Bank Of America Wells Fargo Chase, Andrew, Roblox discussed on Ben Greenfield Fitness

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Bitcoin and cryptocurrency now NFTs, the whole notion of being able to have 24/7 three 6 5 control over your assets is pretty remarkable. I mean, literally 24/7 three 6 5 on a Saturday at noon, you can send the equivalent of a wire transfer, a transaction through a cryptocurrency wallet to someone on the opposite side of the planet. If you try to go to your bank right now, whether you're using Bank of America Wells Fargo Chase or a European bank standard chartered over in Europe, you can not go and withdraw your entire balance in cash. You may think you can, but you just can not. They're not going to allow you to do it. Try it. I encourage you to. If you've got over $30,000 in the account, either they don't have the cash on hand, they're going to want a reason for why you're making the withdrawal. You typically have to call in advance. You don't have access to your funds. You're probably limited in how much money you can send via wire transfer on a daily basis or how much you can withdraw from the ATM machine. So crypto is a pretty revolutionary innovation in that if you have a public key and private key on a blockchain, like the Bitcoin blockchain or the Ethereum blockchain or the hedera hashgraph blockchain, you have access to your money around the clock. If you have access to your money around the clock, that is like the founding primitive of the innovation, there's so many other things you can do on top of that. So we've seen a whole world of DeFi, decentralized finance form where there's yield opportunities, better yields than what you'd get in the checking account. We've seen a ways to capitalize businesses. There are literally startups. I just invest in a startup. The company didn't want me to invest in them with cash. They didn't want a wire transfer. They wanted me to send USD C on the blockchain. And I did pretty phenomenal. I mean, the company wants the engineers want to be paid in it. It's a software business. They want to receive that. And a lot of companies in 2016 and 2017 capitalized that way. We capitalized hedera hashgraph Andrew and I, we raised a $124 million at a $6 billion valuation, largely 80 million of that was in Bitcoin. To fund the launch of hydara hash graph. So it became a mechanism for funding new businesses. And now when we look at the trend, where we are in this trend because it is still somewhat early, you probably hear a lot of people try to talk about where we are on this timeline or probably in the late 90s. If you think about it, or try to compare it to the dot com boom in terms of adoption in terms of number of user accounts on the network. But if you look at the trend, we as humans objectively are spending more time than ever, digitally connected online. And it seems to reason that if we're spending so much of this time, whether you're walking down the street in a metaverse environment like Roblox or World of Warcraft or RuneScape or whatever your game is or whatever you're doing online, we've already validated that people are willing to spend real world money in the gamer community is called the RW T real world trading. People are willing to spend real money on characters on avatars on swords, hicks on shields, on games, grades, their powers. Exactly, upgrade their powers. NFTs are really emblematic of digital property rights. They're digital property right protection mechanisms that are stored on a decentralized ledger. That's what another way of calling a blockchain distributed ledger technology or an immutable ledger or a decentralized ledger. All other ways of describing these blockchains, but we can store property rights that says Ben owns this piece of land in Roblox or Ben owns this piece of land in decentraland or an axe infinity or in the sandbox. And Andrew owns this shield and Jordan owns this shirt in the game. And tremendous remarkable things are happening. Like things that people are balking at. Someone just paid $4000 for a digital version of a Gucci bag in the game Roblox. Now fun fact that actually wasn't an NFT, but it's emblematic of what an NFT could be used for, which is someone is spending so much of their time walking down the street or the equivalent of the street of the wilderness or whatever it is in Roblox. They don't play Roblox. What your avatar says about you in the real world, right? Then you walk around in a fanny pack, which I think is super cool. Others may think is funny, but like how we dress, what we do says something about us and it's a statement that you're making, and the same is true for the digital versions of ourselves. What are Twitter, what our Twitter feed looks like, what your Instagram grid looks like, what your TikTok grid looks like, what your character in a game looks like. And NFTs are, again, just ways for us to assign the rights to these to the various different individuals there. So it's a very powerful technology. It's being used in a very interesting way, right? Like we've got board apes Andrew is quickly become one of the more prolific collectors in the world. He's got some multi-million dollar NFTs and arguably one of the best collections in the world, just really some of the original NFTs. And again, just credit to him for being early to it. Andrew doesn't own one of my, one of my boundless cookbook NFTs. I'm just saying, well, those are highly valuable. If you don't have an NFT that teaches you how to make homemade carrot fries, then really, you know, those pretty little ape pixels that you have are not that valuable. And look, guys, I should note, by the way. I have close don't laugh. I have close to zero interest in the metaverse aside from education. Like I am actually upgrading my office currently to be able to put on a VR headset and present to people in a far more dynamic and rich way where they can walk around a room that can interact with my presentation, they can be there with other people in the room that can pick things up, they can have some haptic sensation and some light and sound sensation that goes way above and beyond what they would be able to get via something like a zoom presentation by me. But I don't have a lot of interest in buying swords and upgrading powers and owning some type of virtual real estate or anything like that. But I actually really do like, you know, as a guy who likes to think around with singing and songwriting. I love the idea of artists being able to release NFTs related to their music that are literally digital sound art that translates to things like concert tickets or allows an artist to get a higher royalty for a song that they've produced or a single or an album without having to go through a music production company or the same thing with something like real estate. I think I briefly mentioned this to you guys like I am actually moving to Idaho. I'm going to be getting rid of my Spokane Washington property and I'm considering as one of the possible options that I have on the table of literally listing it as an NFT where people can own a piece of this real estate and have access to it as around the year retreat center or timeshare. And I also love the idea of having things like the book project that I talked about, right? You don't just buy a book, but you own a book. You can share it with others, kind of like you guys do with audible. You can have the copyright access to that book to be able to use it almost like Creative Commons and other places. And you can even by owning that NFT version of the book unlock things like a book signing party with me or private Q&A with me. I think things like that. I like the utility that crosses over into the real world that essentially uses NFTs in their smart contract function. If that makes sense..

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