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Beyond Bitcoin: Unraveling the Mysteries of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain

Braulio Rosa: It’s Braulio Rosa with the Broward County Bar Association’s Broward Bar Buzz. Today I’m here with Joey K from Moskowitz Law Firm and Tyler Yagman from Conrad & Scherer. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for having us.

Tyler/Joey: My pleasure, good to be here.

Braulio Rosa: So, we’re going to be talking today a little bit about something that’s out there in all the realms, and I don’t think people have a really good understanding of it, which is blockchain, and which is really the foundation of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, but it’s the blockchain that really makes this all function. So, can you explain what blockchain really is and what it isn’t?

Tyler/Joey: Sure, so again, thank you for having us. We’re happy to be here. Just by way of background, all opinions I share are mine and not of Conrad & Scherer. I’m sure it’s the same here.

Joey K: Yes, all opinions are mine, none from Moskowitz, but off topic—none of this is intended to be legal advice.

Braulio Rosa: It’s legal advice, no it’s not. I mean, you’re having a podcast with attorneys, right? That’s bound to come out anytime.

Tyler/Joey: Okay, so when we talk about the blockchain, we have to differentiate it from what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin runs on the blockchain; it’s the first blockchain protocol or use case. I think the easiest way to understand blockchain is to take it down to a very easy, digestible explanation. Let’s say this table is suddenly a poker table at the Hard Rock, okay, and they forgot chips—there’s no chips, they can’t find chips anywhere, there are no tables with chips, but they still have to run the Hard Rock casino, right?

Braulio Rosa: Sure.

Tyler/Joey: So what do they do? They hand all of us little sheets of paper. Okay, keep track of your chips, everyone has a little sheet of paper, keep track of your hand. So we say, okay, we’ll see how this works out. So we have a hand, the dealer gives us cards, and we all put chips in and we flip our cards and you win the hand. So I write it on my pad, Joey writes what happened on his pad, and you write what happened on your pad. At the end of that hand, we all put our pads of paper in the middle to form a consensus. Does this all check out, right? And clearly, if there’s three of us, but let’s say there’s like 10, right, and all 10 show the same data, we can confirm that that’s what happened during that hand of poker, right?

Braulio Rosa: Correct.

Tyler/Joey: Okay, that’s pretty much how the consensus mechanism of a blockchain works. A blockchain is a digital ledger, and that digital ledger has different data points fed into it to confirm the same event, and multiple entities confirming the same event allows it to be legitimized and added to the blockchain, which is permanent and immutable, can’t be changed by humans, it’s trustless, can’t be changed by humans, and so we have this ability to record data in a way that isn’t just one person recording the data; it’s we have tons of different nodes or sources of the same information to help form that consensus of data. It’s a great truth mechanism. But that’s really how a blockchain operates, now obviously it expands way past that, but that’s very foundational.

Braulio Rosa: Okay, so it’s not just one person who’s running this server out there in the sky, and he or she can go in and change stuff. There’s actually a network of people that work to verify that whatever data goes in is correct because that would be my fear, right?

Tyler/Joey: Yeah, and if you read the Bitcoin white paper, which is from Satoshi Nakamoto, it’s what started this whole thing. Bitcoin was created to solve a problem: how do you have a peer-to-peer payment network that does not rely on a centralized entity to verify transactions, make sure people aren’t double-spending money that they don’t have, make sure that everything is immutable and kept as a solid record. So, the way that Bitcoin, which is the first cryptocurrency, is supposed to operate, is it’s supposed to be trustless, it’s supposed to be decentralized. So as I was saying, with the different nodes, every full node has a full record of the blockchain, and once a block, which is just a bundle of transactions, is verified—and we could talk about how it’s verified and how consensus is achieved—it’s added to the chain, and then through a number of different shorthands that are done the way that computer code works, a node is able to have that record, and there’s a bunch of nodes all around the world. It’s not limited to any one country or area, where they’re all keeping that record and as they add new blocks, they’re achieving consensus so that you never have false transactions that are recorded on the blockchain. So, I guess I’m going to answer my own question because they found out probably by going back into the blockchain, but how do you avoid being Sam Bankman-Fried, and you know if you’re going in and you’re investing into something like that because I don’t fully understand how that went down, can you shed some light on that?

Tyler/Joey: Sure, so the issue with events like FTX, Voyager, BlockFi, Mt. Gox, which was the first, the issue was not with the technology of blockchain, the issue was with a centralized entity that was ultimately controlled by bad actors, right? So, in the case of FTX, you had a nucleus of people that were running that platform, they gave themselves certain permissions, and they were able to do what they did, which resulted in billions of dollars of losses to millions of people around the world, sure. And it’s interesting that human nature kind of has people migrate toward centralization because they’re not used to seeing the trust being in the decentralization. So, you end up putting your trust into a company, that goes against—it’s antithetical to the technology that is supporting it. So, I mean, we can talk about different ways of holding crypto assets if your purpose for holding those assets is to invest and try to generate value over time, but the glaring issue that people ran into with those types of exchanges was the fact that it was an exchange and it was a centralized entity. So, what you’re saying is, and I think you’re right, we would generally want, we would go to one central person or agent that we trust, or we think we trust, because we think, well, fewer cooks in the kitchen, so less chance of having something bad happen there. But you’re saying that the best part of this technology is that it’s decentralized, that you have multiple people basically verifying, right?

Tyler/Joey: Okay, yeah, and I’m happy to speak on that. Like, I run a node currently, right, just out of pure hobbyist, having a node in my home, a small little computer that just has and verifies Bitcoin transactions on it, right? That’s really what a node does, and a mining operation or miner is partly a node as well but is verifying transactions. So, for different currencies or functions or instruments that are used via this blockchain, there’s going to be, I guess depending on how large, millions of nodes that are verifying. Is that what you’re saying?

Braulio Rosa: Yeah, so our example in poker, I said there were 10 people, imagine there were like a million, okay, right, all playing the same hand. Nodes, do you need to have something special to have a node or once you’re registered as a user or owner of some kind of instrument that’s registered on this blockchain, you’re a node then?

Tyler/Joey: I mean, it used to be way more complicated, now it’s very plug-and-play. There are companies out there that make nodes for the average consumer who just are hobbyists and want to have access to this technology. I mean, back when I started getting into it, like 2011, 2012, you were really doing this yourself, yeah. So, I think it’s great now that you can have your own node and not have to basically program it from scratch. It opens up access to this technology in this world, and again, like, we’re not shy of the immense amount of nefarious actors in this field, right? But I think so far what you’ve noticed is that the common theme is that it’s the human element involved, right?

Braulio Rosa: Yeah, right. So, the node allows you to verify transactions, and we’re not just talking like transactions like I send you money or I send you a coin, we’re talking like if you purchase real estate from me, we want to transact that deed to you, right? That could also happen through the blockchain. It’s really just a transaction of data, right? So, I know before we got on camera, we were talking about uses that people could actually utilize blockchain for that would be useful, yeah, in modern-day, other than just financial because I think everyone thinks of blockchain or now that they’re the ones that don’t, I know that people do know, that it’s a foundation for cryptocurrency, right? So that’s what probably most people are using blockchain for, in cryptocurrency, but there are other things you could use. Can you enlighten us on some of that, for the average person, and then maybe you were talking about like transactions for like some kind of real estate or something, is that something that you could use in court if something went down? Go ahead, multiple questions, multiple questions, yeah.

Tyler/Joey: Right, so, I don’t think for most of those use cases we’re at a point yet where it would be accepted by a court just because the infrastructure is not there yet, but the possibilities are endless. In the case of land records, right now, you have to go in each state, county by county, you have to go to their public ledger, and you have to see, was the deed recorded properly? There are different rules in various jurisdictions—first to record, first to know—it’s very complicated and antiquated. So what blockchain technology would allow us to do for land records is to put all of that into that blockchain that we’re talking about, where it’s an immutable record that goes back to the very beginning. It would take a long time to do that with existing records, but going forward, right, so you can confirm that on this date, at this time, in this area, between these parties, this transaction occurred, and once that’s in the blockchain, it’s not going anywhere. So once it’s transferred, it then travels, and it’s called a hash, that records all previous blocks into this line of code, and once you transfer it to another person, all of that data comes with them, so they have the full record. Like, if you’re talking land, it’s easy. You can also do luxury goods. I mean, there’s an entire industry around following the provenance of a painting, right? You know, once Picasso painted this piece, who did it then go to, how was it transferred, was it stolen by this person and sold on the black market? Tying it to blockchain prevents that from happening because even if it’s stolen, it still comes with all of that previous information, and you’re able to see that clearly. Is this something that, for instance, here in Florida, we have 67 counties, I’d have to see how many circuits, but for each circuit, you’re going to have a clerk of court, right? And he or she’s going to register that deed or whatever, their job is to register legal things that go on in our lives. Would it require for each of them to have some kind of giant server, and I guess that’s centralization again, how could they potentially go about setting up a whole blockchain system where all the clerks are using it in Florida?

Tyler/Joey: Sure, I mean, each county could have its own node, or even a network of nodes, that every node has its code, so it can be compressed. There are differences between a full node and partial nodes. We call them hot wallets—crypto wallets that are on-chain, online—generally are not full nodes, and so they will interact with full nodes to try and get the full picture to verify a transaction when it’s being…so each half node is a wallet, and what’s a wallet?

Tyler/Joey: Okay, so a wallet is the interface that someone would use in order to conduct transactions when you’re talking blockchain. It’s not like a digital purse that you put physical coins in, it’s a record of transactions. So, let me go back even further, when you, let’s say I have five Bitcoin and I want to transfer one Bitcoin to Tyler, I wouldn’t record on the blockchain only, I’m transferring one Bitcoin to Tyler, you would record, I’m transferring one Bitcoin to Tyler and four back to myself, so that you could see that those four were not yet spent. So, every transaction going in both directions is recorded every single time it occurs, and that needs to be verified by a node. So when we’re talking Bitcoin and what they call the proof of work consensus, all of these different nodes, where they have mining capabilities, they’re all competing to be the one to verify that transaction along with a bundle of other transactions. Every node, every node, every full system, I guess, yeah. So, you have, you know, you could have millions of nodes all at once, everyone mining, this is why the investment part comes into it, they’re all mining to be the one to verify the next block in the blockchain, and right now it takes about 10 minutes to do that, and you have all of this competition to make that happen, right. Why are they competing, I don’t, who, I don’t want to say who cares, but why the competition?

Tyler/Joey: So, it’s built into the system, right? You want to have fairness, and also a possibility to be rewarded when you’re verifying transactions on the chain, so all of these nodes are competing and at a very high level, for Bitcoin, when you’re talking proof of work, think of it as just like a super long math problem. So, all of these, think of like mining outfits, just like supercomputers, all around the world, everyone is competing to try and solve this super hard math problem, and to be the first one to do it. If they’re the one to do it and solve that problem, they get a reward. It halves every so often. It started out, I believe, 50 Bitcoin as the reward, and then went down to 25, 12 and a half, I think we’re at 6.25 now. So, but how would that work with a non-financial system, where it’s the exchange of, or recording of deeds, and so forth?

Tyler/Joey: So, you would see it in transaction fees once, so like for Bitcoin, once all of the Bitcoin is mined, which is going to take, I think, a couple hundred years at this point, or 140 more years, yeah, it’ll switch to just transaction fees. So, whoever verifies the transaction, you know, there are fees that are able to be generated that way. That’s going to be interesting because, you know, the clerks, that’s how they make their money, so they’re not going to want to give up the fee to some node that’s wherever, so that’ll be interesting to figure out how to use that, and that’s, and that’s kind of what you’re seeing now, in like a very high level, you’re seeing this technology come in and disrupt industries that we can call legacy industries, banking, money transmission, title search, title insurance, etc., and there’s obviously a resistance to this new technology, which any technology that comes in, what’s the goal of it? More efficient, less cost, etc., etc., right? They’re trying to make a new iteration of whatever was done before, and so we do have this, like, hey, there’s this great solution here, but because it’s against what you currently do, and maybe the way your model operates, your business model, it’s taking longer to adopt. I mean, dumbing it down, it’s kind of like Uber versus the taxi. Can you say that?

Tyler/Joey: This is what I would say, um, up until 2010, when the Bitcoin white paper really started to get its tentacles into the public, right, um, if you needed to transact value, there were like three ways you would do it. You had a bank account, so wires, ACH, right, I could hand you a physical bar of gold, or I could hand you like a brown bag full of cash, and that, that was really it, right? That was all you could do. So now you have this new option, and this new option was way less expensive than the wire, the ACH for the money remitters, it was way more efficient, and it put you in complete control, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s why we see a lot of these frauds occur, um, because they’re taking advantage of the fact that they have more information on how this technology works, you don’t, you trust them, they take advantage, right? And there isn’t a whole lot of regulation around this technology yet.

Braulio Rosa: What do you think about that, a whole lot?

Tyler/Joey: There is, yeah, there are certainly regulations that exist that can apply to various aspects of what people are doing with blockchain technology. There is not really a regulatory scheme right now that says this is how we’re going to specifically regulate blockchain, and many would argue you don’t need that because it still fits within what we already have, and that’s what a lot of our cases sort of center on right now. So we had talked about new things on the horizon that blockchain could potentially make more efficient. I know one you had talked about was voting, uh, tell us how that might work.

Tyler/Joey: Sure, so I’m going to add another one as well, a bonus, so, um, 60 Minutes comes out with this episode about how Kenya is mitigating people putting money under their mattresses their whole life savings, right? Let’s say it’s stolen or something happens, that’s it, game’s over, and the way they did it was using this technology they created called M-Pesa, and M-Pesa was literally a solution to me being able to text money to someone else, right? So there were a lot of unbanked villages and communities now have this ability to just use their phones, even though they were very early phones, to, and such, right? You can text your money to someone else, kind of like Zelle, yeah, very early on Zelle, right. So, so that was like, that was like the first true excitement when people read the white paper, there were a few different use cases because you read it, so you’re like, man, this is so interesting, where is it going to actually have an impact? One of those was money remittance and money transfer, another one was human rights implications, like voting, uh, it’s very well known now, there are different countries, you know, different sovereigns, where elections are, are less than legit, marketed as democratic, is that fair?

Braulio Rosa: Yeah.

Tyler/Joey: Um, and they have not addressed the reality that that’s not in fact the case, right? It’s a very black and white thing, either the election is the people voting, or it’s someone who has a hand in the outcome of the people voting. Hey, I think Putin got like 90% or something in Russia, so I, I mean, yeah, those, those are great numbers. Um, but you can, because of this technology is immutable, is trustless, if I went into a voting booth that was blockchain-centric, uh, and I voted using blockchain, that data is now on the blockchain, it can’t be disrupted, it can’t be manipulated. Um, are there some instances where, you know, um, you know, there can be hacks or things involved, and we could talk about that another time, that’s a whole other discussion, but for the most part, you have this ability to vote, and you’ll be able to see your vote on the blockchain, not by your name, of course, but um, by a string of letters and numbers, a hash, um, and so you’re able to verify, right, you’re able to verify that there’s my vote, right? That’s a pretty powerful thing for democracy, it, there’s my vote, can I, I don’t know if you can do that now, I think, I think I got a number you can call to verify your vote if you do a mail-in ballot, but that’s still secondary to being able to see like your vote on a blockchain, right? I think it’s pretty cool, so that would definitely have to be decentralized, correct?

Tyler/Joey: Correct, so, um, uh, that would definitely have to, well, that’s kind of what blockchain, so there are two theories of blockchain technology in existence, there’s the public and private blockchains, private blockchains are probably better use cases for like corporations who want information to be, uh, have the same features and capabilities of blockchain but keep it internal, uh, and then you have the one that is seen as the only blockchain, which is, you know, the public ledger, the public blockchain, um, so whether a country would use a private blockchain or a public blockchain, I’m not sure which one they would choose, uh, but there are also other human rights applications of the blockchain, um, one of those is the transfer of physical assets, right? And not only physical assets, but our food, um, we’ve seen in the past 20 or 30 years, every couple of months, it used to be every couple of weeks for a period, every couple of days, there’s this company or this restaurant has this food outbreak, this chain has this food outbreak, um, it just was on and on and on, and with blockchain, not only can we track a transaction, but we can track where something went, we could track what, this box of beef and the temperature was kept at, at this facility, how long it took to get to that facility, who watched it, who signed off on it, what the temperature was of the facility, and there’s no people involved, so we’re able to actually have this data and see it objectively, um, and, and, and at the end of the day, the goal is to solve problems, that’s what it would allow us to do, yeah.

Braulio Rosa: So that would require then, I’m thinking old school here, but you know, the farmer would have to do some kind of entry, like at every point, someone has to do some entry, right?

Tyler/Joey: Yeah, basically, we do have that to an extent today, so I mean, a lot of what people would see, I’m calling it the front end, front of office versus back of office, wouldn’t really change much, like for right now, you think of produce in, in at the grocery store, right? Every apple, every orange, every banana, they have a sticker on it that has a four-number code on it that’s standardized across like the entire produce industry, so that four-number identifier would be the same at a Publix in Florida, at a Food Lion in New York, and then even you go to a grocery store in Peru, they all have the same number system, um, the world got on board with that as a way to identify, so that number would be used at each touching point where it would be input, yeah, something similar. I mean, right now, you can, you can buy a half-gallon of orange juice, and it says, made with oranges from Florida, Mexico, and Brazil, um, but you’re trusting, you know, Florida’s Natural or whatever company it is, Tropicana, that that is where they got it from. Using blockchain technology, I mean, it can be done through a QR Code system, um, where, you know, as it travels through the supply chain, that particular orange is scanned at different intervals, um, and, uh, it, it creates a record that you’re able to look at, and there are some companies, like smaller, like regenerative farming companies, that are starting to do this, um, if you ever see, like, you can see ground pork, and has a QR code in it, you like, see where this pork came from, um, I haven’t tested it to see if it shows you like an NFT of like, this is, you know, Piggy, um, but it’s, there are early adopters, um, and we could see it scaling up to a way that, um, allows us, allows the end consumer to have the information that they need, so in the case of a recall, um, they’ll be able to just scan the QR code and say, yeah, this one came from the area where the outbreak started.

Braulio Rosa: Well, how could old-time financial people, what would they think of the evolution of how things are transacted for property of value, or anything of value, you know, not currency, but now something through the air, it’s not even the air, it’s, I don’t know, you describe it, I, I think, I think that this is a question more in the bucket of economics than law or technology, and so I’m going to answer it, I was trying to make it fun.

Tyler/Joey: No, no, I mean, it’s interesting, right, throw a curveball, no, no, that’s fine, it brings up a really interesting point, and, and if you disagree, you want to tack on, you know, if, uh, do it, but, um, you know, we went off the gold standard in the early 70s, and, uh, after that point, you saw, um, the usage of money, um, the volatility of money, the printing of money, uh, continuously skyrocket, and as you see it, you see, uh, inflation since that period also skyrocket. I mean, there are charts everywhere, um, anyone who’s listening, if you’re going to look at charts, you can type in FRED, it’s the Federal Reserve’s like, uh, data hub, and this is all publicly available, and so what you see is that when we went off the gold standard around that event, like in the 70s, mhm, yeah, early 70s, um, you see this like skyrocket of, of, of how we used money, how we spent, uh, the national budget just up, up, up, right, because, uh, our economy no longer was tethered to how much gold we had backing the currency, so let’s bring that to Bitcoin for a second, and Bitcoin isn’t the only, um, it’s not the only blockchain, it was the first, it has the most secure network, um, it’s like the grandfather, but because of that, it has a lot of immense value. What Joey talked about earlier was this concept of mining for rewards, and the halving of how many Bitcoins you can receive for, uh, engaging in mining, engaging in network security as well, and what that does is, from an economic perspective, create a deflationary effect. There’s a limited amount of Bitcoin, there’s never going to be more, and so the value of this digital asset, um, will, in theory, continue to rise, not only rise because there’s no more of them, which is, you know, very rudimentary, but because everything around us will also continue to get more expensive as it’s not based on the same deflationary mechanism that Bitcoin is on. Because of that, I assume Alexander Hamilton would find this extremely interesting.

Braulio Rosa: Yeah, no, that was a really good explanation, deep on that, man, yeah, I like it.

Tyler/Joey: Yeah, well, what you know, you, you’re saying that it’s finite, Bitcoin, for instance, I’ll be specific, you said Bitcoin, so at some point, it ends, the activity around that, then end, the production at the end of that production cycle, then it switches to transaction fees, which is what Joey was talking about, and then if you’re going to use it as a means of transmitting value, um, it’ll then get broken down further and further, so already now, people talk about Satoshi instead of a full Bitcoin as a method of exchanging value, which is just a fraction, fraction of a Bitcoin.

Tyler/Joey: Okay, so it’s okay, instead of a buck, it’s a quarter, so just because you don’t have a full Bitcoin doesn’t mean you can’t transact Bitcoin. I could send, I mean, I don’t know how far the decimals go, but like, s0000 one of Bitcoin, um, and there are a few, a few companies and a few vendors that notate their products in Bitcoin instead of in, uh, uh, in dollars. I think that’s more of like a, like an ideological decision than one that’s going to help their company grow, um, because if I’m looking at something, and I say, oh, what’s that in dollars, right? Because you still have to think about the pricing, psych pricing psychology, but yeah, you can, you can transact for less than a Bitcoin if you need to.

Braulio Rosa: You were said, I asked earlier if any of this stuff would be admissible in court, and you were like, not yet, when do you foresee that potentially, uh, being admissible?

Tyler/Joey: Well, I think we were talking about in terms of use cases for litigation, yeah, like with some kind of transaction, if I have, for instance, I don’t know, a $5 million Ferrari or yacht, and I sell it to you, you give me x amount of Bitcoin, and suddenly I don’t want to give it to you, but I have the Bitcoin now, what is that, something that you could use to, you know, take me to court over, to get your Bitcoins back, or, you know, where do we go from there, legally?

Tyler/Joey: I mean, it’s like Joey was saying, it’s an asset, so it fits into other buckets of law that already exist, okay, yeah, there’s already an industry of experts today that are being used in litigation that help to trace crypto transactions. So, if you’re talking about just in that context, you know, when will it be admissible, we’re already on our way there, um, so there are cases like that where, I mean, not necessarily like that, but that you’re able to transact in Bitcoin, and something happens, and you’re able to get your justice out of it, right? So, like on an individual basis, instead of like a class action, just an easy example, let’s say someone has crypto assets on an exchange, and they, it’s their life savings, it’s their, they put their 401K into it because they, you know, thought it was a safe bet with inflation, um, they get a call from someone that they think is tech support from the exchange, saying give me your two-factor authentication, um, we need to verify some things that are happening with your account, the person’s not paying attention, they, oh, I just got the code, here it is, next thing they know, their wallet is drained, um, the amount of stories we’ve heard, this has happened, very common, very common. So, what a lot of scammers that do this will do is they will then use a strategy that’s called like blending, where they’ll use software that will actually break this up into like thousands of little transactions, spread it across different exchanges, put it into different hot and cold wallets, and then bring it back on the other side to wherever they want to keep it, whether it’s like some offshore account somewhere, wow, um, this is, this happened in one of the Ponzi schemes that we’re litigating currently called Empire X, where they were based in South Florida, they took in $40 million from investors, all different types of currency, but then they had them transfer it in Bitcoin, Ether, USD Coin, and then they took it, ran it through a blender, put it in some offshore accounts, fled the country, to a jurisdiction where they are not extraditable, um, so you can hire companies that will go like sort of audit the blockchain, follow those transactions, and they’ll be able to identify what account, what wallet those assets are being held in, and where it is, once you know where it is, it’s a completely different story with whether you can go and recover it, um, but that is being done, you can find it, but maybe not recover it.

Braulio Rosa: Yeah, I mean, if it’s being held somewhere that is just inaccessible to us, yeah, I think that brings up an interesting point, and uh, I hope you agree, if you don’t, tell me, um, the one of the first three ways we talked about where we could transact money before blockchain existed, uh, the brown paper bag full of money, right, is still the primary and chosen method for laundering, if I have a transaction that I want to use for nefarious purposes, we’ll call it money laundering, money laundering is very, is very simple now to trace where that came from, what other transactions, uh, you used, and continue to get data to pinpoint, okay, who is this person, who through the blockchain, the blockchain, if I, my, my node, if I want to watch, I could see what IP address transactions are coming from, right? If I have the sophistication, which a lot of these chain analysis experts do, I mean, we see it over and over again, um, there’s that, what was that big, uh, pipeline, there was a ransomware attack on a big pipeline a few years ago, yeah, I forgot the name, they were able to trace those guys in like two weeks, right? They gave them like $4 million in crypto, and they were like, two weeks later, it was back, um, so people who are out there are saying, oh, this is only for nefarious purposes, I mean, if you’re using this for nefarious purposes, like, good luck, you’re, you’re playing Russian roulette, right? There’s a digital trail that you’ll be tracked, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, and then, and then I think as well, um, what’s important to mention is, and this is off the Empire X and a lot of the current cases that we’re both seeing now in the crypto space, which are people who are promoting these unregistered securities, more or less, right, um, you know, if you are, like, like South Florida has a large influencer community, and if you’re an influencer and someone’s saying, you know, we want you to promote this cryptocurrency or promote this project or whatever, um, I mean, Joey knows firsthand, I know firsthand, what happened when you had celebrities promoting these very large projects that clearly, uh, took people’s money, and there were just empty promises, um, and then you saw one person, I think it was Taylor Swift, who, who, her counsel very wisely, uh, said no, we don’t want you promoting for FTX because this is an unregistered security, or could be deemed as such, and now you have a ton of celebrities who are caught in this, uh, situation where they were, they’re being pursued for promoting this unregistered security, which we have laws against, yeah, we had, I had on a prior show, we had talked about Crypto Zoo, and I know that was, I don’t know where that’s at now, but they’re, they’re endless, mad, these cases, because it, it comes with the wave of bull market of the crypto cycle, yeah.

Braulio Rosa: Tyler, Joey, thank you for stopping by and educating us. Can you tell us how to get a hold of you?

Tyler/Joey: Uh, sure, so you can reach us at our website, conradscherer.com, you could reach me at LinkedIn as well, or shoot me an email at tyagman@conradscherer.com.

Joey Kaye: Mr. K, sure, you can look me up on LinkedIn, you can go to our website, moskowitzlawfirm.com, my email is joseph@moskowitzlawfirm.com.

Braulio Rosa: Gentlemen, thank you for coming, and I hope we can circle back when there’s some new, interesting stuff we can discuss about blockchain.

Tyler/Joey: Sure, we’d be happy to come back.

Braulio Rosa: PR sure. I want to end this by making it clear that this has been a very broad overview of how blockchain functions in and outside of cryptocurrency, as well as its potential utilization in the future. In this upcoming year, we will be putting out more in-depth content, drilling down on specific topics in a very high quality, with Tyler Yagman and Joseph K. Check back to our YouTube channel periodically. In the meantime, if you have any questions, you can visit www.conradscherer.com or call 954-783-8335.