again just three players outside of the penalty area, Puss Juke and the three kick takers, John, the City fans on their feet, ball played in, it's high into the air off a defender's head, there's a lot of messing around in there, over and Nakie Wells gets the chance to send the game into extra time, the overhead kick from James Hanson and Wells supplies the finishing touch, Bradford have completed a remarkable comeback, it's two please. The Wells put Gary Johns races forward to take the throw and play forward by Atkinson, it's just a little bit hurried from Bradford at the moment, we've got plenty of time, we've still got six minutes, here's Derby, shoots from distance, goalkeeper and Derby's winning for Bradford, a long distance strike from the young right back and Bradford City are going to get into the fourth round and a cover to one from Maley Bird by three goals for two.


healthful, refreshing, delicious, double mint chewing gum presents for your listening pleasure Broadway's My Beat Broadway's My Beat from Times Square to Columbus Circle the godiest, the most violent, the lonesomeest mile in the world Broadway's My Beat, the thrilling drama of murder and mystery and the people who walked the Great White Way with Larry Thor as Detective Danny Clover chew delicious double mint gum often every day and see how much more you enjoy things the refreshing double mint flavor makes your mouth and throat feel cool and comfortable the smooth, easy chewing gives you a bright little lift so at work or pleasure, indoors or out enjoy chewing delicious double mint gum beginning of August, the month of the steam heat and Broadway staggers up to a corner and leans against the lamppost bewildered where are the summer dreams as concerns far rock away in the seashore and the girlies in the two-piece suits, where the sun and the U-kissed golden girl who filled the ticklish part of your brain they're on the poster offering you a glass of beer so have a drink for there and hit the sidewalks again and walk again, September and another dream aren't far away and at police headquarters the municipally conditioned air and the man in the suit for the occasion so see a second boy is the latest weed, you like a mug of it? dandy, what do you call the color? well this eggshell, eggshell, hey it's a nice blend with the pale pink shape think so Danny? I'm sorry you mentioned it I was going to point it out alright so you're going to hold me or are you not going to hold me because if the former I would like to give you instructions as to the care of these gummers because if these what are you talking about Mike? Lieutenant asked what you're talking about oh shit, look don't speak to me like I'm an idiot I asked you a simple question why? what do you mean why? throw him out mug of it wait till I wash my hands I don't want to get the garment okay alright okay I'm going I drop in here friendly in two minutes flat you hate me Mike? what? come back here Mike what's this all about? why'd you come down here and ask whether we wanted to hold you? because if you don't I gotta go to Atlantic City you see we combinated beverage people we are having a convention nobody's questioned whether you're legitimate or not Mike well thank you thanks well it's just this way Danny you see Floyd Decker moided I figured that you wanted to Floyd Decker and me and him lumped together under the title gangsta in the old day when was he murdered? when was he wait wait wait you mean that you don't know? no ooh I'm beginning to see the light boys I am when was he murdered? listen the way on the street is that he got it three days he's been gone from wherever he usually comes to and the word is that he ain't no more once more Mike why'd you come here? well Floyd and I we had an argument a few days ago and he getting bumped you know I figured that you want to talk to me before I sat in convention at Atlantic City I ain't found the body yet huh? uh-huh well what am I talking to you like I'm an idiot for boys goodbye take it easy don't pinch the silk seers Sucker Muggevin nobody no murder, no nothing me neither I'll send Taffy I'm low then of hot room and bewildered policemen and the whore of an electric fan and the irate motorist two stories down background for the shattering question you think he lost his marbles? followed by the glassy stair okay okay I'll find out two hours later followed by the phone call he wasn't kidding Danny the word has it that Floyd Decker is dead murdered followed by 36 hours in the river take a look Danny Floyd? yeah it's Floyd Decker alright been in the water three four days how was he found? you see that kid over there the one on the piling getting ready to dive he can hold his breath for 90 seconds during a small contest where the kid just moved in the neighborhood he saw Floyd midway up bumping against the pier okay you want to talk to Mike Paulus now? uh-huh call Atlantic City and have the police relay the message that I'd like to talk to him you don't have in mind send anybody down to Atlantic City to see if Mike gets back do you? no in a word well in another word my wife wouldn't let me go anyhow who won lieutenant have a seat Mike how's the convention going? ah you know how these things go oh then we're not dragging you away you are not dragging me away from anything you understand that don't you? now look look I got word that you wanted to see me and I ducked the caucus should we go into canned soda pop and I got the face trained in only on a kind of you requested me re-quested me Danny not dragged because I requested you yeah okay we found Floyd Decker I heard pissed him out of the east river I heard I heard stabbed in the back and thrown in the river you said you had an argument with him that's right about what? money well come on tell me about it well you know Floyd you know his background nearly as good as me what's he been doing? well you know he's been on eleven wait five six years eh? well I went up on the same rap with him Danny in contact only I got out a few years earlier because I am nicely behaved be it the penitentiary or be it a parlor and you know Floyd not very well well he's impetuous impetuous impetuous you either got it myself if you gave me time well he gave the feds all sorts of trouble you see so he didn't join us until his full twenty years now you ask what's he doing so I answer he's been a bum oh a panhandling bum that's how he lived huh? yeah and the argument you had with him? it's about dough I got tired of giving him handouts like everybody else everybody else on the street everybody else listen Floyd was the type of fella can best be described as misfit you can ask your hedge shrinker how many of those there are around you got any idea who killed him? nope anybody you know didn't like him enough? everybody why? well all the world hates a failure let me put it this way all the world feels sorry for a failure until they got a bail them out and then all the world hates a failure people on the street got tired of supporting him is that it? well I would say that that's an apt appraisal of the situation what did the word first get out that he was murdered? let's see when it would be oh about last Monday then it would be about it so soon as he didn't show up one day with the outstretched hand everybody was gone uh huh meaning that somebody stabbed him in the back and put him in the east river also an apt appraisal last make we had on him was a boarding house in the Bowery Mike but it's old he's been gone from there for a couple of years well I wouldn't know where he lived also his sheet says he had a wife yeah Alma yeah that's right Alma well I'd canvas the bars along third Danny I would look for a blonde turning gray dyed back to blonde she's kind of tall kind of slender and kind of tired she's kind of an inside laffer and cry she's likeable she drinks to the avenue scotch and never gets loaded it's a nice woman likeable many offered his hand made the clasp and the smile of good citizenship proffered the breath of gin and taffy and went out again to find a train to find the world of Atlantic City again legwork now the bars of third avenue alternate establishments between hand laundries delicatessens used furniture used bric-a-brac used clothing and good as new women's wear the bars of third avenue which progress from respectability to the thin edge of limbo pose the name elma decker also description get the shake of the head the shrug and sometimes the thumb jerk over the shoulder downtown further downtown mister where third began to leave the village afternoon drunks out the shady gutters and draftiest halls in a bar wedged between a fire gut at building and an herbologist there was a woman seated at the table sure my name's elma she said holding high the glass and trying to find the sunlight for it finding something else and hating it and him this boy sees a cross from me and adoring me I do I do adore you elma very much his name is edwin my name is edwin hample man's man drink it down drink it down drink it down sit down edwin he's drunk what's your name danny clover cop mm-hmm above my husband that's right what about him did you kill him he's dead huh hey edwin Floyd's dead did you hear me I drink him a toast a man's oh shut up what'd you do that for what'd they find Floyd what'd you do that for anyway the river that's nice some of our best friends have been found on the river danny of course not recently but there was a day when Floyd was after yeah I heard I'm nice I'm nice to you please don't do that again what's this boy doing here please please please I swear I haven't quite figured it out myself you I'm nice to her he's been to college I've had a year of college sir edwin yes Alma let's not be ridiculous that's all I quote from Cyrano saying it comes to me from all sides that I am jeered at that edwin passed out early this afternoon danny it's turning into a kind of day when I might end up with nothing right danny whatever kind of work you do I'm sure you've noticed how it's the long dull jobs that sort of gets you down you get so bored with doing the same thing over and over well next time that happens find out what a lot of help it is to chew delicious double mint gum you see as soon as you link your teeth into a stick of smooth double mint you enjoy a feeling of real satisfaction and you like the steady natural rhythm of chewing delicious double mint is a long lasting treat too you can chew away for as long as you like and you have something you enjoy doing while you go on with your work and that cool clean double mint flavor is so refreshing it gives you a pleasant lift so you feel better and things seem to go faster and easier yes delicious double mint gum is a pleasant chewing treat that's helpful as well as enjoyable so buy several packages at a time and treat yourself to a stick at work or anywhere that's double mint chewing gum healthful refreshing delicious we now continue with broadways my beat written by Morton Fein and David Friedkin and starring Larry Thor as detective danny clover in the high blaze of summer broadway walks soft and slow the dream walk the careless walk rhythm to a regret for things that have not yet been because other summers have flowed in this street and other winds and in their ebb the erratic gutter dance of the litter of the season snapshot of the tennis girl whose hair was braided and who was summer love snapshot torn in half then torn again and once more the phone number scrawled in lipstick on a bar room that rang on emptiness no answer the code for last summer but this time it'll be different so walk into it but soft and at headquarters a room of a thousand transients room where interrogations are made and motives poised and concerns shown where's Edwin what'd you do to him booked him put him in the drunk tank mr.   Decker it's gonna be like that uh huh no I did not kill my husband I don't know who did I don't know why he suddenly got that important so mrs. Decker let me finish I gave the desk sergeant where I live so if you ever want to chat some more about young men or about the dead come around because I'm not going anyplace okay yeah for now like you said mrs. Decker don't go anyplace at the door she stopped looked back at me and chemistry that is in summer light lay against her face and sped youth across it her hands went to the back of her throat struck back her hair she opened her mouth to speak there was no sound and she turned and left it took four hours to find him to find the man I was looking for needed to talk to man of all trades man on the move man of shouts and man of whispers of Broadway secrets benny feign hawaiian sport shirt beer in hand leaning gracefully against the jukebox of morris third avenue bar and grill be my guest Danny take this quarter for me by yourself whatever three music your heart desires you're doing fine up bennie hawaiian sport shirt free with two bit pieces from whom bennie what are you implying Danny I heisted it I crimped it off a rack in a garment center it was a present if it wasn't would it fit so well the shoulders to here tell it to my measure Danny on the insistence of a young woman who was grateful for me first say you you ain't been looking for me for four hours Danny just to ask how come I was silk no Floyd that uh huh uh huh I don't think you've heard that I didn't hear I saw him when three or four nights ago fired to his river bit but go on find me by asking around by methods just like you did Danny no no no aren't feelings Danny I'm telling you the bit what happened Floyd finds me asked me where's the crap game the big crap game right off her lap in his face why well first how would I know where's the crap game second if I knew and such things were truly happening around Broadway crap games what would Floyd that could be using for scratch but for for bad role Floyd the beggar Floyd the panhandle well you could have knocked me down well I'm I'm giving it a bit Danny Floyd plays a role at least as fat as 5 G's he let me feel it yeah it was 5 G's my eyes open very wide I say well you can tell you like this Floyd Floyd says where's the crap game and I say I don't know Floyd I swear well he leaves next whisper on the breeze about this Floyd blew the juice lost it the whole 5,000 so I guess he was able to find a crap game without my help that's the bit Danny if you ever want a high-wine shirt I know sure sure you do thanks Benny I'll see you around Danny good morning Gino would you early morning and already a scorcher Gino do something for me Mrs. T often says to me it would seem Mr. Sergeant Todd Taglia you were put on earth for the sole purpose of doing things for your Danny call downstairs get Edwin Hample released to my custody have them bring him up here no sooner said morning Detective Muggerman pardon but I am on a mission for Danny Caller and the pleasantries I understand Gino he's bringing the Hample kid up here oh that story Benny Fane gave you I did what you told me walk Broadway stopped a few people ask questions it checks out what Benny Fane told you it checks out Floyd Decker lost $5,000 in a crap game you know where the game was I'll tell you why because it was explained to me by several persons at Broadway like this the heat and the humidity they do something to the brain cells especially the memory valves no one remembers where the game was that's right they wouldn't tell me down here I said in this cooler atmosphere maybe there memory valves would anyone know where Decker got the 5,000 that they don't know for sure they don't know how a broken down panhandling bum got 5,000 together all I know is he lost it and left the game in here Edwin this way to see Danny Caller well that's all Gino thanks sit here Edwin this is Detective Muggerman I asked I heard you well then answer me how do you feel hungover dirty, shamed now you'll answer me something what? Mrs. Decker, Alma what did you do with Alma what kind of you like her a lot don't you maybe it's the wrong word maybe I should have said you love her still not the right word not like, not love give us the right word Edwin I worship her I worship the ground she walks on I adore you know the true that the literal meaning of the word adore Mrs. Decker's over 40 Edwin over twice your age 40 years old so she said twice as long to get twice as lonely as as you Edwin first day I saw her very first day I I said to myself there's a very lonely and a very beautiful woman she has solitude and there is sorrow in her brow this was at Coney Island a week I watched her how she came to the beach in beauty all by herself men tried to get fresh she'd say something they'd go away like their mouths had been struck but she didn't send you away no and I know why why because the kind of woman Alma is because she saw right away I was offering my heart at her feet and my soul if you knew if you knew the life of sorrow and bitterness that woman had led tell us about it Edwin what it was to be married to a man who had been glorious and was now a shell a ruin you mean she hated Floyd hated him because he was a bum a beggar and once he was no no not a hatred but bound to him and chained because once she had been Caesar's wife faithful and loyal and she's still get off it will you Edwin I didn't have my year in college so get off it just tell us that's simple really what I'm telling you Alma was married to a man who was once a sort of king who fell in favor but still Alma was his wife all he had left of his riches and therefore Alma was unapproachable and lonely and sit on a swarming infested beach with a ridiculous young man I told her how to get out of it though how she could rid herself of it rid herself of Floyd and I know the formula with which you gain freedom go on you buy it you get money and buy it I told Elman and she thought it a splendid idea and said she knew where to get money to buy herself from Floyd there's another way to get free from someone you mean to kill him no it was much simpler to buy it especially if he's a beggar like Floyd was like yeah you want to see Elman of course come on I'll take you to her yes hello dear you hurt I hurt you no dear oh stop stop that dear might ever come in come on you don't want to drink do you Elman you wouldn't let me would you let me no just sit down I said to you once Danny I said you want to chat about young men or about the dead to come around is that what you're doing now that's right which both I'll sit over here and rest elbows on knees and chin in hand and listen Edmund told me about the kind of life you had with Floyd how he was a fallen Caesar ain't he a kick that Edmund well he was kind of well he was whatever he was Mrs. Dacker was pretty rough huh is that what you heard but he didn't work yet he was a bum your husband was a bum Elma whatever he might have been in the old days truly he was a bum he went to college he oughta know then how did your husband get five thousand dollars what before he died that's the amount of money your husband suddenly had well where'd he get it a man like him and like him with his connections he didn't have a connection in the world the people he knew when you say he didn't have connection let's try it this way Mrs. Dacker where did you get the five thousand dollars to give to your husband who said I gave him five my tongue slipped dear I blurred it out bless your heart what harm no harm at all Edmund I wanted your heart bless well then dear I also told him what for Edmund said you tried to buy off your husband well I did I gave him the money he said he'd never bother me again he lost it all in a crap game he said he was going away with the money he'd buy himself a steak and a small set up in Vegas and steady finds a crap game in a garage off Broadway when he came back here and started to plead and whine that's when I walked in and stuck him in the back of the knife get him get the collegiate that's not the way to happen what do you want from me don't you tell him anything listen you I stabbed him in the back he wants to be a hero listen what everything all of it's drained away now anyhow he came back he fell on his knees and he cried like a baby like he's been doing ever since he's out of Levenworth recalling the old days and then he came for me it was a scissors where'd you get the money Mike Mike Paulus and Cordell swear it wasn't my husband says to me you know what he had the nerve to say to her honey it's so easy for you to get all that money get more how do you like that and this one's what I'm left with this little nothing with his one year at business college to buy me cheese sandwiches to drive me around in a 29 car don't believe her oh he wants you to know that besides the cheese sandwiches he helped me throw my husband in the river didn't you Edwin yes I did dear yes I did dear he's what I got Danny now put us away in the minutes before dawn Broadway lies huddled in a dreamless sleep and the silent street is a part of it the long night the time of no stars and the muted wind men from far away listen the whispers gather and take away the night it's Broadway the goddess the most violent and the lonesomeest mile in the world Broadway my beat refreshing double mint chewing gum is really two treats in one a satisfying long lasting chewing treat and a delicious flavor treat that's a pleasant combination for real enjoyment and for a good many welcome helps that mean a lot when you need them for example when you get hungry in between meals chew a stick of double mint and you'll find it's easier to wait until meal time you see the smooth chewing is satisfying and gives you something pleasant to do and double mint is light and agreeable never rich or heavy the cool clean double mint flavor freshens your taste and sweetens your breath too yes delicious double mint gum gives you a good deal of enjoyment and many pleasant helps all at a mighty low cost so try it soon at work or pleasure indoors or out enjoy delicious double mint chewing gum just so little tastes so good lasts so long the makers of double mint chewing gum hope you enjoyed tonight's story and that you are enjoying delicious double mint gum every day Broadway's my beat brought to you by double mint chewing gum is produced and directed by Elliot Lewis with music composed and conducted by Alexander Courage the program is written by Morton Fine and David Friedkin and stars Larry Thor as Detective Danny Clover Thomas Tartaglia and Jack Krushen as Muggevin in tonight's story Kathy Lewis was heard as Alma Lee Malar as Edwin Sheldon Leonard as Mike and Leo Cleary as Benny Bill Anders speaking this is the CBS Radio Network


So, I am currently reading through the Broken Empire trilogy. I'm only part way done. I finished the first book, Prince of Thorns, and it's pretty good so far. It's a good, dark fantasy series, and for the most part, its setting doesn't really stand out that much. At least, it doesn't seem to do so at first.  However, this does stand out in one very important way.  Now this isn't a twist, both the audience and the characters find out about this relatively early on. I think we're maybe two or three chapters in before the main character starts mentioning that he's reading a book written by Plutarch, who was a real-life historian, and he's writing about the Spartans and Leonidas and stuff.  For example, there is this place called the Tall Castle, which is the remnant of some old builder ruin, like they call our civilization now, they call them the builders, and as they describe it, for a while you realize, oh, okay, that's just a parking garage, which actually, yeah, that would be pretty defensible if you've turned it into a castle and your opponents only had medieval technology, that would work pretty well. And then you also, at one point, meet an artificial intelligence inside a computer, and the characters don't know what it is, they refer to it as a spirit trapped within a machine, but we know what it is, and there's also chemical weapons left over from our civilization that they find, and things like that, it's made really, really clear, okay, this is our world about a thousand years in the future. And while I do think all this is kind of cool, it would be a lot cooler if I hadn't seen basically this exact thing done a hundred times already.  The first series that was an epic fantasy as we think of it today, and even if you could compare old myths and legends to epic fantasy and say, that was the original and all the stuff today is derived from that, yes, obviously, but the first one that is the way we think of it today was Lord of the Rings, and that was supposed to take place on our world in the very distant past. I believe Tolkien said it was about 6,000 years ago that all this was supposed to take place, and yes, so that's Earth, that's Earth in the past, but then there were no real big epic fantasy franchises coming out until several decades later with the Shinara Chronicles, and that was like the next one which really helped it start growing and eventually enter the mainstream. And in the Shinara Chronicles, that one takes place on the Earth in the future, and it's after some big apocalyptic event, and all the radiation and chemicals and stuff have mutated humans into various other groups, like elves and gnomes and trolls and stuff. Now in Shinara Chronicles, it's treated as a big twist, which is revealed much later, except in the television show where it's just kind of there, and the characters just know about it from the beginning, but the point is, it is our world in the distant future, and these two books, or rather these two book series or franchises, whatever you want to call them, are basically the foundation for epic fantasy as we think of it today, and they both did some variation on this trope, so why do people still treat it like it's some new original thing? I should point out that this trope or variations of it are also done in science fiction a lot, but that's not what we're here to talk about, you know, like there's stuff like Battlestar Galactica where it's revealed, oh, okay, all of this took place many thousands of years ago, and then they just show up on Earth and then that's the end, they populate the Earth and then became our world. You know, stuff like that, it's actually fairly common, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, I'm really just talking about this from a fantasy perspective, specifically fantasy that's on our world sometime in the future, but again, there are some variations of that. Basically, if I had to summarize the entire point of this video, like as quickly and as succinctly as I could, I would basically just say that this trope is super overdone, and it's just not that good in the first place, and it should be retired, you know, we should just stop doing it as a society, or at least wait a while before we start doing it again, you know, let it cool off in our memories, and then when it comes back, it'll be like, oh, hey, it's almost a nice surprise, like, I generally am against blanket bands on tropes or cliches, I'm generally against just saying like, oh, this is always bad, because it's always going to be the execution of it, you know, that's always 150% of the time going to be more important than just the basic idea.  But the thing is, when it's played straight, like when it is just, hey, characters and or the audience at some point, figure out that this world is just our world in the distant future, except now there's magic and stuff, like when it's played straight like that, it is so overdone, and it never adds anything to the story. Like if you want proof that it's overdone, here are some more examples. Now, in addition to, again, just it happening a lot, the main reason that so many of these are so terrible is because a lot of times it's a twist that comes in near the end, and it's a twist that's kind of just there for the sake of having a twist. You know, I've mentioned before that for a twist to really work, it has to fit into three criteria. Number one, it has to be surprising, you know, the audience can't really see it coming too easily, and that's the main one people always focus on. But then number two, it also has to make sense, you know, if it opens plot holes or it doesn't really make sense with character motivations or anything like that, that's also a problem. And less people understand that one, but it's still something they think about. But number three is the big one, and that's that it has to actually change the way you look at the story, or at least change the way it moves going forward. You know, it has to make you look at a character differently and look at their actions in a new light, or look at the events of the story differently, or hammer home some sort of theme that it's been trying to hammer home, or make you look at this world differently, or something. You know, if it doesn't do that, then sure, it'll catch you off guard and it might even make sense, but what was the point of having it? And most of the time when this trope of it being Earth all along is invoked, it's not done well. A good example of this would be in Lightning Return's Final Fantasy XIII, which is a confusing title, even if you have played the game, and even if you haven't, it's probably very, very confusing. But basically, at the end of the game, all the people on this dying world go to a new world, and then when you see it, it's very strongly implied to be Earth, but we don't really see that much of it. Like, maybe they all just went to Earth and it was already here, maybe they created the Earth, but if they created it, then why would they only be arriving here, like, in the modern day instead of thousands of years ago? Like, it's kind of confusing, and honestly, the creators of the game don't seem to know what was going on there either, because they just said it's up to interpretation, which, I mean, maybe they know it and they just don't want to come right out and say it, but I kind of doubt that. I kind of feel like they were just confused too, and they're like, I don't know, you figure it out. I don't know, I just, I feel like this isn't adding anything, because it comes in right at the end, and because it's so confusing and muddled that I don't see any real message there, and it very easily could have just been them, hey, we created a new world, and it's just some, you know, generic landscape of, like, rolling green fields and forests and such, and they just go, wow, we have a new home, and then that's, that's it. They, they're, they're good now, that this new world is their new home, like, that would have been fine, and it would have been less confusing. There's an old anime called Utawari Rumono, which does something kind of similar. Like, there's a big twist near the end where, like, the main character of this whole series has been amnesiac, like, he doesn't know who he is or where he comes from or any of his past, and this whole time, near the end, he finds out he's been a god this whole time, except that, like, in the modern day, he was discovered by archaeologists, and then he came back much later after some sort of apocalypse, and there were some humans left, and then he, like, killed all of them because they killed his wife and his children, and he was upset, and then he, like, erased his own memory, and then just decided to live as, like, a normal person, and it's... Look, it's confusing when I'm describing it, but it's even more confusing watching, trust me. And once I figured out what was going on at the very end of the show, I remember thinking, well, what does that add? Why couldn't he just be a god who lost his loved ones and then lost his memory? Like, what does adding the fact that this is all Earth in the very distant future add? It adds nothing. That's the trick of it. It adds nothing but confusion, I should say. So, like, why would you want it in there? Why would you put it in there? And it's one of those things that's just a twist for the sake of having a twist, which is the same problem that a lot of M. Night Shyamalan's movies have faced, because, you know, after the sixth sense, he became known as, like, the guy who puts massive twists at the end of his movies, and now he just kind of puts them in there for the sake of having it, even if it doesn't always really work. Like, Split is a good example. Like, I know that led into, like, the sequel and everything, but still Split, I think, would have just been a better movie had there not been that big twist at the end, and it had just been, hey, this crazy dude with powers is keeping this girl hostage. Like, it would have been a lot better. Now, I will say that the revelation of Earth all along, or something along those lines, is generally a lot better if it's not a twist that comes in at the last second. Earlier this year, I read a series called The Dinosaur Lords, which you can check out my thoughts on, if you feel like it, and that series was, unfortunately, never finished. The author died halfway through writing it, but it's not on Earth, right? It's this world where, you know, there's medieval-level technology and characters see magic at a few points, and there's dinosaurs on and around, obviously, as well. But all the technology we, the audience, realize pretty quick is just very advanced technology. And it's also very heavily implied that this world that they're on is actually the planet Venus, sometime way in the future after it's been terraformed. And obviously, this raises the question of, well, okay, if all these humans came here and colonized it, why do they not know that? And why is their technology level so low? And what exactly is going on with them? And what's going on with the gray angels? And, you know, things like that, it brings up a lot of questions. And so, if this had just been a twist right at the end, then we wouldn't have time to really think about all this and to wonder and to theorize, which is fun on its own, but also, it would, how do I put this? It would feel almost like it was purposely hiding information from us in order to make the twist, which is not always a good idea. Basically, it makes us view the setting a lot differently, and it makes us wonder what's truly going on, which is half the fun of these sorts of stories, rather than just being, aha, I tricked you, audience, like, trying to outsmart your audience, or for that matter, trying to outsmart whatever piece of media you're interacting with, is not really the point, and I'm not sure why people keep trying to do it, but they do. And this brings me back to Prince of Thorns again. Like, this is just a setting, which in most ways seems like a regular fantasy setting, and you could probably substitute it for a lot of other things, and it wouldn't change that much, but by putting it in our world, it's just kind of a unique setting. You know, that's all. It's just a unique world that similar adventures happen in, and so far, at least, it doesn't really seem to be that big a deal. They aren't making a huge thing out of it. If I had to sum this up, I would just say it doesn't dominate everything the way it often does when it's a big twist at the end, because then you have to look at everything through that lens. Whereas in Prince of Thorns, it's just, hey, medieval world, our technology occasionally pops up, there you go. It's like how a substantial portion of modern fantasy takes place in European-inspired worlds, specifically medieval European-inspired worlds, but if it takes place in a world inspired by, say, feudal Japan or ancient Greece or something, then that makes it look a lot different, and as long as they don't make a huge deal out of that, it's just a different setting, which can be fun to explore and can be fun to experience all these stories and all these characters in. And another series that does this decently well, I think, is Wheel of Time, because in that it is implied to be our world in the way, way distant future, like many thousands of years from now after there have already been several apocalyptic-scale events, but it's also eventually going to come back and become our world again, because this whole thing is just a commentary on the cyclical nature of history and the cyclical nature of time, and it's also kind of a meta-commentary on the fantasy genre as a whole, how it's basically the same things happening over and over again, but it's slightly different every time, but again, I did a video on that quite a while ago. You can check it out if you want. Look, I'm just going to end this by saying, yes, obviously this trope can be done okay. This idea of, oh, it was actually Earth the whole time in the very distant past or the very distant future, specifically in the distant future after some sort of apocalyptic event which wiped out our current civilization, and like that can be fine, but just not when it's played straight, and especially not when it's played straight, and there's a big twist because it's a big twist, especially near the end, because that's just been done so many times and it raises questions and it doesn't really add anything at this stage. So I don't know, I guess if you're an aspiring writer and you're planning on trying something like that, maybe just don't, and if you are, then maybe try doing it at least in a different way, like again, Wheel of Time or Dinosaur Lords, and if you're not going to do it in a different way, at least don't make a huge deal out of it like Prince of Thorns does. You know, like that works out pretty well, at least so far. Again, I haven't finished by the time you see this video I may have finished, but you know, it may be it'll fall apart by the end. Maybe the Dinosaur Lords would have fallen apart by the end. I don't know, but at least at the beginning it was better. And yeah, that's about all. That was just kind of a ranty video that I wanted to make because I've seen this so many times and so many people still treat it like it's this great new idea and it isn't. It hasn't been new for so many decades now. And that's all. Goodbye. Subscribe, check out social media stuff, all that. Goodbye. Hello for everyone who watched this far, all these names. Yeah, those are my patrons, special thanks to all of them and especially a special special special thanks to all of my $10 and up Patreon names, people who are Oppo Savalainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anseljevic, Dio, Echo, Eevee, Flax, Great Griebo, Carcat Kitsune, El Lindbergh, Lysel Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Matthew Bodro, Microphone, Peep the Toad, Robbie Reviews, Sad Martigan, Celia the Vixen, Stone Stairs, Tesla Shark, Vaivictus, and Wesley. Without you, I couldn't do this. If you want to get your name on here, consider donating to me on Patreon. Or, you know, don't. I can't force you, I guess. If you don't feel like doing that, you can always, you know, like the video and comment on it and subscribe to my channel and maybe become a YouTube channel member if that's how you feel. Okay, thank you for all the things. Goodbye.