In the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful, As-salamu alaikum my dear respected viewers and welcome to the second episode of the Islamic Expansion series here on Current Events. As always, I'm your host Ali Jassim. In the previous episode, we discussed with our dear guest Sheikh Muhammad Al-Halli the expansion of the Islamic religion in general. However, in this episode, we will speak about the expansion of the Shi'a Islam, the sect that was found by Amir al-Muminin and the Ahl al-Bayt, peace be upon them. Today, dear viewers, as we answer questions like if we were to compare the population of Shi'a Muslims with the Sunni Muslims, in the guest's opinion, which one will grow faster than the other? And which sect in Islam is growing faster every day? Is it the authentic Islam, which was established by the Prophet Muhammad's holy household? Or is it the deviant sect, which was established by the Saqifah and Anta Allah alayhim? Here to discuss these issues, and many more as my dear guest, he is a prominent Islamic preacher and teacher of Islamic studies at a number of universities in the west, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Halli. Stay with us, dear viewers. As-salamu alaykum, once again, dear respective viewers. Welcome to the second episode of the expansion of Islam series. In this episode, we will discuss the expansion of Shi'a Islam here with my guest, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Halli. As-salamu alaykum, Sheikh. Alaykum, As-salamu alaykum. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Sheikh, let's begin with this first question. If we were to compare the population of the Shi'a Muslims with the Sunni Muslims, in your opinion, which one will grow faster than the other? And is the birth rate the only factor that is increasing in the followers of religion? Or can other factors play a role in this equation? Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem. In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful. The comparison between the different schools of thought as far as their numbers has been the subject of discussion and some research recently, where we find some of the research organizations have such as Pew International Research and others Pew Research Center have suggested that then the percentage, so to speak, for the Shi'a population in the world is 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim Ummah of the Muslim countries or the Muslim population around the world. And the Sunni approximately 80 to 85 percent. However, in reality, we find there are flaws and problems with this particular estimate because in our own research and the research conducted by other organizations, it seems that the number at least is 25 percent of the Muslim world that are following the school of Ahlan Bayt, the Shi'a. And today, what we find with regards to the numbers, so to speak, I mean, one of the reasons for this is, of course, the large number of the Shi'as that are present in Iraq, in Iran, in Bahrain, in Lebanon, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia, in Indonesia, in places, and also the rising number in the West as well in Europe and in America's. You find a good number of Shi'as there, and you find a very similar percentage in these countries as well, 20 percent of the Muslims, so to speak. But in my opinion, having studied the last maybe 10, 15 years and what has happened, there is absolutely no doubt that the Shi'as are being targeted and killed much more than the Sunnis. Nobody can even estimate or can compare that because you look at the countries like we have mentioned, like Iraq, like in Syria, like, for example, in Saudi, like in Bahrain, like in Pakistan, the number one targets are the Shi'a. They're the most oppressed. The most oppressed, the most executed and tortured and killed and so on and so forth. And therefore, despite having, despite this, however, and we don't have international figures and research to support this claim, but we can say from the evidence, anecdotal evidence that we have gathered from different parts of the world, that the number of the Shi'as is definitely increasing at a higher rate than the number of Sunnis. And the reason for that is because of the number of factors, which is not certainly about birthrate because birthrate could be argued to be quite similar in countries which are Shi'a as well as countries who are non-Shi'a in the Muslim world. However, today we have the ease by which the teachings of the School of Ahl al-Bait is being presented to the world. We have the internet. We have satellite channels. We have publications which are easily being distributed more and more. So for example, in Northern Africa, countries such as Tunisia, countries such as Morocco, in Egypt, we find the increase in the number of Shi'as, considerable increase. We find even in places where the Shi'as are heavily persecuted, like in Saudi, the satellite channels and the debates that have taken place and the ease. Because if you think about it, if we go back maybe 15, 20 years time, if you have a Sunni who is sitting at home and is wondering who the Shi'as are, what are their teachings? I've heard about them. They may be a friend or somebody is a Shi'a, but I'm not comfortable to go and ask them what is their Aqidah, what is their true belief. They are restricted unless they go and buy a book. If they're in a country where Shi'a books are banned, and that is the case in many countries today, because they realize the problems they're facing with the expansion of the Shi'a ideology. And there have been many of these Salafi Wahhabi ideology scholars, so to speak, or preachers who have come out on television, you see them on these YouTube, they have gone crazy. They say, the Shi'a are spreading. We have to stop it. They fear, yes, one of them was so angry, that he began to hit the pulpit that he was, and he wanted to do this, very, very shouting, because it's the frustration they see it. They know it as well. They know it's happening. So this individual 20 years ago may find difficulty and then give up. Today it takes him or her one minute, go online on the internet and search. Switch on the television. And there are many Shi'a satellite channels that many people around the world can obtain as well. So the availability of Shi'a belief now, and the Aqidah and the lectures from Shi'a Ulama, and the material that is present, the Shi'a books that is present online, has made it much more accessible for the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world, by the way, to accept Shi'a Islam. In this few days, I'm here in the Holy City of Karbala, and with me there's a brother who's from America, and he first embraced Islam as he does, and he chose the path of the School of Khilafa. And then after maybe one or two years, because of the accessibility of this information, he was introduced to the School of Ahlul Baytan, and Alhamdulillah, today he's a Shi'a. So the key thing is it is something that we find more and more prevalent today, and that is the expansion of the Shi'a numbers. And I tell you, this is the reason why you have people working extra hard to cause damage to Shi'a numbers. So they plant bombs, they execute, they kill, and so on. They think that by doing that, people like Daesh and their supporters and Wahhabism, they think that, okay, the number is increasing, the best way we can do is to kill more. But of course, what this is also doing is people are asking a question, why is Shi'a has been targeted? Because the more they are targeted, the more people are wondering, there must be some truth about them that they are peaceful, they themselves are not killing others. So what is the reason, and that is also leading to more questions being presented, more research, more investigation. And from my experience, many of the Shi'a, and I don't want to generalize, but many of the Shi'a scholars are much more open to questions and happy to sit in dialogue and discussion. And people are discovering that, whereas in some schools of thought, they close the door on thought, and that's the Ba'bul-i-Qtihad, the ability to develop this extrapolation of laws from the Quran and Asuna. Whereas other schools of thought, they're more stagnant, and they're saying, no, no, for example, don't ask this question, let's not go into details. So they stimulated, yeah, yeah. So we have stimulated thought and have encouraged development and are for progression and for the answering of people's queries and questions. Yes, sure. Can the ideology of the followers of Saqifah, may Allah be with them, and Wahhabism bring peace to the world? Or will the Islam of Ma'am Ali ibn Abi Talib, and it's true Shi'a followers bring peace to the world? This is an obvious question, but... Yeah, well, today, if we were to explain to the respected viewer, what are we talking about when it comes to these two ideologies? We are talking about one system which is purely based on violence, rejection of the other, the killing of the other, the forcing of the belief on their throats, otherwise there will be severe punishment and consequences. The image that is very backward and which is very distorted of Islam, on the other hand, we have the Islam of peace, the Islam of love, the Islam of development, the Islam of knowledge, the Islam of taqwa and spirituality, and that is the teachings of the Ahlul Bayt, Alayhum Salam. So, there is no doubt that today, when the world witnesses their atrocities and their terrorist actions, they are waking up to this reality. You look at 9-11, it was perpetrated by the supporters of Wahhabism. You look at in 7-7, in the United Kingdom, the bombings that took place on the underground, on the buses, it was perpetrated and committed by people of the ideology of Wahhabism and this taqfiri mentality, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Taliban, all the same in that ideology. All of them come back to this particular establishment of this ideology, which is Salafi Wahhabi. If you look at what has happened in Paris, if you look at what is happening in Iraq with ISIS and Daesh, you look at what happened in Belgium, all these have a common denominator and that is Wahhabism. And so, the world is not like, one of them is an example and the others. That is why today, the position of the School of Ahl al-Bait and the Maraji An'a wa Ulama has been to present us ourselves with our true identity and that is the Shia of Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace be upon them. We are the Shia of the Ahl al-Bait because the moment people realize that we are in that particular category, we are followers of these holy individuals that propagated the message of tolerance, the message of respect, the message of love, the message of peace. And this is very crucial in this day and age because there have been a number of misconceptions and very much a confused state in the minds of non-Muslims and others as well. When they see someone saying, Allahu Akbar and beheading, when they see someone with a beard holding a Quran and this and that and so on and so forth. And so, it even for the Shias today, again, it provides them with a great opportunity to speak to people about the wonderful personalities of the Ahl al-Bait, alaykum as-salam, to really show their true love and devotion to the Ahl al-Bait by speaking to individuals and propagating them in the right manner. Imam al-Ridha, alayhi as-salam, would say to us as a clear message. He says, Ahyu amranah rahimallahu man ahya amranah. Revive our affairs. May God as mercy and blessings be upon the ones who revive our affairs. And he was asked how, he would respond to ta'allamuna ulumana. You learn our teachings, what the Ahl al-Bait, this wealth, this amazing treasure of knowledge, what ta'allamuna hal nas. And then you teach it to the people. Fa inna nasa lau alimu mahasina kalamina lat taba'una. Imam gives us all a guarantee. If people were to hear us, to hear what we have to offer, they, and to understand they would follow us. It's inna fitra. To follow Allah Subhanu ta'ala. And the ones whom Allah Subhanu ta'ala has chosen for us as the leaders after the Holy Prophet. Peace and blessings be upon them all. So the distinction today must be made between the Islam of the Prophet and the Ahl al-Bait and the so-called hijacked Islam of Bani Umayyah. The Islam of those who have taken the rights from the Ahl al-Bait, alayhum sallam.  This, and the Islam of Taliban and ISIS and Daesh. This distinction must be made in order for people to have an understanding of the true teachings of the beautiful religion. Yes, Mashallah. Thank you for that, Sheikh. Will the growth of the Shi'a Muslim's population and publicizing the true Islam which was preserved through Imam Ali ibn Abi Talim and Imam Hussein, peace be upon them, improve the life conditions of the people in the Western world? Why? There are so many areas we can talk about that the Ahl al-Bait, alayhum sallam, have given us guidelines and instructions and teachings to really uplift our physical and spiritual presence in this world before the Akhirah, of course. First thing we have to say is the Quran is the constitution for the well-being and the happiness of human beings in this world and in Akhirah. Now, who understands the Quran? Who can interpret the Quran? Who can provide us with the correct teachings of the Quran? I give you one example. We have verses in the Quran which, if it's taken out of context, is used by terrorists to perpetrate and commit crimes. Chapter nine, verse number five, kill the disbelievers wherever you find them. If people do not have the right guidelines, the right guidance, the right instructions and leadership, then they will definitely go astray. And this was predicted by the Holy Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam in a hadith which is mutawater, lafzhi, in other words, the exact term was used by the Holy Prophet in Sunni and Shi'a narrations. You'll find that he says, I leave for you two things. If you hold onto them strongly, you will never go astray. Kitab Allahi wa atrati ahlabayti. They are my book and my progeny, the ahlulbayt. They will not separate. They are inseparable until they meet me on the Pond of Kother on the day of judgment. So that means the ahlulbayt and the Quran are hand in hand. That means the Quran can only be understood by the ahlulbayt. That means the ahlulbayt are the manifestations of the Quran. They are the walking Quran. Amir al-Mu'mineen says, I am the Quran that speaks. So you look at examples in history. You look at one after the other of how the ahlulbayt demonstrated these values that we need today. Today, there is so much injustice. Today, there is so much crime. Today, there is so much lawlessness. You come and you find that United Nations in 2002 had produced the document with regards to the rulership in the Arab world. And they have used the example of the letter of Amir al-Mu'mineen that is found in Nadi al-Balaqat to Malika al-Ashtar. And you find them talking about how Amir al-Mu'mineen demonstrated this magnificent values of justice and adalah. You find Christian authors like George Jodak, he's written this famous book, Ali, Sult al-Adalat al-Insaniya, Ali, This Voice of Human Justice. Now, when he talks about Amir al-Mu'mineen and his principles, it truly is a exemplary nature for all of us to follow. That today in the world which is gripped with injustice, we need to look at the justice of Amir al-Mu'mineen, peace be upon him. And with the Ahl al-Bayt, alayhum as-salam, we understand their mercy. In this world, which is now full of hatred, Amir al-Mu'mineen, just for examples, for the respected viewers to appreciate. In the battlefield in Safin, Amir al-Mu'mineen has no water with his army. And they are pleading with the, or asking the army of Mu'awiyah to give them water. They would not. Now, we are talking about thousands of soldiers. Imam al-Salam charges to front and takes control of the water. Now, his companions are saying, we do the same for Mu'awiyah. Amir al-Mu'mineen says, no. We feed them water. But you feed your own enemies water? Yes, even in the horses, even in the animals. Same for Imam Hussain al-Salam in Karbala. He feeds the army of al-Hur who had come to force him not to go to Kufa. He feeds him themselves individually. In his holy hands, he feeds them water. Such was the mercy and the love. Such was the thinking of altruism and self-sacrifice. You look at Sayyidatun Nisa, Fatima al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her. Such an honorable lady who, example after example of her life, that she would give away everything that she had to the poor and the needy. The Qur'an demonstrates this, where you taimoon al-Ta'ama al-Hubbihi, miskinan, yateeman, aseera, three consecutive days they were fasting. They give the entire food to the poor, desperately poor, to the orphan, to the captive. Yet at the same time, what do you find? You find that these individuals, they lived the simplest of lives and they had the highest morality, their akhlaq was superb. And God has chosen them. And for us today, when it comes to advances in knowledge, we can seek inspiration from them. When it comes to how to get close to Allah, spirituality, we can learn from them. We can, when it even comes to political governance, justice and equity and other matters, we can certainly seek guidance from them.  They are the ship of salvation that we invite people and invite ourselves even to investigate further and to delve deeper and to be illuminated and for our hearts and our souls to be purified with taking them as the role model. And that's why the Quran tells us, qulla assalukum aleyhi ajran illa al-mawaddatafil qurba that the Prophet of Islam says, just show love and respect and following of my family and you see the real positive change that will happen in the Surah. The last question, is it fair to say that the ideology of the Shi'a Muslims is based on logic and makes perfect sense? In your opinion, what are the most effective methods to publicize the teachings and traditions of Prophet Muhammad and his household, peace be upon them, to the whole world? You know, this way, people would get familiar with the true religion of Islam and the open-minded would revert to this religion. Absolutely correct. I would say that this school of thought, the school of the ahl al-bayt is one that has emphasized on the role of the akal and the intellect. And today, there are many who would want to see that role being played, that function, that faculty being demonstrated because too often on the other side, it has been ignored and people don't understand. Why should women be banned from driving, for example? What is the reason? There is no akal behind it in Saudi, for example. You look at the school of ahl al-bayt, no doubt. It is rational in its deduction and it's certainly compatible with this day and age, with the challenges that are being faced. And we are, Alhamdulillah, being able to provide the answers to modern day problems and difficulties. But starting from day one after the sad waqat and Shahada of the Prophet, we find that from that time, the role of the intellect was very much emphasized. In that, if we talk about, for example, how such a prominent individual, like the Holy Prophet, who's come for the final and the greatest of messages, that's the religion of Islam, the teachings and the religion, would leave this world without having somebody who would carry on the message. I just narrate to you this story, which is a very important story, to illustrate the role of akal, the role of intellect and rationality, that in Saudi, there was once in a book shop, there's people buying books, there was a Shia scholar. He was trying to buy some books. And the keeper, the book shop owner, came to him and said to him, "'I realize that you are a Shia "'and I have a problem with your madhab.'" So the Shia scholar said, "'What is the problem with our madhab?' He said, "'The problem is you exaggerate the day of Ghadir. "'The day of Ghadir, you think it's big, "'eat and you celebrate and you make it too big. "'It is just the day where the Prophet said, "'Ali is my friend, nothing like this.'" So the Shia scholar said, "'I am happy to sit down with you "'and we present evidence and I show you "'how, for example, over 300 Sunni scholars "'have demonstrated the significance of this day "'and have narrated what has happened "'and how we can prove that the word mullah here "'doesn't mean friend, but complete authority.'" As the Quran says, "'And Nabi U'la bil-Mu'mineena min-Anfusihem," the Prophet has authority over the believers more than they have over themselves. And so on, I could present you with this evidence and we can discuss because our faith is the religion and the teachings of dialogue. Imam Al-Sadiq, alaihi salam, would sit days and months with atheists and they say, we don't believe in God. He said, okay, let me prove to you. He did not hold a sword on them and say, you must become Muslim. That's not our teachings, it's not like that. So this scholar said, let us sit down now and we discuss. The shopkeeper said to him, okay, let's put a diary date tomorrow, sometime. We sit somewhere and we have a debate discussion. The she asked, I said, I have one shot, one condition. What is that? He said, the condition is we do this discussion now, now, now, this moment. We sit somewhere and we have a debate. The shopkeeper of the bookstore said, I cannot. Why? He said, because I'm the keeper of the store.  There is nobody to sell the books. How can I leave the shop without having somebody to look after it? This is the role of Aqan, the she asked to him, look. You are having a shop with books and you do not want to leave it without somebody to sell the books. And you want Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la to take the soul of the Prophet and leave Muslims without appointing somebody to lead them. So you can see that he made him think, I have just a few books, but I don't have someone to look after, so I don't want to go and have a debate. But you want the whole religion, the Prophet to leave this world and say, okay, you choose Shura, whatever you want, and they did in Saqifah, and the disasters that happened.  They are the ones who have found their ability to rationalize arguments and to present proof and to be able to think, not just to follow. Oh, but this and that. But I will be in trouble. No, no, free your mind. Look at the facts. Look at the reality of what has happened. How can I be following individuals that came openly and said the Prophet of Islam has lost his mind, has become delirious in Nahul-e-Yahjur? How can I be following individuals and not following others who were the main people in the battlefield, like Amir al-Mu'minin, not never go back? Yes? Karrar ghayr farrar, Amir al-Mu'minin, whereas others, they would go back. How can I be not following an individual who the Prophet of Islam said, aliyun ma al-haq wa al-haqqu ma al-ali? Truth is with Ali and Ali is with the truth. But the truth revolves around Ali, not the other way around. Yes? How can I not be following an individual? According to Sahih Muslim, that the Imam himself, Ali ibn-e-Talib, al-Ali salam says, kanat li manzila tana'indr Rasool-Allah. This manzila, this position that I had with the Holy Prophet, no one else had. Yes? Anam ad-dinatu l-ailmu al-Aliyum baba. Hundreds of narrations that highlight the Maqam and the status of the Commander of the Faithful. All intellect, if we sit and think for a moment, we are able to appreciate the superiority and the haqq, which is quite evident. So today, no doubt. Today, this is something that we have to be using and certainly more and more people are discovering and finding out. Thank you so much for that, Shekna. Brothers and sisters, this concludes the second episode of the Islamic Expansion series. Be sure to stay tuned for the third episode, which we will discuss our role to expand this faith. Thank you, dear viewers, for watching, and we thank our dear guest, Sheikh Mohammed Ali, for joining us once again. And thank you very much. Wassalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. Mashallah.


Well, to start off, guys, in the program, the official title of this presentation has to do with my work with Bridget and CrowdFact, which I'll explain shortly, and essentially our role in approximating truth through a crowdsourced fact-checking tool. And I've been in Europe the past couple months with these projects and having a lot of conversations in groups like this with thinkers like all of you. And especially when it comes to the crowdsourced fact-checking and how we make that work, something always comes to mind, which is, and I also helped ask this question, which is, who am I working on this project to be the person approximating truth in this sense? You know, if you think about algorithms, you think about people making these fact-checks and you're trying to prioritize them, you're trying to do quality control, you know, you almost immediately get to weights involved. And for some things, for some concepts, for some subjects, that can be straightforward. We have a more precise sense of what is true and what is not. When it gets to complex issues like immigration reform or economic policies or climate initiatives and distinctions between, let's say, certain publishers, so who am I to weight the Guardian or the New York Times differently, or how does Fox News or Yahoo fit into that? So really, I started thinking about the role each of us play in terms of defining what these systems will look like and really how big of a responsibility that is if this space and this annotation layer will grow forward. So when I was thinking about that responsibility in terms of this conference and what would be interesting and add value to people, I really started thinking about our collective stewardship over the annotation layer and that space as a whole. So this is a presentation which we'll eventually get into about thinking as the annotation layer as a commons that we all need to kind of take care of together. And later, I will be demoing Bridget and CrowdFact, so I'll give a brief introduction now and if you're interested, we can go into more depth then. So what are Bridget and CrowdFact? Bridget is a Chrome plugin to build bridges which are bi-directional links in the annotation layer to create contextual relationships between ideas and content across the Internet. So it's essentially an annotation but built into the annotation structure is a link to a separate piece of content somewhere else. CrowdFact for crowdsource fact-checking is a project to utilize bridges in that way. So in one step, you can flag a piece of online misinformation and in the structure of that flag, you are also bridging it to evidence that refutes it or professional fact-check somewhere else. Now why are we doing this? In the words of our founder, David Benjamin, who would have loved to be here today, one of his thoughts or perspectives on this is to answer all of the existential crises facing our planet, we need an evolution of human consciousness. And you can think about those crises being everything from climate change to threats with nuclear weapons to the growing threats of AI. All of these different issues that if you really think about them can keep you up at night. I would just make one caveat there, the words of Greta Thunberg, in terms of all of these crises, we actually have a lot of the solutions for climate change and it's up to us. So that's a little personal comment throwing in there. But why is hypothesis doing this to connect the world's knowledge and I'm sure that's a shared motivation ambition for a lot of us. And it reminds me of a similar ambition from a group probably not all that unlike us some time ago to make the world more open and connected. If we could just do this PowerPoint annotation of that, that was the ambition of Mark Zuckerberg and you can actually take that quote back for a while, Facebook gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. And even 2004, we're connecting people through social networks. And today in the past couple of years, we see, well, connection didn't work out so well. Actually we can end up a lot more isolated and I don't need to talk about that because I think we're all aware of those issues and in our everyday experiences. So what is the point? Sometimes when we have these ambitions, they don't go quite as planned. So I'm going to kind of show a couple different groups that had ambitions similarly and what they were going for and how it worked out. So you have bacteria in a Petri dish trying to reproduce, you have the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia trying to expand and you have Facebook trying to connect people. What was their mechanism to carry out that ambition? The bacteria consumed, it consumed available resources, Mesopotamia introduced agriculture and irrigation to feed its people and Facebook introduced social media, the idea that we could all share these things that would connect us. What were the consequences of these mechanisms and how they were used? So with bacteria, you had feast, which led to the consumption of all the resources and then famine and a drought, you had nothing left. With Mesopotamia, you had a surplus of food, but the way they structured their irrigation systems actually meant that it left these major salt water deposits in the land which poisoned the soil, which means they couldn't use it to create more agriculture. And the social media, it created such an abundance of media itself that we had to move to curation because you think about your feed, it was so filled with content every day and you think about all of the other ways it enabled us to access content. Curation was a natural step forward or else we would be spending all day and many hours to go through all this information. And what were some of the results? So bacteria, you had a mass die-off, opposite of reproduction, Mesopotamia wanted to expand, you had civilization collapse and Facebook wanted to connect people led to isolation. So all of us here at iAnnotate, in broad terms we're here trying to connect knowledge with all the different projects we're working on. Our mechanism is social annotations in large part and kind of creating the space where people can annotate together. What is going to be the consequence and what is going to be the result when we look back at this 10, 15 years down the line. So this is why I just wanted to talk and this might be a familiar concept to some people here about the annotation layer as a commons. As actually a shared resource that's accessible to all members of society and they're held in common, not owned in privately and it's something that we're going to govern together and kind of take care of together. And some of those resources specifically applicable to the annotation layer include the actual digital plane so it's almost easy to imagine a frontier type way, right? We're building portals to access this new plane and we're giving the tools to develop it and the other resource that's involved on an individual level is human attention, right? Like every annotation that somebody accesses is an instance of their attention. So what are the consequences if we mismanage these resources? The resources being this digital plane of information and also the human attention. So one thing we can think about is ubiquitous advertisements. So you open an email or a text message and there could be keywords in that, Gmail is still free but there's keywords in the email that are annotated with advertisements right on top of it. And that's probably an outcome that not many of us are interested in and not why we're here. A deeper level of surveillance. So if you open an article on all of our phones there's a curated list of articles that are specifically geared to us based on what we think will be interesting. And that's based on articles we've clicked through and seen in the past. But now if you can collect that same data and information from the annotations themselves it's a more intimate piece of where our attention is at. But if you just see what article I'm reading you can't see where my attention is actually going within that article to a certain extent. If you see what annotations I'm looking at and where I'm clicking them you can see exactly where my attention is going and exactly what context is driving that. And then from there once you have that information I think it's a short step to end-to-end curation which is all of our different projects. And it's really amazing to see we're all talking about interoperability. I feel that's very important. But if we all have projects and we all have communities where everybody's annotating and the space grows as we expect it all to and we all see it will. We're going to be curating annotations and we're going to be selectively exposing annotations to people otherwise it would be too much to go through. So if you think about the analogy from what we have today and if you have this personalized content you take it once up further and if you have personalized annotations on any content you're looking at that's a personalized sense of understanding a piece or a personalized sense of understanding and in a way it's just a deeper level of this curation that's caused a lot of the problems. If you think about an echo chamber in that sense where it's not just the content that's being fed back to you in a positive feedback loop but it is every associated idea with that content and it can really guide your attention and your perspective in ways that may not be productive for us as a society and may not be healthy as individuals. So if we go down that road you could have annotation and then the curation of annotations like we've seen before. And what could be the possible result that we'd all love to avoid from that would be again isolation. Instead of connecting knowledge it's people getting personalized information streams and being in their own little worlds. And if we're all going to be plugged into virtual reality systems and maybe lying in warehouses somewhere in Nevada and just totally in our own little virtual worlds maybe that's not a bad thing. But if we still need to come together and collaborate as a society and make group decisions and functionally cooperate that could be disastrous. So how can we sustainably manage and govern the annotation comments which we all have responsibility over. Sustainable development. So looking at our communities themselves and this is maybe not for today and maybe not for the people here but as this space grows and new actors come in what are some of the principles that are really important. So sustainable growth of the communities themselves and make sure when they are at smaller scales and we can actually have a more realistic feedback channel. We can solve problems at that small scale and adequately prepare for larger numbers of people. An example that really excites me is a group called Open Book in the Netherlands. And they're basically building an open source Facebook, that's their idea. A human centric one and they've had a waiting list for a while of dozens of thousands. They're being very, very slow about how many people they let on to the platform. And they have an open Slack channel with every single user. So they can truly and authentically engage with their early users, try things out, take the community's feedback into account and address the problems before they have 500,000 people. And they're being very diligent and they're being very responsible and they're for going short term rewards in favor of long term sustainable development there. And the sustainable development on the tech side as well. Some of you guys might be familiar with this concept and I couldn't quite, it would have been a great time for an annotation. I couldn't quite find the name of it. But it's the projection that by 2040, if the trends continue as of today, the total amount of energy consumption purely by computation will meet all of today's existing energy demands. Think about all of the energy that's consumed today and you think about all of the data and all of the computation and all of the technology that we're building. By 2040, everything just via computation will match the rest of the world's energy demands. And with renewable and everything else, I mean that might be delayed 10 or 20 years. But that's a serious issue. And so when we're thinking about millions and billions of annotations and all of the data that can be run on that and all of the computations and all of the storage, sustainable infrastructure and sustainable software and doing that in an efficient way, that becomes important as well. And then resilience through diversity and this actually ties into Big Blue Hat's presentation I think. So if you think about ecosystems, if you think about a forest, the number of species within it and the diversity of their different skill sets, their survival strategies, what they can contribute are things that make those systems more resilient to shocks and stresses and everyday issues. So in the annotation layer, if we do move towards curation and we're selectively exposing annotations to people, maybe if we provide a diversity of disciplines and perspectives and ideas, instead of just feeding people what we think will keep them staring at the screen the longest and monetizing their attention. Maybe it can make our connected knowledge system and all of the nodes within that connected knowledge system, all of us, more resilient as well. And then in that case, maybe we have sustainable curation that makes the system more resilient in that way. And maybe we actually do end up connecting knowledge and avoiding the fate of a lot of these ambitions from before. So just one more thought there is it's just I think long term thinking in this sense is really important. Again, I'm not so concerned with this about the groups and the people and the projects here today. But as this space grows and as there's more opportunities within and as more people come inside, I just think it's important to keep perspective of why we're here today, what our purpose is. There's a lot of things we could all be doing and we're here. And think about as a community really stewarding this opportunity to connect the world's knowledge and building a better future. And ultimately if we treat it as a communal opportunity and it's not just one project and one project and one project siloed. But as we've discussed interoperability and making that work, given the potential challenges and given the potential pitfalls ahead, it can be really bright and we can do a lot of good. So if anybody has thoughts, comments, questions, happy to hear them and thank you very much. Stop up and use the mics, please, that would be great. Hey, that was really interesting. Whenever you talk about the- Can I be yelling?  I'll try to speak close to it. Okay, so you're talking about the commons and whenever anyone talks about the commons, it makes me think of the Eleanor Instrum concept of the commons. So in parallel with your fisheries management, I mean with your, sorry, like development of the species or the bacteria, the corresponding concept from that would be like fisheries management. One of the key things that they found, that she found in her work with the commons is that they actually don't scale beyond a certain level. So when we're thinking about the problems induced by scaling and when you get to the scale of a Facebook or something like that. Those might be unavoidable aspects of a system because you don't have the local government. You don't have the local knowledge you need to be able to actually govern and regulate it a little bit. So you mentioned management and governance, but I thought maybe you could talk a little more about how you see that governance piece happening and not just the spontaneous emergence. That is a really good question. And I would say that something I'm really happy about is that you asked that question. And I actually don't have really good answers there. Beyond, I mean, governance is something I meant more in terms of kind of community ownership, not necessarily policy, but just the way that individual projects even in how we kind of collaborate together with things like interoperability and things like standards. We'll make it a kind of resilient and sustainable system going forward. So I don't actually have exact answers, but I hope people in the room and colleagues of people in the room do, and we can start talking about them. Thank you. Yeah. Any more questions? All right, another round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Hi. So my name is Andy. I developed a programming language called Emily that I would like to show to you. Before I get started, a couple of things about this talk. First off, this is a talk about design. I'm not going to try to convince you in this talk to use the Emily programming language. That would be a different talk. This is a talk about the design of the language and my design process in making the language, which turned out to be about trying to construct a programming language from the simplest parts that I could imagine. Another thing to note, this is a side-effect positive talk. It is the opinion of me as the language designer and the opinion of the language that there is nothing weird or scary or shameful about mutable state, and this talk will not interrogate that assumption.  In this talk, I'm going to gradually build up Emily so that you have the spoilers just so you know where this talk is going. This is a working program in Emily. You can run this on the version of Emily on the website right now, and I don't think you're going to get much out of this without me having explained the syntax or anything. But you might get a couple of things just from looking at this sample program. One thing is that this looks a lot like a Python or a Lua to my mind. It's inspired a great deal by those languages or tries to capture their feel. Another thing is you might notice, if you look carefully, that you can see signs of both functional and object-oriented programming styles on this slide. To my mind, it's like the method implementations, the insides of them are fairly functional. The overall program structure is basically object-oriented. So when I started designing a programming language, there were a number of things that I decided I didn't really like about existing programming languages, and I wished I could do something about. But I eventually decided that out of all the issues I had, there was one I was going to focus on. I was going to focus on the idea that I think there are too many redundant ideas, redundant concepts in programming languages. If you want to know what I mean by that, just look at basically anything in C++. So here I've got a slides of all the different ways in C++ that you can say, I want to get this thing out of this other thing. You've got these five different syntaxes to remember, and it's not just the fact that you're using different syntaxes. Maybe it would make sense to use different syntaxes in different contexts to help you remember what's happening. But these are actually different concepts, like six different things. You have to keep the mental baggage of remembering which of these six different things you're dealing with at any one time, and sometimes they change. I don't think this is necessary. I think that there are ways that we could take concepts in programming languages and collapse them into each other. If we find we have two concepts that partially overlap, that were partially used for the same thing, we could just collapse them into one thing, and then we could try to identify the things that used to be the two separate concepts as special cases of this one unified thing. One example of this might be an object-oriented programming. Most languages are what's called class-based, but a couple are called prototype-based, which means that normally in class-based systems, you have classes and objects, classes inherit from classes, objects instantiate classes, but you could think of instantiation as just being a funny inheritance. That means we could say, well, we don't need classes. We could just let objects inherit from other objects. At that point, a class is no longer a thing. A class is just a thing that an object is doing. There are three ideas I want to introduce, and then I'll be able to show you how Emily works, that Emily is based on. The first idea is something from the deep theory part of functional programming called logical combinators. This is a foundational model of computation. It's similar to Lambda calculus or Turing machines in that respect. What a combinator is, is a combinator is a function that takes one argument and returns one argument, and it's a higher-order function. The argument that it takes is a function, and the thing it returns is a function. It turns out this simple idea is enough to model anything that you can imagine in computation. It could emulate any programming language you can think of, you could implement any algorithm you could think of in it. For an example, here is some pseudo ML. In the expressions, we apply one combinator to one function, another by just writing one after the other. So V is a combinator that takes an argument, ignores it, and returns V. Here I'm showing that K and S at the top there, these really weird looking ML functions. S and K form a foundational basis for a combinator calculus, which means that you can take S and K, and you can do anything with just S and K. You can imagine any algorithm and you can do it just by combining S and K in different ways. Here we make V by combining this completely gibberishy string of S's and K's. One other idea, which is a little more graspable, is dictionary-based languages. This is a word I made up, but the concept is extremely common. This comes from scripting languages mostly. Python and PHP are examples of what I'd call dictionary-based languages. What I'm referring to here is the idea of a language where all data structures are built on top of a hash table. If you have any user data structure you want to make, you emulate it by emulating a stack or some other thing using the hash table type. Even more than the user data structures, the internal data structures of the language wind up being based on this dictionary type. In Python or in Lua, if you say object.child, what you're actually doing is you're looking up the string child, the key child on object. It actually de-sugars to the second thing. Even more than that, some of these languages, actually the variable scope itself is just another dictionary. If you type G by itself, you're actually looking up the string G on the scope dictionary. A third idea which follows from this one, which seems a little more unique, but I like the idea of a language where objects and functions are the same thing. Because the way I look at it, an object is just a map from field names to values. I think you can actually write out a type signature for it. If you think of the object as a map from field names to values, and if it's a map, that means it's a function as a domain and a co-domain. Here's another pseudo-MLE example. It's based on the assumption that X and Z are values. In something like ML with records or something like C++ with structs, the field names aren't things. They don't exist by themselves. They're just syntax. But in some languages, like the dictionary-based ones I mentioned, the field names are things. You can store them in variables, and that means this is actually a sensible thing to say. So armed with these three ideas, I am going to construct an entire programming language in the next 10 minutes. This language is going to be based on combinators. What combinators are going to do for me is they are going to provide the structure of the language. All I really mean by this is that everything in the language is a function that takes one thing as an argument and returns one thing as a result. This is actually not that weird. I'm calling this, are we able to see expressions? I think of this kind of expression here with like just a series of tokens written one after the other as this C expression or curried expression. I'm saying that because to me, it's analogous to the S expression and Lisp. In Lisp, you have this S expression idea, which means that your code is a data structure. It's a series of nested lists. This is actually the same thing. It's just that it's for a curried function where the Lisp X expressions are for functions with argument lists. All that happens here is when you want to evaluate this, you take A and you apply it to B, this returns a new function X, you apply X to C, that returns Y, which you apply to D, apply to E. This actually isn't weird. This isn't something I came up with. This is actually just how expressions work in ML or Haskell. You just write a series of data items one after the other. Some of them look like argument lists, but they're just tuples. A tuple is a singular item, that sort of thing. Like I said, you can think of this as a data structure. You can think of this as a tree of applications. What are we going to put in these C expressions? Well, here's just some basic things you might want in a programming language.  Atoms are a slightly weirder thing. They're what common Lisp people might call symbols. The idea is that an atom is actually just a string, but the atom A is not equal to the string A. I'm going to also say that the compiler can somehow figure out what all of the atoms in the entire program are going to be, because they're all written out in this particular way, like dot atom. That means you can potentially intern those strings, which lets you treat them more efficiently. You might note at this point, well, wait, wait, she said combinators are going to be everything, but these are not combinators. I've got a trick coming up. Before I get there, so this language is going to have objects, but like I said, objects are just functions in my mind. They're mappings. And so object here maps the value dot x, the atom dot x, to the number three. And how did it get there? Well, it got there because the object has a member named dot set. And dot set sets a binding on object. It changes the value in binding. It alters the mapping. And it's doing that just with functions. Objects have prototypes. They have inheritance. If you look up the dot, the atom x mapping on object, and object doesn't have an x field, it will automatically check. It will look up the dot parent field automatically, and it will forward to that. You could have a chain of these. So we've just implemented inheritance by just saying forward to this parent. The built-in types, things like three, are objects. And their parents are these kind of core prototypes. Somewhere there's a number prototype that has methods like dot plus on it. So that means if I say three dot plus, well, three is an object, which means it's a function, which means that it can take the argument dot plus and map that to a new function, which adds three to whatever you feed to it. And again, these are still just functions. So you could take that three dot plus, and instead of feeding it a number, you could just store it somewhere. You could think of this as currying on the three function. I'm gonna go a little bit further than that. So I'm gonna find these objects. I'm gonna say like in Lua or in some of those other languages, the scope, the scope that you pull variables from is also an object. So if you type out variable, you're actually just looking up the variable atom on the current scope function. So at this point, I can make expressions that are relatively complicated. That's not enough to make a program. I'm going to introduce one more idea, which is the idea that expressions can be sequenced. I'm just gonna say semicolon means you evaluate this and then evaluate this. Because this language has side effects, it could make sense to have a value whose result is ignored. And we're going to do that with semicolon. So whenever you have a parenthesis group, if it has multiple semicolons within it, the final item is the thing that the entire parenthesis group returns. And because I don't like symbols, I'm going to say that the new line is also equivalent to the semicolon. Curly braces do something a little more interesting. So the parentheses form an expression inside of themselves and the parentheses can allow you to have these sequence statements, some of which are ignored. The curly braces, the exact same as the parentheses, but within the curly brace, you're using a new scope. And what I'm actually going to say happens here is that when you get to the left curly brace, it creates a new scope object. Sets that scope object's parent to the enclosing scope and then you're using that scope for the remainder of the closer. So I've just implemented scope hierarchy with object inheritance, which is kind of amusing to me. One more slightly weirder thing is square brackets are also going to be like parentheses. And the way this is going to work is it's going to be like the curly brace and that when you open the square bracket, it's going to create an object, set it as the scope, but then at the end of the square bracket expression, instead of returning the last value, we're going to return the scope that we created. So the idea is that we have this scope inside of the square bracket. We're calling set on it over and over. I accidentally said let instead of set, sorry, on this slide. You're calling set over and over inside of the square bracket scope and what you're doing is you're adding mappings to this scope object, which means you're actually adding mappings to the value you're going to have at the end. So we can use this to make something like an object literal. Have I lost anyone yet? Okay. So we now have enough to actually write a program with and this is a pretty simple thing. It's an absolute value function and I'm doing a couple of things I haven't explained here yet. One is that you'll notice there's a couple of anonymous functions here at the bottom that don't have arguments listed. I'm just going to say if you don't list an argument, then it still takes an argument because everything in this function is, everything in this language is formally a function that takes an argument and returns an argument but in this case it just takes an argument and throws it away because there's nothing useful in this particular situation. There's also this function named turn for ternary operator. This is how you implement if in this language. The idea is that turn takes three arguments. It evaluates the first. If it's true, it calls the second, the function that's argument two. If it's false, it calls the function that's argument three. So based on this we can just say make a anonymous function which evaluates its argument. If it's greater than zero returns the argument. If it's less than zero, it returns the negation of the argument and then it takes this anonymous function and it sets it, it binds it to the variable name abs. So this is actually kind of cool, I think. This is like this sort of slightly illispy thing because it's all functions. Actually it's slightly more function-based than list because we're doing it without any special forms. There's no let here. Everything is a function including the way we bind objects. This is really unreadable. Like just incredibly unreadable. So let's see what we can do about that. I'm going to attack the unreadability with macros which means I'm going to say by convention in this language any symbol is not part of the language. It's a macro that's going to be kind of rewritten into other code before the thing is evaluated. So for example, if I say E equals B that will when the code is run be treated as set dot A B and that allows me to avoid the slightly weird looking set construction makes something that's a little more familiar.  I have A equals B for setting the variable A. I have A dot B equals C for I have an existing object A. I'm going to set the B field on it. So I'm going to call set on A instead of the scope object. And then I've got arithmetic operators and the arithmetic operators just call dot plus or dot times or whatever on the first argument but they do something a little tricky. They wrap the space before and the space after them in parenthesis and what that's going to do for you is it's going to allow me to kind of if the macros are evaluated in a particular order it allows me to recreate the idea of operator precedence because in this last little bit down here A plus B times C by the time plus is evaluated in a new expression it's already been quarantined in parentheses by the star macro. Couple slightly more weirder things. I'm going to use tilde A for negation because ML. I'm going to say colon is just the dollar sign from Haskell. I wrap the right side of A in parentheses because I hate symbols and I want to avoid them wherever I can. I'm going to have the question mark colon operator from C the ternary operator. All it does is call turn. It's not doing anything magic. And then because you spend a lot of time binding variables to anonymous functions in this language I'm going to make a sugar for that where if you just put the carat on the left it automatically moves it to the right for you. So if we have all these macros we can take this really ugly absolute value function and we can turn it in this thing up top that well if you're a C programmer you'll find that attractive but I am. So in fact we now have enough that we've now explained just in the last, did I make it? 10 minutes, okay. Enough that that entire program from the first slide we can run this now and what we do here is we define our little absolute value function. We define a square root function using a recursive approximation algorithm. Armed with these two things we create a point class which has various functions that you might want on a point object like plus and minus which remember if we use the plus sign or the minus sign it'll actually be calling these plus and minus functions. And then we have a new method which can be used to construct a new point by which we mean an object which has point as a parent. And at the bottom we just say point dot new three five plus point dot new minus four two. Asks for the length and it prints out the length of whatever that vector that we just made is. So what have we just done here? Well for one thing I think that I've actually accomplished my little ideological goal of collapsing things into other things. So whereas Lua objects manage to take objects and classes and collapse them with this idea of a dictionary I've done that and have also collapsed them with the idea of functions which is ideologically kind of neat. Practically the fact that everything works this way the fact that everything in this language that is a function application there is no additional syntax unless you count the anonymous function creator and I think I can get around that with weird combinator magic. You can, the idea is that all of the things this language does are based on this simple idea of composing functions. There's nothing magic the language implementation is doing which means that you could add new abstractions to the language really easily that are just as powerful as the ones I as the language creator built in. So there's an example here with I've got some code on this slide where you have an object which inherits from a function because why not? And I'm using this actually to implement dual inheritance this two line function. There's no dual inheritance in Emily by default. You can add dual inheritance with this two line function it would be one line if the screen were wider. Another thing that's kind of cool about this is that there are no different syntaxes in different context you don't have to remember where you are when you write a block of code unless you count the left side of the equals which is a little weird. But like for example, inside of the object literal brackets that's just code you're just running functions and you can do really weird stuff like have some kind of a function that prepares a scope in a particular way and then call it on the scope while you're inside of the object bracket which is maybe not exciting to admit me. There's some other quirkier advantages that you get out of this everything is one thing sort of thing. I claim that once it's all done I'm going to be able to make Emily better at language interoperability than anything else out there. And the reason why is that whatever the abstractions of the concepts are in this other language that you want to FFI with I can represent it within Emily's syntax. So like for an example here I've imagined I've got a C plus plus class and then down here I've got like some kind of wrapper function for the class that can create a wrapper function for an object and I'm just calling the methods or whatever if this were a different kind of language that allowed different kinds of things I could still just write out whatever it is I needed and it could be translated to what that other language's object wrapper wants and once I have a type system in I could even set it up where whoever wrote the C plus plus FFI library could restrict you to whatever it is that that language actually supports as operations on its primitives. So I just mentioned types and I don't have any background in types. I've done some of the stuff before everything I've shown you up to this point is stuff that actually works in the working interpreter right now. Types, everything I'm about to say is speculative but the way I want to, I do want types in this language and the way I want to do this is so far I've said that I have this one thing, combinators and the combinators I've used them to represent objects, classes, dictionaries, functions, scopes, there was something else, oh yeah arrays and I'm going to say I can also use this single combinator idea to represent types. In this language what I want to do is I want to say a type is just a predicate function that accepts or rejects something as being a member of a particular class and I'm going to have some kind of an operator like is where I say for is int, int is just a function that returns true if it's an integer or false if it's something else and when you call it is well there's no syntax in Emily there's just object applications so is is actually going to be a macro where you do something like test if x is an int if it is return x otherwise halt the program and but because it's a function you wouldn't have to be limited to these built in things like int you could just make some random thing up like if it responds well to greater than three say it's in this new type class so you can have a type for greater than three pretty trivially. This isn't sound but you could imagine there being a subset of it which is sound and there's a couple things I can do once I've got this in the language I think that I could have a compiler that's smart enough for that subset of things which is sound and is possible to check I could take all those is's and I could just optimize them out at compile time if I can prove that something's an int I don't need to do the is int check again similarly I could maybe do some smart and ferrant stuff if you imagine these two lines are an entire program well this is an object and in order for this to execute in Emily it has to do some really inefficient stuff I have to locate this object and then I have to call the hash function set thing twice for dot x and dot y but all I'm actually doing in this entire program is just putting two things into x and y and then pulling them out so the compiler could be smart enough to say I could represent this object as just a block of memory and I could be the sets or the reads on x and y could just be reading and writing memory and maybe at some point escapes this function it gets called somewhere else but when it escapes the thing that the type checker knows it's safe to just treat write x read y as memory accesses maybe it gets closed in a wrapper function at that point I can also do this thing I'm incredibly amused by which is I could imagine if we imagine that the the objects are actually just functions we could imagine something like you know the function bar bar bar thing in ML this might not be entirely clear but what I'm imagining is within the square brackets all I've got is an object literal here but I could say that fields on this object literal have as keys types or something so like the first value here is for the key zero return zero for a key where x is something which is greater than zero return the string positive for x which is less than zero return negative otherwise return not a number and I've got this switch statement which actually literally just switches the argument I've just recreated pattern matching using only the stuff that I introduced earlier because this switch thing is going to treat this object literal as a function pass y into it and then that will evaluate to one of these cases that are just sort of looking up as if their fields on this object I think I can do this another slightly we're gonna think I can do is if at some point types can be used to put restrictions on things like saying you can't read or write this Emily is fairly extensible the macros can all be replaced and the things like curly bracket and square bracket eventually I want those to be actually just macros so you could imagine having some sort of a way you could just say backslash load purity and all of a sudden the scope objects are all immutable and maybe that plus a couple other things would allow you to basically create a pure subset of Emily that could still interact with the other parts of Emily and have all the purity guarantees enforced by the type system I hope so that's all I've got if you want to know more you can download all this and see the documentation at the website and you should follow Emily language the language Twitter what you should not do is follow my personal account because it consists entirely of cryptic sentence fragments and gay politics so that's all I think I've got a couple of minutes left the last one ran a little bit long well I don't know if I have I had exactly 24 minutes and 24 seconds does anyone have any questions?


the second largest payment processing company in the entire world just gave way to fiat on-ramp for crypto and digital assets. And I gotta tell you, I think this is a step in the right direction, but there's some other parts about that's going on in the world today which are not so bullish. So what I am talking about, if you don't know, is Stripe. Stripe is the, again, second largest payment processor company in the entire world. I use it personally for my businesses for my online transactions and it's pretty reasonable, PayPal being the number one, and this just came out actually on May 4th. I didn't hear too many people talking about it. I have been out incognito doing a lot of things with family so I couldn't cover this, but I thought it was pretty interesting because I didn't see anybody talk about it anywhere and this is what's going on. So Stripe is going to be hosting fiat to crypto on-ramp and what I find surprising about this is that they're going through with it in the United States, even though the United States is the worst place for crypto thanks to the SEC and Gary Gensler. This is to help US-based customers purchase crypto, but there's some other documentation which shows that it's actually being global. Stripe now offers two implementation options for its on-ramp, an embeddable on-ramp which is crypto purchasing widget directly into your own website or app so you can embed it right away and you can have a fiat on-ramp or if you don't want to deal with that there's a Stripe hosted on-ramp at crypto.link.com to which companies can direct their US-based customers. So when we take a look at Stripe itself just so we know it has a market share globally of almost 20%. PayPal is up there at 42% but Stripe is right behind it and then also as far as global availability they have they're in 46 different countries. So this story I think just didn't get enough traction but I think it should especially for fiat on-ramp and then remember when it said there was there's two different types so there's two different types for what it's offering. First the embeddable option and then there's also one at crypto.link.com which if you don't want to embed it onto your sites you just go to this part. So the question I had was well how much is it going to cost because that's the big thing. How much are we talking about here? So there's two types of fees for just as far as the link.com option. So there's processing fees which is 3 to 5% which I gotta tell you it's pretty steep let's be honest. 3 to 5% of your order value and there's also network fees which are gas fees. So not only are you going to be paying Ethereum and everything that's an ERC20 token 3 to 5% but also the gas fees. So people will say well who wants to use that? It's a great that's a great perspective. So me personally I was like why don't we just do the embeddable option? So I couldn't find any documentation about how much it was so I had to reach out to customer support at Stripe and after about 30 minutes or so this is the answer I got. I said look if you're going to do it like that if your current Stripe fee pricing is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful card charge it's the same price when you accept fiat. So in other tiers it could be 1.99% depending on the volume that you do or it could be even lower than that it all depends on your volume. So I thought well it's not too bad and what I was thinking about specifically was how it's going to compete with Moonpay. Moonpay in my personal opinion is garbage and I know people some people love it I don't know why you're paying 5% now you're paying they actually got wise and said okay we'll do 4.5% so Moonpay if you're going to use like a ledger or some other different types of fiat on-ramp it's 4.5% or $4 whichever is higher so usually you're going to be paying 4.5% and when I see something like Stripe come along I'm like okay if they have this embeddable option between 2 and 3% you know plus gas using that what are they going after and this is where I was talking about I think they're going to go for a global market not just in the US and it just talks about here Stripe fiat the crypto on-ramp there's three different areas crypto exchanges allow users in more than 180 countries deposit funds via dozens of local payment methods with connect payout fiat currencies and 45 plus countries wallets stay focused on building and defy products service apis through Stripe and nft marketplaces you can scale marketplaces and on-board buyers and sellers within seconds for any kind of marketplace including art blah blah blah so when I take a look at this they are directly competing I think with Moonpay and I gotta tell you thank god let's see what happens so for that I think it's a pretty big story let me know what you think about that in the comment section and also just if you've been living under rock is want to cover this real quick gets out of the way CPI so when we take a look at what's going on year over year the consumer price index and what the inflation is you probably know this already everybody's covered this I'm not going to beat it dead horse and the US CPI it was 4.9% year over year US core CPI which takes energy and food is plus 5% year over year and it was pretty much in line with expectations and the markets explode with a whopping 0.3% for bitcoin and the entire market crypto market goes down 0.2 I think there was a little bit of a rally in Trista markets but I don't really have much in that so I really don't care and that's what we have right there and of course we can just see that some people were complaining about this but I gotta tell you I mean if we take a look all the way back to January 2022 between CPI and core CPI I mean it's fluctuated quite a bit but I mean we are going down isn't that the whole point of all these fed rate hikes so I see this as good news maybe we'll see another 25 basis points hike next month and maybe they'll just stall out I don't think they're gonna cut but that's what we have so I see it as bullish also some more good news ether staking deposits top withdrawals for the first time since the shappella upgrade or the Shanghai upgrade and there's a a website I'm a link this in the description you can check this out all you need to know is this I could go over the whole article but it's boring the net staking balance for ETH this is how much has been withdrawn so far 2.49 million ETH that's a lot but this is how much has been deposited 2.79 million has been deposited so this is the first couple of days or so when the deposits have gone above and beyond the withdrawn and that to me is a bullish signal that people do believe in Ethereum they do believe what's happening and they're reinvesting into it so I can see that is good news now I have just told you some pretty good stories have I not it's pretty bullish but you're not going to get off that easy because there are some bearish things that are going on within the world and need to be aware of what's going on and what I'm talking about is there was a summary a report where the interest in crypto plummets among family offices survey so this is from Blockworks I just find it interesting because a lot of places will just only talk about the great things and it won't give you a perspective of really what's going on everywhere because it's not all unicorns and moon drops and rainbows it just isn't so just be aware that numbers don't always go up and there are some things ahead so roughly 26% of family offices are invested in crypto according to a new Goldman Sachs report which is up from 16.21 that sounds pretty good right although we're doing pretty good just wait but those that have not invested and show absolutely no interest in jumping of the space going forward has grown much more from 39% two years ago to 62% see you've pretty much got almost well not double one and a half times of people going you know what we weren't sure about it now we're really not sure about it we're not going to do it the respondents that are potentially interest in the asset class fell from 45% to 12% over that span those the people we wanted to get and we couldn't get those people because they see the problems that are going on in the crypto and digital asset space all the frauds on the rug flows also the Gary Genzler's and the SEC coming out there why would you want to get into this space if you're a family office to me it doesn't make any sense either I think it's a good hedge against uh as far as the store of value for different things but in all honesty I can see where they're coming from the survey was from 166 family offices from around the world now they did say that the belief in the power of blockchain technology is the top reason for them involved in the sector and they put a bunch of different reasons portfolio diversification I got to agree with that one DeFi crypto to store of value only 8% speculation eight that sounds more reasonable and so on and so forth so there's that piece we're losing interest in and family offices also what we've been talking about a lot is for tokenization of assets and Larry Fink who is the BlackRock CEO 10 trillion assets that are management has been talking about that quite a bit tokenization of assets which got everybody talking about great what's the chain going to be here's the chain Microsoft Goldman Sachs and other partners they're going to start their own new blockchain network so when Larry Fink was talking about all these things maybe it was just smoke and mirrors here's what we got a new blockchain network aimed at financial institutions in the works this was announced today actually a couple days ago the Canton network will be a privacy enabled interoperable blockchain network aimed at those working with institutional assets it allowed a synchronization of financial markets that were previously siloed so there is one thing here that interoperable blockchain network so maybe this is private but maybe they will interact with other chains like it says right here so that could be good but the primary is not going to be Ethereum it's not going to be Bitcoin it's not going to be Avalanche not going to be Solana to be their own privacy network which I don't think is really really crypto but we'll let that lie so the network will begin testing in July participants include BNB Parabas CBOE global market digital assets Paxos Microsoft Goldman Sachs Deloitte and a host of others and Kathy Clay the executive VP says this this is exactly what Larry Fink said the tokenization of real world assets may offer an unprecedented opportunity to create new market infrastructure and drive efficiency in the trading of products across the globe so you got to ask yourself there's waning interest in some family offices also in some of their institutions and now we've got these big players going you know what we're going to do our own thing we're not going to use anything maybe some interoperability down down the road why is that why is why are people shying away a lot of things that we just talked about but there's also been the big one this place is turning into a casino now this is going to be a very unpopular opinion and I will not dwell on it too too much but there was a tweet lady crypto was pretty good and she brought it out she said yeah this is a casino and in a lot of these meme coins you can invest whatever you want to i'm not your dad's do whatever you want to show it's great for you but to me it doesn't lend to legitimacy and if you're making money fantastic that's good for you but just know that all these different meme coins that you're getting in on they have no utility they don't do a damn thing and the things that you're getting into is fine you're just making money but what you're doing is dumping other people look again you do whatever you want to making a ton of money great fantastic but I will remind everybody of this just because the number goes up doesn't mean the project has utility or is worth anything because it's not and here's a prime example Voyager which I used to talk about quite a bit and I think it would still be around if it wouldn't for that idiotic mistake that they made to lend 630 million dollars to three hours capital and make it uncollateralized geniuses regardless the Voyager token is now ranked 456 after dropping out of the top 50 for good reason but just so you know as far as the trading volume over the last 24 hours 16 million 914 thousand why is this token or any of these tokens even in existence all it is is speculators trading it back and forth it has no use case it has no function it had a function when Voyager was around but it doesn't now so all the different things that are out there just take a look at what does this thing do what is its utility it's okay to make money I'm not saying that I'm just saying if you're going to be investing in a long term there's a lot better ways to do things which will lead me to my last point we'll get out of here all these things we talked about you might be a little bit shaky like what am I invested into whatever I can't tell you what to do but I can tell what I'm doing the things that I look at that are going to do pretty well I can see a store of value for Bitcoin and heck I can even see a lot of different plays for layer one solutions and another thing that's layer one solutions can really bring on board is blockchain or web three gaming this is Nakamoto games I'm going to link them in the description they just announced that they're in the final verification process with meta you know facebook for the facebook gamer profile strike for us to go live on may 19th alongside games with 5 million to 15 million players it'll launch the first ever web three game on meta during the revolution that remind me of just how big facebook is now facebook might be a joke to some people but just so you know it's almost got 3 billion people as far as users in the world it's not bad it's saying we're looking at around 8 billion people give or take and that looks pretty good and you know what else used to be pretty big on facebook stupid games like this so farmville which was been around for for quite some time it's only got like 30 million people like this 20 million people follow this and just so you know this was a goofy game I used to play it actually and it was mildly amusing and fun but just imagine what's going to happen when you can use and trade crypto and do win to earn not play to earn but like a win to earn type of situation you know people are going to do they're going to lose their minds and the last thing I will say is this but Rob we just took a look at microsoft and all these different places they're going to build their own chain why doesn't facebook just do that because facebook is smart enough to realize they don't have to build everything from scratch this is facebook acquisitions and from 2005 they made some pretty big place I don't know what friend feed is or connect you but remember frenster chain labs drop i o sure snap i o mail rank this little company called instagram they picked that up they could have made that themselves they're not going to do that they're just going to acquire acquire and acquire and before you know it they're going to be one of the biggest companies in the entire world and that's what we have so to me i'm pretty bullish on layer ones bitcoin and gaming and that's it for today so look like today's video give it a thumbs up consider subscribing this is not a set it and forget a lot of things going on might behoove you to subscribe but i want to say i appreciate you stopping by thanks so much and i'll see you on the next one