Good morning, everybody. Good morning. I was waiting for the bumper for some reason. Oh, yeah. Well, we have one that does that. I should have clicked that one. Good job, Taylor. Yeah. You know, we were talking about this in September when we were kind of getting event calendar stuff together. And I haven't worked on it yet, but I'm still, I haven't forgot, I think, New Year, New EdTech countdown is in order at some point. So that's right. Watch out for that. I know we have some fans of specifically the countdown, maybe not the rest of the stream or video content. But honestly, that's what pulled me in. What would be the theme for the new bumper? Well, we had talked about going a little bit more like cinema, right? I mean, yeah. So we may do that. I may be writing checks. My video editing skills can't cash. But we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. The stream is a workshop, is where we're going to workshop the new bumper. We false advertising. Yeah, yeah. We've got to get hype. We've got to get investment. We have to raise funds to get this together, isn't it? Yeah, for all our venture capitalists out there in the community. Yep, yeah. Yeah, I've got that final cut pro license I bought like nine years ago. We need to pay that back. It's time. So cool. Well, what are we here for today? Yeah, today we're going to check out the hedge dock installer that you've been working on, Taylor. Get that wrapped up and then look ahead to our flex course that's coming up, not next week, but the week after called Open Publishing Ecosystems. I know that this week has been like for anybody who's been paying attention has been really heavy on the Open Publishing Ecosystems kind of, I hate to call it propaganda. But also it is propaganda because they're trying to lure you all in. We're propagandizing something that is free. You can choose to go to. We're not selling you anything. So is it the most harmful propaganda in the world? I think not. I don't know. It is a lifestyle.  So yeah, essentially, I'm sure you've all heard this. But just for the sake of this stream, I will just the Open Publishing Ecosystems is really to help everybody get a sense of what's out there for Open Publishing, what you can do, what you can use for it. And we're going to be talking to some experts, really the people who have either developed or have had a key hand in developing the tools that we're going to be working with. And it's going to be a lot of fun. And essentially, today, what we want to do is just get ourselves prepared as prepared as possible for it to start so that we can just dive right into the content as opposed to we don't want this flex course to be talking like demoing how to get things set up. We want it to be talking about how to actually use the thing. So that's kind of what we're going to do today. Yeah, I'll showcase how to use the installer a little bit. We kind of went in the last stream we did on the installer a month ago or so. We kind of went through a lot of the technical details of how it was going to work in terms of it'll be using Docker. And if you're familiar with Docker and you're curious about exactly what it uses, there's a whole GitHub repository. You can just look at it. Or you could just install it and look at it. Nothing secretive about it. And so today, I just kind of wanted to work through, like, OK, well, what's the experience of using this thing? How would I set this up? Reclaim Cloud to run your own Hedge Dock. So do we jump right in? Let's do it. Sweet, so I've got my Reclaim Cloud dashboard up over here. And moving windows around. All right, great. So oh, I guess before important things first. Like, how cute is Hedge Dock's logo? Like, it's ridiculous. They did a great job. I realized this morning that I'm pretty sure maybe not. But the face part of the hedgehog is it's a heart. It also kind of reminds me of like a sharpened pencil. A little bit, yeah. That's a good point. I wonder if they were.  Like, that's what really gets me. Yeah, I've got a larger version of that same image in the GitHub here. Yeah, I think it's the color. And yeah, the pointed tip definitely evokes pencil for me, too, for sure, heart-shaped. I mean, hedgehogs kind of look like that, but I think they're really leaning into it. Yeah. It's good. It's really good. So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. And one thing I will mention that I'm kind of excited about to see is this is kind of an interesting time for HedgeDoc because they're about to launch their 2.0 version, which is a big redesign in the user interface of it. So we're not going to be running that today because it's not out yet, and I'm not going to build installer for something that's still not stable, basically. But we'll have that, basically. As soon as that comes out, my installer should just work, and if it doesn't, I'll fix it. But yeah, it's kind of interesting. They do have a demo of it up, and it's very similar. We'll explore the actual HedgeDoc interface a little bit, but it's pretty similar to how it is now, but they've kind of simplified some tools and did some good, I think, reworking of the user interface. There'll be things that we talk about probably more in the flux course about how to share notes and things that I think HedgeDoc does well, but you have to read about that are a little bit clunky if you haven't read about it. They have a whole permission system that is kind of complicated, to be honest with you. I agree with that. This is actually my first time seeing this updated version. It's very slick. Yeah, they do. I think they did a great job of you will see. But basically, it does most of the same things. There's not a lot brand new here, but they do contextual, like, oh, this link points to the editor as you currently see it kind of stuff. And this link is a read-only version. Things that you could do. Oh, I like that.  Yeah. The other one is the permissions also has a Google Doc style ad individual email addresses. That is not something the current HedgeDoc version has at all. So they basically just completely simplified this whole permissions thing that we'll look at later. So I'm excited about that. And I don't know exactly when it'll come out, but they're like third alpha version came out recently. So maybe before the end of the year, I don't know. Probably if with our luck, it'll be like right after we put out our HedgeDoc video for open publishing ecosystems. It'll be like we summoned it. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, that version, it's a side.  Oops. You probably need to search for it. I have it favorited here, but if you search for it, it'll show up and hit install. You can give the default subdomain, the environment URL here, whatever name you want. So I'm gonna call it my HedgeDoc, I guess. You can pick a region. We'll keep this one in Canada, that's fine. And install it. And so this will take a few minutes, about three or four minutes, all told, to deploy. One thing to think about with these, really anything you deploy on Reclaim Cloud is, oh man, I hid the thing, that's fine. Is where you want it to live after you've set it up, right? So you can definitely have HedgeDoc live at the, ca.reclaim.cloud kind of domain name. In my case, it would be my-hedgedoc.ca.reclaim.cloud. But it's really, we really want people, we wanna make it easy for people to map a custom domain to it as well. So I'll demo that today too, that's pretty easy to do. I think today, for simplicity's sake, I will use my CPanel and I'll just give it a subdomain of my-hedgedoc.jaden.me, which is domain I have. Yeah, I'm kind of spinning my wheels here while we wait for this to deploy. I should have gone over the cute logo while we were waiting. It's been a while since we've done a new installer stream and I'm out of practice. I used to have this like off the top of my head. But I guess while we're waiting, and I'll bring it back up here when it's done installing. Tear ranking of logos for installers. Tear ranking of logos for, okay. I was gonna say, what else do we like about HedgeDoc? No, that's better, we should do that. Nope, nope, we're running with this. Cause I actually have, I am, I realized here all of my favorite things, these are the ones that I made. So that's kind of how I keep track of what installers I've made. And of course I've made none of these logos. But I think for me, HedgeDoc is definitely up there. Number one, I think a close second cause I love the color is manifold. And then for me, a third is mastodon cause I also love the color, so. Yeah, I think, I just, I'm, I really like AzuraCast cause I really like just hexagons, anything with hexagons in it, it's like a good pattern. Ever seen the CGP gray YouTube video, hexagons are the best of guns? No. It's a 20 minute scientific discovery of why hexagons are objectively the best shape. Well, they are. It's in depth, it's researched. Yeah. Well, AzuraCast knew what they were doing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think HedgeDoc and Manafolder are also pretty up there for me, definitely. I think, I wish Jitsies was a little bit more, like it's got a lot of small details going on. That I remember. This is an old version of it too. I think Jitsies logo is updated. But yeah, well, okay. It's kind of got like a. They put a transparent version of it. Well, we should move on cause our HedgeDoc is ready to pull out of the oven, but before we do, Amanda, top three icons go. Okay. I will say, I mean, look at the beauty of that site archiving toolkit icon. I mean, that is stunning. That font awesome icon that I completely just ripped. Yeah. That's great. I mean, it's free to use, so. I would definitely say my top is HedgeDoc, which is funny because like I dislike hedgehogs. Like I have a hard line on hedgehogs, but it's really cute. It's a cute icon they did well.  I'll say another shout out to Omeca with the, I've always liked that they use the, what is that called? Full-finished spiral? Yeah, yes. I like that. That's cool. Anyway, so HedgeDoc ready to go here. So the environment URL here, we should be able to click on it and yep, it loads. So that's awesome. So it is working. Now, unfortunately, because I dismissed the, hey, we're installing thing. It also, I missed the, it should pop up a message when it's done that says, hey, this is done installing and it has some information. So instead, I'm gonna pull up the email because it'll get emailed to me as well and I'll share that really quick. But yeah, you can tell I've been testing the installer a lot because I just reflexively am like closing things. But you'll get an email, it'll look something like this. It'll say, hey, Groovy, your HedgeDoc has been successfully. I don't, yeah, I don't know where this, I don't love Groovy. I didn't write Groovy here. Do you know it? I mean, it's fine. I just, I don't know. What I want is this to rotate between things. I don't like that it always says Groovy. You know what I mean? Oh, I had a picture in my mind of like, what you want is when the email arrives, that's just a little gift of the word Groovy spinning. That's a really odd request, Taylor. We showed a gift and a gift in this email, I think. Yeah. So anyway. Can I borrow your applications? Yeah, I think so. So the HedgeDoc URL will be here, username, password. So this is my ad, or not admin, but this is my user password for HedgeDoc. We'll talk about also, you can create additional user accounts in HedgeDoc but you do have to use a command line tool. HedgeDoc as of right now anyway, maybe it's a change of version two, but right now it has no admin interface. There's just the configuration you set in the text file that I'll show you in a little bit. There's this command line tool. There's other command line tools that I've never needed to use and that's kind of it. So it's sort of bare bones, but they do a good job of setting up in such a way that I don't, we've been using HedgeDoc here now for like a year and a half and I've not had a need to administer anything other than creating users. So, and then finally it says, hey, if you want to map a custom domain, point in a record at this IP address because that's the IP that it has right now. So let's actually do the custom domain thing right away. So I'm going to grab that IP address and if I didn't have it here, I could also find it in the Reclaim Cloud interface. So that would look like this. So if I go to my environment here and expand this node, the IP address is also right there. So I'm going to head back over to C-Panel and I'm going to go into my DNS zone editor and on the domain I want to use here, I'm going to make a new A record, paste that IP address in and we can give it a URL here. So we'll go with my HedgeDoc.jdn.me. This is just a temporary one anyway, but then I'll add an A record, okay. Now I'm going to load this here. It's not going to work yet, but I just want to see if the DNS has been pointed. So I'm going to test it. Okay, this is exactly what we want. So it goes somewhere, but it's broken. That's perfect. Now we need to tell HedgeDoc and Reclaim Cloud, hey, this has a domain name now. So- You should expect people to, yeah. Expect traffic from this new door we've installed. So yeah, so go to add-ons. I made two add-ons for HedgeDoc. We've got an update one, which does what it says. You hit the update button, it's going to update it. That's all it's going to do. It's going to restart HedgeDoc and pull the latest version using Docker and there we go. Domain configuration is what we need though. So it says, hey, tell me about the new domain name. Domain name should already have an A record point at this environment's IP address. We just did that. So now I just need to tell it about the domain name that I want. I just pasted it in there, hit apply. We'll wait, I was going to say a minute or like 30 seconds. And you just still kind of need to wait a little bit because what it has done is it has edited the configuration in a file that we'll look at in just a little bit. And it's restarted everything and now the process of issuing a HTTPS cert is there. Sweet, so we're there. MyHedgeDoc.jdin.me. And now I can sign in with my credentials that it emailed me, that I'm pulling from that email. And then, yep, there we go. Oh, I have this open twice. Okay, and there we go. Now I'm logged in. So it's using the installer is as simple as that. You don't even have to map a custom domain right away. Like if you're just playing with this and want to see how it works, just keep it at a temporary URL or the Reclaim Cloud Environment URL, that'll work just fine. So we are logged in. There is the actual, like I said, the actual interface of HedgeDoc is pretty bare bones. When you sign in, you just get a list of your notes. And right now I have no notes. No notes. Yeah, no notes. I can go in here and there's a few things. You can export all of your notes out of HedgeDoc which is really nice. You can do that in bulk right from here. You can delete your user account.  You know what? I haven't used it. We'll find out. I don't know what it does. I suspect that's what it does because as far as I know, there's no way to port over to another HedgeDoc. You would need to import each file. If you have 100, it would be kind of slow, right? So yeah, you can delete your user account right from here which is interesting. That's just how that works. And you can of course sign out. So let me make a new note here. This is a test note. Ray. There's formatting options, all kinds of stuff in here. There's multiple views. You can just preview it. You can see this side-by-side view. You can just see the editing view. You can change the dark mode. You can... The preview view also works as like a rich text editor, I think. Or is there, there's a different way to... No, as far as I know, you need to edit either here or here. But this does work like you can use this toolbar. And if you have this in both mode, you can kind of actually get a nice... Okay, no, that's what I'm thinking about. Almost LizzyWig style experience. Yeah, I didn't do a great job because this is all text right now. So it'd be better if I did something like this. Like let's go find a iffy... Yeah, that's how I like to use it is the split screen because I like the instant graphication of seeing exactly how it would look if you were to plug it in somewhere. Yeah, for sure. That's how I typically use it too. So let's grab the small version of this. And I can, I could use a toolbar to do this a little bit faster and nicer. I should have maybe. But that's a good example of like, hey, this string of text should look like this. Oh my God. I didn't know you could do that with Markdown, which is mostly on me, but that's amazing. Yeah, so in Markdown, the difference between a link and an image is just putting this exclamation point. So if I put this, this is a cool GIF, that's a link. And if I put exclamation point, it becomes a GIF and this now is the alt text. That's amazing. We live in a magical world. Yeah. But the nice thing about HedgerDoc is that you don't have to know that stuff, right? You can just give it an image or there's an image button that will spit that out for you. But also you can use this little upload button to upload your own images right into HedgerDoc. Super handy, because it'll even host them there too. You don't have to like find a publicly available image. You can just upload one right in place. And there's of course other formatting options in here, italics and, you know, bold and all the good ones. All the good formatting. The classics. Yeah. So that, you know, we'll go way more into how HedgerDoc works and how you might use it together with people during the flex course in that first actual session. But, you know, this is the basics of what it looks like after you install it. So a couple of things from here. If I go, I can create of course new documents still. I can export these as a markdown file, as an HTML file and as a, I don't act the raw HTML is a little bit different. Basically these two are both valid HTML files, but they look different when you upload them to a server. So one of them has like styling information that makes it look nice. And one of them doesn't. It's just unstyled HTML, basically. There's a slide mode. So you can actually do slides in markdown and you can like separate, you can make a slide deck in markdown and you can preview them and see them in HedgerDoc, which I have not done it that way, but I want to. My next presentation, I wanna do that way. You can also go through revision history, which is super cool. And you can even, sorry, you can even go through and download other versions of it, like from the past or restore them basically, which is really cool. Right now we just have the one revision, but if I was looking at a doc over time, and we will in the flux course, you can actually see how that revision history looks. So getting out of this interface for a second, if I just go back to the main domain name for it, you can see I have two notes and that's because I actually clicked on this features thing. So if you wanna overview of the features of HedgerDoc, it'll just make a new note for you and put the features documentation inside the note, which I think is kind of funny. But it's nice, it goes through a lot of things. This permissions table is particularly something that I actually end up referencing a lot because there are six permissions levels and it's kind of hard to know what does what unless you reference this document. This is one of the things that they're, in my opinion, doing a good job of fixing inversion too to try to make this simpler. I didn't even know that that was there. I wish I had because it probably helped me a lot. I've had to guess a lot when sharing. Full transfer, yeah, I didn't know about this until a couple of weeks ago.  Ah, yes. So this is way better. There's a whole bunch of other features in here. You can, oh my God, you can do Slack style emoji apparently. That's cool, didn't know about that. And I guess you can put metadata in Markdown files in Hedge Dock. I've never really messed with that. But yeah, there's a whole breakdown of not just Hedge Dock, but kind of what's possible in Markdown, which is really cool. So that's there. I go back again to the homepage here. You can from this interface search for things and that's all good. So what I wanna dig into here now is a little bit more of customization of the install if you wanted to do it. So if I go back to Reclaim Cloud here and I look at this environment, if I go to the config panel to pop up my file manager and then Hedge Dock, this is where everything about your Hedge Dock install on Reclaim Cloud lives. So the database is actually like in this folder for whatever that means. Don't go editing files in there, you'll break everything. But what I mean by to say that is if you wanted to migrate to your Hedge Dock install to a different Docker host or a different environment inside of Reclaim Cloud, you would just be copying this entire folder, moving it over and firing Docker up again. So that's kind of cool. The uploads folder is where your images go when you upload them to Hedge Dock, which I didn't actually upload one, but that's where it would go. Docker compose, this is basically the meat of how everything works. You really shouldn't ever need to edit this, but it's there if you were needing to do something super advanced or are you just curious? You can look at that. Wait, Taylor, I didn't realize that you could upload images to Hedge Dock, Hedge Dock. Yeah. I thought it was just regular old linking. No, you totally can. So if I go here, let me just find a good sample image on my computer. I have the Hedge Dock logo right in my downloads folder. Okay, so if I hit this upload button, you can't see it because of the way I shared my screen, but I've got the browser upload thing. Like choose the file you want. The file chooser, Matic, yes. And it did not work. Oh, it did, wait, no it didn't. Ooh, okay, that's a bug I need to fix. That should work. So that's good to know. But what that should do is upload your file to that uploads folder and then link it for you right away. So a good example of this, and I'll make sure this, this is probably gonna be an easy thing to fix. But a good example would be some of our domains camp stuff has images like that. Oh no, these are all... I think these are all gifts on this one. I think the, if I go back and find the WordPress one, this is the earlier version of that. These all have docs.reclaimed.tech URLs, which means I use the file upload tool to do it. So... I think it's good because as easy as it is to be able to just link to an image anywhere and keep it really lightweight, having the option to upload will give you a stable file home. So that means that you're always gonna be able to call it. It's hard to solve that problem normally with Markdown, right? Because it's like, oh yeah, you can grab it from anywhere. But if you do, if that link changes at all, it will break your document, right? So you really should, especially for important things, upload your own copy of it instead of... As practice. Yeah, and then it becomes complicated when you're talking about Markdown because it's like, okay, well, so we're gonna make maybe like a subdomain for all of our images or a special folder on a web server somewhere. And this kind of just eliminates all of that thought. It's just like, no, you can even drag images right into the interface too. Like I said, I'll have to fix that. I'm not sure what's up with that upload thing, but that's a bug with my installer, not HedgeDoc. HedgeDoc definitely has that functionality. So I will fix that soon. But yeah, so if I go to the interface here in Reclaim Cloud, this Docker file, this isn't really much, basically, I just set a setting in the web server to set the upload size to be 100 megabytes as a cap. By default, it is one megabyte, which is ridiculous. So I wanted to make it more than that. But .env, this is your file that you can use to actually make changes to stuff in HedgeDoc. So you go in here, there's all kinds of stuff. My database password is in here. So don't change that because that will break your database, but other stuff in here. So the domain name and email, that's what that add-on changed to set the domain name. So you could change this manually from here if you wanted to. You also could put a different email address in here. This email will only get sent to, if there's a problem issuing the certificate, basically. But it's good to know that it's there. And then above this is this HedgeDoc config section. These are five options that in our installer, I changed from the default. So I changed the ability to register via email. I turned that off because that is open to everyone by default. And I think for most people who are going to use HedgeDoc, they don't want to make a HedgeDoc and make it open to the entire world. For this now, you could invite people, but they couldn't just show up. Correct. I had to create users to do it. And I'll show how that works in a second, but that's getting to that message in my email. It's like, you can use the manage users command. That's how you do it. You also could temporarily turn this to true, right? So you could set this to true and then... Give like a 10 minute window or something. Yeah, stop and start your environment and then turn it off later. That's how initially with hour one for reclaim, that's how I did it, but eventually I went through and actually set up single sign-on for it. So then that wasn't necessary, but that's another thing. Not gonna go into it because single sign-on is like a whole can of worms, but HedgeDoc supports many different types of single sign-on, which is really cool. So you could configure that as well. The default permission for a note, I have it set to private, which means literally the only thing that can happen is the person who created the note, who is signed in, they can look at it and nothing else can happen. I thought it made sense to start from most secure and then let people change it basically. Command allow anonymous. This means that people cannot create notes anonymously without being signed in, which is a feature of HedgeDoc. But then weirdly, I have this allow anonymous edits. And what this means is if you set the permission on your note to allow anonymous people to view or edit a note, they can edit. So it's some of the configuration options in HedgeDoc are a little bit confusing because they seem like they should be overlapping, but they're not. That makes sense though. I'm thinking of the way that Google Docs has any one, you can set the permissions to anyone in the world with the link and edit this. You could set that permission if you wanted. Well, the difference is in Google Docs, if you do that, I believe Google Docs still requires you to sign in with a Google account to edit the document. But I could be wrong about that. Like you have to have a Google account to edit a document in Google Docs. Okay. With this option set to true, you don't have to have any account in this HedgeDoc at all to edit the doc if the person opened their document up to that level of privilege, right? So it has to be, they have to opt in. It's not gonna be like that by default. If I go back to my HedgeDoc here and go to the features thing again, I suppose I can click down here too, I would have to set it all the way up to freely, which means guest write is enabled. Okay. So yeah, but that's configurable and I'll show you in a second where all of these options live on the HedgeDoc website basically. So this link will go to there and there's, cause there's many, many, many options you can set. I simply wanted to give people a list of the things that, well not a list, this is controlling the options, but this is the things that I, Taylor, decided to change from the defaults basically. And then find free, finally free URL. This is off by default, but it's one of my favorite features of HedgeDoc. So I enable it, which lets you make up URL. I love this. So if I go to my HedgeDoc instance here and I just make up a title of a note as a URL. So I'll go like another neat, nido note. That's a note now, as long as I start writing in it. Yeah, I love that. And I really like that because you get this nice clean URL, right? Especially if it lives at your domain, like super neat. So that is a feature that I enable by default too, but if for some reason you don't want that capability, you could turn it off. The trick with this is, it's, you know, you like made it by visiting it, right? So I think the reason why they have that off is if you allow people to anonymously create notes without an account and have this feature on, bots could make like hundreds of thousands of notes instantly. So I think that's why they have it off by default, but I have it set so that by default, you can't make a note unless you're signed in. So, you know, it's just a different choice, basically. Finally, go into this URL here. This will go through, this is HedgeDoc's configuration page. This thing is kind of huge and looks a little bit scary, but it's not. And I wanted to show how you would use it. I wanna prove why it's not that scary. So basically every single option you can change is here. And there are some things like this Node.js thing. This is not gonna be relevant for us because we're running in a Docker container. So Node is set up basically already for us. But all of these are changeable. So I'll have, hey, if you're using a config file, this is how you do it. If you're using an environment variable, this is how you do it. Here's the default value and an example of changing it. And here's a description of what it does. We are using Docker in that .env file. So we will be looking at this environment column. So basically if I wanted to do something like change, I don't know. I could allow, I could allow iframing a document by taking this and put option and putting it in my thing. I wanna find something a little bit more fun though. Maybe not. PDF. Oh, discuss is interesting. We probably won't go through and set this. Is there a PDF? If you control F, there's PDF embeds. It's able to allow embedding PDFs. Disallow. So if you set it to true, then you can embed. Oh, interesting. Okay, so yeah, let's say we wanna do allow that. So I could copy this, go over to my .env file, make a new line, paste it in, do equals, and then true because I think it's true. Yeah, the option should be true or false. It is actually on by default. So out of the box is true. So this is maybe not the best example. But discuss could be another one. So maybe you wanna use discuss as a commenting platform. I actually use it on my blog. So at the bottom of the blog post, discuss is doing this comment section here. Apparently you can use discuss comments in HedgeDoc which is really interesting. Makes a lot of sense. I have always pronounced a discuss in my head. Yeah. Which makes no sense. It's a totally different thing when you pronounce it that way, but okay, discuss. So I'm sure there's more setup that's necessary for discuss because you probably have to attach an account or something and I don't know what we have to do. But let's say we made these two options. We said, cool. I wanna make sure we're allowing PDF embeds and I wanna make sure that we're turning on discuss. So I'm gonna save the file and then I can just restart it. What's up? I was gonna say that I stand with Amanda. I have also always pronounced a discuss in my head. Yeah. It's maybe not the best of those. It's the spelling. It looks like the word just like, oh, look at it. It evokes a word. It's like, does it evoke the word? You think it does? So you can literally just stop and start the environment or we can use the terminal to restart it. Either should work just fine. I could also go to my add-on and just hit the update button because that also will restart it. So after doing any one of those three things, honestly, most of the time I usually just stop and restart. That will apply the new changes. One thing I do wanna note on restarting and this is just a weird docker thing, but hitting this restart nodes will not apply changes you made to the file, basically. And that's, I don't wanna go into why, but it won't. And it's not a reclaim cloud thing. It's a way docker works thing. But basically when you do this, it's going to sort of restart the state of things as they existed before. Whereas when we do a stop and start, it's gonna actually reread the configuration file and say, oh, there's new things, I gotta change it. So that's why I say to hit this stop button and then start again. Okay, so once you do that, I can reload HedgeDock. Oh yeah, this is the old URL. This isn't gonna work anymore. I need to go to my new one. And so if I sign back in, which I gotta grab that password from the email again, I haven't saved it yet. There we go. So I'm back in, things are working. I don't know about the PDF embed thing because of the upload feature not working. And discuss, I'm sure there would be more involved to get that working. So it says enable to allow users to add, discuss comments to their notes or presentations. Interesting. Yeah, that's super cool. But I don't wanna play with, we'll have to figure that out another time. Like I don't really wanna like go through that whole setup, but that's the basics of how you would change options in here. You would look at any of these and grab the environment variable, which is usually in this format of all uppercase separated by underscores. So yeah. Finally, how to manage users. So I mentioned already that we don't, by default, the user registration is off. And this is especially important because HedgeDoc doesn't actually send any email at all. So when it says email registration, the way that works is when you go to register for a new account, it just says, cool, tell me your email and tell me what password you like. And that's it. Like there's no step two, there's no verifying your email address or anything like that, which is fine if only trusted people are doing it.  So that's kind of weird, but I can see why they did it. I think they do it this way because they just basically wanna avoid the situation of like, how do we send email and make sure it doesn't get in people's spam inbox, spam boxes and stuff like that.  So email local account is the default one. Like I said, you could temporarily allow registration and turn it off later. You can set up actually other types of logins. So you can say, oh, we're gonna allow GitHub logins and Facebook logins. And it does have some instructions at links too because you do for all of those single sign-on type things, you have to set things up on the GitHub side, for instance. But you could also do things like SAML, which is like a real single sign-on protocol. And so then you could say, oh, everyone at my school can log in, but only people at my school can log in, which is I think what I would do if I was setting this up for a community at a college. So that's really cool that it has that kind of built-in and has all of these options. There's no like plug-in, it's just part of HedgeDoc. So, but let's say you're using it like we are and we just want a few people to use it. I wanna invite people. The way this would work is we just go into the terminal and we can use the manage users command for HedgeDoc. And if I just type it, it's gonna say, hey, you didn't tell me to do anything, but that's cool because it actually gives some nice information. So we can add an account, we can delete an account, we can reset the password on an account that already exists. And then this final one's mostly just used for like scripting, but it lets you type the password into the command. So you can have like one command that would reset a password. We don't really need that, I'll show why. So let's say I wanted to give Amanda an account and pilot an account in our HedgeDoc here. So let's go manage users, add, and then Amanda, add, reclaim, hosting. And then I can set a password. So I actually have to set this and then I would give Amanda the password. And I'm gonna do the same thing for pilot here and then we'll test it. So this HedgeDoc instance isn't gonna live very long, it's not past the stream. So I'm okay with saying it on stream, but we use the password, reclaim for life, ultra secure. Can you both try logging in there and see how that works for you? Sure. The URL is in the Discord. I'm gonna put it there in a second. Amen. Sweet. And I'm gonna make this note here. I'm gonna change the privacy of it so that only signed in people can edit it. I am in as well. So I'm gonna put this note in, I guess I'll put it in Discord too. I'll change the permission of it later, but you know, I'll edit the note. I was gonna say you could DM it to us on Slack. That's okay. I'm okay if people see it because I can make it public for a little while anyway after two. So here we go. This is the real cool feature of HedgeDoc is actual simultaneous markdown editing. And I can go in here and you get all the classic problems of people putting returns over each other and everything. Why am I having trouble finding the note? I think you need to go to the link. Okay, so it's not listed in the history. It won't be because you haven't visited it and you're not the owner. So in the Discord, I linked it. Yes. Okey-dokey. Yeah, the history is just per user basically. So yeah, I mean. It doesn't support that one. Emoji. No, Mastodon and Twitter support that emoji. Oh. I meant it. Thank you Bob, you guys and your scripts and your ideas. So yeah, that's HedgeDoc and we can simultaneously collaborate on this note. I can also now set this to be more, I could set the note to be more public. So we showed before in that features page all of the permissions levels, right? Well, from here we can also do, I can lock it down or right now I have it at limited. So you have to have an account in HedgeDoc, our HedgeDoc, to be able to edit this and you have to of course know the link. But I can also set this to editable which is one of the ones I use most often. And what this does is only people logged in can edit but anyone can view it. So if that link now is actually public and if you are looking at it and don't have a HedgeDoc account you can still look at it in real time which is I think probably one of the coolest things about HedgeDoc, especially because what it's doing is you've got this note like Google Doc style but it's on a domain you control and if you want to you can even give it a really nice URL. So I think it walks this line of being a document but actually being a little bit more web native than Google Docs is which I know is a weird thing to say because Google Docs is a website but it doesn't speak the web in terms of URLs, right? Like Google Docs URLs you don't have control over, right? So if you, I've been in this situation many times where I make like a QR code, put it on a poster that goes to some Google Doc that I need people to be able to find and then oh, turns out that Google Doc got deleted for some reason and now my QR codes are no good. A lot of different ways to solve that problem. A lot of mistakes I made in that particular anecdote but if I did this in HedgeDoc I have a lot more control over what those URLs are like. So yeah, I'm just a big fan of the tool and I need to use it more. I've been, we've been using it at Reclaim a little bit but I think it would be cool to see like to use it even more for especially stuff that was gonna turn into public facing stuff I think because the nice thing about this is once you write it and mark down it's so easy to port it into other tools especially with this because you get this nice preview. So if you wanted to take this and throw this into a Google Doc or even WordPress, you can just obviously copy it but if you're throwing it into another tool it doesn't support the formatting as well. Taking the mark down and pasting it as plain text somewhere is also way nicer than having to manually format everything after the fact. So yeah, I think that kind of covers it. That's start to finish HedgeDoc. I have to fix that file upload bug but I'm pretty sure that that's just a individual, I think I already know how to fix it. So I'll have that fixed pretty soon after this stream. I think that's, that went pretty smooth then I'd say that's the only thing, sweet. Cool. Well, Amanda Pilot, thank you for joining me and we'll see everybody at the Open Publishing Ecosystems Flex Course where we will start with HedgeDoc and talk a little bit more about like using it and some of the possibilities. We did talk about that a little bit in the stream but it's gonna be more dedicated to the idea of writing and publishing in the open and where HedgeDoc could fit in that equation or situation. And real quick, we gotta get that plug for where and when the HedgeDoc session is happening. Yeah, okay, so you can go, yeah, you can go to our events calendar and RSVP. The first session, which is the HedgeDoc session is happening on Tuesday, November 28th, should be right at, oh, it's right there, at 12 p.m. Eastern. So that's when you'll be able to see the premiere and just hop into Discord into the Flex Course Channel and chat with us while it's going on. We'll be there to talk. Yeah, I'm really excited. As the description says, this one's kind of a long time coming. We've been excited as a team for this for a little while to dig into some of these alternative tools and yeah, hope to see a lot of people there, so. See you there. Yeah.


Happy Saturday, everybody, but this will probably go up on Sunday, but I am so excited for the big-climb Minneapolis! Woohoo! So I know this video is going to be a little bit different than my teaching videos, but I just thought this is a like exercise is a big part of my life and I Wanted to share this experience with you guys. So if you're interested to watch this go ahead and continue So I am doing the big-climb Minneapolis, and it raises money for the lymphoma and leukemia society And there it is. That's Kapella Tower. I ended up raising $200 from the help of my family and friends and I am super excited. We're climbing up 2,572 stairs or something like that. I'm really nervous, but I'm super excited that I'm doing something for a good cause and that you know the people That I'm fundraising for are gonna benefit a lot from this other than like the other five case that I do It's more just for fun for things for me And this one is really gonna go to help other people and I'm super excited So I'm just gonna share my journey with you guys from me being nervous at the beginning, which I am right now and being probably super tired in the middle of it and then Getting to the end and just feeling so good about it So I'm really excited and I can't wait for you guys to join me on this journey So keep watching and I hope you guys enjoy. Thanks guys Check we just checked in and we started our climb up So here we go During the climb there were these amazing posters on the wall on each floor and Some of them were funny memes others were stories of people who either survived or did not survive leukemia and lymphoma and it was really great Motivation to just keep working hard and climbing up the tower


Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show exploring the ways that tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship are creating a freer, wealthier, and more peaceful world. As always, I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and with me in the studio today are Will Duffield, the editor of Prototype, and Aaron Powell, director of Libertarianism.org. Today we're talking about the ancient practice of augury, or the predictive science of animal sacrifice. Aaron brought a turtle dove with him, and after I vivisect it, Will was going to divine the future from the patterns left by its entrails in true Greco-Roman fashion. Don't worry, no animals are actually going to be harmed in the making of this episode, but clearly the tech startup, Augur, didn't have historians in mind when it chose its name. Now, Aaron, could you open this by explaining what a prediction market is, what Augur in particular is doing, and what your experience with it was like. Because I think you actually bought, you placed the bet on Augur, am I right? So a prediction market is simply that. It's a way for people to create a market in bets on various occurrences. So we might have the one that I placed a bet on was whether the Congress would confirm Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee by a certain date. And so I can bet either yes or no, and other people can bet yes or no, and you put a little bit of money on it. And the amount it costs to buy a yes or a no is a factor of what people are willing to pay for that. So you get basically a stock market style effect. And with this, you can kind of get at what the community thinks is the likelihood of a certain event occurring, how strongly they feel it will occur based on how much money they're willing to put into it. And the data we have going back is that prediction markets can often be fairly accurate predictors of what is actually going to happen. They have a decent track record of making accurate predictions and potentially a better track record than just individuals guessing. Because guessing is costless. We don't suffer any personal penalty when we guess wrongly. And in fact, most people don't remember when we've guessed wrongly. So there isn't usually an accompanying reputational penalty.  And so it's a way to aggregate knowledge that people might have and how strongly they feel about this and how much they're willing to kind of put their skin in the game on it. So AUGAR is simply another prediction market and there have been prediction markets. What sets AUGAR apart is that most prediction markets until now have been centralized. So a company runs them the same way that ESPN runs fantasy football leagues. The result is that you can regulate them. The government can regulate them. And so the governments have set all sorts of rules because this looks like gambling. There are certain things that it's okay according to the state to gamble on, other things it's not. They want to limit it so that people don't lose their shirts. And so the prediction markets that we've had frequently have limits that have the effect of then limiting their ability to really get at what the market seems to know. So one of the obvious ones is there'll be caps on how much you can bet.  We can't bet on politics in the United States, for instance, which then limits the ability to use prediction markets to predict who will win elections. So when the presidential election, there's a terrific site called electionbettingodds.com that aggregates prediction markets on various political things. And so in the run up to the election, you could watch what the prediction market said was the likelihood of Trump or Hillary winning or congressional races. But all of that was based on markets I believe were in the U.K. Because it wasn't illegal there. You can walk into any betting parlor and just as you would bet on sports, you can bet on politics, usually get kind of a weird look as the one nerd in there betting on American elections. So auger attempts to use the decentralization enabled by the blockchain to get around that problem because it can create a decentralized betting market that can't be censored, that can't be regulated because there isn't any central service that the state can go to and punish and that everyone who is participating in the market can do so anonymously or pseudonymously. So auger is what's called a D app.   It's interacting with a database that is also hosted by Facebook. And that database is then what contains all of the information that's in Facebook, the content of your posts and what you've liked and all of the creepy stuff that Facebook knows about us. A D app says, okay, we're going to still have a front end. And the front end will be hosted on someone's server. But that back end, that database lives in the blockchain and other decentralized solutions. So it might be, it's information written to the blockchain plus like all of the heavy lifting information, the stuff that actually would take up a lot of space and would clog up the limited bandwidth. The blockchain is stored in decentralized file stores like IPFS or Swarm or something of that sort that's spread out all over. And what really sets these apart is that because you've separated, you've decentralized the back end, you've decentralized the data store, anyone can write their own front end to that data just like anyone can write their own wallet to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain. And so auger is, right now, auger is a front end that's run on auger.com or whatever the domain name is, that is an interface to the auger blockchain, which is part of the Ethereum blockchain as a set of smart contracts as, you know, and other data stored there. So when you make, you make a bet on auger, you are basically creating a, you're contributing Ethereum tokens into a smart contract on the blockchain that says, if such and such event happens, I will, you know, my Ethereum tokens, I'll either get back a certain amount, I'll get back some from the other people who bet the wrong way or mine will go to other people. But that's all written into like a publicly available contract spread out across all the Ethereum nodes. And from a liability perspective, I assume that third parties creating front ends for this database wouldn't be held liable for perhaps what their users, how their users use that front end to interact with the underlying decentralized database. That's a good question. And I wonder if that's one that, you know, will come up as we get into the specific issues that we have to talk about today that are relatively novel because that's not a question that would necessarily have come up with the standard centralized where both the front and the back end were the same place. Yeah, you're pretty clearly liable in that sort of situation because it's your cohesive whole entity. Well, and you have the uncertainty introduced by the kind of weakening of section 230 of the communications act, where now, you know, traditionally, since the mid 90s, hosts were not held liable for content posted on there by a third party user. That's now been weakened, right? Well, only with regard to promotion of prostitution. So I don't see a whole lot of overlap here, though, perhaps someone could come up with a novel prediction. But the legal precedent though. So someone could say, well, because we as a law system, we've decided that it's okay to hold liable a host, a front end or back end host for content posted by a third party user that has to do with the solicitation of prostitutes and sex trafficking. Therefore, we can also prohibit these other kinds of posts and behaviors. Well, if they were to pass another law, but not as a matter of legal precedent, no. Well, we'll see. But so the question then is whether auger with its front end control over access to the back end, whether or not, you know, it's trying to create a cut out so that individual users can bet on all kinds of things that regulators or that law enforcement would find unsavory. This is an introduction to some of the I think some of the early reporting after auger was launched, there was a lot of attention around the fact that people had placed bets on whether or not unpopular politicians or Supreme Court members would be dead by a certain point. And this was thought of as an assassination market. This is the kind of behavior that make law enforcement uneasy. But, you know, auger could ostensibly say, look, that's, we're not in control of that, right? That the back end data, we, you know, on the front end, we can choose whether or not, and there's some discussion about whether or not they were allowing those bets on basically assassination bets, how easy they were making it for users to access the bet itself, but they couldn't actually shut down the bet. It still exists. They could. So my understanding is they could at the very beginning, so when it first launched out of beta a couple of months ago, that they had, they owned the original key, the original wallet address that had control over the whole of the smart contract. And so they could go in and they could modify things or they could shut stuff down or they could censor, they could act as censors. But a couple of weeks, I believe, after they launched, and this was something they had planned, so they, you you maintain control of that until you make sure that everything is up and running incorrectly, because it enables you to make changes and to fix things. But once they, you know, a couple of weeks later, once they're comfortable that it's actually all working and out in the wild, they transferred ownership of that to like a dummy address that no one had access to. And so now it just lives on its own and the people who created it have as little control over where it goes as any of us in this room do. So at this point now they'll have control over access to. There's the question of front end accessibility, but obviously even if the creators with regard to their front end application removed certain bets or removed the ability to view or access certain bets, other third party front end creators could allow their users to access those bets. Right. So this would be similar to if Twitter ran this way. So if all of your tweets were stored in smart contracts on the blockchain instead of in Twitter servers and Twitter were a true D app, twitter.com might have all sorts of restrictions. So it might prevent you from tweeting things with certain keywords. It might have restrictions on what you could see. So if you searched for certain terms, it might institute its own ban or block lists, but all of that data is still there in this smart contract. So someone else could come around totally independent of Twitter and write twitter.com. They could have a completely different set of rules and could access whatever they wanted. So at this point there could be auger knockoffs that provide different front end services, but have access to the same back end data. It just in case auger tried to do something like that. So okay. So in a sense it doesn't matter what happens to auger as a front end provider at this point in time. I mean like the data is there, the contracts are self executing. Someone could come along and create an alternative that provide the same kind of front end service, which is probably a good thing because as we were prepping for the show there's been a lot of buzz since auger launched about the viability of that particular front end service. One of the things I think Will you found was how relatively few people were using the service. Will you explain a little bit about that for us? Yeah. So in order for prediction markets to function as you would intend them to, being able to draw upon the wisdom of the crowd as a whole, you need to some extent a crowd. If you have a very small number of users betting on some set of futures, you're unlikely to be tapping into the breadth of knowledge that you would hope to access through this. So you do see a kind of liquidity crunch here. And particularly with regard to auger, the auger protocol in terms of its valuation derived from its set of tokens seems wildly out of step with both the number of users and the amount of money being bet on futures within auger. So these tokens just to clarify, so when you place a bet on auger, you are betting with Ethereum tokens with that cryptocurrency, but auger has its own token that functions more in a reputation role. So you acquire these by using it by being on the right side of bets. And the tokens are, I believe the main function of the token is one of the problems that you run into with a betting market is how do you decide which side won? And so you tie it to an oracle, which is the thing that's going to decide, but that might be contestable. And so these reputation tokens enable the community to interact with which side won, whether it was right or wrong. And so I believe if you can test something and are proven to be right, you gain these tokens, which then give you more authority at a later thing. And so auger did a initial coin offering that you can buy these tokens, and these tokens have a trading value. And so that's what this, the outstanding value of the auger tokens. And at the moment, those tokens in some are valued at about $300 million and yet auger only has 64 daily active users according to a coin desk article. And I went on and checked today that was 45 active users. So I think pretty consistently in that range. And to clarify the way they're using these, the count of this active users is they're looking at. So when you interact with auger by having an Ethereum wallet that you sign into it with that has your unique address, and when you place a bet, either buy or sell bets on the auger into the auger blockchain, those transactions are marked with your address. And so the way that these numbers of how many unique daily users is they simply count the number of unique addresses that made a transaction with auger each day. So it's possible there's many more people who are logging in to check or look at things but aren't actually making trades. That's a good caveat to point out. But it still looks to be a fairly thin market at the moment. Given the total... Right. If there's only 45 trades happening a day, and that's not in a single market, but that's across every possible. So from my will, the Supreme Court nominee get confirmed to who's going to win the next presidency, to who's going to win the Super Bowl. That means that the vast majority of these things are not getting even a single one each day. And at least compared to other prediction markets I've participated in the past, in this case, good judgment project, there I saw most or many users updating many of their predictions on a weekly, if not daily basis in light of both new information and the shifting price of these futures. And when you don't have numbers, when you don't have a certain critical mass, it becomes that especially with a proof-of-stake system like either as opposed to proof-of-work system like Bitcoin and that's a whole other conversation. But the proof-of-stake system, which is what this reporters is what they call them, people who have some of the auger tokens, who bought a certain amount and who earned them and use them and get rewarded like reporter status, they're the ones who act as a check on like dissolving the oracle problem, they're the ones who kind of police the community in a sense. If you don't have a certain number of people, all the number of reporters who it takes to throw a result is consequently quite low. So it's easier to monkey around the results. There's not only wisdom in crowds, there's safety in numbers for a system like auger. So it is a real issue. I'm still not 100% convinced as Aaron, we brought up with the oracle problem. This has been an issue for prediction markets before. The most famous example is that I could think of was Intrade, which was a predecessor of auger shutdown three, four, five years ago. But one of the founders of Intrade actually is one of the execs of auger. So there's like a filial connection. But back in 2012, there was the Republican caucus in Iowa and it was an unusual situation, sure, but Mitt Romney was declared the winner by eight votes, eight delegates in the Iowa caucuses or kind of throw the Iowa caucus to Mitt Romney. So Intrade pays out and says, look, the people who bet that Romney would win, they get their payout. But a few days later, and the rules had stipulated that there would be no recount. So if there was a recount too bad, whatever the initial count was, was good. But a few days later, they found out, oh, during the basic certification process, so not a recount, we just basically tally the numbers wrong and actually Rick Santorum won.  Like, we should have won this. It didn't violate the no recount rule. What gives guys? And Intrade had to say, sorry, tough luck, like our oracle system just didn't work in this case. And so that's an issue. That really is, especially when you have a small user pool like this, when you can't necessarily rely on your reporter system to fairly adjudicate this system. I think that's a problem for Augur specifically. And it's still something that's always going to linger. I mean, it's not necessarily insuperable problem, but for prediction markets in general, figuring out who gets the side, who wins the bet matters, particularly in complicated situations. So it's one thing when you say, hey, who wins the presidency? That's an easy thing to the top. We want the paper record and whatever the CBS and that New York Times says won the day after, this time of day, that's who wins. But when it's something a little more nuanced, like let's say I've predicted that Donald Trump will not finish out his term, kind of an implicit assassination bet or impeachment bet, or you do that for any other individual person, that person fakes their death. Well, right, like this is a scenario that really becomes a real issue for assassination markets, people who or someone spreads a rumor on Twitter that gets reported on as someone like, these things aren't reversible once you've written it in the contract. I mean, there's ways of gaming this system of playing with an oracle system that is problematic for prediction markets.  Oh, I mean, we keep coming back to this question of assassination markets, particularly within auger given that someone put one up. And the reason that assassination markets have always been a concern when it comes to any kind of prediction market is because if you can, it is unlikely that anyone but the assassin can correctly predict when someone is going to die. We usually don't have a whole lot of advanced warning as to our deaths or the deaths of others. And within the general market for assassinations, because assassinations are illegal, it can often be difficult to coordinate that payout. However, if you have an open prediction market and everyone can step in to bet on someone's potential time of death, the assassin is likely to be the only one who gets it right and therefore the one who wins the payout such that the prediction payout can function as a payment for services rendered. There is utility in that. We should point that out before we talk about assassinations, which is, so let's say you're trying to figure out the balance of power on the Supreme Court. So you want the most accurate possible prediction of when Supreme Court justices who hold their offices for life or until resignation are likely to shuffle off this mortal coil and so that which party will get to pick a replacement. There is political value in that and there is thus social value in good, the best possible prediction of when they are likely to live. So even if it's ghoulish to talk about betting on the date of someone's death, there's value in this and we already do it. I mean the political prognostic here will always say, well, Clarence Thomas is this number of years old and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is this number of years old. We think they'll probably live this long. We're already doing that, but prediction markets offer the possibility of doing that even more accurately. So that's at the outset there is social utility in this and it's not merely an assassination market, even though that's kind of the hyperbolic way of framing it at the same time. You've just always heard this complaint or concern when it comes to any sort of prediction market back in let's say 2003, maybe 2006. The Pentagon set up their own internal prediction market in order to better estimate the time and location of terror attacks. Of course, this was then billed or presented by some as a ghoulish endeavor such that it was rather quickly shut down even though using the wisdom of crowds in order to better understand when terror attacks are likely to happen could help to save thousands if not more lives. But it's a kind of constant refrain that has dogged this useful means of knowledge dissemination. Because it looks like you're cheapening the whole thing. You're turning matters of life and death in this case into going to the craps table. And making money on it. And making money. There's a profiteering complaint. Well, and it's a reminder that a lot of stuff that we recognize that are now quite respectable forms of prediction markets were once illegal. I mean, so the stock market, literally the market. Well, interest, taking interest was illegal under kind of Catholic ecclesiological law. But it was also frowned upon as gambling. It was okay to have shares in the company. Like at some point, we agreed, okay, we'll split share companies in the shares. The corporation is okay. But the idea that you would then trade shares in the company with strangers who weren't whose only connection to that company was through a piece of paper. And like that was considered no better than gambling. And over time, we've developed as a society. Society is the point where we say, no, actually, that's a good thing. It was once unimaginable, but now it's good. And the same thing kind of has to happen with non-financial related prediction markets. And like financial markets, when trading the stock of or ownership of joint stock trading companies first appeared on the scene, it often did look a lot like gambling. You didn't... There wasn't a great societal understanding of how this helped these firms to make better decisions in the future, how it helped other market actors to understand the value of these firms. And in time, we've come to recognize the importance of stock markets in doing that. But now we get back to the problem of legitimate assassination markets. Because prior to a fully decentralized system like this, it was harder to get these things off the ground. If it's a centralized system, then when in trade puts up, will someone assassinate this world leader by this date, the government can knock on the door and say, hey, you got to knock that off. Or it can get at the registration information of the people who are betting one way or another, which might end up being a useful suspect list. But when you've got a fully decentralized, this is living on the blockchain, no one can shut it down, no one can censor it. Everyone who's participating in it is participating simply as an Ethereum wallet address that they could have set up on the fly. So there's no way to trace that to a specific person or it's awfully hard to do. Then you can't... The state agents can watch this thing go and they can see maybe the likelihood keep going up or someone wins and the person was actually... And there's absolutely nothing that they can do about it. Yeah. Well, the prospect for this was imagined a lot longer than I realized. There was a fellow named Jim Bell who's a crypto anarchist. They called him a cypher anarchist back in the 90s was the the termini. Cypher punk. Cypher punks, yeah, right. And he wrote an article called assassination politics and it's actually quite prescient when you read it now back in 1997 and he talked about using digital cash and at the time people were starting to think about the idea of something that looks like Bitcoin and Ethereum but it was still all kind of in the theoretical stage.   Some kind of corruption or crime being committed by local authorities and rather than just fuming at the television, ordinary citizens could say, hey, you know what? I'm going to pitch in the dollar of this digital cash for a prediction of their end of life coming in the near future. And you only need a few thousand people. The number you put in the article was 0.01% of the population to put a $250,000 bounty on someone's head. So that prospect, Bell was very excited about as a cypher anarchist. He thought, here, we'll make politicians more honest that if they do something that only 0.01% of the people are concerned about, they'll have big bounties on their heads from people who are buying into these kind of assassination markets. It's terrible. 0.1% of the population is probably insane or just horrifically wrong about any issue at any time. You met QAnon? Yeah, exactly. Probably 0.1% of the population believes in that. It's the kind of thing that only made sense pre-social media and pre-Twitter.  Or, you know, his more fantastical imagining was that you wouldn't need a military because you could basically just use assassination contracts to control. So lots of utopian kind of visions around this. But what's kind of pressing about is the idea of people placing bets, in particular, acting in the kind of assassination market using digital cash all the way back in the 1990s. Bell himself ends up in tax fraud and he ends up in jail and such. But what's interesting here is that, like, okay, we're 20 years on from Bell writing this series of articles that was very influential in the exact community out of which comes the cryptocurrency community. Cypherpunks are the source. It's people like, anyway, so I won't run down the list. But it is from this community that we get are things like Augur eventually emerging. You didn't take Jim Bell as emblematic of 90s cypherpunk culture either. Well, I mean, we could argue about the specific influence of Jim Bell, but he was definitely a member of the community that was well read and regarded by the kind of anarchist community at the time. Not that everyone would have agreed with him or that he's representative in some way. But the thing is, is we're 20 years on. We have digital cash. We have public encryption. We have all the stuff that Bell predicted would be in common usage to the point where it would essentially get rid of national militaries and control our political system. And by no measure of Augur, are we anywhere close. I mean, the prediction market for the assassination bet that was placed on Donald Trump, I went and tracked it down. It's about 50 shares at 0.015 either, which is like $500 at stake. This is a far cry from Bell's imagining 20 years ago. So how come even though we have all the tools he predicted, in fact, even more than he predicted, do we not see this happening? Well, the first one would be nobody's using Augur. So I mean, my guess is that that particular market is not necessarily an outlier that most of the markets, even the totally legitimate of who's going to win the next super role, probably have similar total numbers. But the other one is, I mean, so this is a real concern. And it's a concern from the Libertopia perspective because on its face, like we as libertarians think, what these things are, these crypto-based markets and what the encryption and the communications and all of that and the lowering of transaction costs, it's opening up markets. It's allowing markets to flourish where they could have been restricted before. Yay, that's awesome from a libertarian perspective. But the fact is that people will do bad things in markets. People do glorious things in markets and probably the overwhelming majority of what happens when you free up markets is glorious. But people will still do bad things. And the concern specifically with this is, so bracket the question of Augur itself not having very many users because we can imagine that it could, it's something could happen and it could spike or some other one could come along and it could do very well. And it's likely that these kinds of decentralized prediction markets will at some time in the future have a lot of users is that this particular sort of bad behavior, namely markets and assassinations. People respond to incentives. Markets can create incentives that people then respond to. And so even if you don't have a, part of it might be that just there's not that many ghoulish people out there. There's not that many people who want to assassinate people. But if you start betting, all it takes is that to incentivize one person to go out and try to kill someone. I also think for anyone important enough to end up with a crowdfunded hit out on them, the would be assassin probably won't live long enough to spend their winnings. I could be wrong there, but it just seems as though there's a kind of importance threshold that you would need to pass. And obviously I'm looking at what is now a pretty limited market if this sort of thing where ubiquitous in our society, I might think of it differently. But then in passing that, you're there and the feds will get you territory. There is here, I think, we mentioned it briefly earlier, but with the CESTA-FOSTA fight online sex trafficking legislation, it's a related question, which is advocates of the law were concerned that people were openly advertising for prostitution in such a way that they were essentially advertising sex trafficking.  So we shut that down. Congress shut that down. And critics have pointed out, well, if you shut that down, those services aren't going to go away. They're going on the black market. In fact, there's early signs, Mike Maznick on TechDirt has highlighted some of this stuff. There's early signs it's made it harder to catch sex traffickers because they're now on the black market underground. So the same argument could be made here, which is that it's not like there is not already a market in assassinations. There is.  Yeah, but competence matters here in a way that it frankly doesn't when it comes to sex work. You aren't concerned about sex work being more open because you'll attract more competent sex workers when it comes to assassins. That's very much a concern. But all it takes with an assassin is one competent assassin. And I think this is where you get an interesting effect and a potentially troubling effect of these kinds of markets because you... So the philosopher Derek Parfit had this thought experiment about harmless tortures where I might do something that causes no... I push a button or I do something to someone else that causes them absolutely no harm. It's utterly harmless. And they might not even be aware of it. We basically cut out everything that might make my action morally problematic. But if lots and lots of people do it at the same time, it has the effect of torturing this person. So you're maybe pushing a button that puts a minuscule amount of electricity into them or something. But in the aggregate, it causes them great pain. And what's the moral status of this? And with a market like this, so at a standard assassination, you don't have a whole bunch of harmless torturers. What you have is one person who has to really, really care and really wants to see this person dead because they're going to pony up 250,000 or whatever it costs. And then you have one person, then you have to find one person who's willing to do it for that. And you have to be not only really committed, but really aware of what you're doing to pony up that amount of money.  Sure, I'll pitch in a bucket. The moral distance is much greater. But it's still all it takes is one person willing to do it for that amount of money. And now it happens. And so we can become participants in greater evils without really realizing what we're doing. I mean, this makes me think of there was... A few years back, there was a tech that also didn't go anywhere, but presaged a fairly troubling future called, I think, Dark Leaks, where Dark Leaks was... You've got the WikiLeaks model of people could send stolen documents to WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks will then put them out into the world. But there's no economic model there. That what Dark Leaks did was it would allow, like say, I stole a whole bunch of data from a government contractor.  It allowed me to mathematically prove that I had that data by basically releasing small pieces of it that people could verify, and then set a threshold so people... You basically kickstarter the release of this. People contribute Bitcoin to something, and then when the threshold is met, enough people have contributed the documents, the rest of the documents that I have get released into the world automatically. And so you end up creating markets in stolen documents that anyone can participate in for a little bit of money. But everyone gets them at the end. It's not just some buyer. Sure. But the seller, you now incentivize sellers. So you end up in a world where you can, in this fairly anonymous way, sell stolen secrets to a global audience. And we all like... Sure, I'd like to know what the NSA is up to. I'd like to know what this company is up to. So I'll pitch in a buck here or there, whereas you wouldn't be willing to spend thousands of dollars of your own money to pay. I think compared to insider trading, for instance, the main complaint there is fairness. Yes, it probably drives us towards a more efficient market, but because only some are getting access to this extra information, it's unfair, and therefore should be prohibited. But with regard to this, I don't know, from an efficient market perspective, it just seems like a good thing. But a world in which everyone was incentivized to sell secrets and had an easy way to do it at all times might have economic consequences. We can think of... It's one thing if it's Edward Snowden selling NSA documents, but if it's every corporation constantly has to worry about every employee selling everything that they've got, their trade secrets, their upcoming product info that could have disastrous economic impacts. But these are the things that the problem, one potential problem with these new kinds of markets, especially these new decentralized, like DApp-based markets is that once they're out in the world, there's nothing you can do about them. And so Augur is now out in the world, and not only can't it be shut down, but it can't really be modified either anymore. So you can't say, oh, we're going to try to adjust the incentives because it's open to everyone. And so I think that's a real concern. I don't think it's a strong enough concern to say, well, we shouldn't allow these things, because any new tech is going to have problems. But it is something when we're thinking through, I mean, the hard thing to do when you introduce a change is to imagine all of its effects. And it counsels us, I think, at least to say we can imagine all sorts of positive effects. But we should also think of the ways that people are going to use this to do bad things. Right. Well, it's not unlike another technology that actually, you know, the cypherpunks and Jim Bell mentioned, encryption, right? Unbreakable, easily accessible encryption. That was something that was being thought of 20 years ago, that is now generally available. And something that annoys the state to a great extent, right, which is why they want built in backdoors, into systems, et cetera. And there's that arms race between consumer goods companies and the government. But while we as libertarians typically say, this is great encryption provides privacy, it allows people to gather without fear of surveillance. We do also acknowledge there are, you know, there are people who are going to use that for nefarious ends. But what we ultimately say is the net, there's net benefit to this technology. But yes, they're going to be bad actors who use encryption to plan terrorist attacks, et cetera. But those are going to be the isolated cases that on the net society benefits from privacy, from freedom from intrusion, that's provided by this encrypted system. The same thing true here with prediction markets. Did you have something with that, Will? Well, I guess getting back to the question of why we don't see a higher user numbers for both auger, but this liquidity issue has plagued all sorts of prediction markets for as long as people have tried to set them up. And why is that? I think to some extent for most of the things you see, most of the futures you see traded, there are other much larger markets with proxies for these futures in them, you know, the stock market. And if you know, you know, you may have a prediction market question as to whether the United States will go to war somewhere or even if Honda will ship X number of cars by next year. But if you really want to make, you feel you have the right prediction and you really want to make a lot of money on it, you're in most cases better just going to the stock market and either, you know, shorting the state industries in the country you think will get invaded or buying a bunch of Honda stock if you think that they're going to ship the number of cars and that those are just more profitable analogs for the specific question in these markets. I don't know what other suggestions we have there, but you know, it might speak to, you know, we've pretty good markets and things now. Well, it's kind of argument against the idea of this. It's not to say that there aren't interesting things going on with prediction markets in general. There are with Augur specifically, however, the company, this particular company pans out, but that this isn't as radical as people might assume. Well, it's nice to get a clearly phrased, like well-constructed yes or no answer to some question you've posed, but if you dig into how people are behaving in real markets all over the world, you can often find the crowd's wisdom as to that question already. Well, thanks guys. I think I can predict that our episode is going to end in the next couple of seconds. So thank you for coming on and until next week, be well. Visit us on the web at libertarianism.org.