Techstrong Gang – July 30, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Tuesday to you. You know it, it seems to be all the rage to have oligopolies all over, so why not the cloud?

We've got that. We've got some great IBM analysis and introspection, and are you ready for Web five? It's Textron Gang.

Hey everyone, happy Tuesday to you. Welcome to Textron Gang. I'm Alan Hummel, CEO editor-in-chief at Techron.

And this is our daily Get Your Day started Show Textron Gang. Um, we're joined as usual by some of our gang members, uh, remote today. We've got the two Stevens one's with a v, one's with a pH, so I'll let you, well, only their hairdresser knows for sure.

But first of all, let's start off with Steven, with the pH, Steven fst, Steven of course, of Tech Field Day. How are you, Steven? Welcome.

It's great to be here. Alan. Uh, looking forward to some, uh, oligopoly instead of Gerontocracy, I guess.

Can't have one without the other. Um, welcome and I'm looking forward to your thoughts on that. And then Steven with a v joining us from, I used to call it upstate New York, but if your mic Ard, it's not really upstate yet.

Um, Steve Dickens. Steven, how are you? I'm good.

I'm, I'm, let's just call me the, let's fancy Steven. Oh, okay. Let's fancy.

We've got premium God tears, Steven, which is Mr. Foskett, obviously. And then I like to sort of come in a little bit lower down the rankings.

I at the every man Steven. Yeah, The everyman, Steven. Yeah, I'll go with that.

All right, welcome. And then joining us here in studio, to my immediate left is our, uh, echo Insights analyst and reporter and editor, Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie.

Welcome. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for being here.

And then to Bonnie's left my far left, he is the expert on all things upstate downstate in New York, as well as the New York Yankees and our content chief Content Officer here at Textron one and only Mike Ard. That's A lot of responsibility. Put a lot on your shoulders right there, especially when the Yankees are playing.

Um, anyway, we're gonna jump into today's show. Uh, we, we've thrown around the word oligopoly now a few times and well, we have oligarch, oli, oligarchies all over the world, it seems, but why not have it in our cloud providers? This is a, uh, you know, there's an argument for it.

There's an argument against it. Risk versus rewards. Mike V what do you think?

com written by a fellow named, uh, James Watts. And, you know, he's a, runs a web development company, and he was just positing the idea that this is a bad idea. And a lot of the things that go with that are basically, um, he was positing the notion that two thirds of workloads are running on the three major clouds these days.

And, um, there doesn't seem to be a lot of price competition among the providers of those cloud services. It seems like. Um, and I will go into Mr.

Dickens for this, but, um, it just doesn't seem like there's, uh, in the core workloads that there's a lot of differentiation in terms of what one cloud service provider charges versus another. And there are tons of other cloud service providers, including IBM and Oracle and a host of folks whose names most people don't know. And most of the workloads that we're running are pretty basic.

So, um, I guess Mr. Dickins, we'll start with you, but you know, what do is your assessment of the state of competition in the cloud era? Well, I mean, first off, I don't accept the premise that two thirds of workloads are running in, um, the three cloud providers from what I'm looking at, in some of the highly regulated industries, cloud penetrations as low as 5%.

So if you look at the financial services organizations, it's already huge on-premise, um, deployments, we look, I think you can hold two truths to be true at the same time. HPE Lenovo Dell all growing with hybrid cloud offerings. And you can have public cloud providers growing at the same time.

Google reported earnings last week, cloud revenue went from 8 billion to just over 10 billion on a quarterly basis. So I think you can hold multiple truths to be true. At the same time, I think there is a concentration risk.

Um, we're seeing the European, uh, regulators, folks on this with Dora the Digital Operational, digital Operational Resilience Act. That's due to some of the concentration risk actually at a physical data center level. So yes, you might be able to have three public cloud providers, but if they're in the same Equinix data center on the outskirts of London, it really doesn't matter whether you've got cloud diversity.

Um, I think we saw some of the downstream impacts of this last Friday. Um, Microsoft Azure and, um, we'll get the re research. Know, I did a deep dive on this.

Microsoft Azure had a 14 hour plus outage of the US central region. Three availability zones all went down at the same time. This is distinct from the CrowdStrike, um, outage that happened at the same time.

Good luck for Microsoft that it happened at the same time. 'cause I think there would've been front page news. I spoke to numerous vendors who were without email, 14 hours plus whole bunch of services affected.

So I think there's, there's a lot of concerns here, but I think saying that two thirds of workloads run in the public cloud, I'm not subscribing to that as a Yeah, I, I think what he's saying is two thirds of the workloads that are in the cloud run on those three platforms rather than saying Cloud not public. I'm sorry, go ahead, Steven. Yeah, so which country?

'cause that's not true if you are in China. 'cause Tencent and Alibaba have got a different regional profile, you know, so there's a lot to unpack. Very easy to make high level statements like that, which sector, you know, if you are a small startup with a hundred people, then a hundred percent of your workloads probably run in the public cloud.

If you're a globally significant bank, probably 5% of your workloads run in the public cloud. So grow eight statements like that, which region first, which sector, you know, if you are a defense contractor like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, I don't think you're running a most of your workload in the public cloud yet. So there's, there's a lot of nuance I think underneath headline statements like that.

We, we all spend our time talking about the public cloud so much that we think after 18 years it's got a hundred percent penetration. It absolutely does not. Yeah, I, I'll I'll jump in on that one too, Steven.

Um, you know, I think that we can quibble with, um, a report or a headline or something, but I think that what we can't quibble with is that, uh, the, there is incredible power that these cloud providers have and that the, uh, the three big cloud providers in the US at least have a very large share of the US market. And I think that there's an interesting counterintuitive aspect to this. And, and this is one of the things that I drew from this report.

It's not just, um, marketing power or sales power that's leading to this in many ways. It is, uh, I guess what I would call feature power. In other words, uh, Amazon for example, is constantly adding new features, functions, capabilities to AWS.

Uh, those are very attractive to customers, whether they're, um, modern web scale startups or app developers or more traditional enterprises. Um, you know, the same is true of Google and, and, and of, uh, Azure for sure. Um, Azure has long been the darling of enterprise it simply because, uh, Microsoft has seemed so laser focused on providing enterprise grade services in Azure that are friendly and easy to implement for, uh, enterprise IT companies.

Google is really leaning into this, we heard about this at their, uh, cloud field day presentation that we hosted, uh, last month where they spent a lot of the time talking about things that aren't all that, you know, web scale, Web3, four, five, sexy and are really sort of enterprise storage and networking and security features. But the counterintuitive thing we hear that happens is the more differentiated features these platforms add, the harder it is for customers to balance and get their workloads out. So it's not just pricing pressure, it's not just, um, you know, uh, egress fees that are locking companies in.

It's also features because if I am going to embrace the coolest features of, let's say Azure, well then I really can't easily move that application to AWS, let alone Akamai or IBM or Oracle, you know, or, you know, on-prem. Um, it becomes much, much harder to do that as more features are added. And as I embrace those features on, on the flip side of that, if I want to have, if I wanna resist the oligopoly, whoever that is in your region, whether that's Tencent or Azure, if I wanna re re resist the oligopoly, I have to not use features that I would otherwise find attractive that would accelerate my workloads and that frankly make the whole thing more useful and productive and cost effective.

So it really is a, a challenge to resist the, the, the, the draw of the oligopoly. And it's not, as I said, just about pricing. Well, it's interesting for me, there's a natural tension.

Uh, I mean, you look at what, um, Kubernetes as an orchestration layer, I think this kind of, uh, encapsulates the point that you're making. You've got the ability to run something like Red Hat OpenShift or Suse Rancher across all of these public clouds and maintain the ability to have infrastructure independence because you made a conscious choice about the Kubernetes orchestration layer. You can do the same thing with stuff like MongoDB and the database you choose, or you can use GKE and the native embedded service from the cloud provider that will give you the featured version of their, um, Kubernetes deployment.

I think there is competition. You've just gotta be thoughtful about how you consume these services to make sure that you've got no vendor locking. I'm of the opinion that you should use a SUSE Rancher or a Red Hat OpenShift, or a Martis or a, you know, whatever it is, independent of the service provided by the cloud provider.

Because what's the very value of Kubernetes? It's the ability to pick your container up and put it somewhere else. If you are doing that with an A WSA Microsoft or a a Google Kubernetes service, will you be able to pick those containers up and run them on another cloud, run them on-prem.

So I think obviously there's a natural intention from these cloud providers to lock you in, but I think that smart enterprise architecture are thinking through some of those lock in points and there's the ability for, you know, things like OpenShift and rancher to, to give yourself control. So, and I think it is this a market operating the way it should going back right to the top, Alan, around oligo oligopolies and monopolies and, you know, all of those anti-competitive type of words that would trigger a an FTC type in investigation. I think this is just markets operating in the way they should.

You've got three or four big players duking it out. There's over the weekend there was discussion on X about whether meta should get into offering a public cloud service. There's not much barrier to entry for them to get into that market.

Could Apple do this for an iOS developer ecosystem? Absolutely. So is there barriers to entry?

Is the market operating in the way it should? I think so, Yeah. I do think that, that the market, this is market doing market stuff, and frankly, I like it.

I like the fact that, as you say, we can use OpenShift and Kubernetes and Rancher to build truly cross, uh, domain, cross location portable applications. That's what what I do personally. Um, I literally have part of my applications running literally in this building and part of them running on Akamai and part of them running in CloudFlare.

And it all works great. And I could, I could certainly have AWS participate in that or, um, I could say, you know what, um, AWS has incredibly attractive value added services and I wanna bet my business on those, and I'm gonna go in that direction. And it really is up to the customer.

I think the fact that two thirds of cloud workloads have chosen the oligopoly means the oligopoly is doing it, right? Yeah. They're innovating and adding value to clients, which is what, what they should do.

I've got a white picket fence, I need paint it. Um, but look, I call b******t on the whole oligo police. I mm-Hmm.

Yes. Today we have three major ones, but quite frankly, Steven is, Steven Dickens is, if you've said I'm past gags, if you take the Office 365 and Google, uh, workplace Out, Oracle is not that far behind those three. We've mentioned the two big Chinese ones, Steven Foskett, you mentioned two up and calming ones that I think people have to look at, Akamai and CloudFlare, by the way, we're gonna be doing a, a video series with our forensic CloudFlare on, on that very subject of the CloudFlare, uh, I forgot what their tagline is, around their cloud.

And that'll be a regular, uh, biweekly here on, on Textron tv. But we're early as, as Steve Dickens says, we're early still in the cloud adoption phases. Having three is a hell of a lot better than we did in desktops Through there are, I think we're also overlooking, uh, the nature of the licensing agreements that people sign with these companies willingly.

And if I have to deliver X amount of workloads to qualify for my discounts, then I'm gonna drive developers in the organization to consume Microsoft or Google or AWS to a certain level, because I want that to discount rate to kick it. Yeah. Look, there are risk and rewards, but I, I want to end this block by saying this.

We're still early in this game. Mm-Hmm. And now, you know, in the words of Vito Cor wasn't, or a true enemy has not yet shown himself well, maybe it was Michael Cor, We, we don't know how big this oligarch's gonna get either.

We don't know. It's an oligo. He got an arch.

But anyway, enough, enough of the Allos. We're gonna take a break here on Textron. We're coming back.

IBM recently announced earnings. Steve Dickens, Stephen Dickens has some key insights, uh, and he's gonna share it with you up next on Textron Gang. All right, we're back.

And we're talking about IBM and its recent earnings report, which showed some positive momentum. And that's not always been the case with IBM 'cause they're kind of, at least in my perception, there's a lot of ups and downs with IBM over the years. Mr.

Dickens, where are we at this cycle with IBM? So I think we're starting to get to the point where Alvin's got the organization into a groove just to go by the numbers. 8 billion, up 2% year over year software revenue up 7% infrastructure was up.

Um, so some softness on the consulting side. I think if I look at the, the sort of, um, perspective here, I, IBM's got a really strong, very focused strategy. Hybrid cloud and ai VINs led the charge with the hybrid cloud piece.

He was instrumental and led the efforts when Ginny TI was still the CEO. He's driven the Red Hats acquisition and driven that across the entire organization. Uh, they've announced their intention to acquire HashiCorp, which will give them more in that space.

So I think they're doubling down. I am seeing a slowing in growth of Red Hat, um, that used to be at 20%. Um, that's now at seven in the, the last earnings.

So kind of some questions there. I think when you look at the core infrastructure business, Rick Lewis is doing a fantastic job overall as the SVP for that business, specifically Ross Morey's business from a mainframe point of view. Normally at this point in the mainframe cycle, they're talking about the cyclical nature of that product cycle.

And they're posting numbers that were down that business unit was up 8%. I'm talking to Ross Morey, the GM, about how he's managed to pull that off this late in a cycle this week, but frankly, still a performance. So I think work to do here in my research notes, I think IBM, if it wants its stock to rip, has probably gotta do some more work on a re reduction in force.

And it's, it's workforce. I think if they were to make a, a 15, 20% trim, um, we'd see that stock rip. This isn't stock advice or, or organizational advice, certainly for Arvind.

Um, but I think IBM returning to consistent quarter over quarter growth, really positive 15 to 20% is a huge rift. And well, You could argue, Alan, that they're fat. I mean, I spent 10 years there.

Have they taken the same sort of medicine that Silicon Valley has taken over the last 12 months? Probably not. Mm-Hmm.

Well, let me ask you this. 'cause historically, IBM has always been wrapped around that mainframe much more than they like to admit. And, you know, they kind of hide some of those numbers because, um, suddenly, you know, some group that sells something that attaches to the mainframe is doing really well when there's a next upgrade cycle of the mainframe, but that gets counted elsewhere.

Um, how dependent is IBM still on that mainframe platform? Yeah, I mean, There's a couple of different ways they measure that. The short stack revenue, which is the hardware, the software, and the, um, support services that are directly around it.

And then there's long Stack, which is all the other things that get dragged. IBM's transaction software business has got a lot of kicks and DB two in it. I think the Mark Street knows that now.

Um, but then there's a lot of transparency around their OpenShift numbers and their Red Hat numbers. There's, uh, um, transparency around their AI numbers and what they're doing in Watson X. So I think the street knows where the mainframe is buried in the IBM numbers overall.

Now, I think IBM continues to do a great job with the mainframe, but I think it's rolling in the overall mixture of their numbers. It's well understood, and it's probably not as big as it used to be. No, yeah, it's still sizable.

I mean, let's mm-hmm. And, and for good reason. I, I could I, I probably know what it is, but probably shouldn't say what that I know what it is.

Let's leave it at that. Okay. I left.

Let's not get ourselves in trouble, but you know, we, Steven, you mentioned it, but you, you focused more on the other side of, uh, the, which was the infrastructure ai Mm-Hmm. They're making a big bet here on ai. com on this, um, you know, AI platform for DevOps.

I mean, look, when you think about it, when I first, when AI first burst on the scene in November, it'll be two years now, right? To me, I was like, well, what's, what's different than Watson? Right?

Watson was AI for me at first. Um, so you would think ai, uh, IBM is going to be a player. And if you believe this whole gen AI market is for real, and it's not just all type, I, I think there's a huge play there for IBM, which mm-hmm.

Could really, I mean, it could be bigger than the infrastructure piece when all is said and done. I don't know. Steven, Steven Foskett, um, you've been around with me a long time.

Um, every time I look back in history, there's all these examples of IBM pioneering something that somebody else benefited from, whether it was a relational database or OS two platform. So, um, will AI be any different? Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it?

Because IBM has, um, really these fan fantastic granite LLMs that they've open sourced, um, you know, kudos to IBM for putting all this development effort into competitive LLMs in, in a variety of sizes. I think I should point out too, that they've, they've got, uh, LLMs that can be used by enterprises, um, for small language tasks or large language tasks on a variety of different PLA hardware that do, don't have to have anything to do with IBM. Um, they've also got this, uh, you know, this capability to, um, experiment on those using, um, uh, what are they calling it?

The, uh, the, the concert, uh, or the, uh, you know, the framework, uh, that you wrote about on DevOp Lab, instruct Labs, Steve Instruc labs. Thank you, Steven. I knew you'd knew, you'd know, you'd remember it.

Um, and that's really cool stuff. But then they also have Watson X and they've been pushing that. Um, I, this is not really about IBM, but I wonder, um, you know, as many have said, uh, there's no moat around l lms, um, and there's no moat around ai.

If you look at the incredible, so, so granted is incredible. Thank you. IBM llama is incredible.

Um, you know, uh, Claude is incredible. Uh, there are open source LLMs and or open LLMs that you can use out there. Um, but does that benefit IBM?

How does that benefit IBM ultimately? Um, you know, I wonder if this is really going to help IBM to be a major AI player, or if it's gonna be a case of IBM, um, thankfully donating incredible technology that we're gonna take in our own direction. Um, you know, how how does this, how does this dynamic play out?

Well, it's interesting for me. I think if I'm a bank, if I'm a telco, if I'm a retailer, do I need a grownup in the room to be able to guide and steer my AI strategy? I see you nodding there, Alan.

Yes. IBM from a consulting point of view, some of what it's doing with, um, attestation and being able to certify and validate some of these models. What was the training data and put some of those assurances and guarantees in place.

We just talked about, um, the ability to fine tune models. Do you want to be in a locked in Nvidia Cuda model where you've got one vendor and your locked in? Do you want to be thinking about something like in lab that's IBM's open source?

People should be thinking about some of the, uh, control points in their AI stack. I think if I was a CIO or a CTO of a large, um, enterprise, I'd certainly get IBM in, I'd certainly be looking at a consulting engagement. I'd certainly be sitting down with those guys and saying, as all these fancy vendors come with the latest WIZBANG Gadget, can you just be the grownup in the room here for me and help me with map this out from a deployment perspective.

Speaking of grownups in the room, Bonnie, thank you. Yeah, no, I just wanted to point out some interesting things about Q2 for IBM because they introduced a series of sustainability related products and services that they hadn't had before. For example, in March of, uh, 2024, they introduced it, um, overall operations assessment.

So how is your, your IT team being more efficient and um, just, you know, overall operations. They also took a look at end of life for hardware. How are we, how is your work, your team handling it?

We can help you with that. com, which was part of, uh, the, when they own that, um, asset, they take a look at climate risk as well as with geolocation data, and that's a new service, and that is all part of their AI efforts. So these are all new things that happened in Q2 that I think affected the July earnings report.

I hope so. I I just quick word on this, Steven, you mentioned it in passing, but I think it bears further discussion, and that is the sick man of IB fm Red Hat, right? It took, how long ago did they buy it?

Three, four years ago now. 20, 19, 5 Years. It took 'em this long to beat the life out of it.

I mean, you talk to the Red Hat people, you see the Red Hat people, it shows they don't have that cocky, I'm Red Hat, we are the open source company anymore. They're now Red Hat part of IBM and I, and I think quite frankly, their growth is reflected in it. Unfortunately.

Steven, either one of you actually, um, You need to be more specific than that. Mike, Steven d um, do you think adult supervision from IBM is too expensive because it seems to be only consumed in these very, very large enterprises and Well, But that's their, that's their base. I know That's their base, but they could be broader.

These guys are, I mean, so Apple sells to a a billion of them richest people in the world and the wealthy, and it doesn't offer low price phones in India. IBM's consulting business is exactly the same. IBM's enterprise business, they're focused in on that Fortune 5,000, the biggest names, their penetration in Citibank, Wells Fargo, Barclays, Vodafone, you know, go across and peak the FSE 100, the Fortune 500, the top hundred names in France and Germany, and you know, Singapore and Australia, that's where IBM's focused.

They're not a startup player. They're not trying to build, yes, you can buy services from IBM Cloud, and yes, there's some IBM storage and there may be some red hats and there may be, but if you look at IBM's go to market model, it is focused on the biggest names. So you've gotta sort of pass out where they want to be and how they structure themselves.

They're not trying to go out and run a startup program to compete with AWS in Portugal to win IAS revenue out of 200 startups in Portugal. It's just not there. They're just, and they don't wanna be there.

The Red Hat is that, that was Red Hat's business. That's, that's the point. That's the disconnect right there.

Anyway, we are gonna disconnect here for a second. We're gonna take a break on Textron Bank. Techron gang got me talking banks.

Um, we're gonna come back and talk about Web five Web Do web four, you say Web3, I don't know, we're gonna be back in a second. You're watching Textron Ag Cloud Native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem. com is your destination for news, thought leadership, features and webinars on cloud native architecture, Kubernetes serverless, cloud native application development, microservices, service mesh, cloud native security, and more.

Stay on the cutting edge of modern application development at Cloud Native Now. Alright, we're back and we're talking about Web five. And to Alan's point, well, it turns out there is no web four.

We went from Web3 to web five. Who, Who makes these choices? I think Jack Dorsey made the choice on Web five.

I think really, if I understand how this all plays out a little bit, um, what the basic idea here is that we are going to have a decentralized internet with the blockchain kind of at its core with a lot of identity management capabilities baked in. So we'll be more secure. Steven, um, is there a, is there a, is there a market here just yet?

I mean, it seems like a lovely idea and maybe where we're headed, but, um, to Alice's point, nobody knows what Web five is. Well, yeah, and, and to be very clear, let's all, let's all get this out right there. Uh, there's two different web threes and whatever it is, it probably ain't what you think it is.

Um, you know, I, I'm with Tim Burners Lee here on saying, basically, forget it with all that blockchain blah, blah, Web3 that you heard about, that ain't, that ain't what we were trying to do. And, and Web four i i, I, I think we did kind of skip web four, honestly, and what, what, what even is that? But, but, but let's set this aside.

First off, web five, whatever Web five is trying to be, let's go to actually what the announcement is that we're linking to here from Cloud Native now. So, um, you can now have decentralized web nodes on Google Cloud. So what the heck is a decentralized web node?

What the heck is a, uh, DID what is, you know, let's talk about it a little bit. So first off, this is not a bunch of blockchain hoo-ha like, uh, you probably heard about Web3. This is actually kind of a useful thing.

A decentralized web node is part of the ability to create a decentralized identity essentially, that you, um, all of your identity information would be stored in a, essentially like a portable web server of your own that would have, um, access controls and credentials and would give you the ability to have sort of a, a, a digital identity that lives in the cloud, not on blockchain. And that would allow you to grant or deny access to that identity information and personal information on demand for use by new applications. It's not a pie in the sky thing, it's not blockchain, and it is a way to give the power back from social media companies.

So what the web is now, I mean, exemplified by login with Google or, you know, iCloud everywhere, that that's good in that it allows you to have a centralized identity source and a centralized control of your information. But it's, it's in the, it's centralized in the hands of a company. The idea with the, uh, DIF which is part of the Linux Foundation, um, again, real deal nerds here, not, um, you know, crypto Bros, is that it would allow you to have that same kind of, uh, identity source that you might get, let's say from iCloud, and yet own it yourself and have it be run there.

This is all really, you know, forward-looking, futuristic stuff, but it's not crazy. Um, one of the people behind this is, uh, solid, which is, uh, Tim Burners Lee who invented the web. So this, again, no crypto bros here.

Um, I wish they hadn't called it Web five. So I've gotta dive, I've gotta dive in. I mean, you are taking the anti blockchain view.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna be, so let's, let's get some, let's get some delineation. Cryptocurrency is one use case of blockchain technology. There is hundreds of other use cases of blockchain and digital ledger di uh, distributed ledger technology that has got nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

So let's get that pack there, there. So when you say, so let, Let, let's stop there for a second. Steven.

When You say crypto bros, You're not talking Steven Dickens, I agree with you a hundred percent. A thousand percent. The problem is perception is reality.

And, and for too many people, even savvy people who watch this tech people, it, it's gotten too, I don't know how you decouple them. Well, we, well, first off, you've gotta do the, the work. First off, you've gotta go and understand this space.

So we did a podcast with Broadcom where we had the lady who runs, um, the blockchain efforts for ey. We'll find a link and we'll put that in the show notes. She's talking about the work that's going on, serious work around using DLT and blockchain technology to be underpin financial markets, underpin custody of digital assets.

You can see things around artwork. You can talk about think fractional ownership of real estate. There is a hundred different use cases that have got nothing to do with cryptocurrency and to throw that entire set of work under the bus because some crypto bro is trying to pump and dump some, um, altcoin is just disingenuous to a bunch of serious people doing serious work.

Let's, let's get that said. So Steve, you and I are gonna have a conversation in a bar at some point in the future and Well, you know, let me, let me jump in there on that one, Steven, because the, you're, it's gonna surprise you, but I'm gonna defend you on this one. You're absolutely right.

Blockchain is a technology that can be useful. The problem is that the problem set best addressed by blockchain is much smaller than the problem set that the, and I'm calling them crypto Bros on purpose, have tried to address with blockchain. And unfortunately, one of the good problem sets decentralized currency has been completely ruined by a bunch of profit motivated, you know, uh, dishonest crypto Growth Basically.

Now, Other side of that though, we're coming out the other side of that. I mean, we're talking about a market that, what is it, 10, 12 years old? We, yes, you go back to sort of the, um, all of the nefarious stuff that happened in 20 17, 20 18.

You know, we've got ETFs now that have been approved. The EETF was approved, was it last week or the week before? We've now got, uh, 11 companies providing ETFs based around Bitco spot Bitcoin, you know, so I think we're at a point in maturity now that we weren't at lots, we, until Someone else gets arrested.

Right? Right. Alex, we gotta stop it with comments like that.

We had two presidential candidates talk at a Bitcoin conference this week or this weekend. Yeah. Let's, let's still, Let's, let's, let's separate here for a minute.

All right, so the crypto bros and all that stuff, push it aside. There are, are these technologies that were created around these blockchain technologies that are gonna be repurposed into things like, well, web five might be an example, but, um, I think we need to distinguish between the technologies and a single use case. And yes, there's a bunch of knuckleheads running around.

I mean, with all due respect, you can't talk outta both sides of your mouth and say, I want to talk about blockchain independent or crypto currency and then talk about a Bitcoin conference, right? Because that defeats what you're trying to do, which is separate blockchain, blockchain from cryptocurrencies. Or maybe we should call these technologies something other than blockchain technologies and call 'em something.

Absolutely. I think it's, yeah, It might be that they're, they're peer-to-peer technologies in my mind. And as Steven described in his use case, that's what gives you control over your data.

And we've been having this argument for 15, 20 years now, and I wish we would get to this point. So here's what I don't understand though. What's the difference between the way and Steven with pH I know you tried to explain with the difference between Web3 blockchain stuff and Web five Five has a little more identity controls baked into it as far as I can tell, but Steven Paska, what do you think?

Well, yeah, I mean, let's get, yeah, let's get brass tacks here. So, like I said, I, I'm, I, what I was trying to do in my introduction is differentiate this from the hoo ha nonsense and say, this is real. It's a Family friendly show, Steven, easy with the haw.

I'm sorry. Hoo ha. I apologize.

I apologize for the s of ears. Um, Trying to differentiate from that and, um, and what people think of like Web3 and, and you know, 'cause Web3 was really Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. It was like, let's, let's, let's, let's blockchain, all the things, this thing that's being talked about here, and I, again, I don't wanna call it Web five because I hate that name, but the, the idea of decentralized web nodes is real technology.

And guess what? There is the potential to use a peer-to-peer transaction technology, a peer-to-peer, um, way of communicating this that uses yes, a blockchain. But I don't want people to be saying, oh, you know, decentralized web nodes and, uh, decentralized identity is just another, let's put everything on the blockchain.

It really isn't. 0, not the blockchain Web3, to do something practical for real people. And so I think that actually if, uh, Steven and I had this discussion in a bar around this specific technology, I think both of us would be nodding vigorously because using a blockchain as a way to handle one corner of this problem, which is how do I guarantee that, uh, my data is, uh, has integrity and is de and is distributed in a decentralized peer-to-peer way that doesn't require a central authority to decide blockchain makes perfect sense for that.

And that's when we should use blockchain. It's just, it's, it's just, this isn't just blockchain. This is a whole world of things including a, a one element that uses blockchain.

Steve, we've Been on, we've, we've been on decentralized domains for five or six years. You can go and buy your o and DI mean, so if you want to go and get a web domain, and you know this, Alan, having done such great work with security bottles hard and you are, and DevOps dog Palm, and every time you've bought a domain that you've then grown into a juggernaut, you go to a GoDaddy or you go to somebody else and they kind of administer setting up the domain and what's your ownership of that domain? You can get tenuous.

So unstoppable domains have been doing, But Steven, isn't that it? Unstoppable domains. I have domains on Unstoppable too, you know, that's Decentralized Web3 de That's what I based domain.

So that's, I guess that's what I'm asking. I'm struggl The difference between that which we've had for five or six years. Web3 based self custody, self ownership of a domain.

Nobody can do anything with that domain once you've got it set up. They've done the hard work of unpicking some of the stuff that, the centralization of the web. It got to, I'm trying to understand, and maybe Steven, you are gonna send me a cool article and I'm gonna be able to understand it, but I'm trying to get the difference between that decentralized Web3 unstoppable domains thought and what we are hearing about here for the first time, for me at least, this website That, that's my question too.

That Is, and that's exactly it. org, if you go there and you check that out, it it, Steven, what you're describing is Right, true. That is, that is another one of the building blocks of this thing.

But the, but what, what do you do with it? What is the application? This is about a specific application.

And that specific application is that you have your personal identity information, your credentials, your personal data stored in a d in, in a, in a, in a pod that is, uh, it is actually built out of components like web servers and blockchain and, and JSON and domain names and things like that. But that this is the digital you and, and it's not just blockchain. It is, it is a practical application that, that decentralizes identity data in a way that is useful potentially, uh, for applications and, and would get you, I, I feel that's what unstoppable, But Apple and Google.

Yeah, I'm trying to understand. You Described It unstoppable, But I'm trying to understand the gap here. That to me sounds like I'm self custody, self custody being easy for me to say self custodying my personal data in a wallet, Right?

And that's, I thought those, I thought that's what the unstoppable domains were. Anyway, hey, suffice to say we've got some time yet to talk about this. We'll return to it.

'cause I don't think this is real for three to five years anyway, if ever, um, I'm waiting for a while. I, I look, let's go to 10. I want Web 10.

Anyway, Steven and Steven, thank you for your contributions and appearing on the gang with us today. You've earned, you've earned your colors, both of you today. Doing great work, Bonnie.

Mm-Hmm. It's always great to have you here, my friend Mike v. Always a pleasure.

Always a pleasure. We'll be back tomorrow with even more, probably not any web five stories tomorrow, but we'll be back with some good stuff. I remind you we have a full lineup of text trunk TV immediately following the gang today.

So do check that I don't go anywhere, but until tomorrow, this is Alan Schmo. Have a great day everyone. com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building.

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