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You are listening to the National University Podcast.

Kimberly King (00:08)

Hello, I’m Kimberly King. Welcome to the National University podcast where we offer an holistic approach to student support, wellbeing, and success- the Whole Human education. We put passion into practice by offering accessible, achievable higher education to lifelong learners. Today we are talking about cryptocurrency and all of the new changes coming up in the future. A very interesting conversation. 

In a recent article in Forbes.com, they’re talking about the top cryptocurrency trends in 2025 and beyond to watch for, including regenerative finance and green crypto projects, advances in blockchain-based dispute resolution, central bank digital currencies and financial inclusion. Also, they’re talking about decentralized identity solutions and decentralized AI. A very important and relevant conversation coming up on today’s show.

Today we are talking about cryptocurrency, and joining us is Doctor Paul Markham a unique proven global strategist, transformational leader and futurist committed to first to market product development, driving revenue and EBITDA growth in Fortune 100 growth and startup organizations. Dr. Markham brings his decades of experience to advise his clients on artificial general intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain and is set to deliver the next generation of enterprise systems for the 21st century. And we welcome you back to the podcast, Doctor. How are you?

Dr. Paul Markham (01:40)

Look, I’m doing very well. Thanks for the intro.

Kimberly King (01:48)

Why don’t you fill our audience in right now, a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today’s episode.

Dr. Paul Markham (01:57)

Yeah, I think, you know, from my personal perspective, I’m an engineer, an educator and an entrepreneur. And if there’s any mission I’ve got, I’m kind of always searching for, questioning and trying to see if there’s a, the story behind the story, if you like, rather than just marching along with the herd.

Traditionally, I have been involved in companies, involved in systems, where I’ve kind of, let’s just say, pushed the status quo. And my mission in this case here, literally, is to help the human race as we move towards artificial general intelligence, which in essence is where computers have the level of intelligence that we do.

And then beyond that, where we go to artificial super intelligence and I’m a firm believer that there’s a place for something that called human metacognitive intelligence or what I’m calling HMI, which is going to put us in the people that get involved in it in a very interesting position on the other side of artificial general intelligence, rather than essentially succumbing to the machines as we move.

Kimberly King (03:24)

So timely and relevant in this time that we live in right now. Today we are talking about cryptocurrency. So Dr. Markham, tell us us again, kind of give us a broad overview about cryptocurrency.

Dr. Paul Markham (03:37)

Yeah, look, thank you very much for inviting me, Kimberly. I enjoyed my last journey here. Let’s get started. I wanted to approach this a little differently today. I have actually been heavily involved in crypto since about 2016.

I created a cryptocurrency in a decentralized Ether mode. So I actually have some credentials behind it, but something really kind of piqued my interest today when my accountant was saying, you know, do you feel like you’re living in a matrix? Because we all tend to, all of us, run around full of these cognitive biases, confirmation bias, framing bias, all these different biases. And frankly, Richard Thaler stated it pretty well when he said humans are often predictably irrational and make decisions based on cognitive biases and emotional factors, not pure logic.

As we go to set this up, another scholar called Dr. Paul Markham was actually talking about humans needing to adopt a mindfulness-driven improvement in their metacognitive intelligence. Kind of setting the scene there. I didn’t want to talk about just cryptocurrencies. I want to talk about value. That’s what the real question is, value and real basic economics as it relates to something called scarcity.

Then you’ve got supply and demand and how much of whatever it is, is actually the value based on scarcity. So if you go through water, of course, right, that’s the life giver. But even back in the day, salt was like the equivalent of a currency. We went on to spice, we would barter. And then in the very early days, the Egyptian days, the Greeks and so forth, they started to have a currency because trying to carry a couple of sheep around was a little difficult.

But these currencies were made out of gold, silver, copper, and so forth. So you can start to see there was a value in it. Okay, it wasn’t just gold. Gold, obviously, has always had a high value. And only because of, guess what, scarcity. There’s only a limited amount of gold in the world. I think they say 20 Olympic swimming pools. So the point of it was that that’s how we moved through history.

Then what we did back in the day, we got this thing called gold-backed money. The US dollar was invented literally, and this is the part I don’t think people are fully aware of, not all people, some people. When you hear about crypto, think, oh fake, and you think about US dollar and you think, that’s good, that’s real. The US dollar was invented as a receipt or a layaway receipt, the similar, when you deposited your gold into it. That’s correct.

So you can see the direct relationship between the value of gold, which is a finite resource, so it’s always going to have value. So the fact of the matter is, we then get into this whole idea of thinking about what is a cryptocurrency? How does that relate to the US dollar and so forth? So then we move- fast forward.

A guy called Richard Nixon, I’m not blaming him, but he decided he would take away what they call the gold backing of the US dollar. Now, anyone that’s listening to this out there might go, what’s the point? Well, the point is that we started talking about our currency or all currencies in what they’ll call fiat. Now, the importance of fiat, we’re going to link directly now to crypto. Fiat means literally, and please, you can’t make this stuff up. It actually means faith in the US government. No, I’m not kidding.

The US dollar is not backed by anything except faith in the US government. The other side of this is we need to explain to people before we start talking about crypto, where does that come from? So we’ve just identified nothing’s backing the US dollar.

Central banks actually increase the money supply digitally, also called quantitative easing. It’s printing money. That’s really what it is. You might go, are they physically printing it, not really. They print it sure. But the fact of the matter is, we already know there’s no technical valuation behind these things. But what happens is, this actually gets created in quantitative interest, is quantitative easing.

But the story gets so much better. Then what we do when we’ve created this money that we haven’t really created, I’m not kidding, we then decide we’re going to charge interest. Interest on, wait on what? Interest on nothing, Paul? Is that what you say? And the reality is it gets even crazier because then the general banks, you know, the ones that we go down the road to, and I’m not going to mention names, but the point is they have a thing called fractional reserve.

Oh yeah, that’s right. Let’s just say they’ve got a certain amount that they keep over here. Most of them loan out. that’s right. Loan out and charge interest on -10 or 15 times what they’ve actually got in the bank account- I think everybody, hopefully by this phase of the call, be careful calling cryptocurrency fake.

The fact of the matter is this exact money, over the last number of years, and it hasn’t just been the last administration before that. We had this quantitative easing, and we have been printing money, looked a lot of money, then created this thing called, yes, that’s correct, the illusionary stock market. It’s just the most amazing thing. So the key learning point is before we make judgments on crypto or anything else that has value, let’s just make sure we understand what we’re actually comparing it to. And that kind of brings me up to, you know, I think part one is what is fiat and how is this different from crypto?

And I’ll kind of hand it back to you, but I really did want to just set that up. And in no way, because people will say, well, you know, the US dollar has been doing so well. It’s everything’s comparative. You’ve got to go back and kind of ask yourself, based on what, and how is it really that different to crypto? Because you’ll get the big bankers standing up there saying, it’s fake, it’s a fake currency and so forth. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have their own crypto currencies. Anyway, thank you for the information.

Kimberly King (10:43)

So thank you for that overview. But what is fiat and then how is this different from crypto as we just kind of discussed as our first question.

Dr. Paul Markham (10:52)

Look, think it’s- how’s it different from crypto… Fiat is essentially, it’s something that comes from the government that’s not backed by any physical commodity like gold or silver. Then you say, what is crypto? Crypto is basically computer code that is equally not backed by anything related to anything. There’s no actual tangible asset behind it. I think the difference between crypto in relationship to certain crypto, or you talk about that more, say, Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a valuation because the people that created it set kind of a cap on it. If you think about gold, there’s only so much gold. Think about Bitcoin. There’s only so much Bitcoin, 21 million coins in total. So anytime you have scarcity, you have value.

I think that the difference between a fiat and traditional crypto, because we’re going to talk a little bit more about that. Crypto is traditional. It’s a kind of citizen’s currency. It means that it’s not coming from a central banking system, and it’s not actually created or controlled by a government or a central bank system.

How they different from their valuations? They’re really not that different at all. People can argue, well, you know, the US government, you’ve got to have faith in the US government. I mean, for me, honestly, a government that can get into debt to $36 trillion, I don’t have a lot of financial faith in that. If you’re running a company and you made $27 trillion a year like the GDP here,

And yet you’re in debt to $36 trillion. I’m having a hard time having a place in that company. So that’s kind of a little bit of an idea of where we are today between a fiat and a crypto. They really, at their base level, aren’t that different. And yet, in the marketplace, if I went up to someone in the street, someone would have a very different idea of what a US dollar was compared to a Bitcoin or an Ethereum or an altcoin or XRP order.

Kimberly King (13:33)

Okay. Well, so how did crypto currency and blockchain technology originate?

Dr. Paul Markham (13:40)

I think it’s really important here to talk about where it came from, but to delineate blockchain and cryptocurrency. Let’s do that. This Satoshi Nakamoto, I love it. It’s kind of like a Japanese anime type figure. By the way, no one knows who this is. I think plenty of people do, but I don’t know who it is. It’s not common knowledge.

But this person slash, I think a bunch of coders out of Palo Alto basically created, think about blockchain as a database. It’s very hard to hack database. Never say anything’s not, everybody does about blockchain. Believe me, anything that’s built can be hacked. But the point is it’s like a railroad track. Think about that for blockchain. And it’s in a decentralized mode.

And it has little railroad cars called tokens or coins. In the case of Bitcoin, but you can have other coins. You can have Ethereum coins. You can have XRP Ripple. There’s all these different types of blockchain processes out there. But the point of all this is, is to why? Why was this created? That’s kind of the bigger question. And it wasn’t…it, just created it because they thought, isn’t this great technology to have this immutable database, to have this decentralized control, meaning you didn’t need just government bank or JP Morgan or Chase, these big buildings. We could actually do all this stuff together. But really, was far more, and I hate to say it, but far more of a political statement.

And that doesn’t mean left or right. It means really citizen against kings and serfs, if you like. was really this idea that we want to control our value exchange. Now, on the surface, that kind of sounds like anarchy. But then on the other side, people that really look at this openly say, wait a minute, I’ve been getting loans from banks that don’t really have them, and then they’re charging me interest on it.

What? You see what I mean? So there’s a lot of, let’s just say, situations happening that are just not fair on the citizens. And that’s where this actually came from. You know, I’ve heard one guy, one of the very early founders, and he was talking about, as far as he’s concerned, the way that this has been set up, it’s another sort of form of enslavement in interest payments on loans that were created by a fractional reserve system. But in reality, there was no money, no dollar, nothing behind it.

So to Bernie Madoff’s point, really, this is a pretty regulated Ponzi scheme, the way this thing works. So that’s where basically this came from. And blockchain is this idea of kind of a distributed ledger where we, the citizens, could actually have control of how we wanted to change value. We’ll talk a little later because that’s what it was built for, but it does so much more. It’s world changing where blockchain is going to take the world.

Kimberly King (17:27)

Wow. Well, you’re talking about, yes, all of course this in the future with cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is often credited as the first cryptocurrency. What problems was it designed to solve and has it lived up to its promise?

Dr. Paul Markham (17:39)

Yeah, look, it was and I think that whoever built it was very smart in that they built it to create value, everlasting value. And I think they did a great job by limiting or creating scarcity. know, gold’s got value because it’s scarce. I mean, it’s that simple. The only other kind of approach to you is that the entire concept was there to rage against the machine and they actually did a pretty darn good job of it. Because this is something that has gone from being valued at a couple of hundred dollars and in recent times it’s in the $80,000 to $100,000 basically. Now remember what we’re saying, but we’re saying it’s $100,000.

What does that even mean? Because we’re comparing it to something that is artificial in the first place. You see what I mean? So the entire concept anyway was that they wanted to give control back to individuals because their biggest fear of all, I believe Satoshi, if I could have been in the room, their biggest fear was central banking digital currency. I’m pretty sure that’s it.

Now on the surface, you might say, what’s a central bank digital currency? It’s a good way of thinking about, imagine if the Reserve Bank, the central bank of the country decides to digitize everything. On the one hand, it sounds wonderful, right? Oh, that’s a great idea. We don’t have to carry cash in the country I come from. They’re about to do that, right? Get rid of cash altogether. Now, that’s a good thing. And Bitcoin was really created to have another option than central bank digital currency.

So you might say to yourself, what’s wrong with central bank digital currency? We’ll talk more about it later. But you can just imagine there’s nothing wrong with it if you have wonderful, loving governments that are looking after all of the citizens. But what happens if you end up with somebody involved that doesn’t have that perspective and all of sudden it becomes a way to control individuals? I mean, if you can shut someone’s bank account down, it has a pretty big effect on their livelihood. Bitcoin, I think the major issue with Bitcoin and pretty much most of these cryptocurrencies. We’re trying to decentralize. One of the big power aspects of computers and data centers is centralized power means centralized grunt in computing.

And it means that things can go fast. That’s why we’ve got big data centers and so forth. But just imagine, we’re trying to do all this in a decentralized mode, meaning we’ve got like our own little mini bank in our own little wallet. So the problem has been is computer power needed to run these things. Also, look, honestly, the technology’s been slower than it should have been to come to where we are. This is going to change dramatically with a new- it’s not new at all, but it’s new to the world, I guess, as far as consumer world. It’s called quantum computing. This is going to change everything. And that’s why there’s probably going to be a fight coming here pretty soon between the two forces. It’s going to be like Batman against the Joker coming up here soon. And I don’t know which is which anymore. But the point is that the central bank digital currency and then the decentralized mode.

Bitcoin only has this value due to the simple fact of scarcity. But the other big problem with Bitcoin or any of these is there’s no reason, the SEC in this country, there’s no reason at all that they can’t make an announcement- because they’ve done it before- and say, that’s illegal. You can’t use that anymore. If we find out you are doing anything with cryptocurrencies, you’re going to be arrested.

Now, I don’t think they’re going to do that, but they definitely stopped back in 2017. We were raising money, true story, on things called ICOs, not IPO, initial coin offerings. We were raising money on that wonderful kind of citizens way, if you think about it like a little bit like crowdfunding. Amazing, amazing stuff. The government shut that down and regulated it. So if they get enough pressure, from big banks and reserve banks and central banks around the world, I mean, that is the biggest risk, if you like, for Bitcoin. So it’s got its problems. Sure, it does. And I think what Bitcoin spurred along was many other currencies. You can’t even imagine it. Now, probably the biggest is Ethereum and what you’ll find, guys, all of the banks that say that crypto is fake, all of them. Jamie Dimon, he’s wonderful. He’s the smartest guy alive. All that stuff with [unintelligible]. He was credited with saying that this whole crypto thing is kind of fake. He’s on NBC, one of those news channels.

But what he didn’t tell anyone that they already had created a JP Morgan coin out of Ethereum, which is a different form than Bitcoin, it still is, think about it, it’s another type of railroad, little caboose that runs on this blockchain architecture. But they’re all involved in it. I think the one reason that Bitcoin hasn’t been crushed so far is because I think a lot of people have now got investments in Bitcoin. Earlier, we were talking about the supermarket today. Normally, what you see is it’s in inverse. It’s like gold, right?

If the market crashes, Bitcoin is likely to go up. So that’s, I think, why people are now starting to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as what I’d call a hedge.

Kimberly King (24:13)

Yeah, it feels like we’re in the wild wild west with this Bitcoin that’s out here. Can you recap how blockchain works and then the different models for those new to this space?

Dr. Paul Markham (24:29)

Yeah, I think the best way to think about this is ways that people would understand this. I think most people use things like Venmo. They use things like cash apps, all these different types of things, they are run through the banks. They’re centralized, even though you’ve got your little phone there. They’re not a decentralized mode. Blockchain is this idea of having a distributed ledger where we all have control over the transaction or of sending value between a consumer and a producer. A good way to look at this would be, imagine today we go and get on an Uber, so I’m in San Francisco, I want to get an Uber.

Wherever I am, I go into my Uber app – all Uber does- Uber doesn’t do anything. I love Uber. But what they do, they’re what you call a value exchange platform. Hmm, that’s interesting. So what’s the difference? Well, if I actually had a blockchain wallet in my, which I do, with coins on it, I could actually directly go to the actual producer. So the big story here is in the decentralized mode, the control goes to whoever is actually in the driver’s seat. There’s no interaction, wouldn’t lead over. By the way, the same thing becomes even more crazy. I could order directly from Shenzhen or Suzhou, I could directly order from that factory in China with no middlemen in between using a blockchain architecture. So I think there’s two different kind of modes out there in blockchain. Blockchain is either decentralized or centralized. This is the absolute because the decentralized guys are against anything that’s centralized. Blockchain can be put into a centralized mode and there’s a company out there called XRP Ripple and they will argue

but they actually kind of call it hybrid because they can actually put it in either decentralized or centralized.

If I was a betting person, I wouldn’t bet against centralized winning this. Why? Because there’s so many issues if all of a sudden, consumers, if citizens have control, mean, that cannot be allowed, right? But the point of it is, you know, wherever the computer resides, and most corporations have major data sets, think about it, and they would, and central banks would prefer a controlled digital currency. I mean, they just would. The issue with that is, without naming countries, but this is happening. It’ll- a centralized anything comes with human rights issues.

The idea that, for instance, this is a funny one, but I think it’s it makes a point. If I actually am working with a centralized digital currency, I may go to the liquor store. I don’t drink by the way. But I could go there three times in a week. It could actually trigger a social credit store and shut down my bank account. I think that there’s positives to central bank digital currency- much faster. We really know the data standards, right? And it would come with the security. That’s one of the key aspects of this whole cryptocurrency is cryptology and the way that we can actually really protect these transactions. I mean, it would be great to bridge to the Ripple network and have a central bank digital currency, but I’m completely against it because it’s essentially putting control into the hands of very few. I’m a bigger component of really trying to get to a more efficient decentralized mode.

Kimberly King (29:02)

Got it. So what are the biggest misconceptions about cryptocurrency and blockchain that persist today in your point of view?

Dr. Paul Markham (29:11)

Yeah, I think whenever I talked to anyone about this, value was based on what we found. Okay. It’s that simple. So if the US dollar, any of these currencies were backed by gold and so forth, this is a different conversation, completely different. Or if the currency were little gold coins or gold notes or something, it’s different conversation altogether.

But when I look at this now, banks have a major reason to keep this noise going. So the misconception is that this is fake. It’s fake currency, fake news, whatever it is that you hear. While all this is being purported in the various news networks, it doesn’t matter which side we’re on, they’ve all got their story. All the major banks have created their own cryptocurrency in the background and large funds, right? If anyone thinks that Goldman and all these other companies aren’t long on Bitcoin, they’ve got to be kidding us all. It doesn’t matter what people say. there’s misconceptions, I believe, that people always say to me, oh, yeah, crypto is really good for drug smuggling and all this other stuff. It’s great. The cartels love it. The answer is

maybe, maybe they do, and maybe that’s how it’s used.

But I’m sorry, there’s places called Cayman Islands and other places that have been doing very, very well with corruption without any sort of crypto currency. I think the other side is the converse side, oh well, but know, fiat currencies are real. Are they? Yes, there’s pieces of paper. But I think the biggest misconception is that crypto and blockchain, are these kind of like fake situations that have no value and whoever, it’s like people say, you’re just such suckers that get involved with that. But if only they kind of thought about the banking system and how the rest of the world is, then they may have a different perspective.

Kimberly King (31:29)

Okay, got it. So the major underlying story and this immense impact that blockchain will have on the global economy, what do you say to that?

Dr. Paul Markham (31:40)

Yeah. Look, what I’ll do, I’ll actually, I’ll answer a couple of questions here. When they created it, Satoshi or whoever it was created this blockchain, they had this kind of idea, right? Let’s, let’s bring back the, the control to the individual. And frankly, let’s create an immense amount of value out of it as well. I think, that’s kind of like, that’s the story, the underlying story. I don’t know that they kind of thought about it when they built this, but think about a database. Think about going back to our railroad track. We’ve set up this incredibly, incredibly high-tech railroad track. This kind of like database that we’re going to connect the internet onto this database. So the fact of the matter is we talk a lot in blockchain.

We talk a lot about tokens, a token or a coin, right? It’s the same type of thing. It’s something of value. You’ll hear about things like tokenized environment with Bitcoin or tokenized with these or so forth. So the major underlying story is not that at all. It’s actually what else can you put on blockchain? Well, that’s funny, isn’t it? What could you put on there? Well, you could put multimedia. Okay. What does that mean?

Well, when you actually use blockchain, part of the transaction is using something called a smart contract. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, you could actually have multimedia and it basically comes directly into something you’ve probably heard of before called a metaverse. And this becomes a global situation where this has impact on when you think about beyond Bitcoin, altcoins and financial transaction.

This is for all digital assets, not just coins and tokens. This has impact on multimedia, law enforcement, legal, smart contracts, medicine, elections, supply chain, real estate, government, higher education, and, and, and, and. So the point is, that we all get hung up on we say about we actually spend way too much talking about the coins right, and not enough time on blockchain.

in the future- think about the differences. If you today are sitting there and you decide you go on somewhere and you’re going to buy a product that comes from China, I know this because I’ve been for some time, the amount of hops between the factory and by the time it gets fixed on board in Hong Kong or Macau, wherever it is, and then the United States and you eventually get whatever this product is.

Every step along the way is what you call middlemen margin, right? That’s all going to go away with blockchain. You could directly interface in a secure mode and also deal with multiple currency, basically currency perceptions around the world. You can do that instantaneously with the factory directly. Now you might say, well, that sounds like you’re going to get rid of the supply chain. The answer is we are going to completely transform what we know of as a supply chain. And this will happen. We’re just going to take all the margin out of the middle and we’re going to get things so much cheaper. So I think when people, my daughter, for instance, she’s an attorney, I’ve talked on and on and on to her about this and she’s like, ah, stop it, stop it, I don’t want to hear about it. All of a sudden she’s become very schooled on what we call smart contracts.

So you don’t know, smart contracts, all of this comes together. So I think the one major underlying story is don’t get hooked on Bitcoin. Get to really understand a distributed ledger blockchain and what that could do for the world as we move forward.

Kimberly King (35:45)

Yeah, it just seems like everything in the digital space, it does seem to be a lot more efficient. AI, all of that, you know, it does, you know, it’s hard to touch it, to feel it, but it’s out there and it just feels like it’s taking us into the future. And you talked a little bit about that real world, the applications with, you know, attorneys, all kinds of, and media. Do you have any other specific examples of what those applications of blockchain that people might not be aware of?

Paul Markham (36:16)

Look, I think in general, it’s something whenever you try to, I do love this one, to be honest, elections. Elections, we have these electronic machines. I can state this, my background is an electronics engineer. So electronic machines are used in elections worldwide. They’re about as easy to hack as like a kid in high school could hack an election machine in this country or anywhere in the world. I’m telling you that for sure. There’s no doubt about it at all. So if in fact the whole thing about a democracy, and let’s not go down that rabbit hole, but just say that’s important and let’s just say that voting is important.

Something like blockchain can have, you could have an election- we’d know the winner, not in three weeks or a month or whatever the ludicrous thing is now, you’d know instantaneously and you can be absolutely certain on the outcome. This is just one thing. But I think what I love about blockchain is it’s like a connectivity web for everything else that’s going on. Let’s think about quantum as the other big thing, just briefly.

Quantum has been needed to speed up AI. It’s been needed to come up with greater computing power for things like blockchain. So as these kind of stars start to align, you’re going to see a very, very different application of these types of things. I think a lot of blockchain and quantum and all that, people like me, we’ve been talking about this forever. So we’re excited to see that the stars are aligning, so to speak.

If we then start to think about, let’s sort of backtrack a little. People ask about NFTs, ask about smart contracts and are they over hype trends? Here’s what I’ll say about the metaverse and these ideas of NFTs, they’re like tokens that are related to, they kind of look ridiculous, like Hello Kitty tokens that the actual image has value. But what we’re going to find going forward, we are going to find that all of sudden this metaverse, it’s going to be the us in the metaverse. We’re already in it, we just, we’re just, we don’t have our full digital twin creators. So just start to think about an entire reality. Remember I started this like we’re in the matrix? I’m not kidding. We are going to be in more through NFTs and other things in the future.

These are overhyped trends, yes, for now. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Zuckerberg. I have no love affair with that guy, but he was right by creating the metaverse. He was just a little bit too early for the human race. Everybody else is trying to figure out online shopping, and this guy decides to create literally a virtual digital world because he knows, I know, we know on this call, that we will become immortal.

I know that sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. It’s true. Everything, if you think about the internet, I remember when I first came to America and I was sitting down with corporate attorneys and they were telling us about email kind of professionalism and all that. And whatever you print on the internet is there forever. So we’re already immortal in what we’ve written. It’s never going to go anywhere, ever.

In year 2754, people would be reading my emails and say, he still has bad grammar. I’m just kidding. But that’s immortal now. But when you think about NFTs and other things, yeah, they feel a bit overhyped right now, but not when the metaverse really happens. And right now, out there in the metaverse, all of us have our digital twin. And people think about that as a physical thing. It’s really not.

It’s basically our brain and everything, our bio behavior, what we like, our emotions, everything is being built. It’s kind of a mosaic. It’s being filled in as we speak. But eventually that will become the equivalent of our digital twin. We will have the equivalent of an avatar long after we’re dead that will be living in the virtual world. I know this sounds crazy, it’s true. And in 2855, Paul Markham, I sure hope so. Whatever that avatar actually morphs into as the computers get serious here.

So if you think about it, some of these things seem to be like futuristic, but they’re really not. It’s almost like we’ve got to finish the house, right? And we’re there, we just haven’t quite finished it. And then I think that the changes you’re going to see is going to be unbelievable.

You imagine a digital world, here’s one for you. You imagine a digital world that we have actual proper artificial general intelligence, meaning at a human level without the biases, because the biases are in narrow artificial intelligence. Once we get the artificial general, it’s going to go away because the machines are going to be able to look at 40,000 law cases and come back with an actual objective answer and they’re going to be able to deliver it in secure transactions across blockchain.

My point is that this is coming quicker than I think anyone imagines. When you hear things like all the metaverse and people running around with those big glasses and all that stuff, it does look a bit silly at this point, but it’s really not going to be. And if you do want to have some immortality, I mean, back in the day, Walt Disney got his head frozen, thinking that sooner or later he can come back in the physical form once they figure out cancer or whatever is wrong with him, and they’ll throw out his head and put it on a robot or whatever. This is beyond that.

This is starting to think about the physical and virtual world. all of these things we’re talking about here are related. Blockchain is a big part of it. Unfortunately, since you get hung up in this whole thing. And it’s getting hung up because people need this to go away. If I’m running a central bank, I really don’t want to hear about a whole bunch of citizens that are going to say, hey, yeah, I don’t think we need the bank anymore. I mean, I can work with Mike and I’ll just not Venmo, not PayPal. So I’m going to see a bank, right? I’m going to send my value to Mike. It’s kind of, if you think, it’s digitizing marketing from way back.

We’re all of sudden, got a bunch of Ether, Mike’s got a bunch of Bitcoin, and we’re going to actually work together, and he’s going to sell me a car. We don’t need anybody else, right? That’s today. We just hope that they don’t do what I think they’re going to do, and that is regulate this or make it illegal.

Kimberly King (43:43)

Yeah, that’s why it was my next question about is those common myths that cryptocurrency is primarily used for illegal activities like you’ve been talking about. So how much truth do you think is really to that?

Doctor Paul Markham (43:50)

Yes. So look, there’s no doubt at all. It’s about timing, right. If I’m, you know, back in the day, this is the other thing. This is not like it’s yesterday. This is something that happened in the earliest days of crypto. I was involved in, and there were some really interesting people, I’ll try and be nice here, involved in it because of course…

If you don’t have the federal government or the international, whoever, looking at transactions, of course you’re going to do your fentanyl transactions, you’re going to sell guns and whatever. Of course you’re going to do that. But it’s about timing. It’s about timing. You could also say the same about them. Why do people have Swiss bank accounts or why do they have… Nobody tends to talk too much about…

Hey, I think there might be a little bit of corruption going on with the normal system. I mean, the level of corruption with the normal system is so astronomical that it’s a little bit to me when people talk about, hey, crypto is all about illegal. My answer is yes, you’re right about timing. Early days probably used the extensive loop alert and say when cannabis was sort of not really legal, and so forth. Yeah, of course.

But I think used appropriately, this is going to be the equivalent to the next internet boom once we get these three pillars together, quantum, AI, and blockchain. Think about one as the driver, one as the precision engine, and the other one is the deployment, so the blockchain is the deployment.

Kimberly King (45:46)

Okay, thank you for your expertise on this. It’s so interesting speaking to you about where you’re seeing this now and in the future. Some say crypto is just a bubble and those signs that it is staying power versus being that financial fad, which again, you’ve been talking about a little bit. What do you think about that?

Doctor Paul Markham (46:03)

Yeah, I’ll be honest here. I, when it first happened, I was a little bit in a similar kind of mode, even though I love talking about the future and all that good stuff. But when Uber came out, I really said there’s no way that’s going to work with the taxi industry. They will regulate this out of existence. People aren’t going to pay a million dollars for a cab plate in New York or wherever, and it’s just not going to happen. So I was wrong about Uber because of what’s called the platform revolution, because what Uber did, it actually used the platform. It’s a different business model. It’s a value exchange. They’re not buying and selling anything. They’re just hooking up a user and a producer. That’s all they’re doing. And that’s why that’s succeeded. Now, if we come to this, is this just a bubble?

Again, the difference with this is no it’s not a bubble at the moment, major impact, major difference here is the taxi industry is one thing, the banking industry is a whole different situation. Meaning, if you look at the banking industry and the history in this country, if you go back to 2008, we all bailed the banks out. Just like, wait a minute, what did we do that for? Well, we did.

There was some great story as to why. So my point is, is it just a bubble? No, it’s not. But. My kind of nagging theory is that big banks, central banking systems and so forth, I mean, they could tomorrow literally come up with regulation around this and enforce it or remove it entirely. They could come up with a confirmation bias-driven approach that it’s, I don’t know, terrorists or something, come up with some story and then pump it into the various media outlets and all of a sudden the general public would be against it, then they’d have a referendum, we can’t get rid of crypto.

So the answer is, it’s got staying power for one reason, I think. It’s because people with money, real money, not just a little bit here and there, but people with real money see that Bitcoin, for instance, was $5,000 now it’s 100. No matter who you are on the planet, it’s really tough to say, oh, I don’t want any part of that, even though I saw that grow by like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life before. I don’t want anything to do with that. So think if there’s, on the one hand, the regulators can shut this down. Yes, they could.

And then it would be a financial fund, a fad. But on the other hand, I think there’s now enough people, not just Bitcoin, by the way, that’s just one coin. It just happens to have notoriety because of the valuation. But Ether is another one, massive amount of people on Ether and alt coins and other things. The point of it is, it’s only a bubble if the regulators and the big banks decide they’re going to shut it down.

I just don’t know. We’ll wait and see. And governments too, right? I heard that this government’s going to have a Bitcoin reserve. Once you start to codify this in a way that it’s kind of, it’s okay, then it’s very different because no one ever stands up and talks about the real story behind fiat currencies. It just doesn’t happen. It’s too shocking. I think the general public would say, well, what? What’d you say? Well, what? This isn’t backed by anything. So anyway, that’s my take. I hope it’s not a financial fail. I really hope it continues. But I’m also, I was there in 2017 when the government said no more ICOs, just like that, overnight. It became, they became known as STO’s, right? So you had to really do an ICO then pretty much like an IPO. And it just wasn’t realistic for, you know, a little tiny startup company.

Kimberly King (50:29)

And again, I mean you’ve said it over and over again really we don’t know and it is we’re just in this very interesting timing because Like we’re just talking about the government and those financial institutions Where do you see this future of blockchain and cryptocurrency in the next say five to ten years? And what should investors and enthusiastic enthusiasts be paying attention to?

Doctor Paul Markham (50:57)

Yeah. And you know, how I started this really depends on whether we can get, if humans do what I think they’ll do and frankly, succumb to the machines, right? Hey Paul, it’s time to, you know, brush your hair or whatever. And it’ll get to that, believe me, it’ll be so addictive once we get into artificial general intelligence. But the tough question really comes to the heart of illusion, right? We’ve got this democracy or capitalism or communism or what is it, right? What are these things? It’s really important to get people to get outside of their head and actually start to be clear and crisp and understand what’s happening. Basically, know, humans are greedy by nature in order to survive and eat.

And the last, we’re brought up, we’re only here because we’re one of our ancestors was lucky enough to get the last morsel of a woolly mammoth. We’re not that smart. So I think that the fact of matter is, you know, what do I think is going to happen going forward? It’s going to come down to whether or not the general public can get their head around what this actually is and not just listen to the barrage of information coming in. And I think, you if I look at Aldous Huxley, where he said there’ll be so much information out there that the important stuff will be missed. That’s my biggest fear here, is that the governments and financial institutions will adapt to crypto, but they’ll adapt to their crypto or centralized crypto. And I think that that’s tough because the true heart of democracy, if you look at it, to see what the Greeks actually came up with. It really is related to what Satoshi was all about, right? Control over one’s wealth. And it’s not likely to be well received if you’ve been kind of hanging out in the central bank and doing very, very nicely in the south of France or whatever. I mean, you’re not going to like the idea of, a minute, we don’t want to give all the control back to those messy little peasants, right? We really can’t do that. You know, we sit here and we talk about democracy, for instance.

And I saw this presentation at the university when they were talking about democracy. And the reality is one of hallmarks of democracy is owning property. But the fact of the matter is most of us don’t own property. It’s owned by banks and owned by foreign corporations and so forth.

So think in general, if in fact the general public can kind of wake up and see what’s actually happening here and don’t look crypto and blockchain and go, that’s fake and I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s crazy if they do, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. I mean, we see what people do, which is unimaginable. You know, I’m not sure, Kimberly, if they’re going to be able to get this or if they’re going to actually do their own kind of review of what this is all about in time to save it, because you really do need a lot of voices out there to be able to save this from just turning into a central bank digital currency. I really hope it doesn’t.

Kimberly King (54:30)

You know, and it kind of really plays into the world that we’re living in today, where there’s so many, and to talk about in the political landscape and media, you really have to be a critical thinker and as you say, do your own research and really dig deep. But I appreciate your time today because this is such a fascinating conversation and a future conversation that hopefully will have you back again. And keep moving along on this, but we do appreciate your time. And if you want more information, you can visit National University’s website at nu.edu. And again, thank you so much for your time, doctor. We really appreciate it.

Doctor Paul Markham (55:08)

Thank you.

Kimberly King (55:09)

You’ve been listening to the National University Podcast. For updates on future or past guests, visit us at nu.edu. You can also follow us on social media. Thanks for listening.