Exploring the Potential of AI Domain Names: Expert Advice and Insights | Saw.com

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today on the Uncomfortable Podcast with Jeffrey Gabriel. If you're interested in building your business on or investing in aai domain name, then we've got the episode for you. Join us as we sit down with Vincent Cate, the head of Anguilla Domain Registry, akaai domain registry. He will share his story, delve into some registry statistics and address key questions that potential registrants like yourself may have before committing to aai domain name. Getting to know Vincent he has a bachelor's and an MBA in computer science and he is very interested in financial cryptography, cryptocurrencies, as well as his extremely forward thinking and entrepreneurial. I really can't think of a better person to represent this extension and I think you will feel the same way as well after listening to him. And, as always, thanks for listening and if you have any questions, comments or would like to be a guest on the show, you can always email us at buzz at sawcom. That's buzz at sawcom. Have a good day. Today on the Uncomfortable podcast, we have Vincent Cate from theai registry joining us and to give him a little bit of a background before we begin, he is a software developer based in Anguilla. He graduated from the University of California, berkeley, and has a master's in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

Speaker 1: 1:36

You had an Atari hardware business in the 1980s. In 1994, moved to Anguilla to pursue many business opportunities like establishing an internet service provider. Some people call it an ISP, offshore services, limited real estateai, goldai, which pays cash for gold. You launch publicdatacomai where people can look up people's criminal records online. You're also one of the founders of the Financial Cryptography Conference. You're a published author, blogger and is also a model plane slash boat enthusiast. And, as I said before, you manage the top level domain extensionai and have done so since 1994. And I'm guessing that nothing has really changed since 1994 in the last 30 years with theai extension. So welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Speaker 2: 2:28

Doing well, so it's pronounced anguilla. It rhymes with a vanilla Anguilla. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Okay, I'm just going to say it's like I did your last name on the first thing.

Speaker 2: 2:41

Father of four boys. You've got to mention that too.

Speaker 1: 2:44

What are their ages?

Speaker 2: 2:45

Geez 15, 17, 20, and 22.

Speaker 1: 2:52

So I didn't really spend a lot. I spent more time looking into your background and things like that. And Anguilla, is that also an English territory? Yeah, or is it its own Okay.

Speaker 2: 3:02

So if we ever declared our independence, they would respect it, but we haven't tried that yet.

Speaker 1: 3:08

Okay, so it's similar to Cayman, where it's an English. You still have to answer on certain things back to the crown, but most of it, you're on your own. So, with children getting to the college age, are you looking at sending them to England for college or United States? What are you thinking about?

Speaker 2: 3:27

It's not clear yet, they may not go to college. I'm not convinced that college is worth all the time and money really. They're helping me out with this job and learning stuff on the job and that might be a better thing, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 3:46

We'll see, I always felt that, and my dad said the same thing to me. And getting older and looking at it is, I always feel, like the four years that you would go to college. Obviously it gives you experience, a lot of life experience, especially if you're living there and meeting people from all over the place and it's usually your first time living alone and obviously your parents aren't there, and I think that is more important than the education itself. And then after you graduate, obviously you learn a little bit of things, but I think your college is what opens your first or second door and then it's really obviously up to the student or now the worker be to do something with it, and after that I don't think it matters.

Speaker 1: 4:28

I find it bizarre when I speak to people in the business world who say I can't go any higher at the company on that unless I go get a master's or I get a college degree, and it's like, really Does it matter at this point? And I also one of the best developers that worked with me at Uniregistry was a self-taught developer. He never went to school for computer science and he built the Uniregistry brokerage, all of the tech behind it, and so he had every qualification, or he could probably teach the class better than most professors could. So it's definitely, yeah, I agree. So, anyways, I'm sure we could talk about that for days. So how about you tell us a little bit about your story that I kind of went over, and how you got yourself involved with the Don AI registry?

Speaker 2: 5:18

So I was interested in cryptography and financial cryptography type things way back. I was on the cypherpunks mailing list in the early 90s and so I wanted to write software to do some sort of internet payment system and the US had these ITAR international traffic and arms regulations which made it like my brain was their property and you weren't allowed to export outside the United States and that my brain was their territory. So even if I was outside the United States and I wrote software, it was considered exporting it if I wrote the software in Angola, and so I got rid of my US citizenship. That was early on, and when I first came here I needed some way to make money and the idea was to do an email business, not full internet, just email. But I still wanted a domain name for the email address and so when I tried to register a dot AI name, john Postal was the god of the internet back then said that nobody is managing it and did I want to run it? And I said sure, and so I actually ran it.

Speaker 2: 6:38

At the beginning there was no charge and only young Williams could register names. And then at some point, like a year or two later, I felt like this shouldn't be in my name, so I put it in the government's name. I made them the admin contact and then somebody came to the government and said that they should run it. And the government gave it to this company in Taiwan which thought that they could sell a lot of names, because I in Chinese means love. And then they didn't sell any names, didn't give the government hardly any money and disappeared. Their company was struck from the books in Taiwan. They never answered emails or phone calls or anything, and so we got it back and then I ran it after that. Ed from Infermoney.

Speaker 1: 7:27

Sorry to interrupt you. What year was that that occurred? So you moved to Inguila in 1994. And then you started working with theai or took over theai registry for a period of time and then you lost it. So when did you lose it?

Speaker 2: 7:42

I don't really remember the numbers, but say three or four years in or something, and then it was gone for maybe five years and then we got it back and then I started selling it to anybody for money, selling the domains for anybody, and essentially it's been growing. Back then when we started it was around $5,000 a month, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a month and I used to print out the list of names in a page or two and give it to the government with a check and it's just kept growing and growing and growing. Since then and the way I would say it is, it's about like 10 dubblings. We've gone from like three and a half thousand a month to three and a half million a month, so there's like a factor of 1,000. And so it's you know, two tenth is 1,024.

Speaker 2: 8:37

So we've had like 10 dubblings in like 15 years, something like that. Right, so it's been growing, you know, for a long time. But we had sort of two of those dubblings in the last two years when chat GPT came out. It just shot up. So yeah, it's just been doing well.

Speaker 1: 9:03

So let me ask you, when it came to losing it and then gaining it back and then working with the government in general, obviously they knew, when you were writing them checks, that there is a value to this and, being an island nation with not a huge budget, that even if you were giving a half a million dollars a year or $100,000 a year to their cause and having you know 4,000, 5,000 names, what did that mean to them? Like did they start to notice wait a minute, this is a real good moneymaker. Like when did that happen? You know when they're saying this is a big deal.

Speaker 2: 9:36

It's kind of like the you know the frog and the boiling water. If it just keeps going up a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Nobody ever gets too excited because, you know, each month the check is just a little bit bigger than last month, right and so you know, and it didn't really.

Speaker 2: 9:53

After chat, gpt came out. Then some other people like Forbes or whatnot you know people are Bloomberg came and interviewed me and put some articles out and then those articles got shared around Facebook in Anguilla and then everybody in Anguilla knew right, and that's just like last year.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Before that it was yeah, I was going to ask are you finished as of last?

Speaker 2: 10:15

year. There's people that now know who I am right and know what you know, know that AI is big and stuff, but before then people didn't really talk about it. People didn't know really who I was, that I was doing this, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:30

So let me ask you this, so the people back in home listening. I'll give a little background here. So I worked at Uniregistry. Uniregistry was based in the Cayman Islands and when I was working there we provided a registrar registry services where and we had our own GLGTLDs as well, and one of the things that we did in Cayman was manageky, and while I was there, one of the things that happened was just like you said was it went from being a free extension for locals to one that is sold anywhere or at whatever registrar will list itky, and then they started charging $20 a year or whatever. It is an affordable amount of money, but in our it's called the Cayman Compass in our local newspaper, people who had very ruffled feathers and they kind of positioned it like Frank Shilling, who's the owner of Uniregistry, has taken the internet away from the internet, and then people were competing that it isn't a local. You know, anguillian, who's running it. Now, I know you have your citizenship, but are there people now saying why aren't, why aren't the Islanders running this?

Speaker 2: 11:46

So I'm training foreign willians to run this business, you know, and my four sons, my four, sons are all born here. And it's so it doesn't get. You can't do better than that, right? You know that I'm training locals to run it, so I don't. I don't get too much flack and I'm really pretty local after 30 years, I mean.

Speaker 1: 12:11

Oh, you certainly earned your stripes and you've done a lot for the island. I mean, you know, looking at the numbers, I read in one of the articles about dot AI. Let me see here Cassandra Cassidy. At Morning Brew, she published an article that said that your revenue as of 2022 was 8.3 million, but as of 2023, you're expecting 30 million. Is that something that is of reality?

Speaker 2: 12:44

or is she managing?

Speaker 1: 12:46

those names out of the air and then well, that's pretty insane lifting money. So I'm sure you've gotten the attention of the island government now as, being a pretty big moneymaker and doing some additional research, their entire budget is just a little bit north of 100 million for the government.

Speaker 2: 13:05

Right, yeah, I think that it's 400 million EC, and then there's 2.688 EC to a dollar, so 100 something yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Yeah, 125 million. So you're now making up a third of the income of the government of the island.

Speaker 2: 13:25

Roughly, yeah, and we're likely to double. Yeah, almost certain we will double in about a year, because we do these two-year registrations. Yeah, and we shot up a year ago. In another year the renewals will shoot up Right.

Speaker 1: 13:44

Yeah, it's like every other year, almost like pistons coming back and down.

Speaker 2: 13:47

So you know we're like January was 3.4 million US that we gave to the government, but almost all of that is new registrations, which it has, you know, for the last year and whatever it's, almost all the money is new registrations. So once the renewals kick in, we'll be over 6 million a month and wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:07

So you're going to have to print those lists of names on both sides of the paper.

Speaker 2: 14:09

Yeah, so at some point we went to a PDF, An Excel To a PDF file and an Excel spreadsheet, and then it got to the point where we couldn't make a PDF. That was the size of all the names we had to do each month. We thought it was. It said it ran out of memory and so we got a, you know, a computer with bigger memory, but it wasn't really the memory. It's like the. That process just couldn't have that much memory or something Right, and so we couldn't we had. We ended up just doing Excel for the list of names.

Speaker 1: 14:45

Yeah, you think Now, speaking of the government some more one of the things in Cayman was they didn't want outsiders to be able to register the names, with the idea that if a local comedian wanted to open a business in Cayman, they wanted them to get a good name and they didn't want, you know, investors and people to own them, so they'd have to pay thousands for a name. What's the attitude of, like, a local who wants to get jet skiai or something like that to help their local businesses? Are there some that are held back for them, like registry reserved, or is it just kind?

Speaker 2: 15:22

of like They've outlawed they've outlawed jet skis in Anguilla, so that one's not a problem.

Speaker 1: 15:28

Bad example, but it's you know like you know. Vacation I have not.

Speaker 2: 15:34

So the normal situation, really, because we had years where Anguillians could register them for free and then we had years where they weren't that famous. There's a lot of Anguillians that registered names you know early on, like you know shopai or newsai or weatherai you know different things right Years later have become worth huge amounts of money. Yeah Right, so people are selling you know Bingai or campusai or you know something for crazy money.

Speaker 1: 16:03

We just sold campusai. That's funny you mentioned that. It's funny you mentioned campusai because I think we just as a brokerage, we just sold that.

Speaker 2: 16:12

Oh, you were involved with that. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:13

I think so.

Speaker 2: 16:15

Okay, well, I know the, I know the Anguillian that had it for years.

Speaker 1: 16:18

Okay, small world.

Speaker 2: 16:20

Yeah, so it's more. There's many, many people here who are getting this incredible bonus of, you know, selling some name for tens of thousands of dollars, which many cases they weren't really using, right, yeah, so most of the people are pretty happy with this situation, honestly.

Speaker 1: 16:40

Okay, because, like when I when I again I'm making the analogy back to Cayman is when I, when I lived there, there was the generation of people, so there was a. There was a woman named Jess that I worked with and she was born and raised in Cayman and she was telling me that there's a. There was a restaurant and bar that was a huge piece of land called the Palms and it sold when I was there for like 40 million bucks or $45 million, and she said that in the 1980s that her dad could have bought it for like 25,000. Because in the 80s the locals didn't think land on the beach was valuable, because you can't grow anything on it and it just gets messed up when the storms come. So they always. And that's why that when you go to Cayman you see graveyards on the beach, because that was the low value land, right. So no one was wanting to buy the Palms for like 25,000 bucks 30 grand with the liquor license and everything.

Speaker 1: 17:35

I had a pool like the works, and then it sells for this and I and, and there was other pieces of land, like when I was there, that a lot of the older comedians were then selling out and getting out, but then eventually you know they're the locals are getting priced out of. You know all of the beachfront properties. So I'm sure, like right now it's good times, but I'm sure that do you think that there will be people that are going to have an issue with it? Or the amount of money that you're creating for the government on a yearly, monthly basis is probably providing some really amazing services. You guys never would have had, right.

Speaker 2: 18:09

So they've been able to get rid of property tax on residential buildings. Right so your house, you don't have to pay property tax anymore. That helps a huge portion of the population and yeah if I'm right, and it doubles again in the next year and keeps growing after that they will probably. The wages tax is tiny compared to what we're going to increase in AI this year, right, the more websites that are using dot AI, the more people see it, the more people think of using it, right, so it's sort of the bigger it gets the bigger it adverts.

Speaker 2: 18:44

It sort of advertises itself.

Speaker 1: 18:47

And yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 18:53

So yeah, so I'm not planning to do any, any advertising, and we're growing at a really fast pace without any advertising. So doing what we're doing is seems to be working right.

Speaker 1: 19:08

It sure is.

Speaker 2: 19:09

Absolutely. And the, the advertising that you know I was driving around California and you could see signs on the side of the buildings with you know I forget which ones they were, but you know something dot AI, right. So there's a freeway, with, you know, 10,000 cars per hour going past this sign, which is something dot AI, and you just know all these people are thinking about. You know, hey, we could use a dot AI name, right, yeah. And so the the advertising that's just organically happening because people are using it is beyond what we could seriously do.

Speaker 1: 19:42

Yeah, and and I agree with that and I think with a lot of extensions, when people who are asking me what, what should we buy for our business, and they can choose between you know you look at a smaller company and then they're talking about registering like kind of an obscure GTLD, I always say to them, like you have to make sure that you see it in the wild yourself and I think if you're seeing that happening in California and you're seeing that happening in other places, then the general public are getting used to it.

Speaker 1: 20:12

But if it's a very obscure extension, I think a lot of normal, especially if you're a B2C company, are going to put dot com on the end of it and you better register the dot com as well to protect you know your brand and that's, you know, a big part of that discussion. So I have some other questions about the dot AI extension and for people in general who are investing in it whether it's their business or to build a business on it or as a domain investor is why do you have two year registrations anyway?

Speaker 2: 20:45

So how did that come about? It's a way to bring the money forward so we get it sooner without increasing the price.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Right, okay, so we get more money up front.

Speaker 2: 20:55

Thank you, but it's not changing the yearly rate. So if we were to like change it back, it like would drop the amount of money we're getting this year substantially, right, okay?

Speaker 1: 21:14

But next year you're relying on, kind of like, if the growth is next year, you're going to get your two years then. So then the year after you're getting the next two years and go, go, go, go, go. Okay, so you believe that charging two years up front is making it so you can still provide a more reasonable price for your registrants and causing no price rate increases.

Speaker 2: 21:34

It's a way of getting more money for the government today without changing the yearly price. Right Got it, and so yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:43

Understood. Another question that I was actually thinking about is why is it that you only auction off names once a month when they expire?

Speaker 2: 21:56

It's easier for the accounting to have. You know all these names are done, you have a certain amount of time to pay them, the payments are done and we can record what happened, right? You know these names sold, these names were paid for, these names weren't paid for, nobody bid on these names, and so we have a chunk of accounting that we can file away, right? If it was every day, it would be just too much record keeping.

Speaker 2: 22:23

You just don't have a bandwidth, it's easier to just do once a month Plus for people. You know, I don't want people to have to come every day. I mean, these people have other things they need to do besides bid on AI domains, right. We have sort of like 20 people that do you know 80% of the buying right, and I think it's better if those 20 people just come here. They essentially do all the bidding on the last day, right, and so essentially there's one day a month where you know there's bidding going on. I think it's better than to try to make them have to come every day or something silly. That just you know.

Speaker 1: 23:01

Yeah, All right, and then that leads me to the next question is why do you only do it in one place, and is there an opportunity to offer it on other registrations?

Speaker 2: 23:12

It is on other places, so you can. It is on other websites. I think it's Dynadot has it on theirs and other people have been connecting in as well, so there will be more places. It's a lot we have. There's something in the FAQ you know. You can send email here if you want to connect your website to our auction.

Speaker 1: 23:38

Yeah, Okay, all right, so I'll link to that in the description. I'm sorry, I just understood that. Let me see. I have some other questions for you that I was thinking about that I wrote down here. Oh, here's one. That, as a domain broker, is kind of a strange one. For me is at one period of time you did have the updated date and the creation date and the who is record, but then that mysteriously vanished one day and I'm like is there something wrong with this who is? So I just started typing in other names and it was gone from them as well. So why did?

Speaker 2: 24:12

why did that vanish? So there's a couple of things. One is you know, if people stop paying, we want to auction off the name, right. But if it's getting down to the end and everybody can see that it's about to expire, then people contact them and buy it from that person, right? And then we don't get the money.

Speaker 1: 24:37

I got it, so you're doing it as a. You've realized the amount of revenue you're getting from these names and the expiry and you, OK, I can see that that makes sense. And then, as for the who is on your website, if I go to contact a registrant it gives me an error. You know that there is an issue with the who is through your own who is.

Speaker 2: 24:59

It's usually working. Is it not working at this moment?

Speaker 1: 25:04

No AI names are actually actually relatively challenging at times to be able to contact the registrant because for some reason some registrars redact everything and don't let you know who is worse.

Speaker 2: 25:17

The, the command command line and the web page are working.

Speaker 1: 25:21

What do you think? I've been to it quite a few times and get an error. When we put in the CAPTCHA letters and hit submit, it says is an error. It's been like that for months.

Speaker 1: 25:33

Yeah, I'll show you after I mean other brokers it was a complaint, and another brokerage was complaining to me about it as well and then other registrars. I don't know if you feel like it's up to them to decide to do this, but you also they. They redact all of the information of a registrant and don't let you contact them. Is that something that is permitted or is that more of a registrar decision? This is something I don't understand.

Speaker 2: 25:57

The registrars can do this and some of them claim that for their you know privacy laws that it's better for them to do that and we don't fight it too much yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:11

I got it. I mean, what ends up happening is the registrars that do that. Usually when we contact them, they'll say something like you know you will, will contact our client but you need to pay us. You know, it's usually a pretty extreme commission to get them to do the work. So it's like they're kind of, you know, wedging themselves in there and then and then charging, not just like, okay, well, you know, we'll split it with you. It's not like that. It's usually a lot more than what even we're charging our client, it's usually a pretty extreme amount to do the work. So you know and I think this is this is kind of potentially the direction in the name of security and privacy that you know this is just kind of going is people like me are taking away opportunities from registrars or from names expiring and they don't want that to happen, you know.

Speaker 2: 27:03

So people can put on their webpage how to contact them. So if they want to bypass everybody else and let people come straight to them, they can.

Speaker 1: 27:11

They sure can, but the who is should be. I think, whether it's protected or not, people should be able to contact someone through the who is right.

Speaker 2: 27:22

Yeah, so I I kind of like the way it used to be and that it was sort of a public registry and you could see who owned everything and that sort of. There's some niceness to that. But when the EU came out with their new rules about privacy, they the people that do the software that we're using, the COCA software believed that just giving out somebody's you know phone number from the registry or their email address from the registry was probably a violation of the new EU rules right, and so then they had to make all these changes and it it's sort of annoying.

Speaker 2: 28:05

I wish. I wish we could just say look, you give us information which we're allowed to make public, and we make it public, and you know, that's it. And but then again, like you say, a lot of the registers are now hiding the information anyway. So it's, it's being hidden by them, and then we're hiding it and it's like you can tell that a name is registered, but beyond that, well, I think, I think the thing is is that like, maybe a registrar doesn't need to give you an email address and they don't need to allow you to write free form messages.

Speaker 1: 28:37

but you know, go daddy offers like a drop down, so you would just say, hey, here's my email address and here's a list of options, choose one and they'll send a message to the registrant saying Jeff Gabriel wants information on your domain and if you want to respond, that's fine and it and it has a capture. So it's like you know. So it it makes it. So some guy doesn't write a script and hammers everybody at go daddy 30 million.

Speaker 2: 29:04

That's. The other problem is that spam has gotten worse and worse and worse over the years right. You know, 20 years ago you didn't get tons of emails where people trying to buy your domain name. And now you do and it's. It got to where it's annoying enough that, like, not that a lot of people don't want to list their email address on their domain name anymore.

Speaker 1: 29:21

Yeah, absolutely All right. Well, you know we can talk about this. For days I was reading on your website that it is let's see. I believe it's section 13. I didn't write this part down, but it talked about the UDRP and how and how people can use you use UDRP. So in cases where someone wants to take a domain from someone else and Gwila uses the UDRP to file a UDRP challenge, you must use one of the. I can't approve dispute resolution service providers. But then at the bottom of the, there's a very long and boring paragraph writing about all of that, so I'm not going to read it, but at the very bottom there's a sentence that says as of January 1st 2023, we do not accept UDRP challenges for domains where there's only one, two or three characters before the AI, unless the Complaintin already has domains with those same few characters in at least three of the following five TLDs comukdejpfr. So a company you've been out of the United States for a long time, but a company like CVS. Do you know who they are?

Speaker 2: 30:40

No, so the problem is that a trademark has to be unique and special in some way. Yep, and two characters and probably three characters are just if there's not some funny font or there's not some special colors or something, and it's supposed to be for a particular domain, right? And if what you have is a domain name, it's not for a particular field, it's not a particular font, it's not particular colors, and so I don't believe that three characters there's. You can have many different people that have trademarks on the same three letters.

Speaker 2: 31:17

Oh yeah absolutely Use different designs and they use different countries and they use different whatever it's. Even in the same country, you could have many with the same three letters. So to me it's I don't want people to be coming to us with some little trademark they filed in some little country and getting this domain name that is really a big and attached to some other big company, right? Yep, yeah, so that was how. That's how we decided to do it.

Speaker 1: 31:44

Okay, so a company like, let's say, bmw owns the Comm, but they don't have the G.

Speaker 2: 31:49

They're going to have it too bad. They're going to have it in three of those domains, right? They already have three of those.

Speaker 1: 31:54

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:55

And so they're the one that should get the Anguilla one.

Speaker 1: 31:58

What about, like QQ? You know who they are right? No, I don't. Qq is the biggest messaging app in China.

Speaker 2: 32:07

Okay, okay, I guess I have seen users, you know.

Speaker 1: 32:10

So I'm saying that they don't have any of those names in the extension, but it doesn't make sense for them to but AI. It might make sense for them and if someone puts a messaging app on the AI, I would think they have a right to come after it because it is an international product or service. But you know it. I mean there. I could sit here and dig for days and find examples, but you also make good, a good argument on the flip side, where it's protecting domain owners from. You know these situations, so I get it now. The other question is from my understanding.

Speaker 2: 32:45

But if you, if qq wants to get the dot AI, they just get you know a couple of other ones first, and then they come to us and they're everything's fine, right and and so it's not. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 32:59

So why dot UK instead of co UK, where co UK is a little more widely known? I?

Speaker 2: 33:07

Don't know. The truth is, it's hardly ever a problem that people don't come to us with just three. They send us a list of 50. Yeah right, and it's like, okay, you get it, you know, it's fine.

Speaker 1: 33:19

Okay.

Speaker 2: 33:20

Oh it's, it's not, it's not been close right.

Speaker 1: 33:23

They either have it or they just don't yeah, and then and then the other question is is that and I correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not, you know, I haven't read all the ICAN rules and UDRP rules and things like that, but to my understanding it is is that if I wanted to file a UDRP, I I file it, you know, with WIPO, and then that it begins where I'm saying that somebody is squatting on my name, and for the following reasons or I pay a lawyer to do that, and usually the registry isn't involved in that in the slightest.

Speaker 2: 33:59

So the first, if that rule altogether and just no, the first email that WIPO sends is the ask does this, does UDRP, apply to this domain, right? Oh, okay, it's the first question they ask, is not that one?

Speaker 1: 34:18

You can say no, it doesn't, that's the end of it, okay. That's. That's, that's life. Okay, well, that answers that. And then another one. That's really the similar it's like. A similar situation is you have the grounds for suspending or revoking a domain and it talks about things like anything that would be illegal in Anguilla porn.

Speaker 1: 34:39

That would be, illegal and go out and Slap me in the head violin, copyrights, hate speech, fun stuff like that. And then Looking at different things. Because in in the Cayman Islands, for example, you know you weren't allowed to drink past past 12 o'clock at night on a Saturday and you couldn't offend the rights of a woman you know and say mean things to her or talk negatively of you know God himself or things like that. So I looked into some Of the laws and in, in, in, in in your country it says any person who uses any decent, abusive, blasphemous, insulting, threatening language in any place to the annoyance of the public Is against the law. So if someone has like Bible burning, dot AI and that wouldn't be okay In your country, would would you? Would that lead to grounds for removal of the name, or is it kind of like a Case by we have?

Speaker 2: 35:36

not had. We have not had this test case come up and I'm not sure what would happen next.

Speaker 1: 35:46

Yeah, I think, like like, for example, I understood that the story of I can was I can was only created because the US government Used to manage calm and what happened was is in different treaties and situations.

Speaker 2: 35:58

It wasn't the US government. Is John Postal there was one guy and he died. He died. Something had to happen, right? Okay, they replaced him with this huge or institution.

Speaker 1: 36:09

I Was told. I was told that people were including, like in different treaties and things like that, limitations on Com and different parts of the internet and countries that didn't like different things, and then people are trying to limit it. So they try to create a nonprofit organization that protected everyone from you know different views. So, like in a Muslim country, they might block all the adult related content and that might be illegal there, you know, and and maybe is fire our firearms illegal In in your, in your country.

Speaker 2: 36:43

You have to get in they work, you have to get a permit, which is hard to get yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:47

Yeah yeah, and there's no reason to have one there in reality. But you know, I think like so you haven't had a situation where you've taken a name where it's kind of like more of a social issue or something like that.

Speaker 2: 36:59

I wouldn't say we've had anything that was Particularly like that. Like you know, bible burning, offending locals with that kind of thing no.

Speaker 1: 37:08

Okay, I got it and I've been looking around in the background there and in my amazing office as well, which is, if I turn, the camera would probably look very similar to yours. Is this where Dot AI happens? Yeah, is this the? Is the head, the world headquarters of, of AI.

Speaker 2: 37:31

That machine right there is the main one.

Speaker 1: 37:35

Which one? The little, the little black? Yeah, oh, wow, that's it. Everything is on there. What do you have for a backup in case?

Speaker 2: 37:45

you guys get hit by a hurricane there's lots of other backups, and then there's off-site backups, and there's you know there's there's backups on top of backups, there's backups into safes, there's backups offline backups, off-site backup. You know all this stuff, do you? When?

Speaker 1: 38:03

when there is a large hurricane coming, do you are? Is it up to you like you need to leave the island to be prepared, or you kind of wait it out and hope?

Speaker 2: 38:12

No, they happens. So the worst that happens is that there's a period where you can't register new names, right, but the names keep working. And then what happens is all the companies you know name cheap or whatever. They save up the names that people wanted to register and as soon as we're back, they're all registered, right, Okay. So it's kind of it's weird, but we could be offline for a few days and it's not the end of the world, but it's really only happened once.

Speaker 2: 38:40

And and it was only for a couple of days, so but we're getting in. We're building a new office right now. You know they're putting up blocks and stuff and this will be extremely hurricane resistant and have oodles of power and, you know, backup star links and all that kind of stuff. So we should be pretty well okay in the next hurricane.

Speaker 1: 39:10

And tell me about the hurricane and Tell me more about financial cryptography. I'm actually, you know, I obviously I got it. I got into crypto in, like, I'd say, 2013, so obviously I was 20 years late from when you got him and you're talking about the cypher punks and the history of it. Can you give me like a brief From someone like you who's been involved everyone I've talked to got in on the similar time or a couple years before me, but when and tell me what it is like back then? I've never met anyone like you before okay.

Speaker 2: 39:42

So once you understand public key, you know cryptography and digital signatures in particular, you realize that there's gonna be ways for computers to process payments, because somebody can now use a digital signature to authorize something and then a computer can process it and the computers are gonna Be able to process it much faster. There's gonna be less chance of you know, there's no chance of fraud on a digital signature, whereas any other financial system payment there's there's chances of fraud. Right, and the cost, yeah, I mean, if you compare to the cost of credit cards that you know Three and a half percent, or wire transfers at $100 or you know whatever, it's clear that it should be the case that a computer could process a payment, but it's cheaper, right?

Speaker 2: 40:23

Anyway, we could see this. You know 35 years ago that computers should be processing cryptographically signed payments. Somehow, it was just a question of how right, what's the?

Speaker 2: 40:39

you know. How do you want to structure this? How does the system set up? What's the? What does the software? You know? What's the user experience, what, what Institutions are in the middle of it or whatever, whatever, right? So that was all you know. We had to figure that out. But it was clear that in the future we wouldn't be doing financial payments the same way that we were Since the invention of the telegraph. Right, the wire transfer is really from when they invented the telegraph wire. They could send a message. Right, and it's still called a wire transfer from way back then and it hasn't really changed much. Right, there's a message going to another bank and account that bank is being debited from it. You know the count, this, you know that kind of. It's the same technology really, from you know, 200 years or whatever. I mean it's a long time, whatever the telegraph was. So it's. You know we could see something would come along and we wanted to be part of it. You know we wanted to try to write the software to do that.

Speaker 1: 41:38

Okay, so I have two questions off of what you just said. So during that similar time in the 90s we have Elon Musk and PayPal Coming out and obviously they Were able to do international payments. I don't know in the 90s, but I know that PayPal I had PayPal back then, so that was something similar that the market quite quickly.

Speaker 2: 42:05

No to me. There's no digital signature, no cryptography. And then that PayPal was cool and it's nice, but it's not what we were thinking about, right okay, and and then?

Speaker 1: 42:21

where did that lead to? Really like crypto and what you have on your shirt, like the crypto that we know today? How did it get there from what you were thinking about?

Speaker 2: 42:29

Yeah, so some of the stuff that people were doing back then Came into Bitcoin. Like they, they had these Remailers and they used to do this sort of proof of work to make these little, you know, like stamps for doing the remailing and that sort of idea of yeah proof of work came into Bitcoin right, and so I think a lot of the the the world view that we had back in cypher punks has now come to pass, and it's kind of fun.

Speaker 1: 43:05

Yeah, I mean I was thinking about, when you're just talking about it, that you know the progression of exchanging money, and I was at the grocery store a week ago and Older woman was writing a check for her groceries.

Speaker 2: 43:17

I'm like oh my god.

Speaker 1: 43:18

Look at this, you know, like I haven't seen anybody do that in a really long time and I have a checkbook for my business. I think I use it once a year, you know, and someone's like I'll take a check and they're you know, whatever, some random situation. But yeah, I mean, I think I think Bitcoin is obviously the wave of the future. It's instant, it's easy, you know, it's pretty simple and it makes sense. So when you're in financial cryptography before the call we talked about and you brought up in the very beginning is, you know you doing the same work outside of the country Technically can make you an arms dealer. Can you tell people the story about how, about what you did and and and what it led to? I mean, I thought it might lead to your arrest because technically you're a felon at that. So why don't you tell us this? I think it's a great story and I was laughing when I was reading about it.

Speaker 2: 44:05

So the international traffic and arms regulations covered cryptography, and if you had software that did cryptography and you exported it out of the United States, that was the same thing as if you were an arms dealer. You'd violated the itar. And so in Anguilla I made a web page where the default text was like a three-line RSA encryption program, and If you just hit submit on this web form with that default text, it would go from your browser, say in the United States, to my computer here in Anguilla Right, which means that you have exported some software that does encryption, Therefore qualifying you as an international arms trafficker Right.

Speaker 2: 44:55

So I put up this web page and everybody that could went to it. You know they could be an anonymous arms trafficker and not put in their name, or they could put down their name and be an officially registered arms trafficker, right.

Speaker 1: 45:08

And.

Speaker 2: 45:09

Something crazy like you know, 20,000 people and this is back in, you know, like 97 or 96 or so, you know, a long time ago, where there were quite so many people on the internet and so we had some crazy number of people that you know became official international arms traffickers by doing this and it's it's this sort of civil disobedience and making fun of the law, right, and that that's sometimes necessary to get a law changed, and it got enough notoriety that it was actually on a CNN Program where they, you know, they talked about this and and the law changed soon after that, so it might have had an impact.

Speaker 1: 45:53

I'm sure it did. I mean, I think it probably helped and I'm sure that you weren't the only one probably talking about it, but it created the discussion and made it relevant, you know. But, like there's there's other sayings, like I there's weird laws in the United States. I think I remember there was one that you couldn't beat your wife with a stick no bigger than your hand. I was reading about, and then you know there's one that's like you can't hit your wife with a stick thicker than your thumb. That's where, like, the rule of thumb Comes from, you know, but some of these laws were actually, like, still in Existence up until, like you know, the 80s or the 70s. But obviously it only comes to light when some crafty lawyer says, well, my client used a stick no bigger than his hand and they'll go God, that's. You know, it kind of comes out, but but it's also could probably become dangerous, because if what you were working on actually got momentum and and was getting a lot of, you know, publicity, that that you could become, you know.

Speaker 2: 46:52

An extra I was no longer. I was no longer a US citizen, right? So they sort of don't have any claim on me. But you know, the fun part was that Americans sitting inside these crazy laws could just click a button and officially they're. They've now violated the you know, international traffic and arms regulations. But you know they're not gonna go arrest these 20,000 people for clicking a button on a webpage, right, it's not gonna happen. And so it's a way of you know, it's civil disobedience, it's a. It's a way to break the law publicly and Not seriously enough that they could actually justify arresting you.

Speaker 1: 47:36

Yeah, absolutely. So. What is a day, what is a normal day at the dot AI registry for a guy like you? Not at the end of the month, not when the auctions are going on, but a normal.

Speaker 2: 47:47

Day, like you know, in the morning we come in and there's a few emails and we have to deal with a few problems that somebody has, and Most the time it's, you know, we actually do a several other businesses here just At the same time. So we have a cash for gold business, we have Bitcoin, we have a Bitcoin ATM here, and so people are coming to use the Bitcoin ATM. Uh-huh, we also do DNA testing to see who's the daddy. So, and and we're working on several other projects. You know, in the background, the last month we've been trying to simulate Electrons in a wire.

Speaker 2: 48:31

So we bought a computer that has a, an RTX a 6000, which is a 10,000 core, 48 gigabyte GPU, right, so it's a pretty beefy GPU to run some of these AI models. We've been playing a lot of AI models just because it's fun, right. But once they had this computer, which is apparently about as fast as the fastest computer in the world, like 21 years ago as far as far, as far as flops, okay, gosh, we should do something, we should try to simulate something, right? And so do you know? Veritasium, the, the youtube guy? He.

Speaker 2: 49:10

He's worth following, but he did something about how electricity propagates in a wire, which I think he got it wrong. But it would be fun to be able to simulate how the electrons propagate in the wire right and to be able to, you know, very clearly demonstrate what happens. And With this GPU we can calculate for thousands of electrons. You know what's happening, right, and so we've been. We've been playing with that, but we're always doing, we're always so. The first thing is they, they talk about a drift speed.

Speaker 2: 49:46

And how the drift speed is very slow for electrons like. The current speed is very slow, like you know, less than a millimeter per second, but what they're missing is that's the average speed of a bunch of electrons which are going in different directions. Right, the individual electrons can actually be moving quite fast and they completely miss that. Then all the explanations there's. There's a bunch of people that have tried to rebut veritasium because you know he's wrong and you got somebody's got to get it cleared up because he can't. You can't let something be wrong on the internet. Right, and of course so, but in all of their cases they're still, except the fact that electricity doesn't move. The electrons don't move fast, so they can't be.

Speaker 2: 50:32

What's propagating the electricity? Because the electric signal goes nearly the speed of light, right, but it's it's wrong, because the actual electrons may be going like a tenth or one percent of the speed of light just on each one of them. Okay, the other thing that's weird is that the electrons Like if you look at sound, the atoms are just pushing on the one next to them, but in electrons an electron could be if you have like a wall of electrons they're not just pushing on the electrons right next to them. Their field goes through many, many electrons deep, and so they're pushing far ahead of where they are. Okay, and so the way of can travel much faster than the electrons themselves are traveling, and the electrons can travel much faster than people think, and so actually it's not that bizarre that the electrons can carry a signal at the speed of light. But we need to get you know I want it to be a nice simulation that Everybody can see all the little parts of it and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 51:39

Yeah, I'd love to see that. So let me ask you this I mean, if I went out and bought that computer, brought it to my house and I just casually say I'm going to do a simulation that you just mentioned, I mean, how do you even begin To do that? I mean, I'm sitting here thinking to myself while you're explaining it, like how do you even begin, how do you begin to do that? I don't even get it.

Speaker 2: 52:04

This is the other fun thing. I had never written any code to run on a GPU a month ago, never. I don't know how to write code for a GPU, but I have three AI's on three different tabs up above the browser. Here We've got Google and chat, gpt and clodai, and if you ask each of them some interesting question like what's the easiest way to write code for a GPU, you could usually get an answer that's probably pretty good. And then if you say, ok, write some code to do this they like do, and you just try it out and I really basically wrote the code with the help of these three different AI's and it's not quite there yet and I may have to really learn more to get it to all be right. But we've been doing lots of different simulations and lots of different visualizations and at times we're having waves propagate. We could get to 2% this speed of light so far. When are you going to build a collider?

Speaker 1: 53:15

underneath the island, is that? The next step.

Speaker 2: 53:21

No no.

Speaker 1: 53:22

I remember when we spoke. The last time we spoke was four years ago, pretty much in December. It was four years. In December was the last time we spoke and when I spoke to you you said you're flying RC planes with your boys and RC boats and things like that. And then this time I talked to you. Now you guys are doing this. So I'm interested to hear what you're going to be doing. Four years ago in the Mad Scientist lab, where you've been, we'll see.

Speaker 2: 53:51

It's pretty wild, right, because we have the ability to buy whatever toy we could possibly want to play with and we have four boys that need to learn stuff and have time on their hands, so I don't know what we'll be doing.

Speaker 1: 54:10

Well hopefully we keep building off of this. I mean, if you get up to what is the closest we've gotten to, the speed of light in a normal science setting, I don't think we've gotten to the speed of light. We've gotten very close in the collider, isn't that right?

Speaker 2: 54:26

No, no, no. So I'm trying to simulate electricity in a wire. This is like a very fundamental thing. We've been playing with electricity for a long time. People ought to understand how electricity propagates down a wire and in fact they have, like telegraphers, equations from 100 years ago. They sort of understood how electricity propagated down a telegraph line, but at a low level. What do the electrons do? Yeah, and there's not. I mean, I had got a degree in electrical engineering and I've wondered about this question for 40 years. Very few people have anything really as to what the electrons, how the electrons are moving and why it's just like hey, it works, it's fine, don't worry about it.

Speaker 2: 55:14

Hey, it works. We've got a high level equation. This gets us the right answer. Yeah, and I want to understand at the low level how does this electron do what it's doing and why? And what's the thing right? And I can't find anything that really does it at the electron level. And we have a computer that's big enough to simulate lots of electrons at a reasonable speed for a tiny piece of wire right, do you think?

Speaker 1: 55:43

any of our listeners might have that answer for you or give you some tips. Do you think there's any odds? Maybe, right, yeah, yeah, let's see what they say. You'd be surprised, yeah, all right. Well, is there anything you'd like to tell our viewers about theai registry or anything else that you're working on? Or tell us any use cases that you've seen of any of the domains that you find that are really exciting or interesting to look at?

Speaker 2: 56:14

No. I don't know it's just. It looks to me like it's going to keep growing and keep getting bigger and I hope that Anguilla can keep reducing their tax burden on the local population. And thank you all for buying domain names, yeah.

Speaker 1: 56:29

I mean, but it's an awesome story. You know, I think it's an awesome story and I think it's great that what you've been able to do has helped. You know, it's helping push innovation right, which you love, and also is helping the 14,000 people of an island nation move forward into the future as well and get the things that they need to survive, which is great as well. So, you know, I can't really think of a better outcome for everybody in business.

Speaker 2: 57:00

If you look at even countries like some of the Arab countries, where they get a lot of money from oil, they still have a bunch of taxes, right? So we could be the first country you know five years or 10 years from now, that's completely funded without taxes, and that to me is just like amazing, right? As a libertarian, that would be like a dream come true if we had a country that didn't need to have taxes.

Speaker 1: 57:25

And.

Speaker 2: 57:25

Willow might be the first one there.

Speaker 1: 57:27

Yeah, I agree, and I don't mind paying tax. I feel that the amount that I have to pay is debilitating and life changing and I don't think the amount of money I'm paying in is giving me the value of what I'm putting in. You know, and I'm fine if I want to go buy a luxury car and I got to pay a 30% tax on it. Fine, I mean that's OK. But you know, when I'm paying in tax more than I'm actually saving a year, I mean that's a lot, you know. And then if I drive down my road and there's a giant pothole and I call the city and tell them to fix it, they just say too bad, you know. So it just isn't. I don't know, I just don't see the value. But we could have an entire other episode talking about that. But great, you know, I really appreciate you doing this, especially on short notice. I really, you know, and thank you for your time. I know you're a busy man. You got a lot of great things going on there.