Clif High - clif interviews Reggie Middleton ~ part 1

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Aug. 2, 2017 - Clif High

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clif interviews Reggie Middleton ~ part 1

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	Well uh start us off now.
	We're kicking in to record and we've got our first uh hundred frames, so we're good.
	Okay, everybody.
	This is the uh second of um August.
	It's uh ten in the morning here for time stamping purposes.
	This is my interview with um Reggie Middleton, and damned if I know how either one of us ended up here.
	I don't do these things as a rule, and he's got better things to do with his time.
	Welcome, Reggie.
	How are you doing today?
	Fine.
	Good to be here.
	Uh well, like I was saying, I don't know how we ended up here, but um l uh uh let's do some stuff for uh the guys who read my reports and watch my videos, which is to explain some of the technical aspects of this, but but I'm not talking the t the software technical aspects, I'm talking the business case technical aspects.
	And so the very first thing I'd like to do is let's try and make Tone Vay's head explode.
	Okay, so t Tone has this issue, and I'd like to go back to um r refresher memory.
	One second.
	Yeah.
	It happens to be uh a five shot coming by.
	So no problem, no problem.
	Uh I'm out in the woods, so we're you know, much more likely to be uh herd of elk or something.
	So anyway, um uh tone has this issue with uh an understanding about what it is you do on a business case that just seems to be nagging at him.
	And uh it's based around a particular we can use a particular example you used, which was the hundred dollars exposure to IBM uh stock.
	And Tone seemed to not understand how this would work, that he would have to commit capital to a contract if he wanted to buy hundred dollars worth of exposure to IBM and then allow the market forces to provide someone on that on the opposite side.
	We're correct in understanding this, right?
	In terms of how Veritaceum would work.
	Yes.
	And I would be shocked, Tone.
	You know I love you, Tone, but uh I'm shocked that you have this understanding because you actually traded with the alpha and the early beta version of Veritasium.
	Um we did it in person at the Bitcoin Center, of course, when you know it's like exchange, so maybe you forgot.
	No, no, I I don't think it's that.
	What I think annoys him, or what he what what I don't think he really grasps is how a market dynamic would develop around such a concept.
	And so when I see Tone and I I hear his uh interviews and so forth, uh he's uh somewhat perplexed as to how that might work.
	And my thinking is that what he's considering is the goofy bastard like myself, who might decide to make a um uh uh contract or an offer to purchase uh exposure to uh to saw to some um uh equity, but I might do it in such a way with the terms and conditions that it's highly improbable that uh improbable that anybody would ever take the contract, and thus my capital would just kind of sit out there.
	And so if I'm correct in understanding how Veritasium would work at a um ingrained organic social engineering kind of a way, I'm assuming that the production of these smart contracts would naturally narrow everybody down towards a very realistic understanding of the markets in the process of getting away or doing away with the market makers, who basically will take any kind of wild ass bet anyway because they know who's betting on each side and they're gonna make money off of both.
	Now, in this case then we'd get rid of a lot of the extraneous garbage in the markets, just using the Veritasium smart contract approach to purchasing, say a hundred dollars exposure to IBM.
	Am I understanding that correctly?
	Yes, and and also um this could be put to bed with an explanation of how the market currently works.
	I I think um those who are approaching it from tone's perspective, and I understand where tone is coming from.
	We actually had this discussion before.
	They're thinking of the Hovinspoke retail model, where um you have a bid and that bid is exposed to uh you know 10,000, 100,000 market participants with the market making between.
	Okay, those are not large transactions.
	Actually, the vast majority of large transactions are always done over-the-counter.
	Basically peer-to-peer without the peers having full contact with each other, so through intermediary.
	Um the same goes for the cryptocurrency markets as well.
	Um if you have uh say 400,000 bitcoin a move, you're not gonna move it through Bitrais.
	Okay, because the mere fact that you attempt to move it moves to market and provide significant sippage.
	You find a seller who's interested in buying the j the package hole, the chunk ho, and you negotiate over the kind of transaction.
	The issue is we negotiate the over the kind of transaction is done through an intermediary who takes a significant chunk.
	Outside the cryptocurrency world, you have the same thing.
	Hedge fund A wants to buy Pacific Northwest electricity exposure, okay, through XYZ vehicle.
	Okay.
	So Goldman Sachs finds uh someone who's a natural producer of such electricity exposure, let's say utility in the Pacific Northwest.
	He puts them together and they do the transaction, but they're both exposed to Goldman Sachs's balance sheet, and they pay Goldman Sachs's fee, which is usually significant because that's what takes that 60% of gross um revenues in terms of compensation and bonuses.
	What Veritacium does is it creates a facility where these two can deal directly without the Goldman.
	And so it takes out the Goldman portion.
	Right.
	Now, and as I would understand it, because we're dealing with software here and the Ethereum network is has an exposed layer, um, such as like Ether Scan gets at, then uh in your uh uh uh Veritasium approach to the same kind of transactions,
	uh they would be exposed, although we're talking distributed and no spoken wheel, nonetheless, uh piece of software could be easily uh uh crafted that would simply be like a broadcasting kiosk that says, hey, I know about this contract for uh Pacific Northwest electricity exposure, any guys out there interested.
	And so it's not as tone would imagine that these contracts once let would sort of languish for lack of exposure.
	There's a variety of ways to do it.
	Um this becomes very complicated because now you have regulatory issues on a federal and a state level.
	But let's push those to the side, you know, with no offense to regulators.
	Um, this is more of a business model discussion and not a regulatory discussion.
	Correct, at an abstract level.
	Right.
	So you can um create uh an order matching book and put and publish and market the order matching book.
	You can use current um agents, okay, who put two parties together, okay, but they don't rely on, they don't use their balance sheet, and they don't act as a middleman or principal at all.
	So again, you're taking the Goldman portion out of play, and you simply have a matchmaker, okay, who could take a fee outside the system, okay, or you can have a full-blown exchange.
	And that full-blown exchange can have um Google style into intelligent searching algorithms that allow you to find bespoke combination.
	There are most of the transactions in terms of size are over-the-counter, like I said earlier.
	So, but most lay people and retail investors aren't exposed to this type of uh financial transaction.
	They're used to buying, you know, 100 round lots of uh IBM or around lot of IBM, etc.
	They don't see the esoteric um, you know, deals like a CDO of XYZ mortgage back securities with uh swap should embedded, you know, right, right.
	And so variety, you know, scenarios, yes.
	Yeah, so but basically the um uh the the uh large over-the-counter trades, uh although they're I'm certain some of them read my reports, uh probably the vast majority of the people that are reading mine are within the retail sector.
	And so that's that's the understanding that I want to piggyback off of because a lot of them just don't get it.
	That, you know, and they have this idea that uh tone had expressed earlier, which was that you know these things would basically languish because there would be no market maker involved.
	And of course, Tone has this idea that central um authority or officialdom uh is um uh better than distributed, you know, and he thinks Google is like the end all be all and and this sort of thing with databases at all.
	But uh, you know, we'll let his his head explode around that later on.
	Uh so let me jump in because I want to put a real word example.
	This was my uh hedge fund roadshow week.
	So without exposing which funds I visited, you know, it's obvious I walked to them or took the train to them.
	So in the New York City area, but we have one fund, roughly about 15 to 16 billion dollars assets on the management AUM, a big fund, another one with over 20.
	Okay.
	These funds I sat down, and these Funds will not do a deal under 100, 150 million unless it's very, very appetizing.
	And then they'll go down to maybe 20 million.
	But you know, they usually won't touch anything under 20.
	I think 100, 150 million dollars is a sweet spot.
	Okay.
	When they do these deals, these deals don't go through anything that looks like what a retail investor would um would experience.
	Okay, they're pure over-the-counter.
	Over-the-counter basically means they are dealing directly with another buyer-seller on a one-to-one basis.
	Very rarely even one to two, a three to two, or three to one, one-to-one basis.
	Um, and they go through an intermediary, like the big investment banks.
	And of course, my pitch to with them was we can do the same thing without the intermediary.
	Basically, you know, the Veritasian business model.
	This is how business is done on the macro monetary level, the large um the big boys.
	And more business is done this way than the retail, no matter which way you look at it.
	The more commissions are driven from the retail transactions because the retail buyers and sellers are in general, in general, less sophisticated.
	What we're looking to do is cut the cost for everybody.
	On the retail level, if you cut costs in terms of transaction fees on the um macro level, the big boy level, we're doing the same.
	Not the main book, global macro, but in terms of big deals.
	Most people, because again, they don't see these transactions, they think of them as pie in the sky or one-off.
	But this is what makes the hedge funds 15, 20 billion, 13 trillion dollars, not 15 trillion, one, two, or three trillion dollars, etc.
	And these funds are very large.
	If you Google um BlackRock or Fidelity and take a look at the assets in the management, you see trillion dollars.
	Not even billions, but trillions.
	So this is where the money is, and that's where we're starting, and we're looking to trickle down into the retail.
	Okay, it makes perfect sense to go that way.
	And uh, and I'm sure a lot of the guys at the retail level, you know, have sent coins uh uh in the ICOs, they've sent a few coins to uh their cousin Roberta.
	And so basically they're doing the over-counter kind of thing with without the mass involved.
	And so they so they do have exposure to that, and they understand they think of it in in terms of um how uh like middle class uh retail investors see these things, uh them sending coins to uh their cousin Roberta, uh, they think of as somehow being black or gray market.
	And uh so their view of the larger thing, that there's basically a very large gray market that runs everything on top of their little retail sector is gonna be news to most of them.
	So, but I do understand what you're saying, having worked at that level for those those people.
	Uh so uh in the getting back to the uh just to put this uh part of it uh uh closed, uh getting back to the hundred dollars exposure to IBM stock.
	Say that I actually wanted to get the stock.
	And my goal was not to have a trade that that ended in six months that gave me a profit or a loss, but I wanted to actually have those damn stock certificates in my hand.
	Veritasium can accommodate that as well, correct?
	Veritation can accommodate it theoretically, but the facility that we built, the soft application that was actually built and that ran as a beta for several years, doesn't do that.
	What it does, it gives you exposure.
	It's a derivative system.
	Okay, so it gives you exposure to the underlying that you want.
	In doing that, it allows you to get exposure to any underlying that has a data fee.
	Okay, a data fee that both parties agree that is accurate, shall I say, be more precise.
	Or both parties agree that they'll use accuracy aside.
	Okay, so uh so let's um let's say then that in that um uh case where I actually wanted to get it and I wanted to write a smart contract, I could say that I would be willing to settle uh for um uh basically the stock certificate numbers,
	which would fundamentally be their unique ID to a particular share of IBM stock, and so that way I Veritasum does not actually have to hand me the paper certificate or anything and could deliver uh the um the stock certificates,
	but even in the case of where you want IBM exposure and not real stock, how do you know the guy on the other side is um uh able to actually uh uh validate or or pay up?
	So in this sense, it's it's money to money, correct?
	And so you're just agreeing that that you're betting on where IBM will be at a particular point in time, and both people put their money into the contract, walk away and let the contract settle it, correct?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So go ahead.
	So I'm clear on it.
	Uh what I was going to say.
	So under those circumstances, then this derivative market is basically open-ended.
	And you could even use it if you wanted to for strict betting.
	You know, the first uh human to um uh land on the moon will have will have you know four fingers on one hand, something like that.
	Uh however outrageous you want it to be, but uh you you always have to put in those uh real world things, such as the expiry date, the uh the capital has to be actually enclosed in the contract and thus is locked up, etc.
	etc.
	Correct?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Correct.
	The parameters have to be filled.
	Umce it comes to data only, um I don't want to call them wages, but that only transfers of value.
	Um you can do anything.
	Okay, the reason we chose financial services because it's low-hanging fruit, basically the industry is overpaid.
	So that fixed that 60% um gross revenue line item that goes to compensation um is a structural deficiency in the business model.
	That's why we ran after it.
	Let's not confuse that with a limitation that this is a financial services um product or endeavor.
	This is a value product endeavor.
	So any industry where value comes into play is sought after, required, or it's traded is veritasium um uh capable, and that's where we're going.
	The stock certificate trade.
	If you want to trade physical, any physical item, you bring into the equation counterpart and credit risk.
	So if you want actual physical certificates and you want delivery or even access to a physical certificate, you need to use a depository institution who would hold the physical certificates.
	Now and then at that point, uh veritasium becomes basically a soup uh superior form of an escrow service.
	Exactly.
	In automated small contract with an escrow.
	And so you could, if you wanted, do a contract to uh buy a house, as long as all parties agreed and put it in the contract, no worries.
	As a matter of fact, I have a scenario we went through this when I discussed it with the uh National Association of Real Estate Professionals.
	Um I think that was a thing that was organization, um, where you create a small contract for the transfer of a house with a smart contract and include it, um, the insurance, the mortgage purchase agreement, uh title clearance, etc.
	etc.
	And everything is automated, pass or fail, or XYZ, if failed, then you know the contingency method, and you can theoretically start from the beginning and go to enclose on a property in less than 24 hours, you know, from the time we decide to hit start, automatically driven by the smart contract.
	Any process fails, like somehow the mortgage doesn't clear, title doesn't clear, etc.
	There are fallback mechanisms.
	This can all be done via smart contract with all capital escrow within the contract through Veritasium um uh platform, and you can condense that 24 hour period down to literally a few minutes, as long as everybody has their ducks land up in a row.
	And so this would also, of course, extend to uh art um and naturally as well, precious metals, even right, and of course, costs go down.
	Any situation where value is needed, transferred, sought after, or required is veritasium fodder.
	And so let's let's talk about a really ripe place for that.
	I've got this um uh friend of mine who uh has a lot of hair, unlike myself.
	This guy's name is Bix Weir, and he's always hot on the idea that Veritacium is gonna come along and pull the rug out from underneath um uh the commodities exchange markets, which are highly manipulated, uh hugely inflated, and in which the um middlemen rake money off of both sides.
	And so is this a veritation target as well, something like the silver exchanges?
	Well, I don't want to name who the direct targets are before we get too close to it, but um let me just reiterate my spiel, and you can figure it out any industry where value is transfer required, sort of or um needed is veritation worthy.
	Commodities um are interesting because um you can both digitize them and have uh physical transfer, the vast majority of um value transfer in commodity markets are the derivatives, basically forwards, um futures, options, etc.
	Um, so seldom in terms of actual cash flow or actual value transfer or the physical transfer.
	That basically bet minute uh I won't say manipulated, uh but you guess you can they're basically um wagered on using derivative contracts, and that's the vast majority of financial markets right now.
	Um back to the stock certificate example.
	Very few people buy sell stocks.
	They buy and sell stock derivatives, they just don't realize it.
	If you don't have the actual certificate in hand, you bought a derivative derivative.
	You bought something that gained its value or its value is represented by the physical stock certificate.
	So the only way you actually buy a stock is you get a stock.
	If you haven't got a stock, you bought a derivative, and that goes for anything, not just stocks.
	The only way you have gold is if there's some relatively heavy yellow metal in your hand when you outside of that, you want to go with derivative.
	And so since uh really the markets that are used to control the price of the physical delivery are in my I'm using the language manipulated, and uh are all around derivatives, then to a certain extent, anything that comes along and disrupts their derivative flow is going to be as disruptive as my friend picks weird hopes under uh uh to the underlying physical uh price uh action.
	But I'm not asking you to make uh uh any kind of um prediction on that.
	But uh but I would like to take you from deep in the ground with all these hidden reserves and stuff out into space.
	Because one of the things that occurred to me was that well, uh maybe Veritasum is the first one of these um uh IC first tokens to start being space-based.
	Because I was thinking, oh, well, uh way back when I first heard about the contracts and the way you were going to structure them.
	First I thought, oh, they'd be great to write in C. C code would just be so cool for that.
	Uh, but in any event, um uh the other thing would be for negotiating uh satellite uh transponder use and contracts, where sometimes you need you've got a you know an extra 80 minutes on the on the transponder that you're just not using and happens to be um you know um aimed at a particular region, you could have a smart contract and say, hey, I've got these 80 minutes free, they're at this cost.
	Let's see if anybody wants to use them, that kind of thing.
	Uh any thoughts on moving into that at all?
	I mean, it sounds like a very good idea.
	It's very similar to the um the sharing economy um idea that we've come up with.
	We fleshed out a sharing economy.
	We actually were that close to buying an electric vehicle company.
	Um we're very different from the typical ICO.
	Um just as willing to buy an opportunity computer code or expertise as I am to build it, um, depending on what it is we're buying.
	It's also also a more also a more efficient and uh method and quicker route to our destination.
	So the purpose of buying that was not just to have an electrical vehicle company.
	I'm not gonna go into any detail as of yet, but it enables us to embed uh the veritassium infrastructure and business logic in the vehicle.
	Okay, and basically you have uh Uber meets eBay without the centralized Uber server and corporate system.
	This allows peer-to-peer um ride sharing.
	Okay, just like you have with Lyft Uber, etc.
	That's set same um business model, right?
	Can be applied to Airbnb's business and can be applied to the satellite business with radio sharing minutes or auctioning off spare minutes.
	The auction of spare minutes, when you have 80 minutes, you know, might be convenient to one, you aggregate these spare minutes and you have an entire market.
	Okay.
	This market has the efficiency of peer-to-peer capital markets, which is basically the gist of our entire venture.
	And you have a vast improvement in efficiencies that improvement in efficiencies gives much more supply to the market and makes demand um more transparent in terms of price discovery.
	So it brings costs down, it brings availability up, and it brings to it introduces a much cleaner, clearer marketplace.
	Of course, it pisses off a lot of people who would get paid from opacity.
	And um that's gonna be once you know the big boys jump into the space, that will be our largest uh competitor group.
	And and that would be those who benefit from opacity and attempt to eliminate transparency.
	We are the antithesis of that.
	We benefit from transparency because transparency brings more activity, brings more use of the underlying platform, which is us, and that's what we want.
	And we actually can't fail, we don't benefit.
	Opacity hurts us because opacity prevents people from using the platform.
	Even if they do use a platform, they don't use it with full faith and effort because they can't see how price is discovered.
	So we're all for transparency.
	The blockchain is perfectly fitted for our business model.
	Yeah, no, it's uh it's ideal for uh what you're after, and I understand your statement that it's not technology that changes the world, it's the uh technology uh in lim or uh allowing uh facilitating entirely new business models that change the planet, and that's where we're at now.
	So uh let's deal with both transparency and the fact that you're not like an ICO, not like some of these others, uh because there's a lot of confusion around uh well, and I understand it.
	I'm just voicing the um of the uh some of the emails I get, they say, well, you know, Reggie doesn't have a white paper.
	And my response is, well, you know, BMW doesn't have one, General Electric doesn't have one.
	They're companies, they're doing stuff.
	Pretty much the case, correct?
	You were never intended to be a community kind of a thing where the white paper had to introduce you.
	Well, I'll start this from scratch.
	Um a white paper, technically it's an academic thesis.
	Okay, a lot of what people are calling the white papers an academic thesis, okay.
	Number one, a lot of white papers are CM marketing documents, okay, and that's as I see it.
	I'm not trying to cast aspersions, but that's how I see it.
	We before the ICO, we had a demonstrable product.
	So instead of reading a white paper, whether we had it or not, go always download the product and use it.
	It's just that simple.
	Yeah.
	Okay, we never did bother with the white paper, we don't see it.
	Look at all our major competitors.
	Go to JP Morgan, ask them for their white paper for their um product.
	For their white paper for investment banking, Citibank, et cetera.
	Yeah.
	And if it's really, really important for you to see something complicated and long, you have multiple patent applications, you know, all together about 140, 150 pages, which blow from technical specificity, most white papers out of the water.
	And most ICOs don't have um any attempt to protect IP.
	The difference is I'm not putting ICOs down, I'm not trying to big us up.
	The difference is we started this as a for-profit entity, a business.
	Um, and so the first thing we need to do is get to business.
	Um, white papers are ideal for trying to build an open source platform, okay, that's community-based, okay, without having the actual stuff needed to operate.
	So, what you're trying to do is you have a dream, you want to build the dream, you want the community to participate.
	The white paper is perfectly suited to gain interest and educate for that.
	We want to benefit the community, okay, but we also want to make large structural changes in the way things are done, and we want to do it as a for-profit entity, and that's where we are.
	Sure, makes perfect makes perfect sense.
	Yes.
	And you're uh worst part is you know, there's some very significant media concerns that are you know big mainstream media concerns, not small cryptocurrency concerns that are harping on things such as not having a white paper.
	Um they actually had the nerve to say that um we've had a few experts check your GitHub and we think that you're a scam.
	You're not sure.
	They actually use these words with business partners and clients.
	Oh okay, which is nervous.
	That's not the sole of the role of a journalist.
	And it's even more disturbing because the experts so-called that they had to investigate it, didn't seem to understand the simple fact you need a password to get into our GitHub.
	It is private.
	Okay, and we've had code running longer than most ICOs out.
	Okay, but I'm not going to get into whose code is bigger contest.
	It's a private GitHub.
	You know, it's proprietary.
	There's no white paper, we had a product.
	And the vast majority of the value ad is uh mixture of software engineering, software development, financial analysis, global macro, economic analysis, and strategy and consulting.
	So we're more like Microsoft meets uh McKinsey meets Gogan.
	Exactly.
	And it's it's business vision.
	And so let me uh frame this for some of the people that are um uh watching this because there's a misconception that all these uh tokens and coins are like Bitcoin was where it was a community effort or um some of these other coins and so these coins are in fact a sort of a shared distributed resource.
	Whereas your tokens and your effort, as I tried to tell people, it's not at all like Bitcoin.
	It is not a community-based sort of thing.
	And where Ethereum, in my way of thinking, is like um uh the uh uh rails for a train for for a railroad system, you're the the locomotive pulling all of the stuff and doing the actual work on top of the rails.
	Or put another way, more modern perhaps, although some still antiquated, Ethereum is the is the fuel, and uh you guys are the engine that are gonna burn that fuel and get it get you into space.
	And so it's just a different paradigm.
	And so the but the you know, you run into the mainstream, and so you're running into the propaganda arm of the uh same people that are trying to stop all the disintermediation.
	Uh, you know, the people that have a vested interest in this are fighting back.
	We see it in a lot of coins, and I'm I'm a you know paranoid uh conspiracy nut, so I see it everywhere, but uh anyway, I think I've actually got evidence of some of it.
	The um from my analytical perspective, and we started analyzing and valuing, which is very difficult valuing as in getting a US dollar value for particular token or unit.
	Um we had to create a new valuation framework because gap accounting doesn't work uh as currently applied.
	So Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, those are platform tokens.
	Okay.
	Veritasium, economy, um entities like that, uh populist, we are entity tokens.
	So a platform token is usually run by a foundation, a not-for-profit foundation, uh even for forget legal legalities.
	I'm talking about actual um business purposes, uh a foundation, and it's openly ran.
	Even though many who attempt to create these platform tokens still have economic gain as they're called the economic gain comes from the increase in value of the token, primarily.
	Okay, now many, if not most, uh, of the um platform tokens usually have a for-profit armor sitting on top of it.
	Okay, Ethereum is a perfect example, and I don't want to spill the beans for too many, so please don't be mad at me, and I'm gonna leave it uh short analysis.
	But Ethereum was very successful that I was not doubtful when they uh first found out about it at their uh initial announcement in Miami in 2014.
	But um it was a very ambitious project.
	They pulled it off for the most part.
	You know, they've reached better stage and moving past the initial better stage.
	But um it is not for profit.
	They benefit from increasing the value of the token.
	Okay, and now there's a for-profit arm, okay, call consensus that basically does a lot of consulting and a lot of incubation, okay, and consensus, it's a for-profit arm that works with or on top in conjunction with the platform and the platform um the uh platform token.
	So you have Ethereum, which is a platform token model, and then we have an entity on top of it.
	Now, consensus is not a NCD token because they don't have their own token, but they're a for-profit entity.
	Now is there nothing wrong with it?
	It is good because it introduces real business, real business thinking to what was initially um a group of mostly software engineers and developers.
	Um I'm not trying to talk down a software engineers and developers, but you need diversity in your business in your business model to make this real for software engineer developer.
	Would you have a lot of confidence in a software platform and software applications built primarily by investment bankers and accountants?
	No.
	Absolutely not.
	So look at how um difficult it is to conceive of uh a useful productive financial application built solely by software engineers and developers.
	You need diversity.
	Our team is diverse.
	We have attorneys, we have uh intellectual property, um, I had intellectual property um specialists, we have global macro guys, we have traders, we have financial analysts, we have forensic accountants, we have biz dev guys who are very good at what they do, deeply connected in Wall Street, deeply connected in politics, deeply connected in solving concerns.
	We have financial engineers, we have architects, and we have developers.
	So while we don't have anything, and we're hiring and replying, I do not put all my eggs in developers or in traders or in anything because that's not how a business is run.
	I feel that the mindset of many people who want to pursue ICOs is that if the dev does this, if the dev does that, there is no business or industry in the world where people think the developers are be all end-all of an organization.
	It's usually management.
	Now, management may have to focus heavily more heavily on one side of the business, depending on where you are in the business cycle.
	Such as if you're a software startup, then you know software developers have a very, very strong role to play.
	As you become more mature, then you have to go more in the marketing, business development, uh, business management, operations, etc.
	But um until everybody has more of a business-minded mindset and not that of a software development engineer, I will consider the icon market immature.
	And and let's uh go to that too, because a lot of the um uh people that are on the outside buying into it uh are unsure of what they're buying, really unaware.
	And as you point out, there's those uh kind of things like that I described as train rails that where the value is really the network effect itself.
	So if you've got a coin that's launched and it gets no network traction and it was intended to be simply a platform for something else to run on top of it, then it it'll never gain the network effect.
	The coins uh will not go up.
	Your uh value proposition is bringing value via new business, and you're not attempting to grow a network effect, therefore you are not like, and it's unfair whether it's um alt media or mainstream to try and do a comparison between uh your kind of activity and any of the other community network uh value-based platforms.
	Okay, well, let me let me fine-tune that message.
	I mean, I'm glad you brought it up.
	Okay, we can benefit from one user using our platform, one decent sized user benefit we can benefit, okay.
	Two decent sized users we benefit by unit sales, the revenue derived from unit sales of that one user times two.
	So we benefit twice as much.
	But realistically, we benefit more like 2.1 times as much because there is a network effect there, okay, but it's minimal.
	Okay, we benefit from the network effect, but that is not our sole value driver.
	Okay, our sole drive value driver is basically selling a product, okay, which is a software token, consulting and advising on that product, teaching the buyer how to use that software token to the best of their um ability and to solve a specific problem that they have, or even a general problem.
	Now, the more of these users that buy the tokens, okay, the more revenue we get from unit sales, the more revenue we get from advisory and consulting, but the more value we get from the network effect.
	Okay.
	To explain this in a more layman's perspective, and I've done this in other videos, but it seems to work because people got it finally, so I'm going to use it here.
	Think of um, I think Electronic Arts is the company that makes EPA, Grand Theft Auto, but whoever makes it, you have a grandfather, right?
	They sell one copy, Grand Theft Auto, they get paid whatever $50, $60.
	Okay, that's good.
	They sell two copies, they get paid 100%, plus those two members can now play with each other versus playing with themselves.
	The first guy who bought it maybe enjoys Grand Theft Auto a lot.
	He has a lot of fun.
	The second guy bought it, may enjoy it, but now they enjoy it even more because they can play with each other.
	They sell 500 copies of Grand Theft Auto.
	Now you have a potential community, and they can play a lot with each other.
	The value of Grand Theft Auto goes up.
	Right.
	The Grand Theft Auto software is the same as the Veritas token, a piece of software that was sold.
	Okay.
	A lot of people confuse this piece of software token, which is Veritas, with some type of uh security instrument, such as a stock.
	Right.
	Hence they think the more stocks that you buy, the more dilution that you have in some imaginary pool of earnings.
	Hence the less valuable the individual stock is.
	That's the antithesis the antithesis of the fact.
	The truth of the matter is the more the software tokens sold, the greater the network effect and the greater the interactive um value derived from hedge fund A versus hedge fund B using it versus Family Office C versus Sovereign Nation D versus pension fund F versus XYZ individual users on a much smaller basis that get to intermingle and rent contracts XYZ between everybody else.
	Right.
	This is a whole community.
	So we get the benefit from each unit sale from a revenue perspective.
	We get the benefit from each consulting and advisory um revenue stream and we get the benefit of the network effect of everybody dealing amongst each other peer to peer without any central um repository, third party authority or or authority.
	So we have multiple revenue streams and multiple value drivers.
	Okay.
	A virtually network effect is one of them.
	When you put all this together it is in our best interest to sell as many tokens as possible because the more tokens we sell the more valuable everything is unlike um a pure platform um token we do not fail if we don't sell a whole lot of tokens.
	You know, we succeed if you sell enough tokens to break a profit.
	Okay.
	Right.
	This is a hybrid model.
	Um and it is I think the wave of the future particularly if you know token sales truly take off from a business perspective and not just from a small niche of software developers and engineers, etc.
	Oh did I take that clearly because that's just uh perfect because it it segues right into the uh view that we get out of my data sets uh which are a jar a large aggregation and are pointing to a future where we'll see um uh diminishment uh to uh the extreme of the paper debt model and all of that wealth will flow through the vehicle of ICOs into the new science fiction world that we're all building here.

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