Daml 101: What happened in September 2008 [2022]

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so names such as Daml and Canton can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   many of us will remember september 2008 as the most memorable month in recent history that month alone rocked the entire world hi this is steve sale from digital asset many of us will remember september 2008 as the most memorable month in recent history that month alone rocked the entire world when metallica dropped its ninth album death magnetic all right i'm joking something else happened in september 2008 and maybe metallica's album and the songs in it sort of predicted what was

2. 0:40

   coming in a matter of days take a look not good let me try to give you a very compressed version of what happened on september 2008 other than metallica's album on september 15 2008 lehman brothers filed for bankruptcy and this was a big deal lehman brothers have been around for 158 years they were worth 700 billion dollars and they have invested in the earlier years in coffee to retail to aviation and then into real estate and their bankruptcy

3. 1:26

   led to one of the saddest biggest and traumatic stock market crashes in recent history now what led to the demise can be traced back to something called a sub prime mortgage a subprime mortgage is a home loan a mortgage that is given to a borrower with very unfavorable terms the reason why they are unfavorable is because their interest rates are really high and the interests are really high because these borrowers are risky and what made people really mad was that

4. 2:05

   they believe that the banks the retail banks the issues and gives these loans knew that so you have these borrowers who will probably default on their loan which means they can't pay mortgage anymore and that would have been fine but these loans were packaged by the retail banks and sold to groups like lehman brothers the investment banks because the idea is that with a wide big fat portfolio of these loans the mortgages paid by these borrowers

5. 2:44

   would generate revenue well you can make a guess what happened four months after the stock market crash something very interesting happened in january of 2009 a person or a group of people by the name of satoshi nakamoto initiated a wire transfer of bitcoin to another party specifically to the late computer scientist hal finney this was a big deal because it marked the birth of bitcoin it proved that it works that that digital money could be transferred

6. 3:23

   from party a to party b without going through a middleman without going through a central bank now the stock market crash of september 2008 and the birth of bitcoin are forever linked together and for good reasons but it's important to remember that bitcoin and blockchain has existed prior to the crash of the stock market many people talk about the origins of bitcoin by pointing to the stock market

7. 3:55

   crash in 2008 when in reality the concept of blockchain and digital money have existed prior to the crash now could the concept of a cryptocurrency save or prevented the stock market crash maybe at a time of taping we have not seen an implementation of cryptocurrency in the in the in the real estate lending space so the debate is still out there but i would say that they are related and then let's just call them a

8. 4:28

   bit coincidence i like that so just to be very clear we have this technology called blockchain which gave birth to cryptocurrency and what this video series is all about is a sibling of cryptocurrency called smart contracts all right i know i'm going really fast let me slow down let's go back to blockchain and make sure we understand what that's all about there are many great videos by the way

9. 5:01

   on youtube on ted talks that talk about blockchain and explain them in comprehensive manner but this is the 60 second version some databases would store data in a very excel like format where there's rows and columns so if i want to change a particular cell i would identify the data find where it is and then i go into the cell and i see hey steve so let me change it to stephen enter other databases would store things in a

10. 5:31

    key value system where you have to look up the key say steve i'm sorry name and then you find the value steve and you go and you change it to stephen in blockchain you do not do that in blockchain you have to preserve the old data so if there's new data you preserve the old one and you add a new one thereby creating a chain now what happens when you go back and fudge your data suppose i drove a toyota five years

11. 5:54

    ago and i want people to believe that i dropped a ferrari so i would go in and change the ferrari guess what there's not only one copy of the rackets which we call the ledger there are multiple ledges involved so if i were to change my record to ferrari everybody else is saying that i drive it toyota that's it that's blockchain in toyota's are perfectly fine cars now when you put it all together you have a digital record-keeping system of records of transactions

12. 6:24

    that are immutable cannot be changed and is distributed and decentralized and importantly duplicated now all this together is called the ledger the ledger is the record-keeping system that is blockchain so this unique way of storing data is touching all kinds of industries from banking and finance to currency healthcare records of property supply chain folding and all that is made possible by that

13. 6:57

    sibling of cryptocurrency called smart contracts we'll look at that mix see you next time three months after september 2008 9 10 11. four months four months after the stock market crash