230529 Omocast on Crypto 001 Intro, IoI and basic banking

The speaker recounts how they were encouraged to start a project by Grant Edwards after listening to his podcast. They emphasize the importance of credibility and their goal to share information. They discuss the development of communication methods and the internet, highlighting the parallels between online and physical transactions. They then introduce the concept of the internet of value and its potential to replace traditional financial systems. The speaker briefly explains the basics of bartering, money, banking, and accounts. They conclude by mentioning that the next episode will delve into the creation of cryptocurrency. Hello. When I was first interviewed by Grant Edwards on the LibertyNZ podcast a couple of weeks ago, he encouraged me to start this rather daunting project. I had to think about it for a little while and decided to plunge in. I'd contacted Grant after listening or whilst listening to his show one evening and his guests, one of whom had believed in chemtrails and something I don't. I simply sent him a text that espoused my personal motto. His credibility is very precious. It's hard to gain, easily lost and just about impossible to get back. So while you listen to my words, I would ask you to keep that in the back of your mind that that is my goal, to be credible. Anyway, Grant asked me to call and so I blessed himself three times, threw a bucket of holy water over my head and picked up the phone. That podcast can be found on his site. I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. Grant was open-minded and welcoming and consequently, we've done more. Nevertheless, right from the start, I made it clear that my thoughts are mine alone and my interpretation of what information I've been able to obtain in my personal professional life and somehow assemble and hopefully draw together into a sort of coherent picture. Nevertheless, I emphasised that it is only my opinion, one man's opinion. So forgive me if I'm not quite on your wavelength and of course, the power of the off button is always yours. But I hope you just may get some small value from my efforts as that is my only goal, to share some of the information I've had the benefit of through growing up with a relatively traditional childhood and growing into my teenage years parallel to that amazing inflection point in our civilisation which was the birth of the internet in the mid to late 70s. Whilst in a philosophical mood, I just emphasise about credibility. If I make genuine mistakes, please forgive my failure to accurately report the facts because that is all I'm interested in. Likewise, if I'm demonstrably wrong, I would gladly welcome your feedback, critique and criticism. I have fairly thick skin, I do my best to be open-minded and I will listen to you until I understand. If you convince me with your facts and your data that I'm in error, then I will swap instantly to your side because one of the biggest barriers to learning is a vested interest in a position or an emotional attachment. So here we go. We all live in a fascinating, complex and sometimes infuriating society of individuals. Nature has provided over a quarter of a million odd years with an enormous diversity of individuals and to quote, I think it was Carl Sagan, each of us is as special and individual as any snowflake. That's probably my first incorrect report, but it was someone like Carl or someone. In the development of this highly sophisticated social system we live in, we've not just communicated in grunts and gestures to inform others of alerts, dangers and changes in the environment, rather we've developed a means of transacting information through many channels. We don't just talk to each other, we write each other letters, we write books. In the old days, if I wanted to send a person-to-person communication to virtually any person on the planet, I could do that, write it on a sheet of paper, put in an envelope, address it, pop it in the post and away it'd go. The same with disseminating information that I'd like to have a wider audience and make a permanent record. I would write a book, pop it in a library, it'd be catalogued and copied and there'd be copies of it in various libraries and people could go and find it. We have public meetings where one person can stand up and have a debate with a group of people, we have multi-party debates, lots and lots of different ways of transacting information to our greater benefit, collectively at least. This is one of the things that's made us a dominant species on the planet and that has evolved into our mastery of technology. The mastery of technology has many facets and hopefully we'll try and deal successfully with most of them over time, but first the basics. With any technology, the first thing we have to do is someone's got to have the idea. They have to invent something, do the math. Then they put that into a protocol, some way that we can actually use it. Then there's an ecosystem created where a number of people or groups or whatever build out the system where we can use this new technology which has been placed under protocol. Then we need to make it accessible to the vast majority of people so that we all get the benefit of it and then finally there comes adoption. And so now I'd like to refer to how those steps have taken place with the advent of the internet. Back in the 50s and 60s, some very smart scientists, computer scientists or mathematicians, took the technology that was available at the time and developed it into a protocol to allow computers to talk to each other. TCPIP, Transfer Control Protocol, Internet Protocol, doesn't matter. They then built an ecosystem where computers could communicate with each other. They could exchange information. They had an interface which was the scientists sitting at a keyboard tapping commands into a terminal and then finally they built out more and more computers. They linked computers together across universities and so on and eventually we had a worldwide system that adopted the process of TCPIP for the exchange of information between computers. The internet as it now exists simply provides parallels or analogues of the way we transact information in the physical world. Email has replaced snail mail, the old letter. If I wrote a wrote a book in the old days, these days I publish a web page. And in fact there are a lot of other functions to transact information on the internet that are now absorbed into the interface that you use called the web browser. Things like being able to search library catalogs, to send a file from place to place, that sort of thing. So I hope that gives you a basic introduction to what the internet of information is. You've done well to keep up so far, so in the few minutes that remain I'd just like to touch on the internet of value or cryptocurrency, black cash, cosmic money, call it what you like. But before we go down that rabbit hole we'd better have a look and think about what are we actually trying to replace with an internet of value and that would be our traditional financial system. So in the TradFi system we had an exchange of our wealth. It's based on a barter where we exchange our wealth or our assets for those of others. This of course begs the question, what is wealth? What is an asset? To my simple man's view they are the same things. They are what we can create, grow, build, own. The things we have, the things we can do, the services we can provide. The original system was straight bartering. I swapped my pig for your cow, your eggs for my cow's milk, I'll build a house for you and you dig a ditch for me, whatever. But it was all a bit clumsy to carry your wealth around and so we created a system of representative value. That is, we created money. That was back as far I believe about ancient Assyria some 5,000 years ago. Anyway, in earlier times money was considered to be gold and silver because it had a number of special properties. It was small, you could carry it around, you could divide it up, all that sort of thing. But we can talk about that another time. Suffice to say we had gold and silver coins. In fact, for the time being we'll stick with that as our analogue for money for reasons that I'm sure we are all already aware of every time we go to the shop these days. But again we'll touch on that another time also. So our wealth is what we have, what we can create and it's precious to us. Being good risk mitigators and not wanting to carry them all around, we didn't want to have them all in the same place at the same time in case you cash under the bed, the house burns down or whatever. And so we created recording systems, first off to remember where we hid it. Was it under the fire in the back room or whatever? And also accountancy systems for several purposes but especially for depositing them in a safe place with a trusted person so I could get it, get them later. In other words, a bank. Now of course the bank had a recording system and one of the functions that was developed on that recording system so that I could give them a certain amount and I could go and get it later after they looked after me, after it for me. Of course that'll clip the ticket, that'll charge me some interest or whatever. They also had a function where instead of me going to get some of my cash, my gold or my silver out of the bank to go and pay for the pig at the market, what I could do was do a direct transfer from my account, my safe deposit box, my wallet that they held directly to yours and I could get a claim check or a note or whatever and go and collect the goods from you. So the bank's recording system is what we would call a ledger or perhaps a spreadsheet and each person who has an account or a safe deposit box would have a big page in that ledger and the bank would manage transfers by making an entry on my page, take some out of my account and adding it to your page. The bottom line is that the bank has absolute control over those transactions. If they chose not to authorize or to allow a transaction, they could do that. They can intercede in our business. This is what we call a permissioned system. Nevertheless, on each page of the ledger, the one that belongs to me and the one that belongs to you, there are a couple of numbers associated. One is the account number which anyone can have and anyone can send cash to or funds to, but the other one is a private number, your PIN number and that is needed to send funds from your account. Of course it's still a permissioned system. So in a brief review, we've covered the internet of information, we've talked about why we'd like to have an internet of value and that we want to create a system, an internet of value that can replace our traditional finance system. We've covered the basics of that financial system, barter, money, banking, accounts and then in the next episode we'll start talking about the creation of that internet of value cryptocurrency. Thank you for listening.