Hi, everyone. What you're about to listen to is a remixed version of a Patreon exclusive episode I did last month around the height of NFT mania. Although, you could probably argue it's still going on. I wanted to unlock this episode for the public because there's been some serious confusion around what NFTs actually are, even though everyone seems to have an opinion on it, or should I say want to be angry about it, and I want to get my, what I believe to be, more educated and nuanced view out to the public. This was originally a Patreon exclusive episode because as a Patreon, you are able to vote on what the monthly or so Patreon exclusive episode will be about. And, well, my patrons at the moment voted for an episode on NFTs. So it's difficult for me to make episodes that are are always timely according to the latest news on crypto because in case you don't know, I also work a full time job, and I do this during my free time. So I have limited time to make an episode on my own about a hot topic in the news just to make sure I have my hot take out there on it. Interviews are generally much easier to produce as well, which is why I mostly stick to those for the publicly published episodes, and I can plan them weeks in advance. The types of episodes where I'm alone, like this one, usually take a bit of preparation, but they're shorter, and it's what I do to thank people for supporting what I'm doing. So I hope that if you like this episode and find what I do important, you'll consider heading to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist and throwing an amount that is significantly less than a fraction of the cost of most NFT art pieces. And join the latest Patreons like Leo, Mark, Aubrey, Michael, and Drew. Also, so you know, this episode is remixed because after recording, posting, and listening to it again, I realized I had a couple more things to add and clarify that I thought might be helpful. That also means that since I'm not a professional audio producer or anything, there could be some, let's say, not perfect mixing. So I apologize for that. But, yeah, there you go. Here is the remixed version of my hot take on NFTs, which will hopefully be one of the better hot takes you've heard on NFTs. Enjoy. NFTs are not crypto art. NFTs are not crypto art. NFTs are not crypto art. NFTs are not crypto art. NFTs are not crypto art. The Patreon Democratic Economic Planning Council has spoken with a choice between discussing NFTs and the left's reaction against centralization versus decentralization. The former has won. Some have speculated that the topic of centralization was just too spicy for the council as it didn't want to butt heads with the anarchists. It seems they'd rather suffer through another hot take on NFTs. So what could I possibly say that hasn't already been said in the deluge of hot takes that have polluted our social media feeds? Well, frankly, I don't know, but I'm gonna try. But before we get to my hot take I want to do two things. First, I want to remind you that as a patron you have the ability to suggest questions or topics for the next episode on the Patreon post for this episode or in the Patreon Discord channel. So if you have any ideas, definitely feel free to send them. And second, I want to be transparent and bring to you some of the hot takes from People's on the Left on NFTs before I get into mine to serve as a baseline for what I'm talking about in this conversation. To start, I wanted to talk about the article by Everest Pipkin, who is someone that I actually I really didn't know beforehand, but he had an article that came out that that became very popular with the anti NFT crowd titled, here is the article you can send to people when they say, but the environmental issues with crypto art will be solved soon. Right? In the article, he calls blockchain and and cryptocurrencies a crime against humanity, and that the only viable option is total moral rejection. So he goes through a lot of different, points about the especially the energy use and and about commodification, of art. And then towards the end, he says that the actual things that, should be done in order to help artists, were alternatives like, largely social democratic reforms around UBI, universal health care, more regulated housing, income taxes, etcetera. He wrote quite a bit of of an article, and then at the end, he he writes, I will not be taking any questions on this or any platform because I've never been more bored and depressed by a topic that I've written 5,000 words on in my life. So that that that's a starter. Another take that I've seen, by some people include Lee Carter. So he's a a socialist congressman in Virginia. He states artificial scarcity on real products wasn't enough. Now we have NFTs to create artificial scarcity on virtual products. And then later someone asked him what is NFTs, and he explained it. It's a blockchain based signature on a digital file to make sure only one person can use it, and thus it can be sold as a commodity. Another take I've seen comes from, Chelsea Manning. Thanks to Sam pointing that one out. Where she says, NFTs have no inherent value and not even technologically innovative. They require the preexisting system of violence and control to enforce a belief in the value of what is ultimately a glorified checksum. You also have Yanis Varoufakis who says, it has been suggested to me that I should turn some idea slash concept of mine into an NFT and auction it off. I shall never do this. The commodification of ideas slash concepts will be one extra nail in the coffin of the commons. Am I too old slash antiquated or do I have a point? And then you have a multitude of different left wing accounts, Twitter and various some of the quotes I've taken. Include this one, leftist artists should understand that NFT art is fundamentally counterrevolutionary rent sinking, reinforcement of property supremacy that only deepens class divisions. You can't critique capitalism with tools of capitalism. Another one, that I shared with in the Discord says, seeing people mine their NFTs or whatever for 200 k US dollars is upsetting in terms of the amount of power they're using up. So I I think, you know, we can summarize this all in that the left generally doesn't really like NFTs and and however, if you were listening and you maybe know a bit about NFTs, you may have already heard a couple of, misunderstandings just from, like, a very basic technological level. But so I think to summarize, I think the issues about NFTs, and maybe sometimes also could be related more broadly to cryptocurrencies, are issues around property and and, you know, how property what the optimal version of property should exist under a, like, socialist society, I guess. And in particular with the focus on scarcity and commodification, the feeling that art is becoming more corporate or more capitalistic through NFTs, and then third is, of course, the, issues with ecology with an emphasis on morality and moral rejection against the use of of this technology. But so I'll keep those in mind as I'm going through my hot take on NFTs. So what is an NFT? You've probably consumed a thousand different pieces of content that try to explain it, but I'll try to give a very short example to very quickly explain fungibility. So to explain fungibility, when you withdraw from the ATM, you don't mind that these aren't the same dollar bills that you deposited whenever you deposited money into your bank account. Right? These things, money is fungible. $1 is always equal to $1. If you have five $1 bills, you can get a $5 bill and it's equal to the same thing. However, when you take out your kid from daycare, you won't accept if they just give you any random kid back. So that's your child is a non fungible thing, that exists. So in short, a non fungible token is a unique thing, which is referred to as a token, being held on a blockchain which can take many different forms. One common thing you may hear is about the different token standards like ERC seven twenty one and ERC eleven fifty five as the sort of creators of NFTs or something like that, but this isn't this isn't true. There are these ERC seven twenty one and eleven fifty five are simply data standards that are shared and accepted by the wider Ethereum community. But there are many different ways to resent to represent a unique non fungible thing on the blockchain, you know, for example, like your child, and they don't have to use these ERC standards. The standards actually came out of the crypto gaming world, and the founder of the company Enjin, is a a crypto gaming company, created a lot of these standards for the use of gaming. So by making these standards, it makes it easier for web applications to fetch the data about these non fungibles and compare them easily for a human audience and to create other games or platforms that use the same assets used in another application, on the blockchain. So So this was ultimately the selling point, for decentralized gaming, is to use these standards so that you can, for example, buy a sword in one crypto game in which you own the NFT of this very rare sword, and then you can turn around and play a different game made by a completely different company, and use that sword or that non fungible token as some asset in another game. And one of the biggest things that are missed when talking about NFTs is actually what is by far one of the most prominent examples of them with a very clear use case beyond arts and gaming, which is the Ethereum name service or ENS. Similar to the domain name system or DNS, the ENS lets people purchase a particular text that redirects someone to a specific address. So in the case of domains, I purchased, for example, the blockchainsocialist.com, which redirects you to my site where you can read my articles, listen to my podcast, sign up for my newsletter that I do infrequently, and all the other normal Internet things you would be able to do. This is convenient because without it, we'd have to know the numerical IP addresses of the websites we want to visit, and no one wants to do that. The domain name system has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since at least 1985. So we can say from at least that point, purchasing digital objects that can theoretically be reproduced infinitely has been a thing especially if you've ever squatted on domain names in the hopes that someone or some company wants to pay you to take it over. The ENS does something similar where instead of someone needing to know your Ethereum address to send you ether, which is basically just some random string of letters and numbers, they can instead remember your ENS name. So for example, I own the blockchainsocialist.f.eth, And I bought that for the equivalent of 5 US dollars, which people can send ether based crypto to donate to me or pay me instead of needing to copy and paste my full public address. All of this runs on NFTs because each name is non fungible in order to function, and the name is tokenized so that particular text, the blockchain socialists, for example, can be purchased. And similar to DNS, every once in a while, you have to renew it, so you have to pay a little bit of a fee. This is one of the biggest and clearest use cases for NFTs with direct parallels to the current Internet that no one ever talks about, which is pretty frustrating. This obsession with purely thinking of NFTs as volatile art based financial instruments serves only to obscure the much larger potentials and imaginaries that we can discuss, especially on the left. So if there's at least one takeaway from all this, it's NFTs are not crypto art. And that's a really important distinction to make, I think, because if we solely think about NFTs as crypto art, then we really really reduce the scope of the conversation that we can have around non fungible things and how non fungibility is actually a somewhat important, thing to think about when it comes to socialism and to to think about politics and understanding value and what types of things are should be considered as fungible or exchangeable for one another and versus non fungible to be considered unique. Like, you as a person are a non fungible thing, but your labor is treated as a very fungible product on the market which is bought and sold by companies, which you receive a wage for. So I really want to expand, that conversation beyond crypto art because I think crypto art is very, very, it's a distraction essentially. It's like it's a spectacle that's happening in the background, or maybe in the foreground where, you know, you're seeing price fluctuations go like crazy and of course the media is going to pay attention to that and people are going to pay attention to that because of like the numbers are just so big. Whereas on the other side, I mean there's a lot of interesting things happening around the NFT form on a blockchain that I think could be interesting and could provide some sort of opening up of economic dialogue and discussions when discussing the differences between a more capitalistic versus a more socialistic, form of economy. Another really interesting thing that I've noticed, on the criticisms of NFT is that there seems to be a slightly different criticism from the left and the right that are actually complete opposites about NFT. For example, on the right, sort of the Bitcoin maxi community, and the NFT skeptical non left people generally I've seen, I've seen them say that like, you know, I can just copy and paste the JPEG. Like what this is not scarcity. Like what are you talking about? And on the other side, like I mentioned in the criticisms people on the left, they say, NFTs create scarcity. And that so there there's this like contradiction. It's like do NFTs create scarcity or is it just like stupid shit that you can just copy and paste anyway? So like what's the point? So I think in order to understand that, to be more specific about the particular nft forms that crypto art is taking, with an nft we're referring to the token and the tradable thing that is a part of the blockchain. 99% of the time it's Ethereum, but you can also create NFTs and other blockchains that, have smart contracts. So you can't do this on Bitcoin. You can do this on something like Tezos. Inside of the token, you have what's called metadata. And in that metadata, you have particular, properties that you can hold. Metadata is usually something like a JSON file or has like a JSON format, which doesn't really matter if you're not a technical person. It doesn't really mean much. It's just like a text file. And within that text file, you'll have particular properties, that you can indicate in there. So for, like, a video game or for, like, a lot of these collectible items, you will have different properties that are held there, and, you know, it'll say, like, this particular I don't know. We talk about, like, like, the CryptoKitties, they they have this a lot where, you know, you have, I don't know, like, personality or something like that, and, you know, personality is equal to bubbly or something, and it tells you whether that's more or less rare. So that way you can tell if it's like a more or less rare collectible item. Or you can say, like, you know, for maybe like a a sword, the attack power is 17 or something, so that you can keep track of that. And then for the case of CryptoArt, you have, a with usually a link to the actual piece of media that the crypto, that the NFT is referring to. So the NFT, doesn't or the blockchain itself doesn't host any media. That's a very common misconception that I've seen as well. The blockchain doesn't hold any media. The media is can only be hosted, via web protocols. So, like, IPFS is a very common web protocol to use for NFTs that are representing crypto art. So that means that anybody who has the link to the actual piece of media is able to copy and paste that piece of media into whoever they want. However, it also means that some public address, somebody or some group of people has their public address forever sketched into the history book of the Ethereum world. They have officially paid the price in order to put their public address forever fixed next to the metadata that refers to a piece of media that is held on something like IPFS. The reason why IPFS is used is because IPFS is a decentralized protocol for hosting. So it's IPFS stands for interplanetary file system, and so it basically tries to come up with a way for people to forever be able to host some piece of media. The two criticisms from the right that, you know, I can just copy and paste the jpeg and on the left saying that NFTs create scarcity are both correct and incorrect. The NFT is a representation of the piece of media and that part is commodified onto the blockchain, which you can buy and sell if you are the owner most of the time. So it creates scarcity, not in the media itself because you can always copy and paste that media if you have a link to it, but it creates scarcity of the space next to that piece of media where the name or the public address of the owner should be. So the actual piece of media, like, the the idea or the concept itself isn't commodified. It still keeps the same Internet form that we're used to in Web two point o. There is no way to enforce that someone does not copy and paste the JPEG or whatever piece of media that you're holding onto this IPFS site. However, there is scarcity in that there can be only one public address held by multiple people or just one person who is able to put their name onto the space next to that piece of media. So whenever Varoufakis, Lee Carter, and all the others say that NFTs are commodifying, The answer is a lot more complicated. It's it's yes and no, and it really depends on the design because you can also make it, you know, you can you can link the non fungible token to, for example, a physical good, which is actually, becoming a lot more popular with luxury brands. But that luxury brand that that, like, luxury good, you know, a Louis Vuitton purse or something like that, you you can have, like, a claim that you own this because you own the NFT. The scarcity is already there in the physical product, in this Louis Vuitton bag. You are just mimicking the physical form of the Louis Vuitton bag into a digital space by using the blockchain, which you could otherwise not be able to do without some sort of very very strict centralized legal authority. But then there's the other question, there's the other thing that why do people still want to purchase these NFTs? Like, what is the the benefit? And of course the the biggest sort of benefit is just like flexing when it comes to the crypto art. It's just being able to say that, hey, that's my public address, that's my name, that's right next to this piece of media that you can find to in the link in the IPFS that I own. And so in order to get someone to sort of fetishize the art itself or that piece of media itself, the artist needs to sell that media onto a platform. And so now it begins to mimic almost exactly what is already a thing that happens today, in that social networks and relationships become fundamental to NFTs. Whereas as compared to, like, cryptocurrencies, they only require cryptocurrencies only require that someone accepts that particular cryptocurrency that they, you know, believe into the future of that cryptocurrency that later they will be able to spend it. NFTs require that the artist needs to create some sort of audience and needs to create some sort of desire for collectors to want to own that piece of art because they think, you know, in the future maybe it'll be worth, more because they like the work of the artist. Or they just like the work of the artist so much that they want to be a patron and make sure that the artist is paid for their work in in some sort of way. There's a couple of different reasons why someone may be interested in purchasing in an NFT, particularly in in crypto art. So it's a slightly different variation of the need for a type of social system, which is very antithetical to the, like, extreme anarcho capitalist libertarian view of extreme individuality and, like, the desire or belief to not need any sort of social networks in order to, like, survive, and that's why they hit the government and that and so depending on how loose of a definition we want to use for for tokens, in a sense, like, everything is an NFT. It's just that the standards that have been adopted by the industry, in particular in Ethereum, have allowed for the mass proliferation of NFTs to make it easier to mint an NFT in a form that is easy for people to understand and for web applications to pull information from. Additionally, if you want to learn more about the reason why and what exactly art collectors look for in collecting arts, I'd highly suggest reading Mackenzie Warrick's piece titled My Collectible Ass. While the article itself isn't specific to NFTs, it's a pretty funny story about how she tries to convince art collectors that she had a tattoo of performance artist Tino Seagal's signature on her ass and makes interesting observations about the art collecting world. For example, she says, paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely. This can be exploited to create value in art objects that that are not in the traditional sense rare and singular. The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has and more in owning the thing that everybody else has. I found that to be a really relevant observation when it comes to NFTs because I think it answers most people's confusion around why someone would want to, quote, purchase a JPEG when anybody can copy and paste it. She also makes some other really interesting observations that you can find in the article, which I'll link to in the description. Okay, wow. I've given quite a bit of information already so far in the roughly twenty minutes, so maybe let's take a one minute break of listening to some nice music before we continue on to the episode. Well, what about the energy question? That's something that's been brought up quite a bit, as I showed in the beginning with the different tweets. But so, what is incorrectly believed by a lot of people who bring up the ecological question is that by minting an NFT or by doing anything onto the blockchain creates a carbon output. However, this is not the case. The energy output expended from the network of any proof of work blockchain is due to the consensus mechanism, right, by proof of work. In proof of work, you're basically creating an arms race between all of the different miners and they need to continually need to increase the amount of power or energy or their hash rate in order to be more likely to win the cryptographic, puzzle that is needed to win in order to win the ability to mine a block onto the blockchain and earn the reward that's associated with that. All of these miners are essentially standard businesses that only want to expend as much money and resources as they need to make the maximal amount of profit. So they don't it's not an arms race, like, just as it is. It's only an arms race in relationship to the price of the underlying asset. So in the case of it of Bitcoin and Ethereum at the moment, they're both proof of work blockchains, and they will expend as much energy and use as much energy as it takes up to a point until it is not profitable. So if they expend more energy, then there's a high chance that the cryptocurrency that they're winning becomes unprofitable to win because they're expending so much energy. So whether or not you are deciding to make a transaction or to mint an NFT on a blockchain doesn't really affect the energy output in any meaningful sense. So while I agree that, yes, the energy output of a proof of work blockchain is terrible and, like, it's is unsustainable and it's it's quite bad, I think we need to be realistic with ourselves and thinking that just because you choose not to mint an NFT, for example, that you are somehow morally superior as what a lot of the, previous people that I mentioned, talked about, like Everest Pipkin asked for. He called for a moral rejection of it, but I don't think that it's useful to think of political action as a moral thing to do, especially if you're a Marxist or if you follow the infinite science, of Marx or the immoral science of Marxism. You want to create socialism because it would be better for you and for your class of people, AKA the working class probably. But putting that aside, what I think is missed in the debate is actually the interesting fact that Ethereum, the most popular blockchain that is minting NFTs, is already in the process of moving to a different consensus mechanism called proof of stake, which is estimated to decrease the energy output by 99.9%. So if that happens, will it be then morally okay to mint an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain if they reduce energy consumption by that much? I don't know. We'll have to we'll have to wait and see. But what Ethereum is providing at this moment through this transition of proof of work to proof of stake, specifically, almost entirely because of the energy question and the ecological waste that proof of work encourages, is that we are able to see a technological platform that is publicly doing something about their energy consumption. You don't see Google or YouTube, which is part of Google, or Amazon or any of the other big tech giants really doing all that much to decrease their energy output in the same way that Ethereum is doing it in a public manner, and in a public sphere. So I think the fact that Ethereum actually is a public and open protocol is actually, ironically, partially the reason why they're getting so much more flack than would, like, Amazon or would, any of these other Apple, for example, these big tech companies. But so if you're an artist and you're thinking about making an NFT, but you're worried about the ecological footprint, you can still do them on other blockchains like Tezos, which already uses proof of stake as a consensus mechanism. So I don't think that it's very useful to throw away the baby with the bathwater in the case of NFTs solely because of this ecological question. And I think it actually will likely hurt us in the long run if we if we don't because of this moralistic drive. So if we set aside this bourgeois moralism around the use of NFTs, what can we think about as the potential of NFTs for a more radical context? So first, I've I've outlined a few different metaphors that I think are helpful to try and explain what an NFT, is and what an NFT potentially could be in different contexts. Right? You have NFTs. They could be like a certificate of ownership in a digital or physical asset. They can be a purchase of space in a book of history. They could be considered like a membership card. It could be a digital representation of a physical asset, which is commonly known as a digital twin in the Internet of Things space. It could also be digital class indicators. That's why people, like to buy these very expensive crypto arts because they know that people know that it was very expensive to purchase and they're the ones who purchased it. But so keeping in mind those metaphors, a couple of the different ideas that I've been thinking about for NFTs is one, to think of them in a radical context to potentially be used as a form of a digital membership card into a radical political organization within a digital space. So an example that I've been sort of thinking about is, like, what if a radical political organization that spanned across geography and therefore use the internet a lot in order to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to signify particular things that are happening across the world created NFTs that represented a digital membership into their radical organization. And that digital membership gave you access to, for example, a pool of funds, mutual aid funds that you can, disperse amongst your organization, or use other digital assets that are being used by this organization to achieve particular political goals. An important concept to maybe understand how this would work and why this is possible are airdrops. An airdrop is when someone writes a smart contract that sends some digital assets, like a new cryptocurrency, for example, to a large amount of addresses, specifically to ones that either hold some asset or have performed some function. So for example, if you want to get people to notice your project, you can airdrop your new crypto token to all addresses that are holding more than $1.0.1 ether, for example. Or you could do the same for whoever owns an NFT, which is another functionality that is seldom spoken about. For example, there are artists who sell their NFTs of their work, could be music or also digital art, etcetera, and that NFT will give you a right to future airdrops from that artist, which could be a token or another NFT which gives you access to something else or is just a nice piece of artwork. It's in a way buying into what the artist will do in the future. Now imagine the same concept except for some type of radical organization. For example, an open cooperative could airdrop a profit share to all the addresses that have helped with a particular project, or a mutual aid organization that can airdrop crypto to those who have an NFT, which signifies that they have been vetted and they're trusted by the mutual aid organization and know that they need help. Or maybe as well a digital communist party that can airdrop an NFT membership card to those who have helped fund the actual organization itself. So I think that's maybe one way that could be explored for the use of NFTs within a radical context. Another thing that I've been thinking about that's maybe a bit abstract, but is potentially interesting, I read this article once about how scientists were looking into using artificial intelligence to simulate what a forest would want or to advocate for the interests of the forest to continue to be alive. So it would keep track of the amount of trees that are being cut down in the forest, and it would advocate for the forest and say, like, no, only an x amount of trees can be cut in this forest in order to keep it sustainable, and therefore we should not cut any more than that. But I think it would also be interesting maybe to represent something, some particular ecology like a forest, like the Amazon Forest, as an NFT. And in that way, the forest could take advantage of the artificial intelligence that was calculating the needs and, in a way, the desires of the forest in order to keep it alive, to also give it a type of economic agency or to let people send funds to that particular forest in which people can use those funds in order to purchase, like, things that will prevent, illegal logging of, like, the Amazon Forest or something like that. You know, so those are the couple of ideas that I've been playing around with that maybe NFTs could be used for in a in a more, political context. So if you want to read a really good take on NFTs from Marx's perspective, I would suggest checking out previous guest of the podcast and member of Exa John Beller's recently published piece in CoinDesk titled Fascism on the Blockchain, the Work of Art in the Age of NFTs. In the article, he talks about Walder Benjamin who wrote the book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which was written while the Nazi party was consolidating its power in the thirties. He saw in mechanical reproduction a set of possibilities that not only had consequences for art but would change its nature as a medium of social relations. But unfortunately, Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis a few years later, but he recognized in the art of new media ecology capable of greater democracy served primarily to preserve existing property relations. So Benjamin mentioned that the logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life and the rise, or rather redeployment, of cult worship through mass entertainment, so, like, the worship of conservative cultural values. So John warns that if we aren't careful, NFTs will only feed the aesthetics of inequality as it threatens to make all art the art of making money, making it as unconscious force for what he calls fractal fascism in platform design. And this is a shame, he continues, since this programmable economic medium has the potential to democratize finance and therefore create economic democracy. He says some will shrug, dismiss the dreamers, and say, so what? I don't care if there's blood in my code so long as I'm getting paid. That, of course, is the world that we know. There's blood in the banks, in the money, and in the code. But crypto media has the potential to do more and better. It has the potential through disintermediation and remediation to remake the fabric of society in accord with the call of justice. For this, we must also keep art, which has the potential both to create forms of beauty only dreamt of and to transform social relations by creating new aesthetics of relation from turning into its antithesis, a rationale for the supervaluation of charismatic personalities whose very existence depends on inequality. So at the end, he concludes NFT does not stand for non fascist token, but it should. Let's not get fooled again. So I think it was a very interesting take in that it acknowledged all of the things that are that people are criticizing about NFTs in that it's fueling aestheticism around inequality and will likely just add on to the fascistic tendencies, that we see in the world today and sort of the the fascism that is created just through capitalism. So it's a really interesting, article. I I I'll link it in the notes. And then as well, if you want to listen to other Informed Left and Takes in the form of podcasts, you can listen to the episode that I did interviewing Ruth Catlow from Further Field. She's been involved in the blockchain and art space for quite a long time now, like, since the age of Bitcoin. So she had a lot of really interesting takes. And then as well, there is an episode from the Interdependence podcast by Matt Dreherst and Holly Herndon titled NFT for Noobs that I would really recommend, checking out if you would like to. So there it is. That's my hot take. I couldn't say everything because, as you can maybe already tell, I'm I'm taking quite a bit of time already. So to end it off, thank you guys for listening. Be sure if you're a patron to suggest topics, ask questions that you would like me to answer in the comments and in the Discord Patreon channel. And I want to end it with this clip, because this past weekend was the MoneyLack conference. And the second person to be interviewed for the MoneyLack conference was actually Ruth Katlow, and she had a really interesting take on the role of the left and blockchain and her experience, that I think is really good and I'll end with that. But, yeah. Thanks, guys.