Moving Mountains and The Power of Small Percentages
Today I want to discuss with you some concepts I've been working on recently. As you all know my book, Behold The Cryptopreneurs, is all about leveraging the blockchain to create positive change in the real world. Today I want to delve into how the power of small percentages can come into play.
Hey there, welcome. Hi, I’m Dennis Lewis, welcome to take two of today’s livestream. We had some audio difficulties. Let’s just check and see here if it’s for good if we’re going on right and jump into today’s live stream. So here’s the deal. Today’s Thursday today is about concepts. It’s about big ideas. And basically what I want to talk to you about today is moving mountains with tiny little small percentages.
And you might say, What do you have in mind? Well, let’s just start off with a little bit of context. And if you stop and think about it, the world the financial sector represents over 20% of the world’s GDP. that’s a that’s a big chunk of money. Okay, it is a lot of money. And what do they do? Well, if you if you stop that sit back and think about it largely they facilitate transactions.
Think about retail banking, think about trading, international transfers, even, you know, even when they’re doing big investment banking deals, they are being financial intermediaries. And basically, they, they take a cut of everything. So every Apple that you eat, every Uber you ride in every deal you make, the financial industry is thinking the little fingers in there and taking a little chunk of that. And, you know, when you start looking at the numbers, you know, the context really can can become surprising.
Just to give you an idea in 2019, Apple had a total revenue of 260 A billion dollars. But think of all the stuff they made all the iPhones all the MacBooks all the services they provided, you know, all the work and the effort and the value they created for their users. In 2019, Tesla had 24.6 billion in revenue. But they made a whole bunch of cars, right? I mean, you could go out and see on the X, you know, you could even drive in Tesla. In 2018, Visa had an annual revenue of 10.3 billion US dollars. In 2018, Western Union had an annual revenue of 5.6 billion US dollars.
Okay. Both of these companies, they just take little tiny percentages or of transactions of moving money from one place to another. In 2019, Bank of America had an annual revenue of 91.2 billion US dollars. Okay, that is almost four times, Tesla and You know, putting it in context, they didn’t build any cars. They didn’t, they didn’t put an iPhone in your pocket. They didn’t, you know, they weren’t like Walmart and they got groceries to your door or Amazon that actually, you know, you know, put packages and boxes on your doorstep.
Okay? They were all it’s all about tiny percentages. And where does all this go? Well, obviously it goes straight to the shareholders and executives of the companies that’s that’s where it goes their private enterprise right and, and hey, fine, that’s, yeah, that’s capitalism, right. I mean, you know, that’s what’s the big deal. You might say, you know, that’s, that’s the way it is. That’s what it should be. They provide that service and they make money.
And for many, many years, you know, they you could consider them the veins and the arteries of our economic body. And, you know, money was hard to move. I mean, if you go back centuries, money moving Money was a risky business, it was definitely hard. It was money, it was hard to store, you know, you had to have vaults, you had to have security guards, you had to have, you know, Sterling reputation. Because we need good, trusted institutions to act as caretakers in our economic system.
And this was this played a really important role in keeping the financial system keeping the economy alive, and they were largely responsible in a great deal of, you know, causing the Industrial Revolution and and, you know, the huge economic expansion in the last couple of centuries. You know, you could, you could make a good argument that that was, you know, they played a vital role in that. And, and for this, they have been very handsomely paid, you know, and they still are, but now, I want you to stop them and say, but in 2020 things are very different.
Right now, as we’re talking on this live stream, I could send the billion US dollars anywhere in the world in seconds, and for a few pins, okay, I need the billion dollars. I don’t have them. I did I could send them to you, just like that. And it would cost pennies and you would get the billion dollars in it literally in in seconds, you know, maybe a minute or two, depending on, you know, maybe if we if we send them on the Ethereum network, it might be a little faster than on the Bitcoin network. But that’s how fast and easy it can be done.
And the blockchain technology eliminates many of these core value propositions of the financial industry, it just gets rid of, and many of these core services have become commodities and they’re really of limited value. But we still pay for them. We pay for them extensively every day. I mean, every time you you take your credit card. You’re paying a hefty fee to to be if you go in, you know, if you if you have family that lives out of the country, you send them a wire transfer, you’re paying out the nose or you send them a Western Union and it’s just pulling right to the to the hefty percentages.
And the reality is that technology has made that far simpler and the reality is is these banks doesn’t cost them any more to send a transfer on their internal servers as it does for us to send them in the blockchain are a really doesn’t sound much more sure they’ve got overhead costs of keeping those servers secure and, and, you know, making them hacker proof, you know, stuff that the blockchain does just by its very nature. But um, but really, the effort isn’t Is it like it used to be it’s not that hard, but we keep paying as if it were. So think about all this money flow.
Through the economy as a energy kind of going through the power grid, and instead of thinking about it, you know, like a costly service that, you know, that is going to make a few lucky members of the society that basically just inherited their position because, you know, banks and, you know, most of the, the large capital behind the financial sector there, they’ve been around for a very long time, okay, they’re, they’re not there because they built them from the ground up there because they inherited their the ownership of their stock in these companies.
And why don’t we instead take that energy flow and all those tiny percentages and put them to good use? And I’m not, you know, put them to use for society. And you know, because we have the technology that makes this possible. We could, we literally could be on the brink of a whole new paradigm. Imagine harnessing the power of all those tiny percentages to help the most vulnerable in our society or using it to provide a universal basic income for everybody.
Okay, just by harnessing the percentages on these transactions, or imagine having a tiny economic engine that would help power your kids Little League, okay, just by taking percentages and off of the payments that, you know, your your little league group is does every day. And that money could be funneled into something like that. This is the idea of micro economies. It’s the idea of using technology to build what was once required humongous corporations, because it did, but no longer does. And by substituting all of that infrastructure and all of those people that are, you know, working to keep an antiquated system going and just take that value and actually provide it back to society.
And this doesn’t even require taxes, it doesn’t require doing it through a government institution, this could be done through, you know, private networks, private micro economies that just work together to harness on either a big scale or small scale. These tiny the power of all these tiny percentages, and this is an example of the true potential of blockchain technology. And, you know, the truth is I’m actually right now working on a couple of the several initiatives that that could that are based on this idea.
You know, they could be based off of social media, they could be based off of, you know, nonprofit organizations that could be based off of, you know, users user groups that have share a common interest. You know, the Imagine doing this to fund your favorite charities, you know, quite quite well, you know, why aren’t we doing it this way? You know, why? Why isn’t this the new normal? And, you know, if you’re, if you like this idea of this concept resonates with you, you know, maybe it’d be interesting to collaborate. If you aren’t, leave me a comment, reach out, Let’s have a talk.
Maybe you think that I’ve been too simplistic, maybe you think this idea of, you know, taking the whole system and turning it upside down and, you know, using technology to commoditize you know, economic transactions. Maybe you don’t believe it, maybe you don’t think it’s possible. Maybe you think it’s a pipe dream? Well, tell me below Or even better, reach out to me and let’s come on and debate it. Let’s talk about it and say, you know, because I’m not I’m not normally a utopian thinker. That’s not who I am. I’m an entrepreneur I believe in in creating wealth.
You know, I am basic I am capitalist I believe in free enterprise. But I don’t believe in, you know, a society where a very few powerful groups and organizations lie to us and say that in the guise of free enterprise, they’re just going to stop their pockets because they inherited, and they have a privileged position. And they happen to control some networks that are quite easily substituted by, you know, new technologies. Now, the truth is that these people are very powerful and they probably don’t like this concept.
But the blockchain is here to stay can’t be turned off without dismantling all of you know, the internet dismantling all of basically society. So it’s not a question of if it’s a question of when, in my opinion, and the past have all these small percentages been, you know, brought together to actually create positive change in the real world for real people? Is something I believe that, you know, we need for this post COVID-19 society. And it’s not a far fetched idea that has to be 50 years down the road.
This could be, you know, we’re seeing COVID-19 accelerate so many things. Normally for the worst, why don’t we take it and accelerate some things for the better. And this is, my, one of my you know, the reasons I’m doing these live streams is because these are the ideas that as entrepreneurs, we can push forward and make into a new reality, and a new world with new rules. So let me know what you think I’d really like to hear some comments on this video. So give me some comments below.
Share below. like to call me out and say I’m doing you know, it’s all just a bunch of malarkey. I’m waiting for that as well. That’s it. That’s all for today’s livestream. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you have, be sure to, you know, shameless plug, grab my book, Behold the crypto printers. It’s on Amazon Kindle version and I also on paper version if you want to kill a tree and you won’t be maybe maybe a branch or twig. You can kill a twig with my book. Anyway, jokes aside, thank you very much for listening in. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.