he's the lead business reporter at coin desk which is the preeminent publication around the world playing with blog digital currency i'm going to ask him what is the things most important if we don't know plus i'll give you a little tour of times square maybe we even have a glimpse of the naked cowboy a bunch of mickey and minnie or maybe the statue of liberty but right now here are the numbers at the closing bell. is getting international recognition with the help of israel at least in the world

of zoos bill fiddlesticks mission to do it for you like you know. this isn't my cup of tea is going up the study hall maybe you know john. the only palestinians who gets the most help from is to reduce from counterparts i don't think some of those who were on the vision didn't know when to do this. and the it's not as to how to display any of the muscle that you have i'm going to compete in the doesn't seem to do more. but result. hey everybody i'm stephen baldwin task hollywood guy will suspect every proud american first of all i'm just george bush and r.v. . this is my buddy max famous financial guru just a little bit different i noticed. you know with those with all the drama happening

in our country i'm rude have fun every day americans. all over. the store to bridge the gap this is the great american. made goods manufactured consent to the public will. when the ruling class is protect themselves. with the flame and there we go read this and be the one percent. we can all middle of the room sick. room.

and we're back and we're really pleased to be joined by michael dell christy oh he's the lead business reporter at coin desk which is a preeminent publication dealing with these sorts of issues regarding digital currencies on the block j. michael welcome and thank you for being with us it's a pleasure thank you ok let's take this one hundred thousand feet yes what's the most interesting thing you're seeing in this space bizarrely the most interesting thing that i'm watching right now is supplied chain finance that's different from supply chain management which we hear talked about a lot where distributed ledger technology like the block chain is being used to prove the origin points and movement of products and what we're talking about with supply chain finance on a block chain. is being able to simultaneously pay every level of

a supply chain logistics of a moving something a product a physical product from one place to another and tracking that well the finance aspect of that is actually in the payment so what happens now is if you go to a big factory like foxconn that is making cell phones they will receive the bulk of the payment for the product and that money slowly trickles down to every layer of the supply chain taking weeks and sometimes months to finally hit the people at the very bottom of the supply chain and we're seeing some interesting work actually foxconn and p.t.p. lending platform d.n. wrong are working together to reimagine the way the supply chain finance works so that the lowest level of the supply chain is actually being paid at the same time as everyone else not only would remove the need for the middlemen that are making money in between each of those transactions but make sure that the people at the

lower end of the supply chain the farmers the miners who are creating the raw materials that eventually go into these products aren't being forgotten or delayed in payment you know i wonder if that should be we talk about block chain and in general it may be the moral to the block change story or the montra if you will is getting rid of the middleman or the middle person makes sense really i mean that's yet about i would agree i think that the innate understanding of a middle man and in today's day and age or at least a couple of years ago was definitely relates to finance so it was it was a no brainer that the first application of blocks and technology would be money cryptocurrency but there are a lot of other exchanges of value out there that aren't necessarily reliant on money and were. seeing new cutting edge imaginative applications of this technology

to remove middlemen across a wide range of value exchanges yeah i've spoken with people and i imagine you've done stories on this that want to track the movement of diamonds. and even some precious metals so there's a number of different applications outside of traditional payment systems let me ask you though the. talk about the large financial institutions who really have been and there's nothing wrong with that they've been important to the development of the world the development of our country in the us here serving as the lenders. but they really are the middle people in a lot of these trends yeah so are they on the defensive with regard to digital currencies or are they do they have some sneaky strategy there where they're going to have some you know internalized banking financial system ledger as opposed to a distributed public ledger which would truly get rid of the middle people great

question i think with the big first of the short answer to question is they are involved they are exploring and there are a couple of instances of them exploring using cryptocurrency publicly which we can talk about but to answer the first part of your question the big difference between . innovation that is being explored in the blocked chain space by banks and other financial institutions is that they are used to leading the drive towards those innovative products block chain and crypto currencies as unusual perhaps even unique in the fact that it was driven by the retail world that was driven from the ground up and so in a lot of ways these banks stock exchanges financial institutions generally speaking had their hand forced they were watching from a distance as other people were driving innovation which is unusual but it's as i

said earlier it's not accurate to say the banks are not involved. some of it's self preservation i mean they don't they they don't want to lose. this is a horrible term and i don't mean it in a negative what well you better not use it you. they they they don't want to lose the source of the revenue so they can provide to find out thing that is important to our economy there i say that is part of our it is it is it is difficult to talk about because of the fact that their hands have in a lot of ways been forced to this innovation i think that. they were largely content with their role in the financial system and you're right they had to go into this in order to stay pertinent. but that's not to say that they aren't also willing participants or at least they haven't become willing participants some

of the most exciting crypto currency experiments in the world right now some of the biggest banks in the world are in the room while they're happening quietly about those tell me about you think what are the leading financial institutions around the world that are maybe paying a little bit closer attention to this than the others and when i say closer attention i'm talking about they're reaching in their pocket to maybe get their wallet so there's two there's two public examples that i'm happy to talk about and there are a lot of examples that are going on behind the scenes. report that will read the stories that you can the future so the stuff that i can talk about publicly that has been publicly revealed i should say money gram is now using ripples x r p which is a sort of next generation crypto currency that is designed to increase the quiddity between global banking institutions. one of the earliest use

cases was in cross border payments generally speaking the sending money from one currency to another x r p serves a really potentially valuable place in doing that by freeing up money that is being stored in different accounts around the world just in case it's needed instead of keeping that money laying dormant. places like money gram can can use x r p theoretically to cut out that that middle trends and it's got a lake of liquidity essential. what you're saying that can be used for that doesn't have to be it can be in held in reserve and then you'd to make the transaction and then they deal with whatever the the the difference between one currency and another currency ideas and flatten it out and then they get paid a little part themselves there i guess so there is there is still somebody making

money in the middle here but it's different than the traditional financial institution and i think other others out there there are another one that i think is really interesting is is what might be called a sister currency to x. r.p. which is lumen which is the currency that was created by a company that was founded by one of the same people who founded triple stellar and stellar recently announced a partnership with i.b.m. which isn't a financial institution but i.b.m. powers some of the technology on the enterprise level that runs some of the world's biggest financial institutions that was a big deal because i.b.m. had been in the space for a while using what we call non trip a currency applications a block chain which is moving value around in other ways storing data in a distributed way but not necessarily using an actual crypto currency i.b.m. and stellar last year publicly talking about the potential use of lumen was it was

a big deal and i think that it's sort of indicative of the fact that it's not just financial institutions that are starting to become increasingly comfortable talking about crypto currency in public but technology companies as well are we could talk michael for a long time but we are running out of time i promised our viewers at the beginning of the show that i wanted to i was going to ask you about the biggest thing out there in this space that we don't know and maybe you'll have to do so. but you haven't written about there but what do you have for us ok so i think what would be most surprising to a lot of people is the degree to which some of the biggest banks in the world are in fact experimenting with crypto currency. again i have firsthand

experience knowing that some of these banks are in the room at vice ng observing and learning and reporting back to their superiors about some incredibly exciting cryptocurrency projects. we will be looking for you we'll be looking for michael dell christiane's articles that coin desk and we can't wait to see them thank you so much for spend it was a pleasure mark thank you take care take care. and before we go a little bit about right here times square it's a place with more energy than most you can feel it just standing here coming up through my boots all around you this area used to be called long acre square it was renamed back in one thousand zero four when the new york times moved its headquarters to the times building it's now called one time square it's just a couple of blocks away from here and it is named after the new york times and when you hear times square it's the new york times after the one nine hundred twenty

nine stock market crash this whole area was pretty beat up businesses moved out closed down went bankrupt and as they slowly businesses started to come back in they were really of a cd or nature some peep shows a little bit of vaudeville shows some pawn shops and a lot of panhandlers that was pretty much the norm and it wasn't until the one nine hundred ninety s. that america's mayor rudy giuliani initiated a real cleanup effort here in times square and wow did they do a great job it really came back and take a look at this canyon of whites just amazing because. looking all around you can turn around slowly and there's seemingly an endless cascade of vibrant video of news feeds and of advertising for five stories tall even higher i'm looking probably fifteen story worth of lights there and speaking of that it really is a show here of course we will talk about shows we talk about broadway and broadway

is like right there that's broadway or broadway and forty third street and you could be at one of these local hotels and watch a different show every day for two weeks the lion king is right behind us school of rock is is just around the corner there it's pretty amazing and it's not just theater shows there's plenty of movie theaters too and they're not just one or two screens there are sixteen and twenty four multiplex theaters it's really incredible and speak about some of the anomalies also just down here a little bit is the naked cowboy the fellow that is in his white skippy's with his guitar strumming and his cowboy hat love to get a couple of bucks from you and there's probably more mini and mickey mouse's within a block of here than there are in disney world as a matter of fact when they were.