And welcome to Think Tech, I'm Jay Fidel, it's Thursday morning at 10. And we're talking tax with Tom Yamachika, talking tax and fiscal policy. No, don't leave. This will be very, very interesting, I promise you. Welcome, Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Jay. We're gonna talk today about a subject that has come up often, and it's one in homelands. We're gonna talk about the historic funding, funding that is really historic, you noticed in the paper, $600 million now, the legislature is considering giving to DHHL. And that is remarkable. So Tom, for as long as I've been in Hawaii, which is 55 years, 56, 57 years I've been here, this story, the story of one homelands has repeated itself over and over again. It's about all these people waiting online for their whole lives for a piece of that land, 200,000 acres, wine homelands controls, and PS, there's a lot more it could have too. The largest landowner in the state is the state, and they can have as much land as they want, but somehow they're unable to manage it in a way to satisfy the mission of the agency, and that is to help the native Hawaiian people get housing. So here we go again, another story, deja vu all over again, only this time, $600 million. I don't understand, Tom, why we keep hearing the story, and I certainly don't understand $600 million. I guess it's burning a hole in somebody's pocket. Well, let me give you some background on the entire thing here. We're talking about the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, and what that is for those of us who aren't familiar with them, is they are an agency of the state government. They administer about 200,000 acres of public lands, and their mission is to lease it to native Hawaiians to live, farm, ranch, and engage in commercial or other activities. It's led by a nine-member commission, and they must provide financial and technical assistance to native Hawaiians defined as those with at least 50% Hawaiian blood to enhance their economic self-sufficiency and promote community-based development. And they were kind of mentioned in the Hawaiian Homes Commissions Act of 1920, which as you can tell from the date, greatly precedes or even being part of the United States of America as a state, so it was about 38 years before. In practice, however, moving native Hawaiians to homestead lands has been an agonizingly slow process. We have some other nonprofit organizations that have reported that the list of native Hawaiians awaiting homestead land leases has been growing steadily. In 2010, the list was about 26,000 people. Today, it's more than 28,700. It's no exaggeration to say that scores of Hawaiians have died on the wait list. That was always the case. That was the news reported when I first came here, that they're dying to get these native Hawaiian lands and they're not getting them. Dying is absolutely correct. No exaggeration there. Now, this year, our legislature wants to do something different. They are proposing to give $600 million to the Department of Hawaiian Homelands. They think that this would be a great thing to clear up that backlog. And the question is, can they do it? Now, the reason why- What's the connection between money and clearing up the backlog? What do they need the money for? A lot of these, the 200,000 acres, it's an uninhabitable land. It's forests, cliffs, land that really nobody else wanted. So some money has to be expended to swap these out into people, into lands that people can actually live on. So you got to do that. Can't the legislature do that in one fell swoop? As I mentioned, the largest landowner in the state is the state. They can do that with one stroke of the pen without costing anything. Well, if they could, they probably would have done it by now. I'm sure there are a lot of complications and things that have prevented that from happening between 1920 and today.  Okay. And you got to put infrastructure in the land. You have to get permits. You have to build houses and then people can move fit, right? And getting these permits, for example, is no easy task, especially if the land is, let's say, not viable in its current state. Now, the reason why we're concerned about this is we've been following, we've been following the Department of Hawaiian homelands for some time. Back in 2015, we wrote about agencies that received federal grants, but were unwilling or unable to spend the money. At the time we listed DHHL as having $55 million in federal housing funds awarded for native Hawaiians, but unspent, resulting in HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, suspending additional funding. Okay, and let me kind of give you an indication of what we had back then, okay? In 2011, we got a federal grant for $12.6 million. We spent as of 2016, when I wrote the article, we'd spent about a quarter million and it encumbered pretty much the rest. In 2012 and 2013, we basically got $12 million a year. And the notes on the account where that they had moved the monies to an investment account in October of 2013, query whether they could do that. Because the feds are giving to us to spend, not to invest. In 2014 and 2015, we got $9.7 and $8.7 respectively. And at the time I wrote the article in October of 2016, the department wasn't able to spend any of it, okay? Well, that's always a big question, and if you're looking at, if the point of view of the tax foundation of Hawaii, you're concerned about the fact that that's tax money that somebody had to pay that into government, whether it federal or state, and then it languishes. Let me ask you in general, Tom, why does this happen? Why do funds that are given to an agency like that not spent? Is there a good reason, is there ever a good reason? Well, the reasons that the agency had given in the past were, geez, we can't get permits, we can't do the necessary grading, we can't do the necessary installation of infrastructure, no, we can't do this, we can't do that, okay? And the question, at least in my mind, is what's happened in the 10 years since I wrote the last article, okay? And let's get that slide on the screen to show what's happening today, okay? What this shows is the federal block grants that were allocated to the Department of Hawaiian homelands and their current funding status as of like yesterday, when I pulled this down from their website. And it's not my website, it's their website, Department of Hawaiian homelands website, okay. So they've spent about 80% of 2014 money, 2014. 2015, they spent a sliver, like $60,000. In 2016, HUD had enough and they said, fine, if you're not willing to spend our money, we're not gonna give you any. And they didn't, that's why you see the goose egg in 2016. And then 2017, 18, 19, somebody probably in our congressional delegation probably convinced HUD that, yeah, we gotta give them some money. So they did, but none of it's been spent, none. So none of it's been spent. Probably, yeah, I'm just trying to connect the dots of what you're saying is, okay, so we have this land that is some of it, maybe a lot of it is unusable. It needs topographical change, earth moving, or it needs to be swapped for other land, which is more usable. And then when you finish with that, you have to build infrastructure, that costs money. No matter who you are, that costs money. And then you have to build houses where you don't have houses and there aren't houses. So that costs money. Let's assume just for this discussion that it costs $100,000 per house, okay? And by the way, there are some homes in Lanai city that Hawaiian homelands built years ago with the help of Murdoch, remember Murdoch who owned Lanai before Ellison did, he helped them, he gave them money. And they're really nice homes. They cost much more than $100,000. They're upper middle type homes. And that project stopped for some reason, even though Murdoch offered more money. I'm not sure what happened, why homelands didn't take that money and build more homes in Lanai city, big question. In any event, so if I multiply $100,000 times 26,000 people on the waiting list or 28,000 people on the waiting list, it'll take a long time and a lot of money to do all of that. So 12 million, 10 million is peanuts when you're trying to spend 100,000 times 26,000 or 28,000 to get where you need to go. But to spend nothing means no forward motion. No forward motion in earth moving, in swapping, in infrastructure or in home building. It means you're stuck completely in that, I was going to say inept. I meant to say inactive, static, no forward motion. Am I right about that? We call that a Freudian slip. Yeah, well, maybe sometimes Freudian slips are accurate, but nothing has happened because there has been no money. And then when you get money, you don't spend it. And the money they got until the 600 million really has been completely inadequate to do anything significant. With these lands and with this list. So even the 600 million, if I divide, maybe you can do this, you have more training in arithmetic than I do. If I divide 600 million by say, just for this discussion, 100,000, how many homes is that? How many people on the waiting list is that? Okay, let's bring out the calculator. 600 million divided by 100,000? Yeah, I think it's 6,000 homes. Yeah, 6,000 homes. 6,000 homes out of 26,000 or 28,000. If they spent every single penny on doing what we were talking about here, and if we're assuming a relatively cheap house for 100,000, that's a cheap house now. It's probably closer to 200,000 or three. In any event, that only gives you a fraction of the list. This is still not making progress even if they get to 600 million. Well, I mean, that's true. But sometimes you just got to chip away at things. Chipping away for 100 years, got it. Yeah, that's what they're supposed to have been doing. Did they? No. So I think we've got to get some organizational fixes in the organization to make sure that they have the correct tools and the correct staffing to do what they need to do. Maybe they need more positions. Maybe they need to hire some architects, engineers, or whatever it is. Isn't it management, though, Toms? Seems to me, you can get staff, you can get architects and engineers, you can buy them in-house or as an independent contractor. Not if you don't have authorized positions. We're talking about management. We're talking about the people at the top who are steering the ship, aren't we? Well, you've got to have authorized positions first. They've got to manage it. They've got to board. Why can't these people do anything? Well, you've heard the excuses. We can't get through the firmament thing. That's probably the one I've heard most often. What do you do? Is it ineptitude? Is it corruption? What is it that locks them up this way? Maybe a little of both. We've had a big corruption scandal rock the legislature just a few days ago. With stuff like that happening, with the stuff that's happening with Roy Amemi, Donna Leong, and so forth in the city, we're just kind of wondering what in government is happening. Are we in fact corrupt? And if we are, how can we ferret this out? How can we fix things? The people deserve a government that's honest. And people who are willing to do the right things for the population as a whole. Now, I have no doubt. And of course, the Native Hawaiians, too, say it again. And I have no doubt that there are lots of people in government who are honest, who have this passion, who want to do the right thing to serve the people. And the question is, why are they being led astray? Or are they being compromised for some reason? If you accept my proposition, my inclination, my intuition, that this kind of problem that we see in Hawaiian homelands is really a function of management, not staff, and not professionals. It's just management. There's two things that come up in that context. And it's probably so in a lot of agencies. One is the manager was not well-selected. Two is on top of that, that the board of the manager, the board that's supposed to be supervising the manager, working with the manager, overseeing the manager is not well-selected and not functioning. And the third is that in the executive branch, which is supposed to be watching all these agencies, nobody's home, nobody's watching them. Those are the possibilities logically that come to mind. So which combination are you most concerned about in this context? Basically all three. I mean, you've got, you know, a few weeks ago, Jay, we had a similar discussion about the department of land and natural resources. We had a guest that came on our show to talk about, you know, how, you know, he was trying to do the right thing inside the agency and how he was being stopped by management. Let's me question, you know, is the same thing going on here?  Well, I mean, what makes it worse here is that, you know, the whole, obviously the whole purpose of this agency and the, this 200,000 acres and the money, whatever money has been given to them, federal estate over the years has been intended to help the native Hawaiian people. And it's very clear in our time, increasingly clear that the native Hawaiian people need help. A lot of them are homeless now. A lot of them are on the poverty side of the line. A lot of them are having trouble, you know, socially and educationally. And they need, they need all the help we can give them. And here's an agency that is at the center of that. More than any other agency, this agency can help them lift themselves up with, with, with housing. Housing builds families, builds jobs, careers. It builds, it builds a people. It builds a culture. And it allows for the development of a, of a, let me, let me kind of go back on one thing that you said, and that is, you know, what agency is it that is really taking care of this? We have, we have OHA as well. Okay. And maybe the problem is that, that, that we've got, you know, two agencies doing different things. And maybe they're getting in each other's way. Maybe they're not being coordinated. That's almost a certainty. Yeah, maybe, maybe one thing that we have to do is, is get them to merge. What exactly is the difference? I mean, in terms of helping the Hawaiian people. Well, the department of Hawaiian homelands is supposed to be more focused on disposing of the homestead lands. And they're doing different properties that 200,000 acres and, you know, getting, getting people on homes. OHA is supposed to be doing get, you know, everything else. What is it doing? OHA. Yes. I know they have a lot of educational programs. They provide native Hawaiians with other kinds of assistance. They have. Assistance to cultural programs and that kind of thing. You might want to ask our, our think tech co-host, who's one of the trustees. I'm sure he'll have a lot to say about that. Strikes me that the state government needs a good, a good look. And, you know, that takes me to one point I want to mention to you is that there's a provision of the constitutional calls for a constitutional convention every 10 years. We had one in 1978. We haven't had one since. And I think state government needs a good look. Good, a good bath and shower, if you will. And we're not doing that. We're not, you know, the executives from state government. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. We're not doing administration to administration. Don't do it. I don't think anyone's doing it. And it needs the people to get back in there. Have a convention and take a look at this. Don't you think? Well, there's got to be somebody who's going to drain the swap, right? We got a swap that needs to be drained. Isn't that what you're saying? Yes. I hate to use that term, though. In the national politics of the day. Yeah. So this is just one example of it, right? And it's, you know, it's, it's a kind of a sacred cow. Nobody wants to take a really hard look at either Oh, or Hawaiian homelands. Because it's a sacred cow, you know, and it belongs to native Hawaiian people, native Hawaiian managers and so forth. But it doesn't mean it can't do better that either of them, or both of them can't do better. Right. And. It also turns out that there are, you know, a number of very vocal native Hawaiians who don't trust government at all. And. And think that. They're, you know, the government that we now have is not legitimate. And that we should do, you know, be rolling back to the kingdom of Hawaii. There are some people who think that we should have that the, a native Hawaiian should have the same status as native, Native American Indian tribes. With their own governance and their own land. That's not that that's not something we did here. No, but we have alternative arrangements. And so we're just going to start with the next question. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it's probably the most homelands and then later. Oh. So the question is whether these organizations have realized their mission, their goal, their identity, the vision that existed when they were created. And the answer is. It's a hard question. It's an opinion. It's probably not an exciting answer. I guess, you know, what one question we should discuss though. Is the fiscal aspect of this? lot of money. How come, you know, with a history of about 10 or 12 million in recent years, with a history of not being able to spend it for whatever reason, now all of a sudden the ledge is taking our tax money and giving $600 million to an organization that has never received that much? What's the purpose? What's the motivation? What is going to happen with that? Well, I think there is a sense that at least from the legislature, the legislators that I've seen read about on the news and so forth, that a number of them do have a passion for at least attempting to remedy the injustices that were visited on the Hawaiian people by the U.S. in the early 1800s or so.  But at some point, we've got to let, we have to let bygones be bygones and we have to kind of go on with our lives if we, you know, if we think that there is justice and fairness in helping out the native Hawaiians, which I think everybody thinks there is, then we ought to execute on that. But I mean, come on, let's make sure the execution happens correctly and doesn't, you know, get mired in some morass of ineptitude within the agency corruption, which may or may not exist, you know, permitting devacles where corruption did exist and we don't know if it's still there and things like that. Well, you know, it seems clear, at least in my time of observing this, that Hawaiian homelands has never really been an effective agency. At no point in the time I've been here was the general sense that Hawaiian homelands was an effective agency. And the stats you gave over recent years really demonstrate that yet again. And it has some performance mission and there are all these people out there literally dying for some beneficial interest and not getting it over a hundred years. So if the agency is, you know, badly organized, badly managed, whatever it is, whatever it is that has created this efficiency, how does the $600 million improve that? What I mean is, what's the accountability? Is there accountability? Because if I give $600 million to an organization that can't handle it, it will wind up in an investment account again or wasted and in any event not really used for the purposes intended. How do we control? I mean, in tax foundation would be concerned about fiscal management, fiscal accountability. How do we control where it goes, how it goes, how it's spent, what benefit is derived? Well, supposedly that's a function of the legislature. They oversee all the executive branch agencies. They decide how much budget they're going to get. They have extensive budget briefings before the session starts. That's when we can do it. And if it's not working, we have to do something more drastic. What about the state auditor? I think he's weighed on this as well. He's weighed in on this as well. Well, you know, I think the amount of supervision ought to be directly proportionate to the amount of money, don't you? That would make sense, yeah. So if this is a huge jump, a jump by how many, 50 times, you get that right? Well, using that theory, we ought to, you know, give a lot more scrutiny to things like the Board of Education, Department of Health. They are spending the lion's chair of state money, Department of Human Services. Yeah, I mean, we have to make sure, and I think our legislators are tasked with making sure that, you know, fiscal oversight happens. Well, I guess one other question is derivative is, do we have that money?  I mean, we don't have much money. Tax base is shrinking. We have all kinds of unliquidated obligations to pay and liquidated obligation to pay, including, for example, the employee's retirement system, which is largely, you know, unpaid. Do we have $600 million we can spend on this?  Is anybody helping us? Or is it out of the taxpayer's pocket? And if so, can we really afford that with all the trouble that you and I have been talking about for the last couple of years? It's like anything else. You know, government has limited funds. It's got to do, you know, a means of allocating to figure out where the funds are best spent. That's the constitutional function of the appropriation process. And that's what we're trying to, you know, make sure happens. What else can you do? And why 600 million? Why not 500 or 800? Is there, you know, a code look here? Is there some liquidated amount that we should focus on? Is there some analysis that drives us to that number? Not that I'm aware of. Okay. We're just about out of time. And I want you to know that I'm not feeling really good about this news item. But I wonder how you're feeling about it. And I wonder what message you would leave with people who, you know, potentially observed what the ledge is doing, what the executive is doing, and what this agency is doing. What message would you leave with them about this, assuming they do have some oversight? Well, they do have oversight. And my message to them is to exercise it. You've got, you know, you have a problem that's been festering for 100 years. You can't just simply throw money at it and hope that it'll solve itself. There's got to be, you know, more direct action taken to, you know, help stuff from the inside. Like if you have a football team that, you know, is scoreless in 28 games, don't you change the coach? Do you change some of the players? Of course you do. So we have to think about doing the same thing. You need to, you know, change up the plays that these football players are executing. Of course, right? If strategy one doesn't work, try strategy two. And, you know, various forms of this I think are needed to get this agency out of the pickle that it's in. And, you know, it's really our problem as well as taxpayers because we're funding this. It's our money. We got to, you know, we got to be concerned about this. And let us, they towards know that they ought to be doing something about it. You mentioned that you wrote a piece about this some years back. And now here, here we are talking about it. I don't know if there's a whole lot of follow-up in the media. What's your advice to the media about this issue? Not only the issue directly related to on lands, but the issues we've been talking about today. In other words, helping native Hawaiian people in a way that was originally intended. What's your advice to the media about this?  Read the information and follow up on it. That's a good way to start. Yeah. Okay.  But for us here, we should continue and we should look at this and we should see what actually happens in the legislative session and what actually happens in homelands and how the list is in six months or a year. Will it stay at 28,000 people waiting? Will it go down to 27,000? Will it go up to 29 or 30? I think somebody should cover that. We can cover that, Tom. Sure, we can cover that. Thank you so much. Tom Yamachika, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, joining us here on Talking Tax with You Know Who, Tom Yamachika, thank you so much. Thank you so much, chair. Aloha.


Well, it's everybody Jason here for jazby's case breaks comm this fills up premier hockey picker team number five our last case in stock This is a 13 team high-end team random number block for primary hockey pick your team number five 10 box case break And again the teams that are featured in here are the penguins all the way down to the wild So you get 13 different teams remember works just like any other random number block break on our website but only for these teams in this specific break and For spot you get a random number from zero through nine and as an example if you get randomized number three You will get any card with the teams below if they hit anything three being the first number next to the dash on the left side of The serial number dash so for example, we had a penguins hit card number 13 out of 99 that would be your hit three out of 25 would be your hit 43 out of 49 93 to 99 and so on the number three block would get those hits Arboretum to the cars go to spot zero Even if we know it's a one-on-one to still go to spot zero and there will be some unnumbered relics potentially hits as well Base cards so we're gonna put those all in one lot and we'll randomize them to one customer in this list here at the end of The break, so let's do the randomizer really quick. Let's roll the dice and we got ourselves a four and a five for nine times. Good luck one two three four five six seven eight nine Nine times Kang down to William Boom nine times here one two three four five six seven eight nine nine times Four down to three and there you go That's uh This is up just a little bit So can't get four and you have eight Oliver with nine Kevin with six Nick You have zero any of our redemptions mark with seven Matt with one any one-on-ones will go to you for these teams Chad with 5d with two and willing with three so there you go guys in a separate video We will start the break and Pull some fire guys appreciate it


I'm Gilbert Gottfried and your friend sent you this video because you're investing in Bitcoin even though it's obvious you don't know what the f**k it even is. What is Bitcoin? You ask? A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to the other without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending. We propose a solution to double spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof of work forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof of work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of sequence of events witnessed but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will accepting the longest proof of work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.  Alright, let's get into the white paper. Section 1 Introduction Commerce on the internet has come to a lie almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments while the system works well enough for most transactions. It still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust-based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of the mediation increases transaction costs limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services with the possibility of reversal and need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These cost and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper we propose a solution to the double spending problem using peer-to-beer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes. You understand this?  When you're starving to death in the street I'm gonna be looking out my window laughing. Section 2 transactions. We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify signatures to verify the chain of ownership. The problem of course is the payee can verify that one of the owners did not double spend the coin. A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority or mint that checks every transaction for double spending. Each transaction the coin must be returned to the mint to issue a new coin and the only coins issued directly from the mint are trusted not to be double spent. The problem with the solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint with every transaction having to go through them just like a bank. We need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions. For our purposes the earliest transactions is the one that counts so we don't care about attempts to double spend. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions in the mint based model. The mint was aware of all transactions and decided which arrived first. To accomplish this without a trusted party transactions must be publicly announced and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received. The payee needs proof that the time of each transaction the majority of nodes agreed it was the first received. Okay do you understand this? Please pay attention pay attention I'm here to help you. Section three time stamp server. The solution we propose begins with a time stamp server. A time stamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be time stamped and widely publishing the hash such as in a newspaper or Usenet post. The time stamp proves that the data must have existed at a time obviously in order to get into the hash. Each time stamp includes the previous time stamp in its hash proving a chain with each additional time stamp reinforcing the ones before it. Are you paying attention? Please I don't have all day.  Probably not. Section four proof of work. To implement a distributed time stamp server on a peer-to-peer basis we will need to use a proof of work system similar to Adam Bach's hash cash rather than newspaper or Usenet post. The proof of work involves scanning for a value that when hash such as with SHA 256 the hashtag begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is an exponent. Screw it. In a number of zero bits required can be verified by executing a single hash. For our time stamp network we implement a proof of work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU effort has been extended to make it satisfy the proof of work the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it. The proof of work also solves the problem of determining, deader mining, it's something like that. Representation in the majority decision making the majority were based on IP address. One vote it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate IPS. Proof of work is essentially one CPU one vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain which has the greatest proof of work effort invested in it. In the majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes. The honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a pass block an attacker would have to redo the proof of work of the block and all the blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up on diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added to compensate for increasing hardware speed and verifying interest in running nodes over time. The proof of work difficulty is determined by a moving average of targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they generated too fast the difficulty increases. Hey dummies that was the bitcoin mining part. I hope you understood it because if you don't I want nothing to do with it. Section five network. The steps to run the network are as follows. One new transactions are broadcast to all nodes. Two each node collects new transactions into a block. Three each node works on finding a difficult proof of work for its block. Four when a node finds a proof of work it broadcasts the block to all nodes. Five nodes accept the block only if all transitions in it are valid and not already spent. Six nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash. Nodes always consider the longest chain to be correct. One and will keep working on it extending it. If two nodes broadcast different versions of the next block simultaneously some nodes may receive one or the other first. In that case they work on the first one they receive but save the other branch in case it becomes longer. The tie will be broken when the next proof of work is found and one branch becomes longer and the nodes that were working on the other branch will then switch to the longer one. New transaction broadcasts do not necessarily need to reach all nodes as long as they may reach many nodes. They will get into a block before long. Block broadcasts are also tolerant of dropped messages. If a node does not receive a block it will request it when it receives the next block and realize it missed one. Get it? I stopped listening to this an hour ago. I hope you are. I know. I know. It's up to you to learn.  Section six incentive. By convention the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for the nodes to support the network and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins acknowledges this.  Okay? Expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case it is CPU time and electricity that is expanded. The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees if the output value of a transaction is less than its input value. The difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation the incentive can transition entirely to transition fees and be completely inflation free. The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes he would have to choose between using to defraud people by stealing back his payments or using to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules.  Section 7 Reclaiming Disc Space Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks to spend transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space to suffocate.  You know what?  This is for you to learn. This, without breaking the blocks hash transactions, are hashed into a merkle tree with only the root included in the blocks hash. All blocks then can be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored. A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes times 6 times 24 times 365 equal 4.2 megabytes per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2 gigabytes of r of ram of, well I was spelling it because I don't know if you people understand. Ram is R-A-M. R-A-M. You have a crayon and a piece of paper. Write it down. Because I want to have taken that. As of 2008 and Moore's law predicting current growth of 1.2 gigabytes per year storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory. You get it? Pay attention. This is the bitcoin that's headed to the moon. You could be driving a Lambo. And now I know what your old saying right now. You're saying Lambo. Was he like the seventh Monks brother? There was Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gumbo, Zeppo and Lambo. No, it's a car. Section 8, Simplified Payment Verification. It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof of work chain which he can get by querying network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain and obtained the Merkle branch linking the transaction to the block. It's time-stanted. He can check the transaction for himself but by linking to a place in the chain he can see that a network node has accepted it and blocks added after it. Further confirm the network has accepted it. As such, the verification as reliable as long as honest nodes control a network but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency businesses that receive frequent payments will probably want to run their modes for more independent security and quicker verification. Get that? I mean anything? Do you want me to start from the beginning? I'll do it because I don't think you understand any of this. Section nine, combining and splitting value. Although it would be possible to handle coins individually, it would be unwieldy to make a separate transaction for every cent in a transfer. To allow value to be split and combined, transactions contain multiple inputs and outputs. Normally, there will either be a single input from a larger previous transaction on multiple inputs combining smaller amounts and at most two outputs, one for the payment and one returning the change. If any, back to the sender. It should be noted that fan out where a transaction depends on several transactions and those transactions depend on many more is not a problem here. There is never the need to extract a completely standalone copy of transactions history. Get that? A transcendalone? That's a flower, a transcendalone. Yeah, yeah. There are old kind. There are roses and there are transcendalones. Those are the most pretty. They are the most pretty colors.  Section 10, privacy. The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but the privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking to the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges where the time and size of individual trades, the tape is made public without telling who the parties were. An additional firewall, a new pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that the owner of a key is revealed linking could reveal other transactions that belong to the same owner. It's very easy. Satoshi, explain this to me. See, we're on a first name basis. Me and Satoshi and sometimes I call him Toe. I say, hey, Toe. Toe, what about that transaction? You like that? And Toe says, yeah, it's okay. That's how he talks. Surprisingly, he goes, it's okay with me. I don't care. And I say, that's why I like you, Toe. Section 11 calculations. We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest claim. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes such as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belong to the attacker. Nodes are not going to accept an invalid transaction such as payment and honest nodes will never accept a block containing them. An attacker can try to change one of his own transactions to take the money back he recently spent. The race between the honest chain and the attacker chain can be characterized as a binomial random walk. The success event is the honest chain being extended by the one block, increasing its lead by plus one and the failure event to the attacker's chain being extended by one block, reducing the gap by minus one. The probability of an attacker catching up from a given deficit is an analogous to gambler's ruin problem. Suppose a gambler with an unlimited credit starts at a deficit and plays potentially an infinite number of trials to try to reach breakeven. We can calculate the probability he ever reaches breakeven or that an attacker catches up with the honest chain as follows. Now watch when I clap my hands the chart is going to go from that shoulder to that one. Watch this, see? Given our assumption that p is greater than q the probability drops exponentially as the number of blocks that the attacker has to catch up with increases. With the odds against him it doesn't make a lucky lunge. Forward early on his chances become vanishingly small as he falls further behind. We now consider how long the recipient of a new transaction needs to wait before being sufficiently certain the sender can change the transaction. We assume the sender is an attacker who wants to make the recipient believe he paid for a while and then switch it back to himself after some time has passed. The receiver will be alerted when that happens but the sender hopes it will be too late. The receiver generates a new pair and gives the public key to the sender shortly before signing. This prevents the sender from preparing a chain of blocks ahead of time by working on it continuously until he is lucky enough to get far enough ahead then executing the transactions by that moment. Once the transaction is sent the dishonest sender starts in on a secret on a parallel chain containing an alternative version of the transaction. The recipient waits until a transaction has been added and to a block and Z blocks have been linked after it. He doesn't know the exact amount of the progress the attacker has been made but assuming the honest blocks took the average blocks time per block the attacker's potential progress will be poisoned. Distributor with expected value. Where did it go? Oh there it's back there. To get probability of the attacker could still catch up now we multiply the poison density for each amount of progress he could have made by the probability he could catch up from that point. Rearranging to avoid summoning the infinite tail of the distribution converting to C code. Running some results we can see that the probability drop exponentially to Z solving for P less than 0.1 percent.  You know Toshi said that uh that uh you know all this bitcoin it's all well and good but I couldn't P less and I said you should drink more water to see and uh sometimes he'd pull his socks off and go toes see he thought it was funny. Our graphics department worked over time for that one. Section 12 conclusion we have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures which provide strong control of ownership but is incomplete without a way to prevent double spending. To solve this we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof of work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will accepting the proof of work chain as proof of what happens while they work on. They vote with your CPU power expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.  If any of this was lost on you and you are even thinking about trading crypto check out CoinTelegraph Markets Pro. They have analysis on every coin. They have crypto news.  Go to cointelegraph.com for more info and get smart about crypto.


Terrorism. A never ending problem for every country. At times we have wondered, isn't there an end to this? Can we control it? If you are a person who is wondering the same, watch this video. Firstly, we will see briefly about the mandate of UNSC. See the core mandate of the Security Council contained in Article 24, Clause 1 of the UN Charter is to take primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. So, this is the core mandate of UN Charter and that is exactly why UNSC's permanent member countries are provided with veto power and other countries like India don't have. See this is the basis of the Resolution 1267. Now let us see what is Resolution 1267 of 1999. See the Resolution 1267 of UN Security Council deals with the issue of terrorism. Its main objective is to stop terrorist activities by issuing sanctions against them. See sanctions here means a threatened penalty for disobeying a rule or law. See the Resolution 1267 was introduced in the year 1999 and subsequent changes were made in the years 2011 and 2015. See with the adoption of 2011 resolution the Security Council decided that the list of individuals and entities would be split into two and one of them looked after the Al Qaeda and the other looked after the Taliban. And again after the adoption of 2015 resolution the Security Council decided to expand the listing criteria to include the individuals and entities supporting the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant which is shortly referred as ISIL. Now this is about the basics of the Resolution 1267. Now coming to what is discussed in the article the Resolution of 1267 allows any UN member state to propose adding the name of a terrorist or a terror group to a consolidated list. And this list is maintained by 1267 committee that has affiliations to Al Qaeda and ISIL. See the article says that China has placed a hold on a joint US Indo Resolution. This resolution is to designate the Lashkar E. Taiba commander Shahid Mahmood as a terrorist affiliated to Al Qaeda and ISIL. See through placing a hold to the proposed name China has used its veto power. And as a permanent member of the UNSC China can do this any number of times. And this is what is discussed in the article. See what is this article about? The article is about the addition of a name of a terrorist in the consolidated list maintained by the 1267 committee. Now what is the criteria for the declaration of terrorist? The criteria includes acts or activities indicating that individual or group or undertaking or any entity is associated with ISIL and Al Qaeda. This means that they are first participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts in the support of terrorism. Second they are supplying, selling or transferring arms and related material to terrorism. And third they are recruiting or otherwise supporting acts or activities of ISIL or Al Qaeda or any cell or derivative thereof. So these are the criteria for which an individual, a group and undertaking or entity is declared as terrorist and they are proposed to be added in the consolidated list. Now coming to the special committee which looks after the resolution 1267. See the committee comprises 15 members of the Security Council and it makes its decisions by consensus. Here 15 nations include permanent members which is five countries and non-permanent members which includes 10 countries who are elected from the member states of United Nations. See non-permanent members they are cyclically elected for a period of two years. Here know that currently India is one of the 10 non-permanent members to the UNSC. So what does this mean? This means that India is one of the members of the special committee which looks after the resolution 1267. But since it is a non-permanent member it does not have veto power like China. Now coming to the mandate of the committee. See the committee is mandated to oversee the implementation of the sanctions measures. And it is mandated to oversee the designated individuals and entities who meet the listing criteria set out in the relevant resolutions. And thirdly it is mandated to consider and decide upon the notifications and requests for exemptions from the sanctions measures. And fourthly it is mandated to consider and decide upon the request to remove a name from the ISIL Al-Qaeda sanctions list. Fifthly it is mandated to conduct periodic and specialized reviews of the entries on ISIL and Al-Qaeda sanctions list. Sixthly it is mandated to examine the reports presented by the monitoring team. And after that it is mandated to report annually to the Security Council on the implementation of the sanctions measures. And finally it is mandated to conduct the outreach activities. Now these are all the mandates of the 1267 resolution overlooking committee. Now coming to the effects of the sanctions. See the effects of the sanctions include 3 things. One is asset freeze. The other one is travel ban. And the third one is arms embargo. Now let's see them one by one. See first of all asset freezes imposed. See the purpose of the assets freezes to deny the listed individuals, groups, undertakings and entities the means to support terrorism. It is obvious right? If we cut the finance then they can't support the terrorism. To achieve this it seeks to ensure that no funds and financial assets or economic resources of any kind are available to any individual or any group of terrorism. And this is done for so long as they remain subjected to the sanctions measures. See this particular type of sanction is done to stop the economical support given to the terrorist activities. Now coming to the second one. Do you remember what is the second one? Exactly. It is the travel ban. See the purpose of the travel ban is to limit the mobility of the listed individuals. See member states are encouraged to add the name of the listed individuals to their visa watch list. And they are also encouraged to add the names of the listed individuals to their national watch list. See this is done to ensure the effective implementation of travel ban. See if they are watched then only we can limit their movement right? And this is about the travel ban. Now thirdly there is this arms embargo and it is imposed on the sanctioned individual and it is imposed on the sanctioned individual or the group. See the obligation of member states to implement the arms embargo means that they have to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer of arms and related material to the sanctioned individual or group. Now apart from this technical advice, assistance or training related to military activities are also prevented to the sanctioned individuals or groups. Now these are all the effects of sanctions on the designated terrorist. Now coming back to the article, we saw that China has placed a hold on proposal to add Shahid Mahmood to the 1-6-7 terrorist list right? Now what are all the reasons given by China for that? China says that there is no conclusive evidence to prove the wrong doing of the accused. And it also said that it needs time to study the issue before coming to a conclusion regarding including Shahid Mahmood in the terrorist list. See the real reason for placing the hold might be to not affect the friendly relation that China maintains with Pakistan. Why is Pakistan coming here? See Pakistan is where Shahid Mahmood is based. So to not offend Pakistan, China may have done that. But what is China saying officially? It is saying that there is no conclusive evidence. Now we can't do much here. Why is that? Because China has veto power in UNSC. But India, it is a non-permanent member. So what are the ways in which India can rise the issue? See India can rise the issue in the FATF meetings. FATF is nothing but the financial action task force and it was established in the year 1989 by a group of seven summit that is G7 Summit in Paris. See it was established initially to examine and develop measures to combat money laundering. Then subsequently the mandate of FATF got expanded to incorporate efforts to combat terrorist financing in addition to money laundering. Now other than FATF, India and US have built their own separate list of most wanted terrorists. See they have done this to document the cases against the terrorist with the view to eventually receiving a global cooperation on banning them. And apart from this, India can also rise the issue in Shanghai Cooperation Organization. See SCO has a separate anti-terrorism structure called RATS. And this RATS is expanded as the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure. Now these are some of the other ways in which India can rise the issue of terrorism in the international arena. Now these are the things that you have to know regarding 1267 resolution. See this asserts that in the international arena efforts are taken to combat terrorism. Now the benefit of the video lies in the fact that these points can be used in your civil services examination especially your mains. If a question is asked related to terrorism you can very well quote 1267 resolution and you can mention about India's efforts to add terrorists and terror groups in the consolidated list of 1267. Now if you want to know more things like this and if you want to stay updated, subscribe to Shankarayez Academy's YouTube channel and also watch daily Hindi news analysis of Shankarayez Academy. Thank you.


If we were successful, we now have a wonderful, spoke, café counter. The residents that come in, they love it because it's much easier to see everything that's on display. The transactions are easier, it's a nice solid surface. And it really says that we're here for good. So we're delighted that it's been such a successful project and that we were able to build enough community support to make that work. I've seen a lot of other projects going through the ground page and doing really well and being really successful results. I would just encourage more groups to go ahead and apply because it's a wonderful thing to achieve and will benefit the community as a whole.


So, hi, I'm Basam, I'm the CEO of Oppen, and I'm also a maintainer on the cross-plane project and the Rook project. I try to spend most of my time here talking about cross-plane and kind of its importance to, I think, the multi-cloud maturity model and how we open up the cloud. I want to start with this dynamic around hyper-clouds and the commercial open source, where commercial open source companies and kind of where we see a lot of the platform and infrastructure innovation happening these days. I don't want to talk about licensing, I think that there has been a ton of coverage about how people are licensing and re-licensing, but I do want to explore essentially and motivate a technological approach to the problem. So, let's start right at the top. Let's actually look at a typical hyper-cloud. In this case, I mean, you can pick your favorite one, but just speak behind the scenes of how most hyper-clouds or these hyperscale clouds are built. Every single hyper-cloud offers a buffet of managed services. They are typically proprietary services or they could be based on open source. If they're open, so if you take the case of Amazon, you have things like RDS, which offers MySQL and Postgres, and they've done all the wrapping around it to integrate it into their platform. And you have things like DynamoDB, which is proprietary service and is their own database. These services are typically all integrated and offered as, you know, you can pick any one of those, they can mix and match them, and they offer integrations between them as well. At the heart of every hyper-cloud is a control plane. This is the component that is responsible for serving the API when you ask for an RDS instance, when you ask for an EC2 instance or you're talking to the control plane. It's the thing that offers the API. It's the component that is essentially doing the initial provisioning and the ongoing lifecycle management of the resources that you're deploying in the cloud provider. It's a very central piece. If you want to think about the architecture of every hyper-cloud, control plane in the middle, a set of managed services live around it. There are typically a set of integration services that are built around the control plane, things like billing, metering, authorization, authentication, essentially things that make it look like a singular platform, an integrated platform. When you go to one of your cloud providers, you get all of that. It's all integrated. At some level, you can argue that the companies, the cloud providers are master integrators. They bring together a lot of disparate technologies and offer them in a way that's really well integrated and save you from having to do that. You, as an enterprise, consume the hyper-cloud by essentially just calling an API or using the management consoles or any of the CLI tools.  It's nice that they also offer an SLA on these services. It's a really fantastic and incredible thing that has emerged over the last 10 years around essentially large-scale cloud providers that offer all of these features. Let's switch gears and talk about this from a perspective of a company that has some really great innovation in platforms. You can think of a database company like Yougobiter Cockroach or Redis or all of those companies that have built fantastic technology but are not themselves a large cloud provider. Typically, these companies start with open-source or open-source technologies that they build communities around those. Their path to cloud could start with them offering a service in a given cloud provider's marketplace. Essentially, they can put their software in AMIs or VMs or maybe in these days there are now container marketplaces and they offer them in the marketplace of the cloud provider. In this model, they have limited integration. They're not featured as deeply as the other managed services that the native cloud services that the cloud provider offers. Limited business model, so they're basically stuck to some markup on top of hosting fees. They have limited access and visibility onto what their customers are actually doing on the cloud because it's back to essentially running software. If they wanted to go beyond that, the next step up is to actually build their own managed service. That's a big step because what they have to do is they have to build essentially a cloud, their own cloud, a cloud of one managed service. Typically, they layer on top of hyper-clouds. You'll see things like Redis Cloud or Cockroach Cloud or Yugo Byte Cloud or all of those things essentially offer their own cloud offerings that run on AWS, GCP and Azure. But they have their own control plan. They have their own API, their own automation, their own CLI. If they're essentially, it's a completely independent cloud with a really great best-of-breed offering. And they have to do this work for every hyper-cloud they support. And increasingly, if you think about companies that are in the infrastructure space or the platform space, their customers will demand that they run on multiple clouds. So they're actually one of the early examples. People like these, the commercial open source companies are really good examples of multi-cloud offerings themselves. And so now if you switch gears and talk about it from a customer standpoint, from the perspective of someone in an enterprise that's attempting to adopt or integrate technology into their own stack. The world there looks like essentially a set of heterogeneous services, whether it's multiple cloud providers or even if you're just a one cloud provider. And if you wanted to actually use just one cloud outside of, one cloud service outside of your, say, AWS account or outside of your GCP account. The cost of doing that is you have to add a new vendor. You have to create a set of custom automation to deploy and manage that service. You have to probably go through security and compliance. You have to do your own monitoring integration. You have to do your own logging integration. You basically, and then of course go through education and training. So you're essentially to the cost of bringing in just one additional service is quite expensive. And imagine if you're doing that for multiple. Everyone of those looks like has a different API, has a different off story, has a different monitoring story. And it becomes quite complex. And so that's a real problem if you want to venture outside of a single cloud provider. And there have been some partial solutions to that. So things like essentially infrastructure automation tools, which help you manage whether it's the, you know, terraforms of puppets or chefs or all those things that help you essentially do your own custom engineering.  Okay. How many use managed services and cloud providers? Okay. So, so a very different consumption model. And then of course most of these solutions are either closed or vendor driven approaches. And so if you kind of summarize the dynamic, you'd say, like think about it as you're the person inside an organization that's trying to make a decision on some database or some platform infrastructure that you want, you want to adopt. Would you pick the good enough service that's offered by your cloud provider of choice where it's completely integrated, it's a click away or an API call away and no need to set up a new vendor, no need to, it's all there. No need to go through your infrastructure teams. You just use it. Or would you venture off into, you know, essentially picking an independent boutique cloud that offers us really best of breed service. But you have to take on all the integration work. So that's a real integration hurdle that that dynamic becomes a real integration holder in terms of adoption of heterogeneous clouds. So we believe the solution is essentially similar to how cloud providers are structured themselves. We believe there needs to exist a universal control plane. Essentially a control plane, not unlike the control planes that are running in cloud providers, but one that is open source and driven by a community. It becomes the point of integration for the community. We bring a set of services, including the cloud hyper clouds themselves on a common control plane that enables us to essentially consume all their services in an integrated fashion. So it has it offers a standardized API for the cloud and is a host of standardized automation for the cloud. So things like why doesn't Kafka cloud and elastic cloud talk to each other where if you were to make them integrate. Just like say that happens between two services inside a hyper cloud. Where would that automation logic live today? How do I set up multiple services? Typically it is if it is happening today, it's happening in a one off way in every cloud provider and sorry in an enterprise itself. There is no standardized way of arriving at automation today across cloud services across heterogeneous services. This control plane would definitely need to be extensible. Everybody's first class on this control plane. There isn't a native versus marketplace third party. You can think of it as all a marketplace or all essentially a level playing field. And it would need to offer shared services, including billing, metering, off, monitoring, logging, all the things that make it feel like a singular platform. The things that you like about going to a single cloud provider today and trying to stick within the wall guidelines. And obviously, like I said, this has to be open source and has to be community driven. Otherwise it will become a shell game. We're going from one proprietary solution to another. So that was the motivation for Crossplane. That's why we started the Crossplane project. We started Crossplane because we think that it actually levels the playing field and cloud computing. We're focusing mostly on the control plane. We're not looking at solving a compute issue or a database issue. We're basically just trying to bring these disparate and heterogeneous services under a common control plane. So that an enterprise customer could actually consume them as a single offering, if you will. We launched it just like Jared talked about. You guys saw it in action today, which is fantastic with GitLab. We launched it in December last year. It's open source. It's community driven. It offers a single declarative API for a set of services. And it's based on the Kubernetes API. So the whole CRD controller model is what we adopted. And essentially, it looks very similar to Kubernetes API model. So it's a single control plane. It can span clouds. It can span regions. It can span vendors. It can span hybrid boundaries. It's essentially you can configure the control plane to work with your own deployment, whether you're a single cloud provider or you're multiple or you have multiple vendors or you're in hybrid solutions. You can attach this control plane to any of your environments. It's a host for automation. So it actually runs the automation logic and offers a point of integration and the ability to standardize on this automation. And we separate between the concerns. So what infrastructure owners do and admins versus what application developers do and in terms of how they self-service. So we earlier, Jared talked about, showed how we've integrated cross-plane into the GitLab ADO offering, which is fantastic and it's less than 24 hours old. There's something else that we did as well. Like we showed this off in Barcelona and we're still working on essentially a production ready version of this. But GitLab itself is a prime example of a portable application. So GitLab proper, when you want to run GitLab, it runs 50 plus. The GitLab folks, please correct me in the room now, it might have changed. 50 plus microservices that run on a Kubernetes cluster. They use Postgres, Redis, Object Storage and Plethora of other things that run on this. And if you think about it, you know, GitLab, because of the way they're architected, it can run on Google, can run on Azure, can run on AWS. In fact, it can also run on premise. And so one of the things that we did with them early to validate cross-plane was to write a stack for cross-plane for GitLab and run that on multiple clouds. And when it comes up on each of the clouds, it uses their managed services of the cloud provider. So when GitLab is deployed through cross-plane on AWS, it's using EKS. It's using RDS. It's using S3. It's setting up security groups and IM rules and everything else that's required to bring up GitLab. And so if GitLab can be a portable application, I think you can do it too. So let me step back for a second and kind of talk about what this all means. So kind of summarize, I think if we had a universal control plane, one that's owned by community, I believe, and to borrow from Andy Grove here, that we can tip the market today from the cloud computing market from vertical integration, where we have essentially three, maybe four or five, if you count the other cloud providers from being these vertically integrated solutions where they sell you every part of the stack, they own the entire thing from infrastructure all the way up to applications, to more of a horizontally integrated market. We saw this happen in the PC industry in the 80s. The main frames of the old days were essentially similar to how the cloud providers are today. You can think of, it's ironic, but you can think of AWS as a mainframe company. And so we believe that essentially if there was a universal control plane that levels the playing field where the customers are using this control plane to access both their existing clouds and anyone's cloud that it levels the playing field and it essentially enables folks to differentiate on services, which is critical to the continued innovation in this space. And so that's kind of why we're doing crossplane. And I want to just finish by saying it's going to take a village. This is not something that one company or one group or one individual will do. It has to be a community effort. So super proud of the work that we're doing with GitLab and Yugabyte and others that have now joined this party. And I hope that you guys can help us too. So feel free. There are links here. Definitely engage with us. We'd love to talk to you. Thank you. Awesome. Do you want to take questions? Yes. All right. Questions, anybody? I'll be over. So the question is, what's the roadmap for GA maturity of any of your stacks? So we've had a few stacks just go into V1, beta one. We work on CRD versioning. So some of our APIs turned beta as of 0.4. We're turning more APIs into beta, mostly database APIs have turned beta. And we're on a we just released 0.5. We're on a path to essentially turning all of the APIs beta in the next few months, the ones that we support on the core base. It is an open and extensible platform. We're hoping that there are more people that kind of bring in their stacks and essentially help us with maturity around them. All right. Thanks. No offense to our sponsor, but this was a very GitLab focused approach of how crosspoints used. Is there a roadmap or thought about how this would integrate in other CIC pipelines or code repositories? Yeah. I mean, cross-plane works with, I mean, cross-plane is essentially you can install in any Kubernetes cluster. There is nothing that ties it specifically to GitLab. We've just done a lot of really good work with GitLab folks to integrate into the experience. In fact, yeah, I'm sure there are others you could look at that are on the cross-plane blog that all should work. As long as your CICD pipeline of choice supports Kubernetes clusters, cross-plane slots in really nicely. Yeah. I believe there is some work around that, but I'm not sure... What was the question? Sorry. Any direct integration with Spinnaker? I believe that they're involved, but I'm not sure if I know the status. Thanks. That's really good stuff. One question would be, how has cross-plane been integrating or interacting with the SIGs around multi-cluster or cube-fed? I mean, these concepts are great. I'm interested to see how it maps into the broader community. Yeah. Good question. At this point, so we actually... I'll address the Federation one first. That one is interesting because I think there's definitely... It feels like there's... From a workload scheduling across clusters, there's overlap. But the approach that we take is a bit different. So we looked at it early as could cross-plane itself use Federation. And I decided that that was actually not the right starting point for us. And went down a path of essentially defining a concept of a workload. We call them Kubernetes applications, looking at it from a scheduling problem as a scheduling problem onto clusters and managed services and essentially going down that path. And it didn't take much for us to kind of essentially diverge from architecturally. And we realized that the starting design points are quite different. From a cube-fed standpoint, they see the world as a set of Kubernetes clusters and they're essentially trying to propagate Kubernetes API to API objects to each of the clusters. We're creating an abstraction for workloads on top of clusters and not clusters and other stuff. And so it wasn't a great match for us. Your second question about SIG cluster and others. My understanding is most of the work on clusters is focused around managing the cluster internally. We're quite early in that work where we'd love to figure out how to integrate that. At this point, we support API to deploy clusters, mostly managed clusters, EKS, GKE and AKS. But we're not in the business of, say, growing a cluster or adding things to a node pool yet. And so that's what I think that collaboration will be very meaningful. One more. I'm still trying to understand how cross-plane fits in architecturally. Is it an application that is orchestrated by a cluster? Does it extend a cluster by adding its own custom resources and controllers? Is it some combination of those things? Did I miss the mark? Yeah, it's the latter. So think of it as like, if you were to bring up your own Kubernetes cluster, let's say it's mini-cube or whatever your choice is, right? You have APIs for pods. You have APIs for deployments. You have replica sets, volumes, all that stuff. When you install cross-plane, you now have APIs for Postgres and MySQL clusters themselves and other things that are part of the thing. And when you run, when you create YAML for Postgres database and you configure a class for it, RDS comes up in Amazon or Cloud SQL comes up in GCP. So essentially, it looks like a set of extension APIs to a Kubernetes cluster. All right, one last. Can you comment on the relationship to Service Catalog in Kubernetes? Yeah. So Service Catalog is from a perspective of, say, enabling a Kubernetes cluster to interact with managed services. That is similar in terms of what we're trying to do. I think the differences are substantially around, you still need a Service Catalog outside of a Kubernetes cluster and that's kind of, you'd have to run your own service broker, which can be quite an undertaking. And then the other thing I'll say is that I don't think there's any attempt to create a set of abstractions in Service Catalog. It's essentially like thin wrappers to just provision. And also there is no kind of lifecycle management. So Crossplane attempts to do both of those in a Kubernetes native way. And that's also my understanding that most cloud providers now are deprecating their Service Catalog offerings. So I'm not sure what the status of the project is. Awesome. Thank you. Lots of questions around Crossplane. You're on to something, Masam. And for folks, if you want to talk more on conference.


Even though the left and anti-establishment candidates lost during the 2020 Democratic Party primary, we got some really fantastic leaders that emerged out of this process. And even if I had policy disagreements with individuals like Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang, the work that they're doing for the progressive movement, it's showing how invaluable they are to not just the movement, but to the country. So last week we talked about how Marianne Williamson endorsed primary challenges to members of Democratic Party leadership. She endorsed Makayla Wilkes running against Steny Hoyer and Shea Hidbutar running, of course, against Nancy Pelosi. And she also has endorsed, you know, a plethora of other congressional candidates such as Eva Putsova and whatnot. So that's so important because these candidates oftentimes lose because they don't have name recognition. And when you're trying to build a campaign based on grassroots, getting recognized by people with, you know, these large platforms with millions of followers, that is so valuable. So I gave Marianne Williamson a lot of credit for that. And now I'm going to give Andrew Yang a lot of credit because him, along with his organization Humanity Forward, have also been endorsing a lot of really solid congressional candidates. And two of them that he just endorsed are Jen Perlman running in Florida's 23rd Congressional District against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as well as Russiorenzione, who's running against Frank Palone. So first of all, Jen Perlman tweeted out, we are thrilled to be endorsed today by Andrew Yang. His humanity-first approach to politics mirrors what our service-based campaign is all about. Let's unseat Wasserman-Schultz together, Yang-Gang. And she includes a quote from Andrew Yang, which says, Jen Perlman is first and foremost an activist. She was born and raised in Florida where she attended marches and protests with her parents growing up. Today, she uses her law degree to protect voting rights, defend women's reproductive health and help people navigate the criminal justice system. All pro bono. Her campaign events are all volunteer service events. A Jen victory would truly be cause for celebration. I am proud to endorse her. And when it comes to Russiorenzione running in New Jersey's sixth congressional district, he writes, today it is with great honor that I announced the Russ for US 2020 campaign has received the endorsement of Andrew Yang and humanity forward. And along with that tweet, he included this video where he announces the endorsement of Andrew Yang. Hey, everybody, this is Russiorenzione. I'm running for Congress in New Jersey, and I'm so happy and I'm super thankful to share that I'm endorsed by humanity forward and Andrew Yang because we really need Beth, the facts, the data to guide us and humanity forward knows these values are true. As a millennial, we're known for changing the rules of the game and shaking things up. It's time to build an economy that puts people first, that meets all of our basic human needs with 40 million jobs lost because of COVID. We need a federal jobs guarantee and a universal basic income for every single person. We can do things better as a nation and live up to our full potential. My name is Russiorenzione. I'm running for Congress in New Jersey sixth. Go to my website at Russ for US 2020.com. So that's fantastic. Listen, these endorsements are absolutely crucial. I cannot stress that enough. If you are running for Congress and you have zero name recognition and not very much money and you're going up against a behemoth of an incumbent, these endorsements are everything. Members of the Yang Gang and people who follow Andrew Yang, the millions of followers that he has are learning about Jen Perlman and Russiorenzione for the first time because of Andrew Yang. He has nothing to gain by making these endorsements, but you can tell he's endorsing these people because he cares about them and think about this. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is one of the most notoriously anti-left, anti-progressive members of Congress. In case you forgot, she rigged an entire presidential primary against the left in 2016. So this person has got to lose her job and putting that aside, putting aside 2016. Her record is atrocious. She doesn't support Medicare for all. And in the case of Frank Palone in New Jersey's sixth congressional district, he sits on a powerful committee that can ensure that we never get Medicare for all. So these are individuals who absolutely must be defeated. And for Andrew Yang to endorse the primary challengers to prominent Democrats, he's making waves. And this actually, you could argue, hurts him. It hurts him going forward because assuming he's going to run for president again in 2024 or 2028, you ideally want to make inroads with the Democratic Party. This was Elizabeth Warren's key strategy, right?  Andrew Yang is pissing off people here. So whenever you see a politician or a public figure endorse someone who's challenging and incumbent Democrat, I need you to acknowledge that takes a level of courage that other politicians are not exhibiting. This is big. This is substantial. And I'm very thankful that Andrew Yang and his organization are making these endorsements because honestly, these endorsements like I'm not going to say that they're make or break, but it gives people running these races that are difficult, a lot of momentum and hopefully that momentum will kind of turn into this snowball effect, right? So this is fantastic. Some of these people, Jen Perlman has been endorsed by Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang. I don't know about Russ, but I will say that all of these endorsements of congressional candidates is really, really important because even if the left and the anti establishment in general, just if you think of them as a block, even though we all lost collectively, I mean, we still have a lot of races that matter to us. We may have lost the presidency, but if we can actually knock out a few prominent Democrats who are holding us back, I mean, that would be huge. It would be a boost that our movement needs. So this is why you never want to focus on one race. Politics isn't just about electoral politics. It's mostly about organizing, but when you do focus on electoral politics, the presidency isn't everything. And I say this knowing the irony as someone who focused almost exclusively on the presidential election, but it's tough not to when we're this close to power, but we have to recenter ourselves from time to time and acknowledge what's really important in these congressional races where we can still make a difference, where we can have an impact. And I'm so thankful that leaders like Andrew Yang and Mary and Williamson are continuing to show us that they are dedicated. They didn't just run for a vanity project or because they wanted a book deal. They ran because they believed in something. And that really is rare in politics. So whenever I see a politician, even if I don't necessarily agree with them on everything, pop up, that actually is principled. You know, I value them because that is rare nowadays.


Mae'n gallu ichi gilydd i gael y cwestiwn yma, os ydych chi'n gwneud i arweunio y cwestiwn am cyffredin o'r llwyddiol? Ono, fydd ei wneud i'r cwestiwn ar flaen. Rwy'n cael ei cwestiwn yn credu o'r llwyddiol. Rwy'n cael ei wneud i'r cwestiwn yn credu o'r llwyddiol a byddwch chi'n rhannu eich byddwch ar fiaith yma o ddymarg. First of all, you've got to make a choice of what you're trading. So are you trading risk off, right? And if you are, then obviously you're going to be looking at the JPY or the Swiss Franc. So these two currencies are safe haven currencies and they should strengthen in a risk off environment so they will tend to strengthen, yeah?  Doesn't mean that you're not going to get pullbacks. Of course, you know, within those within that risk off sentiment, you're going to get profit taking, you're going to get pullbacks just like any market. Just for example, like in a risk on market, you know, when when the risk is on, you're going to get pullbacks, et cetera. Nothing goes up or down forever. But the point I'm trying to make is this. Let's say, for example, right now, the Swiss Franc is number six on the fundamental analysis spreadsheet, yeah? And let's say, for example, we want to be wearing, I'm still in the dollar Swiss from the absolute lows, by the way, yeah? But let's just say, for example, you know, we want to be buyers as a dollar is number one, yeah? Now, there could be this coronavirus that's going on right now, yeah? And what that's doing on the dollar Swiss is it's strengthening the Swiss Franc, yeah? So, for example, there might be a demand zone here, right? And you might not necessarily get, you might get in or you might not get an entry, et cetera, but you might lose that one, let's say, yeah? Because risk is off and the Swiss Franc tends to strengthen.   That's really unfortunate, you know, for those family and people out there. And, you know, let's say, for example, prices come down here, yeah? And, you know, we start to, you know, enter into a trade here and, you know, this doesn't work, for example, right? Now, what's happening and what people tend to not, you know, realise is that the price, yeah? You're getting, you know, the fundamentals are remaining the same as far as, you know, economically, GDP, inflation, interest rates and others. Wise and our fundamental now is especially that the Swiss Franc is still terrible compared to something like, for example, the dollar, yeah? So what this is actually doing is it's allowing us to buy, right, for a cheaper price, let's say, for example, two, we tried a four, and then maybe we tried a seven, yeah? Now, we lose two trades, fine, yeah? Losing isn't, you know, win rates isn't what we're concerned with, it's more about risk reward and understanding what is value. So if prices come down here now to this point and you have a, you know, let's say, for example, the virus has been contained, there's a vaccine that's been developed and, you know, everything now is looking much better in China, right?  So risk on, yeah? And the risk on environment, that's where the dollar, which is number one, and we look at, you know, what we're getting, for example, interest rates where, you know, the dollar is like 1.75, and the Swiss Franc, I think, is like minus 0.75, right?    We have to understand which way we want to be, you know, trading.  What you want to do for me anyway, right, is what I tend to do, I would say, 18, 90% of the time is I trade in the direction of the fundamentals. What are the numbers saying? What are the hard figures, you know, GDP, you know, interest rates and inflation, right? That's what I'm more concerned about. Negative sentiment, yeah, will push prices lower to where I can get a much better risk reward, right? Because that's going to be seen as an absolute bargain, you know, if the corona virus, yeah, you know, is contained in there is a vaccine, yeah? So there's opportunities. Which way should you trade? If you want to take advantage or maybe some short term risk off sentiment, then fine, brilliant.  Me personally, I'm not chasing, you know, risk off and risk on sentiment because it makes things a bit more difficult day to day. You know, I'm not trying to, I'm trying to take the basically the best trades and try to identify value at the end of the day. That's what we're, that's what we're doing. We're identifying bargain prices, yeah? And to try and trade both ways sometimes is a lot of times is very, you know, challenging. We want to make things as easy as possible on us, yeah? So identify potential bargain zones through demand zones and then what we want to do is trade in the direction. So I don't mind losing two or three trades to understand that I'm going to be getting, you know, five, six, seven, eight, 10 to ones, 12 to ones, you know, in the future, if you know what I mean. So it's a decision that you have to make.  Yeah, then unfortunately, that's just what it is if you know what I mean. Doesn't mean that you're not going to get pullbacks and not be able to make any money here because, for example, we know that, you know, we entered a couple of positions, you know, we placed them where we placed them and we might, you know, win one and lose one. For example, we're still up. We might not be able to get the runners that we need, if you know what I mean at these levels, right? Because, you know, prices have to search for liquidity too as well. So prices can't just keep going down and down and down. There's going to be stop hunting involved, you know, to the other side, et cetera. And then price is going to go down. If we buy around here, we potentially, and, you know, we can make some profit potentially on the stop hunts against us, if you know what I mean, because markets don't always trend forever. Mark is going to from trending to ranging markets as we know. So we can take advantage of those periods. We might not necessarily get the big runners. We might get maybe three, four to ones on those types of trades, but eventually we're going to get these big trades, these 10, 15 to one type trades. Yeah. So we've already had a few of them this month. I mean one on the Swiss yen. We had one on the Euro yen, right? Where we picked off the absolute highs and stuff like that. The dollar Swiss, for example, we're in that one, the pound yen, right in that one. There was the Euro dollar, yeah, we were in, you know, I said, missed that one, but that was an opportunity to get, you know, for good, maybe nine, 10 to one type trades. There's been quite a few of those.  And don't try, don't switch from day to day, if you know what I mean, like be consistent in what it is that you want to do. Set out your plan, if you say in your plan, then I'm going to trade risk on, yeah, and risk off, right? And then you're going to have to define also in your plan what risk off events you're going to be trading. So let's say, for example, I'm not going to trade anything that involves war, yeah? Oh, I am going to trade something that involves war. Politics, yeah, so politics and elections, right? Am I going to be trading that or I'm not going to be trading that? So go a bit deeper into your plan about what risk events you are or may not want to trade, because not everything you want to make money off of, do you want to make money off of death, for example?  So, yeah, you have to really, really kind of maybe dig a bit deeper and stuff like that. So again, it's up to the individual. I can't tell you what to do. I can tell you what I do. And, you know, the majority of time I will look to if I'm already in a trade, let's say, for example, I'm already in a trade. So we was in the pound yen, right? And we were shorting, obviously, the pound due to Brexit and interest rate cuts, right? Now, let's say, for example, and the risk that is associated with that against the yen, yeah? So this was, I think, at the time, what was it, seven versus four, yeah? So that's a decent trade, not the best trade, but a decent one to the short side. Then, as we were in the yen, then the coronavirus came along. Now, I'm not a buyer of the, I'm not necessarily a trading the yen due to the coronavirus, right? But I was already in the yen trade. Now, if you're already in the yen trade, yeah, or buying the yen, and then something happens where morally it's against your code of conduct, for example, you're like, I don't want to make money off of people dying and death and things like that, yeah? And you're already in that trade. Then you have a decision to make, yeah? Do you want to hold the trade still because you were already in it from before, yeah? Or do you want to come out of that trade, yeah? And say, you know what, morally it's against what I stand for and things like that. So there's those types of questions you have to ask and answer for yourself. So, so yeah, that is, I hope that's really answered your question, if exception. And yeah, that's it for now. All right, take care.