The Ethereal Summit 2020 Nuggets – My biggest takeaways from Day 2

What an experience the Ethereal Summit was this past week. I wasn’t able to attend both days, but Day 2 was still a blast. Even though this was a digital/virtual event I think there were a lot of takeaways to be had from the speakers. In particular, I was able to attend the following meetings: “Innovation and risks of Deepfakes”, “Fireside Chat with Microsoft and Pegasys”, “Trustless Poker Powered by Ethereal and Virtue Poker”, and “The Societal Impact of exponential and a decentralized world”. My favorite of these definitely had to be the meetings about deep fakes and the trustless poker because they revealed real applications of blockchain technology that can quickly be deployed and integrated into the world we now live in. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy some of the other meetings, but some of the conversations were very abstract and technically in-depth to where my knowledge of such things is at a surface level.

Arif Khan of Alethea AI spoke to the audience about the history and innovations of deepfakes that we have seen all over the internet for the past couple of years. What is this emerging technology of deepfakes? It can be classified as synthetic media where existing images or videos are replaced with someone else’s image or likeness. One of the most famous deepfakes is a video done by the TV Show “Key and Peele” where they have President Obama saying outlandish things while making a PSA to America. For the sake of comedy, I thought this was well done, but for the average person who maybe doesn’t understand the technology or believes the satirical video to be real, this may pose a problem. Arif goes on to explain that as the technology of deepfakes becomes more sophisticated propaganda and cyber crimes have a new tool that could potentially have great harm to society. Arif identifies a problem where there is no effective layer of truth that exists except centralized verified social media platforms that will also spread the false news. The “liars” or “fakes” on the internet then become indistinguishable from what is real and these liars or fakes profit from this. He believes that the solution is blockchain validation of content where a verified social media account can approve and validate content on-chain that has their image and likeness associated with the information. This then helps the community and society start sorting through things to determine what is real and what is fake.

Faceswap between Amy Adams (left, original) and Nicolas Cage (right, deepfake)

After explaining the technology and pitfalls of deepfakes, Arif brought in another panelist by the name of Mike Elias, co-founder of IdeaMarkets. This was my favorite part of the presentation because Mike was able to explain things from a market and game theory perspective and his plan for keeping the corporate media machine accountable. In today’s day and age of fake news and misinformation, it is even more important than ever to be able to distinguish what is real and what is not. Can we really trust what is being told to us by the corporate media machine? These giant corporations are owned by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, and no matter what news organization you are watching, evidence or facts tend to get skewed or altered to promote a certain agenda. Behind the scenes of the massive corporate media is a puppeteer pulling all the strings whether that is Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post or the Murdoch family with Fox News. How do we keep these entities accountable? Mike believes he has a solution with IdeaMarkets.

Mike presented a few slides explaining how the current system is set up and the incentives for the giant media companies. He emphasized how trust is valuable, but why do corrupt institutions get trust for free? One of the many goals for corporate media companies is gaining viewership at all costs. As you can see from one of his slides above, he presented the game/model that has been set up for the media companies to play within. They want clicks, they want attention, and they want views. This is the fuel that keeps these companies at top of mind and keeps the people coming back for more. Media companies are encouraged to promote division, fear, clickbait, and give slanted validation to their viewers. These behaviors are considered to be low risk, high reward according to Mike because these are the behaviors that are incentivized in the current model. Mike believes that this model needs to evolve and incentivize corporate media towards accountability and empathy. Unfortunately today empathy and public service are deemed as high risk and low reward in the current model.

The solution that Ideamarkets has for evolving the model is by creating a credibility marketplace where every citizen can buy and sell trust in an open market. Idemarkets works in a similar fashion to Reddit, but upvoting costs money and increases in cost to the proportion of supply. In the same way, you can buy what you trust, you can sell what you don’t trust by selling your votes at their current price and withdraw your money at any time. The kicker here is that you can earn interest while your money is in the market at about a 2% annual interest rate.

I really like what Mike Elias has been able to craft, and it is truly brilliant and revolutionary. We will be able to take the control back as citizens of the world and make sure that truth is the gold standard and nothing less. In light of recent events with COVID-19, we need the information to be accurate and we need the truth. Ideamarkets will have a great impact and role in evolving a system that has been broken for many years and I can’t wait to see it in action in the future

To learn more about IdeaMarkets check out this great informative link:

https://mikeelias.substack.com/p/decentralizing-the-search-for-truth

STAY TUNED FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE ELIAS ON CRYPTOLIVELEAK’S YOUTUBE CHANNEL WHERE I GET TO TALK TO MIKE ELIAS!

Another meeting that really caught my attention during Ethereal Summit 2020 was that of Virtue Poker. The presentation was made by Co-founder, Ryan Gittleson, and he walked the audience members through his vision of what the online gambling world will look like in the future. What Virtue Poker has done is created a trustless way of playing online poker through blockchain technology. Everything from depositing money, to card shuffling, to payouts is done through the blockchain-powered by Ethereum. One of the biggest things that Ryan spoke about was the corruption in the early days of online poker where these large companies were creating Ponzi schemes that were ultimately shut down by the US Government. Another issue Ryan highlighted was the use of bots and software that tracks others player tendencies and statistics that are being used to target rookie or recreational players. These players have essentially been pushed out of the industry by online card sharks who have been perfecting their craft of hustling through the aforementioned tactics. It created an unfair playing field where recreational players were always on the losing end of this. Virtue Poker’s goal is to bring back the average player and keep the playing field as even as possible. They have done this by creating a trustless environment where every player is involved in the online shuffling of the deck by using encrypted keys that are used for each card in the deck. Virtue Poker’s technology through blockchain is exactly what we needed in our lives for those online poker players out there.

Virtue Poker is truly evolving the online poker industry for the better and they are using blockchain to enforce this. I think it is absolutely brilliant that they are manufacturing the trust for every player, and have even partnered with famous, world-renowned poker player, Phil Ivey. I am excited to see Virtue Poker become a brand name. I had the chance to play around with their beta version using trial crypto they will be issuing later on for their official launch. It is really sharp, clean, and the gameplay is quite fast. It is extremely transparent with the processes that are happening on screen and even shows you when it’s your turn to encrypt and shuffle the deck. Other poker sites I have used in the past have been very arcadey and jenky to be quite honest. Virtue Poker is setting the new standard for the industry and I wish them the best of luck with becoming number one!

All in all, the Ethereal Summit was a really cool event that a colleague of mine suggested I attend last second. I would highly suggest going to another event that they put on. The Ethereal Summit brought together with brilliant thinkers, great minds, and trailblazers. I think that is really the coolest part of these events that some of the smartest people in the world are all brought together to discuss deep and expansive ideas for the future and how they want to accomplish building those dreams. It will be extremely fun to watch many of the start-up companies that participated in the event grow and thrive in the future. Until next time, over and out!