So, our first speaker today will be Manuel Anders. Manuel Anders is a senior economist at Bayern LB. And this is the Bavarian State Bank. And before really falling into the Bitcoin rabbit hole, Daniel won several awards from Bloomberg Finance as a foreign exchange analyst. And so he had a very good preparation to really look into Bitcoin as an alternative financial system. He will talk about Bitcoin today as a decentralized monetary assistant and about the monetary hunger that Bitcoin has. Yeah, thank you, Moritz. I think we can turn it down a bit. But can you hear me well? Too well, perhaps? I have a loud voice anyway, but if it's too loud, just say something. So what I will start with in the first talk is more of an introduction to Bitcoin. I tried at least to bring also some new perspective so people are into Bitcoin for quite some time. But in general, the purpose is to later foundations a bit for our discussions, especially later when we talk about the discussion between Bitcoin and gold. I think it's a bit too loud. So I will just try to do something here. Is this mine? Is it better? Probably. OK, so I wanted to start off with, OK, I always start with a bold statement because, obviously, the point of the value of Bitcoin conference is to have lively debates. And I think this is also one of the success ingredients of the whole concept. So I already start with a bold statement here. And you will probably hear a lot of other bold statements from my side as well. So what do I mean with Bitcoin as the only real global money? We have to first start with this chart here, where you can see the evolution of information networks. So we have in the very beginning the telegraph. And as you all know, we ended up with the internet. It took quite some time to get there. But the interesting point is that there are still shortcomings of the internet because you can only transfer information with this information network. And what was missing was a technology to also transfer value globally and digitally. And this is how I think about Bitcoin because, for me, Bitcoin starts where the internet ended because it solved the problem of digital scarcity. So you had digital objects that you couldn't duplicate at will, what you couldn't do with the internet as an information network. So when you then say, OK, how does Bitcoin fit into the monetary map that we have today? I mean, this is obviously a bit superficial. And the light is also a bit biased towards Bitcoin. But when you have your F here, you have two categories actually, digital versus physical. This is pretty easy. And then you have the more central category here that you have borders. And you have money which is only valid within certain borders and where you have a dedicated monetary policy. And then you have global money. So Bitcoin, obviously, and you also have gold there. And if you look at this chart where you have a global digital information network and then you have a digital global money, you will probably always say, OK, Bitcoin sounds like the better deal given this information network that we rely on. But I wanted at this point to do something else. And not just say, OK, this just fits very well with the internet, which it does. And it relies heavily on the internet, obviously. But I wanted to derive a bit more from first principles since we are in Vienna. And we will hear a lot of oxygen thinking later. So I tried to do the same approach a bit and go into a more deductive approach there to address the question, do we actually need global money? I mean, you could argue, well, it fits the internet, but are there any economic reasons or is there an economic reasoning to end up with the conclusion that global money has certain advantages? And in order to understand this or to go through this mind journey, we first have to start a question, ask ourselves the question, what is the purpose of money? What is it for? And you cannot avoid addressing this question by looking at the problem that money was trying to solve is solving.  It's the problem of the coincidence of wants. So it's the problem that what I want at a certain point in time and what you want and what you can also give and what I can give in this moment rarely coincidates. And so the problem is we really need a mechanism to circumvent a bit this problem. And if you think about it, it's very interesting that, I mean, there are a lot of discussions and I'm not an historian, but if you think about the fact that perhaps the first system was not directly money, which solved this problem was at least circumvented it a bit. It was probably a system which was based on debt. So if you think about small communities, you didn't have to introduce money directly. Probably had some form of money, but you could still base this society, if it's very small at least, you could base this society on a system of favors, assets and liabilities.  Why did this system work? It worked because it was a very close society, a small community. It's actually the same that we have today when we act within our family borders. It's rarely the case that too much money is involved, it's more a system of, I help you today and you help me tomorrow. And this worked because there was a strong web of trust and what game theorists would call, it was a series of repeated games. So it was never the case that the neighbor was just leaving the community and was disappearing and couldn't repay the debt that he owed me. But this was, and the interesting thing for me is when you think about like this, that you already have to have your opportunities to have gains from specialization there. But the problem was it was restricted to small communities where you could have this system of trust-based interactions. So most of you are probably familiar with the so-called Dumbled Number which is around 150 and what is the Dumbled Number? Dumbled Number says that you can only have meaningful relationships with people up to 150. And this is at least how I like to look at the phenomenon of money is that money came into play to make this binding constrained a bit less binding and because you could scale your society with money because now you could interact and transact with strangers as well. So you didn't need this system of trust and you could, for example, transact with a community or a different tribe. And the interesting thing then is if you scale your society like this, you have the possibility then to engage much more in specialization. So beforehand you had a bit of specialization and then you had much more specialization because you could, for example, say, okay, the one tribe is providing agricultural food and the other society or the other tribe is providing, I don't know, some form of weapons or whatever. Weapons probably a better example there, but something else. So the major point that I'm trying to get at is if you say money is scaling societies, enabling specialization, enhancing trade, then the question for me is where does this stop then? So if this, mathematically speaking, this welfare function of Bitcoin or not of Bitcoin, of money in general, but also of Bitcoin is monetarily increasing. So a bit more global money is better because it enhances productivity which comes from specialization and you get welfare effects there. Why would you say, okay, at some point it's enough welfare gains, I had enough welfare gains, I had enough productivity gains, nobody would say the society doesn't need more productivity gains. So this is how I personally look at this, right now at least, I've also thought about it a bit that the major point of money was to scale societies. I mean, this is not a new concept that I came up with, it's the example in the Bitcoin community who laid out all of these points but I think it's the appropriate way to think about it. And then the question is, okay, what form of global money, so if you just say for a moment global money is good because it maximizes this welfare function which form of global money is preferable? Or does it play any role whether the money is physical or digital? Well, I mean, obviously digital fits better or matches better with the information network that we have which is digital obviously but I also wanted to make a different argument here or I wanted to start with the debate that we will have later because in my view there are two problems when it comes to the physical nature in this case of gold for example but also other precious metals because the problem of gold is there are many problems but one of the problems is that you have extremely high cost for full validation of gold. So if you want to validate gold you need a smetting furnace which costs around 700,000 euros which you probably don't have at home and the other problem is the point of portability. This is obviously not all these are just the major points we'll discuss about this later so you could argue I can send gold peer to peer from Austria to China by delivering it for example myself well you could do this but it's economically not really feasible so the same goes for I could theoretically validate Bitcoin myself, gold myself, Bitcoin you can, gold not but the problem then is it's you couldn't argue okay I incur this high economic cost for this for one or two transactions so this always leads us to the fact that you have some intermediaries who are involved because you need economies of scale so they don't they have a smetting furnace and they are checking gold not for one person but for a thousand of people and then it's becoming economically viable but then, I mean this is just my personal thinking and we can debate about this later my problem then is that I have in my head if I have those intermediaries they can always censor transactions so if I want to reach someone in the world if I really want to have a global form of money and I want to address everybody in the world which is in the end the global money when I have a physical good involved and I have intermediaries coming along with them I have the problem that it might be the case that I can't really transact I could theoretically transact if the intermediaries allow it but it could very well be the case that they don't allow it for whatever reasons is another discussion I think but this is how I think about it conceptually and so what I'm trying to get at here is that if you have your scarcity at the level of on the physical layer you run into a lot of problems because you have this centralization forces and it's just a thesis but my thesis from the very beginning here is perhaps, I want to try out this now here okay, no it doesn't work this thesis is that perhaps the only real global money that you could have is if you solve the scarcity problem not on the physical level like you have with gold but on the digital level as it is the case with Bitcoin I think now we have enough to discuss later so the question then is okay, I put Bitcoin here in this category to the right but why is this monetary policy so decentralized why can't it be changed? I think it's a very important point to make well, okay actually there should be another slide well the point is that with Bitcoin you have basically software code so Bitcoin, no this is too far yeah, okay, that's it so Bitcoin is software code so it's actually Bitcoin is what the peer to peer network is running so much more than these six guys here these are purpose built nodes mini computers that run the Bitcoin code and the most important part of the code for us right here when it comes to monetary policy is this we don't go through all the code here we just focus on this part here in light blue and this is the monetary policy rule like the Taylor rule of Bitcoin so the number of Bitcoins that is produced every 10 minutes is equal to this formula and it's important to know that the half things variable is an integer so it can only be one, two, three, four, five right now it's two very soon it will be three in May and this is everything that you have to know about the monetary policy rule that only this half a number increases when you reach a certain block height which means a certain progression of the blockchain with transactions and very soon we will have the 630 block and that's why the half things will change from two to three so we will enter a new era we'll get into this much more later with the stock to flow model but here it's important to have this in mine so the point then is okay if I have this code I can just change it or I can copy it I hear this very often when people see the previous slide and say okay but I can just copy it well first if you think about Bitcoin network as a fish swarm like here and you are one of those fish and you say okay I want to copy the code what you're actually doing if you are copying exactly each and every line of the code you're just replicating yourself you're just creating another fish you're just creating another node so this is well you could do it if you want it's good for the network you have another fish you have another network node the probably more interesting point is that you say okay I'm one of those fishes but I want to change something I want this half thing and variable I don't know what an integer is I want to get rid of this variable I just want to have 50 divided by two that's much easier you can do this but the problem then is that you will become this little guy you will be alone or perhaps you have some other fish that are doing the same then you have perhaps five little Nemo's there but in the end you create a new network and you separate yourself from the rest of the Bitcoin network and the question then is okay but couldn't it be the case that a lot of those fish are doing this? Well, you would have to convince there are probably more than 100,000 nodes right now probably even more than this and you would have to convince a large portion of those fish and if you think about it in a different way if you think in a more traditional way you don't have a monetary policy council of three, five, 25 people but you have a monetary policy council of more than 100,000 people you could very well imagine what happens if they decide on monetary policy they wouldn't change anything they would just decide okay, we don't change anything we don't change anything and this is exactly what the Monetary Policy Council of Bitcoin is doing every 10 minutes they are saying we don't change anything we leave this code as it is just for the pure fact that they know that they can't change the network dynamics because the network is too large to convince a significant portion to change it obviously there are also incentives in play so if you are a node you usually have a stake in the system so you own some Bitcoin and any change to the monetary policy would dilute your own asset that you're having so you have like a firewall in the background if for whatever reason you could change the network dynamic you still have the incentives in play as well as a backup security so we've established a lot of things actually there might be an argument to say that only digital money can be real global money we have seen that the monetary policy of Bitcoin can't be changed or it's very unrealistic that it can be changed now the third point is especially for people from the investment community that are probably around here today why is this guy always talking about the fact that Bitcoin is money and why are people buying Bitcoin obviously Bitcoin is not a fully established form of money yet so you have this weird transition period where you can and it's actually a unique probably unique event in human kind or in human history that you can speculate that it can invest in the future of the money so it is in the equilibrium state it's a form of money but during the transition it's an investment because it's risky because usually you only have investment or you have cash reserves which are riskless by definition so now you have this strange situation that you have a money which is for a certain period of time in investment because obviously it's not completely clear whether it will become the money of the future and then of course next question is okay I somehow understand this but where does the value come from and this is what I wanted to show here that there is no utility value of Bitcoin the same goes for Euro and for gold it's also almost no utility value in my opinion at least and it's completely the different case for example with oil with oil you only have utility there's no monetary premium whatsoever there so the hunting field for Bitcoin so to speak is this middle row the light blue columns where Bitcoin could absorb monetary value from other assets with monetary value and I mean this is just a rough illustration so here I have the status quo of Bitcoin with some monetary premium already and this is well obviously the theoretical potential is 100% with Bitcoin obviously because it doesn't have any utility so the next question then is okay how far could this go then how far what would it mean if Bitcoin gets more and more monetary value from other assets and I wanted to finish off by two ways to address this topic the first one is the stock-to-flow approach where you can we get into this in a second talk later tonight for the time being I just want to say that the stock-to-flow approach tries to evaluate Bitcoin by its hardness and the hardness is quantified by this ratio of stock-to-flow which you could arguably use as a very good measure of the hardness of of an asset which is regularly done for example also with gold and then you can see that right now Bitcoin is about 100 billion probably a bit more than this right now and in May when it the next next half epoch that we saw earlier will have taken place we will be with Bitcoin very near to the stock-to-flow ratio of gold so we will enter a new era and obviously these are not price predictions and whatever but if you just apply this stock-to-flow approach you can see that the fair valuation of an asset within stock-to-flow above 50 would rather be in a vicinity of one trillion instead of 100 billion so the very interesting it's getting very interesting when you don't think about the halving this year but halving in 2024 because then for the first time you have a stock-to-flow asset and you have an asset with a stock-to-flow ratio above 400 which you have never seen before in the history of humankind and then you would have a valuation of probably another factor 10x of 10 trillion so people when they hear this they often say this can never happen this can never happen because where should this value come from and I recommend you I don't know how much time I have because this is just showing zero but since the beginning so I'm not sure I recommend you if you are interested in this to read I think it's a pretty new book from Andy Adstrom he is also a former goldman no I'm not a goldman guy but he's also a former financial guy and and he he's a wealth manager right now so it's very fitting for today's event and he did some number crunching in his book and he said hey look let's just do a rough calculation what amount of monetary value could Bitcoin absorb from different asset classes and I mean I know that I can already see Professor Polart being a bit skeptical because this is obviously not a really Austrian approach but I like it because you can have very conservative very conservative estimates here and you arrive very quickly at a very high number so let's just go through it if you think about gold you have a market cap of nine trillion more or less if you assume that only ten percent of it is non-monetary value you have roughly eight trillion which is pure monetary value and the value that Bitcoin is after so to speak and you just say it takes one third of it you already have a big number like 2.7 or something like this then you have the fiat currencies especially I would say the Vika currencies Argentine peso Venezuela and stuff like this and you have base money around 20 trillion in the world global base money if you just say you take ten percent of this you have another two trillion then you can look at stocks real estate so real estate just think about apartments in London central London or Manhattan where nobody lives in because they use the store of value this number is around like stocks and real estate together 270 trillion which is a huge number obviously so if you say they have multi-value of 10 percent and you have 27 as a base and you take not just 10 percent of this yeah it doesn't have to be that much very conservative another 2.7 and then this is a point that I got from Andy in his book if you've never thought about this that one of the target groups is also offshore accounts because they are very similar when it comes to uh... unseasability censorship resistance obviously the estimates for those are even more difficult because well their offshore accounts one the the lowest estimate is 10 trillion and if you say perhaps here Bitcoin takes a bit more because it's a better match you take twenty percent there you have another two trillion and you already got almost 10 trillion uh... market cap uh... and my obviously these are just estimates in a number crunching but what I want to show you here is since the addressable market for global money is so huge so the uh... the base that you are addressing and the market that you are trying to uh... compete with other multi-asset with is so huge that doesn't take uh... doesn't take huge proportions to take uh... already 10 trillion from this market cap and we will see how hungry Bitcoin will be within this year in the coming years uh... but I think there's a lot to eat for it out there thank you very much and we will talk about the flow of water later then and this was just an introduction thank you very much


Hello everyone. This week we're going to be talking about data locations and the meaning of data that are located in certain locations. For this lecture I'll talk about a few common places or a few places we normally look for information about user activities and in systems and then I'll have a couple things you can read that says about other data types and where to look for them and how to investigate them on your own. So so far we have from actually one of our first lectures a process for asking questions and finding answers to those questions, specifically using the scientific method for your investigation. So so far we've acquired suspect or victim data, we've recovered quite a bit of information from the suspect or victim data and now we need to make sense of it. We actually need to investigate that suspect or victim data and find out what how does this data relate to the question that's being asked. So the first thing we need to know is what is the question that we're actually trying to ask with this data. Once we've done these investigation or once we've done all of these forensic processes to get the data exactly the way that the suspect had it, what what are we actually trying to answer here? So are we just looking for evidence that the husband killed their wife? Are we looking for evidence that this kid went to a certain fishing website or that their computer was hacked? What are we looking for? So to be able to start the investigation we need a very good question. What is the investigator trying to answer? We need verified forensic copies of the data so that was the past lectures. I hope you you are aware of you know acquisition and verification of the suspect data and we need the data to have been processed somehow or recovered. This is our kind of recovery process and usually in forensic tools also indexing and doing some other processes to get the data ready to be analyzed. So that's what we have so far. We need to figure out what exactly does this data mean. So now that we have the data we have to find what it means to our investigation. Imagine that I'm looking at whether the husband could have killed his wife. If the crime is not necessarily a cyber crime that's a very physical crime but digital devices might be related to it. So maybe I want to prove that the husband was actually at the house at the time that's around the time that the murder took place. I can potentially do that in a few different ways with the with the data and the first thing that comes to mind is looking at time stamps on the computer. So does the husband have for example his own laptop and was he logged in was he checking Facebook or YouTube or something like that and what were the time stamps of those activities on his system. So looking at time stamps can potentially place him along with the fact that he was logged in on or someone was logged in on his computer can place him at the crime scene potentially. So some examples of some things that we look at to try to establish user behavior user actions are time stamps definitely. Windows registry entries and also some similar entries in OSX and Linux we'll talk about. Files in the downloads folder. What do files in the downloads folder actually mean? Files in the temporary internet files. What what could files in the temporary internet files mean? So I'll talk about those locations and what they potentially mean for our investigation just because it's so useful for so many investigations. So also I'll have a lot of information about other locations as well. So first off file time stamps. Think about on your computer right now or your phone or whatever digital device you're dealing with what time stamps are created where they located and where is the data stored. So most or let's say most people are using probably Windows systems. On Windows systems files tend to have well now two but usually about three file time stamps. So whenever I create a file or I modify a file or somehow change it those time stamps are updated. So we usually have creation time, access time and modified time most common access modified. But what does that actually mean? Whenever I'm looking at those time stamps what can they mean for the investigation? So most file systems on any system a file system itself will keep track of the time stamp information. So in a Windows system we most likely have NTFS file system installed and all of the metadata or the time stamp information along with some other information will be stored in the file system. It's not related I mean it's not stored in the file itself it's stored in the file system. Again we usually have modified access and created times. So what do these time stamps mean? It means that some action has taken place at that particular time or around that time. We just have to establish what action was it. So for an example for file creation times most people would look at a file creation time and say well obviously that's the time that the file was created but is that always true? Can we always say that's true? Not necessarily. If I create a file on my computer then the creation time would most likely be the time that I created it. But what happens whenever you copy the file onto a USB stick and then move it to another computer and copy it onto that computer? Are the time stamps updated? How are the time stamps updated? And how the time stamps are updated completely depend on the file systems that they're being copied to. So for example most USB sticks are probably something like FAT32 or EXFAT and whenever you copy the time stamps over or the data over the time stamps might be updated and then if you copy it to another computer that might be updated again. So this metadata can change depending on the file system and how people are copying things. So just because we see a created time at a certain time it doesn't necessarily mean that that was when it was created. It just means that some action has taken place on this system at that time and we have to find out what exactly that action is. So time stamps can be updated for example moving the files around, copying the files, creating the file, editing the file. All of these common actions that we do on files can potentially update the time stamps in different ways. So it's the investigators job to know when are certain time stamps updated for certain file systems. Once we know how the time stamps are updated then it becomes much easier for us to investigate and actually say something about what those time stamps mean. So we'll practice that a little bit this week. So we really just need to figure out whenever we're looking at a time stamp we know that some action has taken place on that data most likely on that system at a particular time. We just have to establish which action was it that took place. So we'll work a lot more with time stamps and especially timeline building this week but I'll talk about that a little bit more. Next a very common data source for investigations especially in Windows systems are Windows registry analysis. The Windows registry is essentially a database of all of the settings and just settings and data that Windows keeps. So every setting that Windows knows about is stored in the Windows registry along with a lot of other information about the user about the system about connections that have been made all sorts of information like that. So because it stores all of the settings information it's a very very good source for forensic investigators to be able to recover activities that have taken place in the system. The registry contains something we call keys that contain information about the settings and each key has its own time stamp. And one key that I particularly like to talk about is something called the typed URLs key. So something that looks like typed URLs probably of course it's a URL so it most likely relates to browsing behavior right and it's specifically called typed URLs. So when we look at that key we want to establish what exactly does it mean if we find data in this key and whenever we look in there I have an example on my slides here. If we look into that key we find just websites. So what exactly does it mean whenever we find websites inside that key? And from its name you might be able to guess those are websites that are specifically typed in by the user. They are not accessed it's not internet history or anything like that. Those are the things that are only added whenever a user types it in manually using a keyboard. They could be inserted other ways. Hackers for example could try to insert some things but for the most part they are specifically typed in by the user. Now why is that interesting? Well we have a key that's only created manually by a human and that means that whenever we're doing an investigation if we want to say that somebody knew about a bad website or they knew they were going to someplace illegal or they knew they were hacking a certain bank or something like that we can establish that they manually typed in the domain name for this bad website or all these things because a human had to have done it. Now of course placing the actual person as the one who typed it is a little bit more difficult but at least we can say a human must have typed this. It's not going to be automatically added it's not going to be a robot or something like that it's going to be a human. So this data source typed URLs in the Windows registry can start to establish human behavior like a human must have done this and that's what we're normally trying to figure out when did the suspect do something with a victim and how do we know that it was them and not something else right so this kind of this kind of investigation. So typed URLs we'll look at that a little bit this week right. The other thing about typed URLs that's somewhat interesting not only the fact that it must have been a human but also that there is a an order to typed URLs. So basically for the first URL that is the most recently typed URL and we have a timestamp so we can say that this URL was typed at a certain time. So if the suspect is trying to say I don't know anything about that website we can say were you home at this time and if they say yeah I was home using my computer but I don't know that website then we can say okay well this typed URL this URL was typed at the time that you were home using your computer so how do you explain that. I'm trying to establish what activities could the user have done and what is their story or their alibi what are they trying to say happened and what does the computer say happened that's that's what we're trying to do. So we'll talk about typed URLs and analyze a little bit of the registry this week. Next is files in the downloads folder think about for a second what what you think files that you find in a downloads folder mean. Of course most web browsers will default any data that they download will download directly to the downloads folder but does that mean that that's the only way that data gets into the downloads folder if we find a an illegal file or a virus or any of this any of these things in the downloads folder what can that tell us it can tell us that it probably came from a browser but I might have also copied it from a USB stick or some other place and I just happened to put it in my downloads folder for temporary storage. Don't assume that there's only one way to get data into a specific folder like the downloads folder it can tell us that most likely this file is related to internet browsing but it doesn't necessarily have to be right so then we go back to timestamp analysis when would the files have been added to the folder we can see the the timestamps of the files when they were created or modified we can also look at internet history at that point and see was there in any internet activity at the same time so now we're looking at multiple data sources to trying to try to figure out okay I think these files were downloaded from the internet but I don't see in any internet history or anything related to these files from any browser installed on the system but these files are still in the downloads folder where could they have come from well now we can go back to the Windows registry and look for inserted USB devices and what time the last USB device was inserted maybe that USB device correlates to the same time as the files in the downloads folder so we can kind of make an argument for for that so again just looking at different data sources and trying to tie everything together don't assume that a data source has to come from a certain location like the internet for the downloads folder but it also is very likely that it did right so we don't assume anything but the chances are pretty good the downloads are going to be related somehow the next thing kind of related files and internet cash or temporary internet files or what's called I net cash now temporary storage for browsers when downloading web pages or web resources a lot of people don't know that their browsers whenever they're connecting to a website the reason it takes a long time to load is because your computer is actually downloading all of the material to your computer right so your browser stores all of that information in temporary internet cash or cash file basically many files are downloaded that the user is usually not aware of so everything you can see on your screens downloaded and that's resident on your computer this is good for investigators as long as it's not cleared out because we can potentially see what the user was accessing however other programs may also use temporary internet files or I net cash it doesn't necessarily have to be a browser although at most of the times it is a browser other programs can use it and could potentially download the illegal the illegal files or legal information that way through a different program than a browser but because it's in temporary internet files we might just automatically assume it's a browser so again there's a lot of a lot of data sources that have a lot of information about user activities that we're normally very interested in the list is huge and it also depends on the operating system systems we're looking at so this week we'll take a look at a few of the data sources for windows as well as maybe some common data sources for I think I'll do Linux a few Linux systems so there are many locations for data and there are a lot of different types of data that relate to user activities either directly or indirectly and usually just by making a timeline we can get an idea of what traces normally relate to user activities each data source or each piece of data can mean something different depending on the context of the case so I guess the whole point behind this is you have to investigate within the context of the case or within the context of the data around around the data that you're looking for so for example if you find in temporary internet files or files that are downloaded whenever people are just browsing the internet if you find pictures of knives and bombs and a picture of soul you might assume that the person wants to kill somebody or blow up soul or whatever however if you look around a little bit more you might also find out that they were just reading CNN news and the CNN news articles had pictures of knives and bombs and soul or something like that right so in one case it might be somebody planning something horrible in context it's actually just somebody who's reading the news like normal right so context and investigations is very very important and the whole point of this is investigators must know how when and how data changes based on user and program activities the more you know how data changes based on some action the better or the easier it becomes to try to reconstruct all of these events so if you know all of the different ways that temporary internet files could be updated or could be added you might or you'll have a better chance that's finding the truth whenever you're doing your investigation so that's what we're doing this week is looking at all of these different data sources trying to extract them and analyze them and see what can they tell us about what we're trying to investigate so this week we'll have quite a bit of homework about just data analysis data location identification and pulling out some more information thank you


Hi everybody and welcome to our channel. Today I'm going to make a video about what it means when you see on the online tool on the IRCC website the wording decision made. So this is a question that we get a lot in our office. So basically when you have filed it could be various different types of immigration applications. Most of them you're able to go on the online tool on the IRCC website, put in your information with your name, date of birth, client ID or file number, and you can see some steps. So you could see when you filed your application, when correspondence was submitted by immigration, when you provided documentation it was received. It's not a very elaborate tool in the sense that it's not like you can click on these titles and then get more information. In our practice, I've always told clients and I always also train my staff at the office to not, we do check it at the office when we file application, but that's not what we rely on to get the actual information or to get concrete information about what's actually happening in your file. The reason for that is that sometimes we might have three, four back and forth with immigration about different things on an application and we get those correspondence usually by email these days, whereas in the past was more mail. Sometimes we still get mail, but it's mostly by email and when we go on the online tool that information is not there or it's not as detailed as we hope it would be. So that's why we actually also tell our clients that if they retain their services to not check what's going on online and leave that part to us just because in all these years that I've been practicing, most of the time it confuses clients because they might see information, they don't understand, they might see correspondence has been sent and then they think, oh, that's a decision or that's a refusal or that's an approval, but sometimes it's just, for example, a correspondence was sent to confirm that you paid your biometrics or a correspondence was sent for you to do a medical which was already done a long time ago, but now the online tool indicated it later, like a month or two later. So it's not something that's really reliable, I would say. So I always suggest that if you have a lawyer, call your lawyer if you have a question about the processing of your file. So you call our office and you ask us because we are handling hundreds and hundreds of files. We've done this for a very long time and we know how the system works and how things get updated. If there's something that looks odd or it's been a longer processing time than expected, then me or my team will call the call center and ask questions and even then with respect to the call center, we often advise our clients not to call themselves because you could call the call center five times and you get five different answers. Not because necessarily the person is not giving you the right information, it's just different clerks have different levels of training and they might see or understand things differently on your file. So instead of getting nervous and getting stressed, looking online, calling and getting odd information that you might not understand and then you tend to panic, then it's much better to just call us, ask all your questions and then we can clarify everything. And if we're not able to, then we'll look into it further. So one of the things that often appears on the online tool is the wording decision made. And I think if you click on it, it doesn't really say much or it might give a dig or something like that. And a lot of clients thinks that, oh, my application was approved or refused, I'm going to get a decision tomorrow or the next day. My experience has shown me that most of the time that decision or sometimes it's not a decision, it's just a correspondence, unfortunately, can come weeks or sometimes even months later. I mean, I can go on some of our files that we filed PR card renewal or H&C and I can go on the online tool and it says decision made and we filed the application maybe a year and a half ago and different things are happening or sometimes I have the approval of the H&C and I go on the online tool months later and it says it doesn't say decision made or it doesn't say approval. So it's really not something reliable. So if you see the decision made, I mean, most of the time it most likely means that something is about to happen soon or we might get some correspondence, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get something that same day or we're going to get something the next day, it depends if it's being an email being sent out. It depends if it's by mail, then sometimes it could take a few weeks to get the correspondence. So when you see the decision made, if you have a lawyer, I recommend you call your representative and ask what this is about. I mean, we're always happy to explain what it means, which is essentially doesn't really mean anything. And also, we also recommend a lot of our clients see that and they say, okay, well, that means the decision is on the way. I'm going to call the officer. I'm going to send an email. I'm going to send the web form to ask them to send me a response right away and tell me what's happening. And they call the call center and then the call center can't really give information. And then you start getting worried about something that first hasn't happened. And second, you as human beings, we always expect the worst. So we're always thinking that something happened. It must be negative. And we start ruminating and we start panicking and we think of all the different scenarios so that when we get it, we're kind of psychologically prepared for it. But I mean, if you have a good representative, a good lawyer, the representative should explain to you the process from the beginning. At our office, we spend a lot of time during the intake appointment, during the consultation to explain how things work with immigration, to explain that it might take a long time, it could be short, it could be long. Unexpected things can happen, but we know how to navigate the system. We put all of this in writing in our contract. We put all of this in writing to you when we submit your application. We also have a lot of information on our website and a lot of instructions and tips and guidelines that we provide to you in writing so that reading it many, many times, you kind of understand that, OK, I'm hired an expert. They know what they're doing. And if I have questions, I can call my representative. Now, if you're not, you don't have a representative. Of course, what you're going to do is you're going to check the online tool. And of course, you're going to call the call center.  And I didn't use a representative. Me and my husband, we prepared it ourselves. And I also go on the online tool and I check what's happening because now that it was my file, I think I always understood what clients felt. But this time around, it was really like a reality to really know when it's happening to you. So I was also going and checking, even though I was basically not taking my own advice, but I would see correspondence sent. And then sometimes it was accurate. Sometimes it wasn't. I also called the call center a few times and, oh, did you receive my file, even though I saw in my FedEx that it was received? And just to see if I can get something more. So sometimes the exercise, so if you don't have a representative, the exercise of calling and the exercise of going online, just that act in itself might make you feel better. And if it does, it's OK to go and check and call if it's going to bring down the anxiety level. But if it's going to make you feel even worse, if you have a tendency to panic, if you're going to take that and extrapolate into a conclusion that's very unrealistic, then I recommend to not call or not call as often or not check as often and be very patient and always go by the processing time that's online. I mean, more or less, it's often the processing time. I would say always a few months less. And if you don't think about it, then often you get a wonderful surprise when the decision does happen. So having lived it myself personally, I can now confirm that I truly understand my clients even more. So if you have any questions about what your online tool is saying, if something happened in your file and you really feel there's something wrong, you can contact us, we'd be happy to assist. But in general, the point of this video was to talk to our clients, but also talk to the general public, whether you have a lawyer or not, just to know that the online tool is not always the best tool. Because you have to rely on the correspondence that you receive. You have to rely on the processing time. And it's not always updated in real time. And when you know this, you're not going to place all of your concentration on that and think about the worst. So hopefully this will allow you to be a little bit more positive while you're waiting for your application. Thank you.