The Future of Internet is being built by this Web3 Company! Giving away 500 FLUX Tokens

Hey, welcome Wednesday morning. I've been very excited. This one's been on my calendar for a few weeks and I've been very excited about it. Can you guys know I'm a software engineer by trade before my YouTube days. Um, and so anything that's in the technology side of things really gets me excited. Um, so we have on Daniel, the co-founder of flux today. So very excited. Um, we're also, I just decided to do this. We're going to do a giveaway at the end of this, and this is a giveaway for me. Um, but I'm going to give away 500 flex tokens. So stick around near the end. I'm going to give away 500 flex tokens. If you stick around. I'm good to see you guys. What I need from you. If you want to be eligible to win some flex tokens, hit the like button. Um, and comment question of the day is what alt coin. Okay. Let's do alt coins. What alt coin do you think will at least 10 X in the next bull run? Okay. I just want to see what you, what the audience thinks. So go ahead and start typing that into the comments, by the way, those question comments of the day, those are actually just kind of a ploy to get comments going. Cause that's what the YouTube algorithm likes. So I'm curious, but also like to trick the algorithm a little bit. So appreciate you guys all being here. Daniel, thank you for hopping on the channel. Very excited to have you. Um, could you start us out with just a quick introduction of yourself, a little bit about your background, and then we will jump into flux. Absolutely. So first of all, James, thanks for having me on today. Um, this was one on my calendar that I circled too. I was excited to do it. So, uh, for those who don't know, I'm Daniel Keller. I'm the co-founder of flux and Zelle core. Uh, so flux is a decentralized, the world's largest and really kind of only truly decentralized compute network. So the easiest thing, uh, to explain it as people ask, well, what is a decentralized compute network? Cause that's a little bit techie, but we are AWS that's on the blockchain. So our node operators, or as I call them, decentralized systems administrators, they provide the compute resources to the network that allows us to basically be completely decentralized. So we're in 78 countries all over the world, uh, about 14,000 plus nodes, give or take. Um, and you know, we're, we're really cutting edge. So we're, we're a fork of Bitcoin essentially. Um, and we, but we took a proof of use of work. 50% of our network is currently on proof of use work. The other 50% is getting ready to move to, to proof of use for work. So, uh, we're, we're trying to fix problems in, in the, in the blockchain ecosystem. And like the number one problem is what does blockchain do? Like people always ask, well, what's it do? Well, it's, you know, you can't, it's not a speculatory thing anymore. Now we're starting to actually have real tangible products, real ecosystems like flux. Okay. Love it. No, that's a great explanation. That's something that I'm really passionate about myself is someone posted on Twitter. They were said, if blockchain technology went away, who would it affect in the real world? And the answer is up to this point, kind of not really many. I mean, it would affect me as a crypto YouTuber, but in your day to day life, people probably wouldn't even notice, you know, it wouldn't be in the news. And so go ahead. I would say, I would say that's like a saying if the internet went away, uh, like three weeks after, you know, it was actually launched, you know, and they were actually using it. So, you know, would it affect you transparently? Probably not much, but it would have destroyed the entire future that, you know, we lay down with, you know, the, the internet as it is today. So, you know, a lot of people say the internet was a passing fad at that particular point in time. You hate to be on the wrong side of history, but there was a lot of people that were on the wrong side of history. Oh yeah. Yep. Absolutely. And I, and that's one of the things I love about flux is I think you guys could be one of the projects that makes it, if you went away, people would notice. It's like, Hey, that made me a little better. Um, and now, and blockchain makes it possible. So, um, and I, I made a mistake when I said, what coin is going to 10 X? We have flux, flux, flux. Let's say besides flux. Okay. That goes without saying it's a, you know, flex AMA. What besides flex? I should have said, uh, I should have, uh, caveat that a little bit. So I didn't know there was any other projects other than flux, but you know, Hey, it is what it is. I know that big gold one too. So, you know, what is that? Bitcoin or something like that? Something like that. I've heard about that. There's one that it starts with an E too, but I can't quite remember what it is. It's high gas fees. That's all I know about. Yes. Amen, man. Amen. Awesome. Well, let's talk through a little bit about what flex is building. So you kind of mentioned it's like, you know, AWS, which if, uh, and maybe people aren't even familiar with AWS and what exactly they do. Could you maybe explain like who is your kind of target audience who would use you guys and what would they use you for? And kind of a, maybe a little bit in layman's terms for people who aren't familiar. Well, our target audience is anyone that wants to stand up any kind of infrastructure. So if you, you know, small business, mid tier business, enterprise based infrastructure, you name it, they all can utilize flux. Um, you know, one of the big things we hear about, especially in the FinTech world today is the fact that, you know, if AWS goes down, DeFi goes down. So it's not really DeFi. Well, that's not completely true because flux is starting to host a lot of the DeFi projects that, you know, sushi swap and, and in different, uh, players, uh, osmosis that they are basically load balancing between the web to world, which is the AWS is the, you know, lumens, the, you know, different, uh, web two providers and the web three world as well. So really, um, it really spans every type of user, whether you want to deploy a game server, you know, my son wants to run a Minecraft server so he can run it on flux, you know, uh, front end, backend web servers, you know, 50% of the internet runs on WordPress. Well, guess what? Runs on flux. WordPress now runs on flux. So now you can stand up your website, a, you know, for a small business, stand up your website fractionally. Now, if you keep scrolling up down right there, the savings. So what makes flux, uh, unique is the fact that it's decentralized. It's highly scalable, highly available, and it's cheap. So it's like, yeah, you be, be the biggest, be the best, or be the cheapest. And we're pretty much all three, at least from the way we're standing. So to deploy something, if you click on that eight B core right up there, that's the meaty, that's the meaty one, right? So we're talking $467 of a deployment on, uh, AWS, you're six, 17 for flat Google cloud flux is $15. And why people say, well, how can you do that? We, we can do that because we've cut out the middleman. We're going just like Bitcoin went peer to peer. We're going peer to peer with, we're connecting fluxes, connecting people that have compute resources with people that need compute resources. And, and it's all completely open source. It's all completely decentralized. So really for us, we don't have any big data centers that we have to, you know, pay the rent on and pay the cooling on and pay that. Nope. We go back out to the people in the, and across the globe and they provide those resources. Okay. Very good. And you know, this chart alone is probably enough for some project owners and business owners to say, Oh yeah, let's, let's go do this. Um, can you talk about what would be, what would be the reasons to, for a company to not use flux? I'll kind of turn the question on. It said, you know, you see, okay, it's 15 bucks a month, uh, instead of this 600 on Google cloud, why would someone choose to use Google cloud instead of flex? Or what are some of the, maybe the false reasons that you've seen people not want to switch? Well, people are creatures of habit and companies are creatures of habits. So once they've deployed their infrastructure on a particular platform, they tend to gravitate toward that unless there's a disruptive moment. And this is a disruptive moment. So if we go back to on-prem many, many moons ago, when I was, you know, standing on a standing up on prem servers, um, you know, it was all about controlling your own network. And then along comes, you know, web two or, you know, cloud-based compute. And people are like, well, wait a minute. So you're telling me my data, which I now hold in my data rooms and my servers and everywhere else is going to be in some cloud. Where, where's that cloud at? Where, you know, well, we, we've come to find out that it was through attrition, you know, legacy based, uh, applications that they didn't want to get rid of, but they didn't want to necessarily pay for the upgrade. So now on-prem and web two live together symbiotically, right? So people still have their own data centers, have their own servers, have their own infrastructure, but they also utilize web two as their overflow or scaling. Well, now we add web three to that and that's flux. So now you can have your on-prem, you can have your web two, which is your comfort level where you've built your infrastructure and you can have your disruptive technology, affordable pricing, you know, a redundancy scalability, you know, so on and so forth. So, you know, why somebody wouldn't use flux? I have no freaking idea. And we've got, you know, plus 50,000 plus unique deployments on flux today. Uh, we've got, you know, our, our WordPress is in beta. We've got, it's good to run on flux.io that runs on flux. Um, you know, really, it, it makes sense. I mean, we have people that couldn't afford backup solutions. You know what I mean? Like they, they were able to deploy in the web two ecosystem, but they didn't have a backup solution. So what they did is they load balance, they deployed it here and they load balanced it to flux. And now they have a very affordable and cheap. I mean, we're talking pennies on the dollar, uh, to be able to back their, their infrastructure up. So, um, yeah, I would say, you know, get your head out of your ass and use flux because it's where it's at. I mean, really. Have you guys had much, I know when I look at like your partners and things like that, there's a lot of, obviously a lot of the crypto and blockchain and web three projects are building on flux. Have you made much headway on getting traditional businesses to come work on flex? I see WordPress. but what's been that experience been like for you guys? It's awesome. We, we partnered with, uh, Lumen technologies and OVH as well, two very large web two providers who are, they're looking forward, uh, and how they can provide web web three to their customers. Because, Hey, it's just like, remember back when Bitcoin started to get big and people started to like, see the price go up and they're like, Hey, tell me about this Bitcoin, you know? And then you tell them and then they go off and then they forget about it. Then they come back and they're like, Hey, that Bitcoin's up like 20%. Yeah. You should buy some. Right. And then they, they disappear again. And then they come back again. Hey, it's up again. Maybe I should. Okay. That is, that's that adoption curve. And that's exactly where flux is at right now. So, you know, we're, we're in that upward tick. We're working with web two companies because we're not maximalists, right? We believe the web two web three ecosystems will work together. Uh, I can tell you right now we have, you know, several fortune 100 companies that are already, uh, beta testing how they can deploy a flux, which is pretty awesome. Um, and you're going to see like with proof of use to work, uh, flux is going to start to, you know, we've already done it with our node network. Now we're going to do it with our mining side. So we'll be a very large provider for on-demand compute resources. And we just recently announced project mayhem, which we'll start to expand around, uh, here, uh, this Saturday, actually we're doing an AMA. So I can't give you a ton about that. All I can say is attended because project mayhem, uh, kind of flips the AI world upside down. So, which is awesome. And we can do that because we have the infrastructure to really do that. Okay. No, I love that. I have, I have so many questions by the way, audience, if you have questions, I don't want to hog all of them. Okay. So please feel free to ask, um, if I think it's a good question, I'll bring it up and get to some of your guys' questions too. Um, but can you talk about, um, interoperability a little bit? So for existing projects, like, you know, this potential fortune, uh, top 100 company that might be coming in, uh, how, how interoperable is it? How easy is it for existing companies to just say, Hey, we have our Amazon web services set up where we want to move over to flux. I mean, I think that's probably a daunting task for a lot of people. Um, what does that process look like? James, I'm going to blow your mind. Uh, flux was built with the, with the forward thinking process to make everything feel like web too. So, you know, people are like, what do I have to do to become a web three developer? You just have to develop. Uh, flux is basically utilizes Docker. So, you know, I know you and I were talking about Docker a little bit. It's kind of confusing, but no matter what you've written your project in, whether it's, you know, Python or Java or JavaScript, or, you know, whatever the code base is, if you can get it to Docker, you can deploy it on flux. And a lot of people don't, they don't expect it to be that easy. We had somebody that develops WordPress sites and they were able to basically package everything up and boom, they were able to roll with it. It's, our goal was to create a marketplace to allow people to very seamlessly and easily deploy on this network. So, the answer to your question is our goal has always been to make it very seamless and very easy to use. you know, our WordPress site is in beta right now, and it continues to grow exponentially. So, you know, we're excited to offer a product that feels, because if you really want adoption in this space, it needs to feel like what they've already used. So, it was easy for me to go from Netscape Navigator to Google Chrome, maybe, or whatever, you know, a brave browser, because they all kind of felt the same, but we know Netscape Navigator isn't Google Chrome and Google Chrome isn't the brave browser, but they all feel kind of generally the same. And that's what we did is we set out to make sure that we had that general ease of use. Gotcha. Yeah, everybody knows, oh, there's a button, a left arrow, that means go back. So, no matter what browser you're using, it's still going to be that same idea, although there's differences. Now, that makes a lot of sense. And I love what you guys are doing, because I think in order for blockchain technology to really catch on, it's going to take some of these existing companies moving into Web 3.0. And so, I think something like Flux, that's one of the reasons I've been so passionate about Flux, is I just, I think it's key for getting adoption into crypto, which will help all of crypto, all of blockchain technology. It'll help regulation. It'll help in so many areas. So, very excited about Flux. All right. Can you talk about this chart a little bit? I think there's some confusion just from my audience and what they were, questions they were asking. I thought this chart sums it up really well about the difference between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. I love this. Do you want to just talk through what this chart means and what is the difference between Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0? Well, if we go back in the way back time machine, and if you have any familiarity with admin or anything on computer support solutions, you have read, write, you have read, read, write, and now you have read, write, own. So, Web 2.0 was basically static websites. So, you had the MSNs, the Netscape navigators. They were more informational than anything. They were providing, you went to a website, the content was fairly static. It may have been updated at some particular point in time, but it was very straightforward. Then along comes Web 2.0. So, now you have the Snapchats, you have the Instagrams, you have the YouTube. So, now the internet has become active and it's a two-way street. So, now you have websites that are not necessarily static. You're giving them updates, blog posts, whatever it is. It now is interactive. And now Web 3.0 takes it a step further. You still have some static components. You still have those interactive components, but it allows you to hold and maintain your own information. So, it goes to the next level. So, we call that rewrite and own. So, you own the data that you're providing. You also have a level of expectation of the decentralization nature of the product. And you also have some expectation to be able to secure your data. And that's exactly what Flux does across the board. Okay, very good. I mean, you really think about it this way. I don't think anybody on this AMA right now would argue this. Google, Amazon, Microsoft is there. They control your data. They harvest your data. They utilize your data. And what do you get back from that? Jack ----, right? You get maybe a decent product or you get spied on and they give you... You don't have that with Web 3.0 because ultimately it's an opt-in process on your side. Do I want to participate in this? And if I do, this is how I do it. So, it really gives back to the people we call... You know, if we always say Flux is for the people, by the people, we literally mean that. It is as decentralized as you can get. So, that's a little snapshot into that. Okay, no, that's awesome. That was exactly the answer I was looking for. Can you talk a little bit more? You kind of mentioned this and sprinkled it throughout. But can you talk a little bit more about the advantages of the decentralization part of it? The advantages of using Flux compared to Amazon? We talked about the cost, interoperability. Do you want to just talk a little bit more about the advantages that come with being decentralized? Well, the killer part is this. We are a global project. So, your data is never in one particular location. So, there's full redundancy. And every time you deploy on Flux, you don't deploy on one location. So, if I go to AWS or Google, I'm deploying one server, right? And then if I want backups to those server, I have to pay additional fees for those backups, which are not cheap. Flux deploys on three instances immediately. So, if I've deployed that $14 that we saw earlier, that was for three deployments, three instances, and it gives you redundancy across the globe. The other thing is, say I want to deploy something, but I need to be regulatory compliant. So, I need to make sure that I'm deploying in what we call geolocations. So, we can select where on the globe our servers are deployed. Why is that important? Well, if I'm running a game server and I need low latency, high uptime, low ping time, I need to have a server that's close by. So, I want that in North America. My user base is in North America or in Europe in user bases. You don't want to have your user base in the EU and have your server sitting in North America, right? You want to make sure that these things all are fairly seamless. So, the redundancy, the scalability, there's no hidden costs, no egress fees from Flux. Like AWS, if you've ever ran servers on there, you get your bill at the end of the month and you get kicked in the teeth because your egress fees are out of the world. We have none of that. So, basically, it allows you to really control your costs and that's important for enterprise-based solutions that are looking to host their solutions. The other thing is we tie basically, we have, of course, crypto onboarding processes, but we also do fiat as well, which settles to Flux. So, everything in the ecosystem, everything relies on Flux. You deploy a node, you need Flux. You run a server, you need Flux. You run a website, you need Flux. It is the king of utility assets. So, that's a little bit about that. Okay, no, that makes a lot of sense. How does scaling work with Flux? Does it work similar to Amazon, where, okay, most of the time of the month, I only need this amount of server space, but then during peak times, I need to rapidly upgrade. Does Flux allow that kind of stuff as well? Yeah, but we don't charge you for it. So, you can deploy more instances to scale up immediately. I'll give you, for instance, Kadena, which I know you guys had one recently. We run 1,000 plus nodes for Kadena and they were having some situation where people were trying to take their nodes down. The nodes that were running on Flux, no problem. As soon as they kill one, another one would pop up. So, it was like playing whack-a-mole. You're moving back and forth between these different areas. So, it gave a ton of redundancy. When Flux got listed on Binance and we had an uplisting, there's nothing harder on an infrastructure than an uplisting. Our block explorer was having problems. Everything was happening. We just went in and deployed an extra 100 block explorers and that was the end of the day. So, really, it gives us the ability to scale on demand and we're not holding people accountable to these egress fees, which are huge with some of these other providers. So, the goal is to give the end user the ability to really use the technology like it should be. And as we're starting to see some of these tech companies laying off and getting rid of things, what's the first thing to suffer? Technology, right? They always go to that IT budget because it's a big... People think if you're a technologist and you've been in it long enough, it's like when IT is working perfectly, what do we pay for? I mean, you pay all this money and it's just always up. Then when it's down, it's like they cut the cost, everything goes down. It's like, now it's down and we've got to... It's a no-win situation. So, with Flux, it gives you that on-demand scaling capabilities as long as you can get it to Docker, you can deploy it on the infrastructure and as many nodes as you'd like across the country. Across the world, actually. Yeah, no, it sounds like you've worked in IT for a while. So, you know how it goes, exactly. Too long. Yeah, that's right. Are you worried at all about Google or Amazon kind of coming into this space? Or do you guys feel like, no, we're far enough out ahead or what's your thoughts on some of the bigger players getting into Web3 and doing their own version of what Flux is trying to do or something like that? I would welcome it. I mean, seriously, I mean, I don't think... For us to get to the next level of decentralization, it's going to take everybody. That is the reason why we work with Lumen and OVH, is if they plan on doing something like that, then I would embrace that as well because I think that we don't have competition, we have opportunities, right? So, you know, it would be like going, owning the very first server farm as the internet started to come online. That's not going to run everything in the entire world and we're going to need different players in the space. And that's exactly why I think, you know, I don't think Amazon can do that because their price model, and I mean, essentially AWS is supporting Amazon at this particular point in time for revenue and their cost models can't be adjusted. And if they let the infrastructure go out to other peoples to host, that cuts into their profit line. So they have a pretty big dilemma that they have to go through. We don't have any of that. You know, our people are our infrastructure. So, you know, they are decentralized network administrators. Okay, great. And then I see a few questions in the audience about this and it was on my list of questions as well. But how should someone think about the Flux Token itself and the price of the Flux Token? Does a lot of people using Flux help the price of the Flux Token as it's being used for gas? Or how should somebody think about the Flux Token and how it relates to the Flux service and everything that you're doing? You know, Amazon doesn't have an Amazon Token. So it's kind of hard, I think, for people who are used to Web2 to kind of associate those things. Well, it's a fundamental part of, you know, there's the reason why Bitcoin miners mine Bitcoin. They want to get Bitcoin, right? So they have proof of work that they put into it. They've got, you know, space, time, material, electric, you know, all these different pieces, right? So you've got to ensure the place, all these different components. Same way with Flux. You have the initial investment that you have to lay out, whether you're going to mine it or you're going to run a node, there's going to be initial investments that's put out. But because we're a utility-based asset and we've made sure we're regulatory compliant across the board, it does require Flux for every piece in the ecosystem. So, you know, we have a hard cap, 440 million. There will only ever be 440 million. I'll tell you, James, like I tell everybody else, I give two flying shits about the price because it doesn't matter. I couldn't even tell you what the price of Flux is because we are so far away from wherever we're at. You know, we're year two of Bitcoin. You know what I mean? Like, that's how I feel about it. So, but there is a demand that comes into play with Flux. It's a very finite resource. There can never be more Flux created, much like Bitcoin. There is a demand. We have happenings regularly. So we just recently went through one of our happenings. We do two and a half years, whereas Bitcoin does it every four years. So naturally, as there's more demand and more need for the asset, for the utility-based asset, it's going to definitely affect different areas. And I would imagine price would be one of those. But then again, I'm not an investment guy. Like I said, I give two shits about the price. It's all about technology to me. This is my legacy project that I'm going to give to my kids and their kids. And the Flux team believes the exact same thing as well. Everybody that works on the Flux project has the same ethos. And we have a rule when you work on Flux. Unlike other projects, you work on one project. You cannot work on any other projects. You cannot be participatory with any other projects. You have to work on Flux, because that makes sure that the... Yeah, we do have developers that participate a little bit here and there. And they may not be full-time Flux, but everybody that works on the project needs to work on Flux. Okay, great. And we will get to audience questions. You guys are awesome. Keep them coming. Again, I selfishly just go through my questions first just to make sure we have time for all of those. But we will definitely get to your questions. Let's go to FunnyTurro's question. And don't forget, giving away 500 Flux tokens at the end here. So stay tuned for that. FunnyTurro says, is Flux's cost advantage right now sustainable? Yeah, absolutely. Because we can scale on demand. So we basically have the habiting on the proof-of-work side, but we can scale on demand on the proof-of-use-of-work side anytime we want. And basically, we've already done one habiting. So we went from 2,500 nodes up to 15,000 nodes. And we can continue to keep doing that as we grow. Now, granted, everybody's going to be like, if I turn a node up and I'm only making X percent or whatever, that's life. You got to figure out what your cost analysis is, what it is, whether or not it's beneficial to you. But I will tell you, as we move forward with proof-of-use-of-work and as we start to turn on our AI components as well, it's going to be very rewarding to be able to run this infrastructure. I mean, that's just the way it is. That's not a price prediction or anything like that. I don't do those things. But long story short is, it's sweat equity. With Bitcoin, if you started mining that, my little first miner was an ASIC miner. I had a whole bunch of them put these little ASIC, these little keys. That's what I started mining Bitcoin with. And if you start to do those things very early on in Flux, you're definitely going to see the project continue to flourish. Okay, great. No, great, great answer there. I was wanting to know if you could maybe explain, again, in layman's terms, and I like throwing out these kind of grenade questions and then just kind of, let's see how he answers them. I like them. But can you kind of explain to a layman, how do the nodes fit in with what Flux is doing and how does that work together? And Amazon has their servers where you're running on. How does it work with Flux? Can you just tell us a little bit about how that all works together? Yeah, your application, and once you deployed it on Flux, is running all across the ecosystem and the nodes basically provide that. So if you think of it this way, we took a data center and we sharded it. We threw it all over the globe. We use Flux IPFS as our file storage system and we do have Flux Drive, which is basically a Dropbox competitor now in Flux as well. So our goal was to basically allow regular everyday people, and it's like when Satoshi Nakamoto sat down and started thinking about how we were going to mine Bitcoin and the node network that supported that. If you took our node structure and dropped it on top of Bitcoin, it would look just like this. This is exactly what it is. We addressed one of the biggest quandaries Satoshi had, and that is, what do I do with excess compute? So there's eventually a point where it goes parabolic and Bitcoin has been there for quite a while. So you have a lot of e-waste, you have ASIC miners that are really good for like a week. There's all these components that come into play, whereas Flux is GPU mineable, ASIC resistant. We're very conscious about our carbon footprint. Our node structure is our proof of use work model and we're getting ready to move to our miners for proof of use work as well. So I think it all comes down to the nodes provide the backbone for the infrastructure. That's really what it comes down to. Our human capital or our people that are running these nodes, they're really the part of, they're the community. That's what it is. Everybody that's running this infrastructure has been around for a very long time and they're enjoying watching the project grow and flourish. And then of course, they have a business model they've built around that as well. Okay, awesome. Let's pull up another audience question here. How many tech support agents are on payroll and what's their response time? Very quick, as a matter of fact, we have a very robust service desk. Those guys are amazing. I mean, you're gonna get an answer pretty quickly in a few hours. And the number of techs, I think it's around seven or eight at this particular point in time. And we have some individuals that are dedicated to the WordPress to press deployments as well. Okay, very good. Nuno says, the question we're all thinking, how can a simple investor win some passive income with FluxNodes? What is the cost and expected return? And I actually did, I did a full video on FluxNodes and how to set those up and things like that. But just wanna get your take. Do you see this as a way for just average people to make passive income with Flux? Is that kind of the intention with nodes is a little bit? Yeah, I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings when I say this, but passive income is bullshit. It's active income. Like you're running, running a FluxNode is not for everybody, it's hard. You know what I mean? But it definitely is worth it in the end. I would say the way I look at it and the way I feel about it is, I think that you have to put the active work into it, go and research it, see what it is. And if it meets your needs and what's gonna work for you. Yeah, but I just hate that term passive income because I don't think there's anything passive about any of these networks. I mean, they're very active. You know, whether you're mining it or whether you're running the infrastructure on the backend, the node side of it. There are some staking options out there. I do know different exchanges, but there and again, not your keys, not your crypto. So you gotta be very careful with that. And we do have a project called Project Titan, which allows you to do on-chain infrastructure. So it allows multiple people to basically run a node on-chain. So nobody holds your crypto or anything like that. It's all done on-chain. So you can check Titan out as well. So those are a couple of different ways you can do it. Okay, great. Let's see, right now, Flux is giving their tokens as rewards to their node operators. If Flux token skyrockets, does that help or hurt the project? It doesn't hurt it. And we adjust the price kind of, you know, as it moves up and down so that we keep basically a fiat peg to the deployments so that, you know, if I'm a business leader, I can't go to my CIO and be like, hey, I might need $100,000 or I could need half a million. I have no idea, right? So we try to keep that even keeled across the board. Now, obviously, as more Flux is being utilized and it's out there, you can figure that out yourself. It's a finite resource. Supply and demand won't freeze. And, you know, it is what it is. Okay. MakeMoneyOnline says, how can a regular person benefit from Flux? So again, non-developers, I know you have Flux Drive would be one thing. Do you want to talk about some things that normal everyday people can use and maybe what's in store for the future too for normal people, non-developers, we'll call them? Yeah, so I would suggest downloading Zellcore, which is the multi-asset Web3 browser that we created for Flux. It runs on the Flux infrastructure, which is pretty kick-ass. You know, we have many products, Flux Drive, Flux Cloud. You know, you can go there and, you know, anybody can use that. I mean, you can use it today. We're getting ready to come out with our Android and Apple version for Flux Cloud. So it feels a lot like Dropbox. Everything's just kind of right there where you need it. But other than that, I mean, there's tons of ways to participate, whether it's, you know, I call it mining with your mind, going out there and, you know, maybe doing some content development for the project or things like that. There's tons of ways to be part of it. Yep, absolutely. I've actually been a bit of an evangelist for Flux among my tech friends. I would love for Flux in five years, maybe, to be as, you know, as in the IT world, as much of a household name as Amazon Web Services. When people are talking about starting up a project, just, okay, we should do that on Flux. That's, I would love that. So I want to be a part of that. Well, I'll blow your mind and I'll pull back the curtain a little bit. That evangelizing, that kind of seamless, there'll be a time when you, as you deploy Flux and you get to the final phase, you can deploy on Web 2 and Web 3. So, you know, Dan has a medium-sized business and he wants to utilize Lumen for some of his infrastructure, but he wants to use Flux as some of his infrastructure. You'll be basically able to dual board onto those different platforms. Oh, very cool. That's awesome. Let's see. Oh, here's one. I think you'll have comments on this. I think I missed the Flux pump. It's too late now. And people do think that about crypto. You know, they think, oh, you know, we hit our time and it's too late now. What are your thoughts on just that comment as a whole? I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, I think you need to zoom out a little. That's all I can say. Because this entire market is secular in nature. So, you know, usually when people have that little cry face, that's, you know, a calculation, that's the bottom of it. And, you know, that's usually when you want to start looking at, you know, do your own research and start to find projects that make sense to you. Yeah. And I would say if adoption, we're at the beginning of adoption for Flux, not the end. In my personal opinion, I can say this. I'm not, I can say whatever I want. We are at the beginning of adoption, not the end. So I don't think late on it at all. Let's see. Jorgen says, will there be possible to use GPUs in nodes as well as CPU? Yes. Yeah. Proof of use of work will also use GPUs, but we will also have GPUs on the node side eventually. Okay. Very good. Why do they want Flux to be proof of work instead of proof of stake? Proof of work has kind of gotten a bad name here as of late. Why do they want to be proof of work instead of proof of stake? Do you want to just talk a little bit about the philosophy there? Well, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but proof of stake is a total centralized ---- coin. It just is. And, you know, you can argue with, people can argue with me all day long. There's a reason why Satoshi Nakamoto's proof of work is his consensus mechanism, because you have to actually put effort into creating Bitcoin. When you mint 100% of your tokens day one, and you sell 80% of them to VCs, it is centralized at best, and you're going to get fleeced in the end, right? So it is a security. You know, I have never seen a proof of stake based project that isn't a security. And Flux made sure that we were 100% proof of work. One, it helps with decentralization. Two, it allows regular people to participate in the ecosystem. Three, there's no VCs. There's no, you know, Wall Street money that comes into Flux. You can't do it. If somebody wanted to invest in Flux, they'd have to go buy Flux. That's the way you do it. So, you know, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings for listening to this, and everybody's super tribalistic with your bags. But if you're holding proof of stake, you're holding a centralized project. That's just the way it is. Yeah, totally agree. Which is fine, as long as you understand what you're getting into. Yes. Yeah, proof of stake is not decentralized. And if you don't care about centralization, then that's fine. But yeah, true decentralized proof of work is the way to go. What are you most excited about in the future of Flux? Proof of use of work, without a doubt. It changes. It basically changes the entire way cryptocurrency works. It changes the way we mine cryptocurrency. It changes the way we harness the power of blockchain. It changes the way that we think about compute. I mean, it really just flips everything up on its head. I mean, there's very, very few times in anyone's life cycle that they get to witness a paradigm shift. When the dot-com boom was started, I missed it by, you know, a couple years. But essentially, that was a paradigm shift. It moved. It was a disruptor in many different ways. Disrupted the phone companies. It disrupted the yellow. Hell, even the yellow page. Do you remember the yellow pages? I don't know. You're too young for that. But you used to get this big old thick book, and you'd have to go through there for your telephone. It disrupted so many industries that it was unreal. And that's exactly what proof of use of work is going to do. People are kind of talking about AI right now. You know, chat GPT-4 and all these other things. It's a glorified chatbot, right? Really is what it is. Does it change the industry? To a certain extent. But proof of use of work flips that entire industry upside down. And it takes away from the big mega box stores, the Googles, the AWSs, the Microsoft deserves. And it starts to put that power back in the hands of the people. So that's why I am super excited about proof of use of work. And it will, like I said, it will change the freaking game. Whether you have a little laptop sitting at your computer that you want to use, or whether you want to have, you know, GPUs on proof of use of work, you're going to be able to participate in the ecosystem. Okay. Awesome. I love this. This is getting me excited just for the future. Maybe along with that, this question is kind of related to that. But he asked, where do you see flux in the year 2030? Maybe not quite that far out. Let's say 2028. We'll say five years. If everything goes kind of according to plan, where do you kind of see this all going? Well, I mean, the way that I feel it. And by the way, this does not represent the project because the project is a community-based project, right? So it's open source, decentralized, it's Bitcoin. But my personal opinion and what I would like to see is let's take about, you know, three to four percent of the market share from some of these big players, allow all of the individuals who are participating on the network to provide their compute resources back to, you know, whether it's AI or rendering or deep fake detection or whatever it is, we'll be able to provide those compute resources back. So I see exponential growth in the demand for computer resources. And if you don't believe me, look at ChatGPT. They're spending, you know, $170,000, $200,000 a day in infrastructure. Now, if you start to be able to distribute that out to regular everyday people that are running their infrastructure, I have two GPUs chilling in my rig. Now, if I can, you know, provide those to ChatGPT for services or whatever it is, you've got BARD, ChatGPT, OpenAI has a product. Well, that's their ChatGPT. But there's another open, there's an open source based AI project as well. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head. Yeah, there are so many now, yeah. Yeah. So Lux has always been an infrastructure play. We don't give a ---- about the bright and shiny, the, you know, metaverse, the, you know, DeFi, fintech, AI, whatever it is, we don't care about that. We care about running the infrastructure that powers all those bright and shiny things. Okay. Awesome. Love it. M, Mountain Brother Productions wants to know, Will, would you sell the company to someone like AWS if they gave you an undeniable, unbeatable offer? I couldn't sell it if I wanted to. That's the amazing part of Flux. One of our mottos is don't be evil again. And why is that important? Don't be evil was what Google used, it was right under their search bar for a very long time and they've basically eradicated it from the code base. Why did they have that mantra? That mantra was specifically around, they saw people doing evil things in the space. Well, Google became what they created, right? What they were going against. Flux was designed 100% so that no individual control with the project. All I am is a community member. I helped co-found it, but I'm just a vocal community member. That's all I am. And there is no way to buy, and trust me, James, I'll tell you right now, we've been approached by some of the biggest players in the space with that exact question. And my answer every time was this, I can't sell it to you because I don't own it. It isn't mine to give away or to sell or to allow. It is for the people by the people. The only way you get exposure to Flux is to run infrastructure, run nodes, provide GPUs, whatever it is, or you go to the market and you buy the product. So we did it that way so that we would never be placed in a position where we had to say, oh, you know, billions and billions of dollars. I mean, you look at ChatGPT, Microsoft came in and, you know, what'd they get? It was billions, right, for them to take 50% ownership of the company. Can't do that with Flux. It is 100% for the people, and I don't control it. Nobody controls it. I just happen to be the most vocal community member there is. Okay, got it. Yeah, and I think you're totally right. A lot of those, you know, evil things that, you know, Google was wanting to get rid of and what you guys are wanting to get rid of, they are inherent. They come with centralization. Like, there's no way to not have them if you're centralized. So the only way to get rid of a lot of those evil things is decentralization. Like you said, selling to the highest bidder is something that, if you're centralized, it'd be really hard for you personally. If you were the owner and somebody came and said, hey, we'll give you $5 billion for Flux, it'd be like, I can't turn that down. But decentralized... I couldn't do it. And trust me, there's been a lot of zeros waved in our face many times, and there's nothing we can do with it because, you know, it was built this way to allow everybody that's participating in this network to be the benefactors of whatever the success of this is. And that's my mantra is don't be evil again. And we built it that way to make sure that there was never a temptation from anyone, especially the founders, the core. We're just, like I said, we're just community members building on the project. That's all we're doing. Okay, good. Let's see. If there are three instances that are given for each Flux VPS subscription, how does their carbon footprint compare to their competitors? So I guess the question is, how does the carbon footprint compare for if you run on Flux versus running on Amazon or Google? Well, we take great pride. We have a project that's called Flux Carbon where you can actually go to our dashboard and you can, you know, if somebody is from the Flux team is on, if you can link that up in the chat, that would be sweet. But you can actually see what your carbon footprint is versus other data centers. And by the way, Flux, because it's ran in multiple locations globally and not necessarily in a data center, you don't have the cooling bills. You don't have the infrastructure bills. You don't have the power draws. It's much more carbon friendly. And it honestly lets us also run infrastructure till death. So we're not constantly every two years upgrading our infrastructure. You can run a server that's six years old, as long as it meets the criteria for it to be on the network. So, yeah, I would say this. We're the very first proof of work project that has started to understand our carbon footprint, how we can maximize our environmental impact and keep that down low. And by the way, GPU mineable, ASIC resistant, you know, we have run till death compute, you know, proof of use to work. These are all major components for us to make sure we keep carbon friendly. All right, got it. Geek of all trades says, hey, nice mic, Dan. You got out from the dark side of the moon. Yes, yeah, I got the white one now. The last AMA I had, it crapped out on me and I had to retire it to the bin. But yeah, thanks, man. Yeah, no, you sound good today. Here's a good question from Ken, which Ken, welcome. Glad you could join us here today. I'm a Flux noob. How does one dip their toe into the Flux ecosystem? The product offering is kind of overwhelming. So where would you kind of recommend a complete new person to the ecosystem begin? You can start at runonflux.io. There's a lot of breakdowns. You'll learn about FluxLab and the nodes. You can learn about FluxCarbon. You can learn about, you know, FluxDrive, all these components. You can learn there. But one of the treasure troves to learn about Flux is our medium. And you can get to our medium. We do all of our blog posts directly through our medium. So you're going to learn everything about the product. And you can go all the way back from the day that Flux started. The very first article we published on medium is there. And if you go all the way back to the beginning and you work your way through, you'll see how much we've transformed. We actually came into the world born as Zelle Cash, which we have since basically changed the entire thing. We've worked the project and became Flux. Okay. So a lot of really good info. Follow us on Twitter, too. It's at runonflux. You can also follow me at DAK underscore Flux. You know, if you want the rantings of a crazy old man, that's great. I can tell from your shirt, there's probably some interesting things there. So yeah. Yes, yes. No, and this is a great thing, too. If you just kind of want to see the history, the journey that Flux has been on, I think it's fascinating. Even just kind of reading the headlines as you go through. It's a lot there. So a lot of a lot of projects have a medium, but they don't really use it very effectively. That's not Flux. There's a lot of you could spend a lot of time on the Flux medium for sure. Hell of a time sink. And if you want to speed it up, just subscribe to the medium app and it'll read it to you, which is super nice. You know what I mean? You can lay there while you're getting ready to doze off and you can listen to an article about Flux. There you go. When does primetime start? And maybe you can explain for us what is primetime? So primetime is basically us packaging everything up. We have done really no advertising on the Flux project or very minimal advertising. It's all community-based organic growth. But for primetime, we have to be able to get this product to the point where people really feel comfortable with it, that it's really approachable. So we built the infrastructure. Now we have to bring the masses into it as well. So how do we do that? We get in front of large players like yourself and evangelize the project. We really take some time around PR and marketing. We have a wonderful marketing team at Influx, which is the company that kind of runs the day-to-day operations for the co-founders. And great CMO, great staff, and some of the content articles that we're creating is to highlight how mature Flux really is. Yeah, that's probably what you just said there is probably what I've been most impressed with as I dig into the ecosystem. I'm used in crypto and blockchain to kind of seeing a lot of potential problems, like things that are just not quite ready to go yet. And so that's the reason people haven't switched from Web 2.0 to 3.0 in a lot of different areas is, well, this isn't quite ready. You can do this on it over here, but you can't do it here. And as I dig more into Flux, it's like, no, this is pretty polished. You can do it. Yeah, you can do it. Yeah, that's for sure. Here's a good question. And we're going to just do a couple more questions, then we'll do our giveaway, and then we will call it a day. Are you truly decentralized? People that run the nodes are using VPS services like AWS and Google Cloud. The VPS services are centralized. Does that mean that you are centralized? What would you say to that? Yeah, we have a percentage of the people that run VPS-based clients, but the majority of our infrastructure is ran by just normal everyday people with their home infrastructure. So Jetsons, Raspberry Pis, servers, computers. We have Seed and Codex C-O-T-X that create infrastructure. You can plug it in. I have one running under my desk that basically provides the infrastructure. We went from a very high amount of VPSs down to a very low amount of VPSs. You think of it this way. To be decentralized, you need to be able to bridge all those different platforms. So the more people that can participate in it, the higher it is in terms of decentralization. So we don't want to put any one particular vendor and have a lot of infrastructure there. We want that spread out across the board. And I'll tell you right now, there's higher rewards that are going to be coming specifically for home infrastructure. So we really are pushing that agenda moving forward. So the answer to your question is, we are as decentralized, even more so decentralized than what Bitcoin would be. Because I would argue that these large mining facilities who control a massive swath of the hash power, that's got an error of centralization to it. And we're definitely more decentralized than that. We're GPU-based only. We have many ways to participate in the network. It is the best of both worlds. Yeah. And decentralized doesn't mean that there aren't centralized things that you use in the process. But it means that there's not a single point. If Amazon went down, Flux would be fine. Because that's not where a majority of the nodes are being run. So Amazon doesn't have any say over what you guys are doing. If Amazon goes down, everything's still fine. So that's really what decentralized means. I can honestly tell you, I don't think there's one node that runs on AWS. OK. Well, there you go. So the majority, I'd say a good 75% of them are home hosted, or people that are hosting them at their work, or a data center, wherever they have them. OK. Very good. And then maybe we'll close with this question. Then we'll do our giveaway. Do you want to talk just a little bit about the WordPress partnership? That's a pretty big deal, actually, and what you're doing with WordPress. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that partnership, how it's going so far? Just tell us about WordPress a little bit. Yeah. I mean, WordPress is going great. We're still in beta. We haven't even ripped the wrapping paper off of it. We just literally gave a present to the community to test. We already got 236 projects deployed on WordPress on Flux. I think what I need to do is explain that 50% of the internet that you use every day is built on WordPress. So I mean, we're giving basically the ability to take that 50% of the internet, make it decentralized, make it affordable, make it scalable, make it redundant, and we're giving it back to the people that can deploy on it. So this opens up an awesome... People ask me all the time, could you see like a Wix where you build your infrastructure on top of it and deploy it on Flux? Absolutely. So anywhere that provides these services, Flux is going to be there. We're going to be right in line. And you're going to see if you deploy it here, it's going to cost you this. If you deploy it here, it's going to cost you this. And if you deploy it on Flux, it's going to be pennies on the dollar. Okay. So yeah, we're really excited with WordPress. I mean, one of the biggest, one of the most challenging statements about blockchain, and I've heard it multiple times, is people say blockchain needs its WordPress moment because WordPress propelled the internet to the next level. Well, they have it. They have it today. And that's WordPress on Flux. So let's get the web three, the next version of the internet propelled forward as well. Yeah, that'd be awesome. I would appreciate it. And my bag of Flux would appreciate it also. So it's a win-win situation for sure. All right. Last question for me, and then we'll do our giveaway, is what's the next big thing that you're excited about in Flux? What's coming up? What's on the roadmap coming up here soon that people can kind of be looking forward to? Well, this Saturday, our AMA, we're going to start to pull the curtain back around Proof of Use of Work. So I highly recommend anybody that really wants to see the future of mining to come on Saturday. It'll be myself and Alex, who is our chief architect on the Proof of Use of Work setup. So be there or be square. And you know what I mean? Like that just dated me like severely, but that's okay. Yeah, that's before my time. I'm not familiar with that saying. Yeah. I'm also super excited about Cypherpunk. Flux will be hosting its very first conference in Fort Lauderdale. You can check it out at cypherpunk2023.com. It brings together all of the players in the ecosystem, and we're going to make blockchain decentralized again. You know what I mean? Like that's the whole goal. We kept the tickets cheap. We kept the venue excellent, and we're looking forward to anyone. And you know what, James? I'm feeling generous today. So what I would like to do is when you do your giveaway, I'd like to give away two tickets to Cypherpunk. Oh, very cool. All expensive paid VIP tickets. So please go ahead and pick a couple winners, and we'll give them away. Or give them as a pair. So that way somebody can take the wife so they can enjoy Fort Lauderdale while you're over there meeting all the Cypherpunks. Yeah, or their husband. You know, maybe it's... No, my audience is like 95% men in the technology stuff. So okay, awesome. Yeah, let's go ahead. We'll do our first giveaway. So type F.L.U.X. If you've said F.L.U.X. in the comments any time during this AMA, you'll be entered here. This is going to be for 500 F.L.U.X. tokens. This is giveaway number one. Then we'll also give away two tickets to Cypherpunk. Wait, Cypherpunk or Cyberpunk? Cypher. So Cypherpunk is who really laid the groundwork for all that we do in blockchain. So, you know, really maximalist Cypherpunks. They don't like, you know, government interjection. They love cryptography. They're all that kind of stuff. So Cypherpunk manifesto is what created it all. Okay, very cool. Yeah, I might... I'm a gamer a bit. So Cypherpunk might slip out. Ah, it's close, isn't it? Close enough. Yeah, we'll let it fly. All right, we'll give you another three seconds. We got 52 people entered. Type F.L.U.X. We'll do this for 500 F.L.U.X. tokens. Let's get it up to 60. Oh, there we go. Too late, too late. Hey, I'm in there too. What if I win? That would seem rigged. But it's obviously not rigged. Completely random. Winner is Roberts5eradu. So congratulations, brother. You are the winner. I'll go ahead and post my... If you have Discord, you can message me on there. We'll get you your 500 F.L.U.X. tokens. Then we're going to do a second giveaway. So let me see here. Streamyard giveaway. This is for two tickets to Cypherpunk. Let's do hashtag Cypher. Okay, that's what we're going to do. Hashtag Cypher. All right, that's going to be for this giveaway. So we got zero entries. We'll give you maybe like 30 seconds. If that's enough for everybody. So go ahead. Hashtag Cypher in the comment. One entry. Right now, if we do it, FunnyTurro is going to win because he's the only one who's put it in there. There you go. Got some others coming. You got to spell it right. It's not spelled right. It might be case sensitive. I'm not sure. So make sure you fix that. Yeah, capital C. Capital C. Awesome. 34 entries. We'll give you another 20 seconds. This is, I love doing this. This is fun. This is like. Yeah, this is a good time. I didn't even know you could do this with Streamyard. We're having to do this on our AMA. Oh yeah, it makes it a lot of fun. We'll give you another 10 seconds. By the way, if you're watching this as a replay, I should mention this. You cannot win. I'm so sorry. This is live. We're doing this live. Inevitably, we always get people watching the replay, hoping that they win something. And so sorry, you got to show up live. That's where the giveaways are. All right, we got 46. We're going to go ahead and do it. This is for two tickets to Cypherpunk. Let's see what we got. Harry. Freddie Knight. Congratulations. All right, Freddie, reach out to me on Twitter at VAK underscore Flux, and we'll get you taken care of, man. And we look forward to seeing you in Fort Lauderdale. Awesome. Well, hey, this has been super informative to me. Love to have you back at some point, just to kind of catch up on things and see how things have been going. Audience, you guys have been amazing. I appreciate you showing up. Again, the only reason I can do things like this, if I had no audience, I know, you know, Daniel, me, we've been having a good time together, but the audience makes it so that I'm able to do things like this. So appreciate you guys. Please hit like on your way out. Daniel, thank you for taking the time out of your day to come talk with us. And thanks for building something in the space that's helping moving the space forward. So really appreciate it. Thanks again, James. I really appreciate it. Awesome. And yeah, if there's anything I can do to help the Flux community, let me know. And happy to do what I can. So all right. Thank you. All right. Thanks, everybody. Hope you all have a great rest.