Ben Diggles on Offering Scalable Cybersecurity with Constellation Network (Episode 164)
Benjamin Diggles joins us to discuss how the Constellation Network is cybersecurity for big data validation, notarization, and scalable interoperability.
Benjamin is the Chief Revenue Officer & Co-Founder of Constellation Network (https://constellationnetwork.io/). Benjamin has been an active participant in web, software development, and digital design for 20 years from both practitioner and leadership positions. Based in Denver, Colorado, Benjamin has effectively worked with startup and enterprise companies driving strategy for Fortune 500 companies in the digital space.
With a focus on big data, mobile and scale, Benjamin has a passion for building, mentoring and inspiring teams to collaborate cross-departmentally in order to drive true sustainable strategic results. Before founding Constellation, Benjamin held leadership positions for Oracle and Webtrends, and he stays actively involved in many industry projects as an advisor or partner.
In 2019, Benjamin participated in the Oregon Enterprise Blockchain Venture Studio as an Entrepreneur in Residence to guide Blockchain startups in aligning with Oregon Enterprise company use cases. Benjamin is also a member representing Constellation Network on the Portland State University Blockchain Business School Board of Advisors and is actively working with the State of Oregon on new legislation around personal data ownership. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrdiggles/
The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.
00:00:04:00 – 00:00:16:00
Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here Richard Carthon, and today I got a special guest all the way out in Denver, Colorado, working on a really cool project called Constellation. We got Benjamin. How are you doing today?
00:00:16:16 – 00:00:18:18
Ben Diggles: Doing great, Richard. I appreciate you having me on, buddy.
00:00:19:02 – 00:00:25:12
Richard Carthon: Of course, man. Well, excited to learn more about Constellation, but before we dive into that, I want to learn more about you. Give us some background about yourself.
00:00:26:12 – 00:01:29:14
Ben Diggles: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I’ve been in tech now for over 20 years. And in the last 10 years, I’ve been really focused in kind of the enterprise, big data world, a lot of analytics stuff. And prior to co-founding Constellation three years ago, I worked at Oracle. And the reason I went to Oracle is because in my software world, I wanted to get a chance to feel what it was like to have kind of like the West Point of software laid and in red tape, see if I could actually create impact. And I learned a ton. It was a really great experience, but then out of that, I met my co-founder Ben Jorgensen through Oracle and he was like, Buddy, you got to get involved in Blockchain. And I, you know, I had this real interest in what was called adaptive intelligence at Oracle and so, I was pitching Ben on all these ideas. And he is like, Dude, you got to get into Blockchain. So, I’m currently based in Denver, Colorado, and my role at Constellation is business development, so, I focus on all like the engagements around enterprise, partnerships, academia and so forth.
00:01:30:07 – 00:01:53:07
Richard Carthon: Nice. Well, it’s cool that, you know, your origin started at Oracle, getting more into the tech side of things and then your co-founder’s like, Hey, look into this Blockchain. So, just let’s stay there for a second. Like, around what timeline was that when you first learned about Blockchain and then once you started looking into it, at what point were you like, Okay, I need to go all in on this or I need to like find a way to make this, like, my full time thing?
00:01:54:25 – 00:02:37:29
Ben Diggles: Yeah, I mean, so it kind of hearkens back, you know, back in 2012, I saw this Gawker article about the Silk Road, about how you could buy drugs on the Deep Web, and that was when I discovered Bitcoin. And I was like, Wait a minute, what is this Bitcoin stuff? So, I had a really close buddy Ian Mitchell that introduced me to it all and he’s like, Dude, you got to start buying Bitcoin. So, I started buying Bitcoin at like $5 a coin and at that time, you know, of course, I didn’t know that Crypto was going to be what it was. It was just more of a means to do shady stuff, right? And so, at one point, you know, my wife and I, we had a tax bill and came out of nowhere and it was a huge one and we were like, God, where do we have some liquidators? And she was like I’ve got all this Bitcoin sitting around. So, we sold it.
00:02:38:01 – 00:02:38:16
Richard Carthon: What?
00:02:38:18 – 00:03:15:26
Ben Diggles: In hindsight. It’s like one of those things where that was probably a multibillion dollar tax bill. The type of guy I am is I, you know, I wouldn’t say I’m a humanitarian, but I really am passionate about lifting people up and trying to balance the playing field. And in my years of being in data and big data and analytics, I became very aware that a lot of these institutions that have been propped up in the digital age are working rather hard to mine data out of people. And I wouldn’t say necessarily use it against them, but definitely capitalize on it and cut them out of that kind of, I guess, exchange, if you will.
00:03:16:04 – 00:03:16:19
Ricahrd Carthon: Right.
00:03:16:21 – 00:03:40:28
Ben Diggles: And I started working on this project called White Magic, which was really around surfacing data around the practices of institutions so that users could have insights in the moment as if they were to walk into, say, a restaurant that doesn’t meet their grade of how they handle their food and whatnot. I knew that data was out there and that there was ways to service these insights in the moment in a very meaningful way to the users based on their preferences.
00:03:41:06 – 00:04:15:26
Ben Diggles: So, I was sharing this with Ben Jorgensen at dinner one night and he was like, Bro, you need to get into Blockchain. And I was like, and this was back in like 2017 and I was like, Nah, that’s some San Francisco stuff, everybody’s a star of their own movie with that. And I just, that’s not for me. But, you know, he convinced me to jump in and he told me it’s kind of like taking the red pill. Once you see the world through decentralization, you can’t see it another way. And it has, I mean, some days I wish Blockchain didn’t exist because I’m constantly going onto a mourning process of letting the old world die as I start to see the new ways that this is going to impact humanity.
00:04:16:09 – 00:04:35:06
Richard Carthon: Yeah. And honestly, I want to spend some time there before we dive into the next subject, because I feel like a lot of people who listen to our show, whether they’re the newbie or they’re a Crypto OG or a Blockchain OG, that once you’ve gotten in this space and you get it, you can’t unsee it. You can’t like your thought process and how you even go about your day to day life changes.
00:04:35:15 – 00:05:16:20
Richard Carthon: And I think it’s sometimes it can feel like there’s so much knowledge and so many different directions that you can go that it’s constantly like drinking through a water hose, you don’t even know like, where to start. You’re just like, I just have a cup, I’m not trying to, you know, pull out a whole pan right now, but it does open your mind to more possibilities that you wouldn’t think otherwise. And also, when you’re trying to explain this to somebody who isn’t necessarily in it yet, they think, you know, Oh, you’re drinking the Kool-Aid and Oh, we’ve got another Crypto guy over here, you know what I mean? Or a Blockchain person over here, right? And I think it’s just really unique how much your mindset really shifts once you’re opened to the possibility of Blockchain and Crypto.
00:05:18:09 – 00:06:05:16
Ben Diggles: Totally agree, man. Yeah, and that, you know, that’s what I’ve been really trying to educate people is that it’s a mindshift. It’s not a technology, it’s not money, it’s not finance. Sure it’s a little bit of all of those, but, you know, the real big thing is that it’s a shift in your mindset. You know, you touched on that, it’s kind of looking at the world a different way. So, yeah, and that’s been great in a lot of ways and like I said, in other ways it’s been a little bit of a challenge. And when I came on with Constellation and this team, I said, “Look, I’m not in the business of vaporware. I’m not in the business of pump and dump schemes. I don’t want to do any of that. I want to see if there is a real solution here that can impact people in the way that all the vision is saying it could.” You hear all these promises, all this hype and I just felt like a steward to just really see if there was a there there, you know?
00:06:06:00 – 00:06:54:07
Richard Carthon: Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And then, of course, you coming from a background in security and data and everything else, you then start Constellation and when you first come on the website, one of the great things it says is, Cybersecurity for big data. And the earlier thing that you’re alluding to is basically how a lot of Web 2.0 and the browsers that you go to, you’re constantly being followed. I remember, or I can’t remember the article or video that I watched that basically says like, Yeah, the Internet is free, but if you look at the cost of your privacy, it’s roughly around like $11 or something like that, which is insanely cheap for how low you sell yourself and like the value of your privacy. So, can you kind of just speak to like, you know, what was the intent behind creating Constellation?
00:06:56:05 – 00:07:32:00
Ben Diggles: So I’ve been fortunate to work with my co-founder, Wyatt, who is the chief architect. I mean, here you have this guy who created a math equation on Ethereum and proved it by building a decentralized public network. And it’s pretty amazing to work with those types of folks. And thank God. I mean, it would be one thing if we went out on this and this technology actually didn’t work, which a lot of our, I would say competitors or colleagues, however you want to position them, are dealing with. And so, when we came in, we looked at like, Hey, what are the limitations of Hyperledger and Ethereum from a transactional throughput? And directed basically a graph with the appropriate approach.
00:07:32:07 – 00:08:28:00
Ben Diggles: We were largely inspired by Iota and some of the, you know, things that they were struggling with and we thought, Hey, we’re going to fix this. And that was more of the technology side, Hey, that’s the opportunity. That’s where we wanted to really build something that was easy to deploy, worked with existing data management tools where a lot of these rich economies would be built into the protocol, allowing people to really focus on developing new businesses in this new paradigm. There’s that side and then there’s the other side, which our tagline is it’s honest data for a connected future. This team is really, for lack of a better term, we’re hellbent on honesty. You know, and I try to educate people on the real promise of Blockchain, which is immutability. And I’m always like it’s like Medusa looking at a database and that thing turns into stone the moment it gets committed. And if you want to change it, you can’t, you got to, you know, Medusa’s got to look at the next thing and add another block to this thing. And of course, the graph isn’t a traditional Blockchain, but it’s still an immutable ledger.
00:08:28:09 – 00:09:12:08
Ben Diggles: And when you start thinking about that immutable data, like my brain goes to things like deep fakes, voter fraud, you know, tax resolution. There’s all sorts of really great things that I mean, honestly, prior to Blockchain, I thought we were screwed. You know, like how the heck are we going to get ahead of this corruption? Naturally, we are a business, so we are going after use cases that require big data validation security from a streaming perspective. But our end goal is not only to just like, help give people a new platform of choice to build on this new Internet, if you will, but also the promise of, Hey, there’s a better way and there’s actually something out there that can fight for truth when it comes to data. So, that’s really the core of our passion behind this project.
00:09:12:23 – 00:09:58:21
Richard Carthon: Truth behind data. I love it. I mean, one of the greatest things about Blockchain is the transparency that goes with it. Of course, that can be a double edged sword as well. However, at its core, I believe transparency is a good thing and it is inherently good as you look at what we’re trying to build towards the future, instead of a lot of things being behind closed doors. You have to like take things at wink, wink, nudge, nudge value in people’s word and now you really can just see are people doing and are businesses performing the way that they say that they are? And also being able to do everything in a transparently secure way as well. So, what are the types of either businesses or ideal people who would come and utilize Constellation?
00:09:59:25 – 00:11:03:06
Ben Diggles: Yeah. I mean, you know, our flex is around scalability and I think that a lot of projects are trying to boast like Hey, we can, you know, beat some of these limitations we’re seeing with existing solutions. And that’s fine. We don’t see ourselves as really trying to compete in this market. I’m rooting for everyone because the pie is so big, kind of like Hyperledger say Blockchain is a team sport. I believe that decentralization forces collaboration. I really like that. So, you know, as far as us being a scalable solution, we went after really the big data space and a lot of folks and God bless them, went after supply chain management, Iot, a lot of these things. And while we can kind of affect those different industries, we wanted to go after the biggest data creators in the world to flex and show that, Hey, a graph based ledger can actually manage copious amounts of data, which is kind of a holy grail if you think about bulk data collection. It requires validation and that’s expensive. That’s CPU processing, that means it has to travel on, you know, different four or five G networks.
00:11:03:08 – 00:11:38:27
Ben Diggles: And so, here comes along this really cool ledger that governs distributed computing in a way that you could do edge computing to open up use cases that people have never even thought of before. And so, one of our claims to fame that we’re really proud of is that we were one of the very first companies to secure a working contract with the DOD and we’re working with a group called USTranscom. Folks don’t know this, but they’re the largest data creator in the world. And so, it gives us a chance to show that, Hey, you can actually create a consensus algorithm around a privatised network that’s handing crazy amounts of data.
00:11:39:04 – 00:12:25:08
Ben Diggles: And when we went to them, we thought, Oh, we’re going to help you with mesh networks and AI algorithms that require automation. All this kind of really grandiose stuff, which don’t get me wrong, really matters. But they’re like, Hey, look, if we could just cryptographically secure some complex data like if we have a streaming data set and in there there’s a row and a column that has something that is like top secret, we need to mask that. And so, that requires us to like, pull it down and do some stuff. And it has to be passed over these compliant networks, but if you guys can help us get that compliance level and the streaming capacity where this stuff that can be passed over public networks like the Internet, it opens up so many different use cases for them to really orchestrate some new meaningful, I guess, data endeavors, if you will.
00:12:25:25 – 00:12:33:16
Richard Carthon: For sure. And something I want to go back really briefly on DOD, if I’m not mistaken, is the Department of Data? I mean, yeah, the Department of Data for the United States?
00:12:33:29 – 00:12:34:29
Ben Diggles: Department of Defense.
00:12:35:01 – 00:12:35:16
Richard Carthon: Department of Defense.
00:12:35:18 – 00:12:40:12
Ben Diggles: Yeah, yeah. Department of Defense. The largest agency within the US government.
00:12:40:25 – 00:13:05:11
Richard Carthon: And what’s great about that, I mean, the importance of keeping us, especially cyber secure these days because the US government’s been getting hacked lately and also like that’s a whole other can of worms. And, you know, it’s cool that you are getting to work with the Department of Defense and try to address some of those issues. So, I guess one of my questions is why is Blockchain a better solution than what we currently have or what they’re currently using?
00:13:06:20 – 00:14:05:10
Ben Diggles: It’s simple, the Internet’s broken. It’s broken. Like there’s a reason Amazon.com still goes down, there’s a reason Marriott got hacked, the government gets hacked, voter fraud, all this stuff is because all this power resides in the application layer that sits on top of this really thin protocol called HTTP, right? And so, you think about I always akin it to like them pouring a single story foundation for like a residential house, and then you put like, Amazon with all these stacked services like IMDB and Twitch and whatever else is like a skyscraper that’s sitting in, you know. So, it’s like if you were able to take one of those floors down, the whole thing becomes unstable because it’s using this really thin protocol. And so, that leaves all the rules of engagement up to the entity, that’s why every time someone accesses a website or anything, it’s like, Hey, partner, we’ve got our own way of doing things, make sure you click this, we’ve got to keep the cops off us. But we also are doing all sorts of stuff using legal speak that you have no idea what we’re up to.
00:14:06:21 – 00:14:58:21
Ben Diggles: And the name of the game is bulk data collection right now. It’s like they talk about how 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last few years. That’s an IBM marketing thing from like 2017, whatever. And what I love about that is it’s not necessarily that that much data is being created, but that much data is being collected. We now have microphones everywhere. You know, you say something next thing you’re getting and you have no idea how they found out. And it’s because data collection has become so ubiquitous. But that’s expensive and it’s shady and it’s a lot to manage. And just because the US government has access to cutting edge tools, they’re still using these same protocols. They developed the Internet. So like, they know that these things are rough, so, this is why these systems aren’t working. They just can’t scale and where we’re operating as a society is not going to slow down by any means.
00:14:58:23 – 00:15:38:08
Richard Carthon: For sure. And I mean, thanks for breaking that down of basically where, you know, Web 2.0 was, where Web 3.0 is going and like, how that’s going to help with the scalability and from a secure standpoint. And I guess a follow up question to that is, although this would help the Department of Defense from a scalability and security issue for companies or people who are looking into big data and want to be able to use utilize Blockchain or Constellation to do that, what are some ways that people would be able to interact with Constellation? Is it like an open source or is it that you go and do like one-on-one contracting with people? Like, how does that work?
00:15:39:27 – 00:16:29:21
Ben Diggles: Yeah. And we’re really excited, so we’re about to push out a new website here in the next like three or four weeks. And we’ve really kind of nailed down the productization of our network because we have Hypergraph, which is essentially our base layer protocol, and then we have this tool kit that we’re bolting on top of it and we’re calling it Hypercube. And this is the first time I’ve mentioned it, so this will be an Easter egg for any of the community that’s watching. In Hypercube, which is a tesseract model, if you want to get into the math or whatnot, the idea is it’s a Blockchain in a box, okay? And from the moment somebody comes in to the moment they’re either listed or deployed on the network, we handle every kind of step of the way from a white glove treatment, not so much from the services or consulting perspective, but more of just the utility of tools, giving people tools. I believe people will be free if they just have the tools. I mean, look at TiTok, people are doing crazy stuff.
00:16:30:01 – 00:16:30:16
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:16:30:18 – 00:17:15:15
Ben Diggles: And so, we have this solution that allows people to build and deploy their own Blockchain networks, mint their own Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, stablecoin, all that, as well as decentralized applications. And so, we kind of akin it to like WordPress, where, you know, a mommy blogger uses WordPress, but so does CNN, right? And developers can get into the API documentation and hack it and do whatever they want. In this case, we are taking a white labeled version of this, an instance and with like, say, the government, we put it on a subnet and it lives in a thing called Gugcloud and now they have their own terminal license terminal to use so that they can build out their own microservices and their own token economy if they wish.
00:17:16:02 – 00:17:37:18
Ben Diggles: And we can talk a little bit about ways that the government could use Crypto. But so, that’s how we’re going to market with folks. We want to get out of our own way because we are such an open platform for so many industries, it’s not really in our best interest to go deep and be like, Oh, we only work with medical customers. We have to be an open playbook to allow people to grab this tool and do what they want with it.
00:17:37:20 – 00:17:46:03
Richard Carthon: For sure. And since you posed the question, let’s go down that rabbit hole, how could governments use Crypto using your Blockchain?
00:17:47:10 – 00:18:19:08
Ben Diggles: Yeah. I mean, so, this is kind of a stretch, you know, meaning that this is in theory, not in practice, but we’ve talked to the IRS, we’ve talked to the Customs Border Patrol, we’ve talked to the DHS. And most recently, I was asked by the DOD to talk about NFTs because there’s all this hype around NFTs. When the DOD’s sending me Rolling Stone’s articles about Kings of Leon out there, like what is this? And they got really excited when I started talking about this thing I call Procurement at the Edge. A lot of folks don’t understand that procurement is what kills almost everything.
00:18:19:10 – 00:18:19:25
Richard Carthon: Yeah.
00:18:19:27 – 00:19:07:02
Ben Diggles: Like people’s lives are lost all the time because of procurement. And if you think about an institution such as one of these domains working or a federal agency, they could have an NFT and that NFT could represent a book of value of the licenses that they can give out in moments that mission bids come in. Say there’s a mission big come in, they parse off and basically loan out a piece of that NFT as a license and once the mission bid is satiated, it gets returned and then they get paid out and they get debriefed. So, it allows for a lot more flexibility versus the old way, which is, Hey, why don’t you print off that PDF, get 15 people to sign it and do all these things when why can’t we just build that entire model directly into the Cryptocurrency, allowing for automation and the handling of different activities?
00:19:07:21 – 00:19:51:09
Ben Diggles: Another quick example is if you think about the licensing of software and simulation, like somebody developed a really cool augmented reality thing that they use in combat training. Well, right now the procurement is like, All right, we’re going to license this thing for this many uses, we’re going to put it out there and try to track who’s going to use it when. Before they go into the simulation we’ll make sure that they have the right clearance for the contract. All that stuff can be handled within the Cryptocurrency and normalize that, say, somebody’s in the simulation, and they use AR for a specific need in that moment, they only dole out a micro payment or they only micro license it in the moment. So, there are all these really cool pockets that are untapped, if you will, in many different areas around Cryptocurrencies.
00:19:51:20 – 00:20:40:17
Richard Carthon: Right. And I mean, something that you’re exposing right now is two big things that I’m taking away. One, that government is seriously considering Blockchain technology and even the thought of utilizing Crypto. But then two, because there’s so many different use cases within it that eventually they probably are going to have to adopt or die, because not only just here in the US, but internationally, it appears that a lot of governments are embracing Blockchain and trying to figure out how they can be at the forefront in the cutting edge of it. I do know that even out in China, there’s CBDCs centralized banking through large currencies. They’re also trying to find ways to use Blockchain so they can start tracking things within their own citizens and whatnot. So, it’s interesting to see how governments are really starting to embrace Blockchain.
00:20:42:09 – 00:21:15:28
Ben Diggles: Yeah. It’s far out man, but I mean, this gets into the conspiracy world that there’s factions. There’s people in these groups that don’t want this to be absorbed because working in the shade is much easier. It’s like giving a landlord a tool that can have full transparency with their tenants. They’re like, Well, kind of don’t necessarily want that because I can work in the shade and it’s my word against theirs and I’m a landlord. Anyway, that makes it a little bit trickier, but I don’t feel like it’s kind of a nice to have. These governments have no other choice but to look at this technology, because as I stated before, the existing systems are just not going to work moving forward.
00:21:16:10 – 00:21:24:15
Richard Carthon: Right. As we look, if you could like look into the next decade, where do you see Blockchain technology growing and going?
00:21:25:06 – 00:22:07:23
Ben Diggles: Oh, yeah. My team is tired of hearing me say, all my friends are, I say this all the time, the future is micro services, the future is micro payments, the future is micro investments. That’s the beauty of all of this is breaking things up from these broad institutions. We always talk about central banks and central authorities, and that’s fine, you know. But like I use the use case of mobility, which we’re a big player in the mobility space is around how you have these cars that need to autonomously communicate to each other, right? So, people are like, Why do autonomous cars not exist? It certainly isn’t because we don’t have the technology. I mean, the technology is there, but there’s a whole myriad of like trust issues. People are like, Oh, right, who owns the network? Is it Toyota? Is it Google? And the answer is no one, right?
00:22:07:25 – 00:22:58:21
Ben Diggles: And so, all of a sudden, now that you have distributed ledger allowing these cars to communicate and pass IP and it still is to the owner. And maybe even they create an economy where they get paid for that IP and how it’s being used, it opens up the ability for these sensors to machine-to-machine, communicate and also transact value that may be locked in the ecosystem or in the network that may not be transferable or liquid to like Fiat, but it conducts a value exchange that is really an edge network and that then opens up crazy possibilities. But for the individual, I think now is a huge play for the underdog because these massive institutions can’t move very quickly to buy this Crypto. It’s too volatile, they’re regulated, they can’t touch it, whereas you know, us folks at home with the terminal can get on and put fifty bucks into Bitcoin, put fifty bucks into some altcoins.
00:22:59:00 – 00:23:37:22
Ben Diggles: And now, I have people that are starting to stake their investments and doing these, you know, these APY programs and getting money back and becoming lenders. Like these are things that like, the common man would not be able to do from an investment strategy, because if you want to invest in commercial real estate, you have to be an accredited investor. Well no longer when you can buy a $1,000 block of a building using Crypto and you get dividends paid out based on the performance of that building. So, micro services, micro payments and micro investments are the reason why every individual on this planet should get excited about this technology.
00:23:38:11 – 00:24:32:27
Richard Carthon: Everyone go back and listen to that again. I think those were a ton of great gems and nuggets to take out. I think that, as you said, instead of it being a lot of different services and different operations that have to happen to make this essentially one small thing happen, we start getting these micro services done so that things can happen faster and with a lot less friction and in a decentralized way, we start solving a lot of scalability issues and ease of use and we start picking up on adaptability. And so, I think that is going to be crucial as well as how can it start being adapted by the greater world. But thank you so much for those nuggets. Another little fun question I want to ask is if you could take all the knowledge that you have right now and then pour it into yourself back when your friend first convinced you, Hey, Blockchain is the move, what are some of the things that you would go and teach and tell yourself?
00:24:35:28 – 00:25:05:04
Ben Diggles: It was crazy in 2018, there was a lot of money, a lot of hype. And at the time I was a little timid, you know, because I was traditional. It was all these people talking about things I had never heard of before. And so, I was, I wouldn’t say insecure, but I was trying to be a little bit more humble and just be like, okay, maybe they know something I don’t. And I should have trusted myself a little bit more that they don’t know anything that I don’t. In fact, there was a lot of hype, there were a lot of promises made in 2018 that really hurt the industry.
00:25:05:06 – 00:25:48:19
Ben Diggles: You know, IBM putting out that stupid forklift commercial in like 2016 saying, We are Blockchain. That really and I don’t know if you read recently they’ve laid off 70 percent of their DLT staff and it’s because they don’t have anything, you know, and a lot of people didn’t have anything. And so, there was all this money that was pumped into it. And so, I just would have told myself to like, stay very tight to my core intuition that, Hey, keep focused on what you care about and put the blinders on a lot of this stuff because it really did emotionally affect all of us. You know, these swings, all these crazy times. The SEC suing, you know, Eos or whatever, like these things just kind of make you a crazy person. Then I realized they never served me and I could have blocked them all out from the get go.
00:25:48:21 – 00:25:49:06
Richard Carthon: Yeah.
00:25:49:08 – 00:25:49:23
Ben Diggles: But live and learn, right?
00:25:50:00 – 00:25:58:20
Richard Carthon: For sure. Great advice. You know, as we kind of wrap this up, what is a final thought that you want to leave with all of our listeners here today?
00:26:01:22 – 00:26:36:25
Ben Diggles: Those that are passionate about this, you have a responsibility. If you are called to this and you feel like myself and Richard, really passionate about Crypto and Blockchain, teach people, sit people down and educate them on how to set up a wallet, how to transfer currency, give them currency. Start to really make this a sticky situation for people that don’t know what they’re doing, because right now is a power play. And I really do believe that we’re going to be in this window that once what I call the normies, the people that think this is all stupid until it gets to, you know, kind of a terminal velocity.
00:26:37:15 – 00:27:17:09
Ben Diggles: Once they get in, you know, we’re not going to get as many opportunities as we’re seeing right now. So, teach others if you’re excited. And the last message is, if you’re an opportunistic, pound sand. I’m just so tired of the gold rush people like, Oh, I can start a mining farm because I got energy and I can do this. I’m just so tired of the opportunistic people coming in trying to squeeze money out of this because there’s something so much more beautiful underneath it all that is really important for humanity. So, you know, whatever, I’m just really passionate about it. I just think that these opportunistic people are just, but they exist in every industry. I mean, look at the cannabis industry.
00:27:17:11 – 00:27:17:26
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:27:17:28 – 00:27:21:15
Ben Diggles: It was like a gold rush and now it’s just saturated, right? So, that’s my advice.
00:27:21:17 – 00:28:14:26
Richard Carthon: For sure. So, people are definitely going to always, you know, follow the opportunities, but as Ben just clearly laid out, share what your passionate about, share what you’re learning. There is a huge opportunity in this space. Keep educating yourself and go and take the actions, right? And some of the actions might even be just sharing what you’ve learned today with someone near you. If you have a friend that you stay with or a loved one or someone in family who’s been talking about Crypto or has any interest, make sure that you’re sharing what you learned with them because you might be able to plant the seed that helps them learn and decide that this is a route that I want to go that ultimately changes their life. And it’s crazy how small little seeds really can make waves with the impact that can come with a lot of people. So, Ben, thank you so much for sharing all that information, dropping that knowledge, sharing that passion with us. What are some ways that people can connect with you and learn more about Constellation?
00:28:16:22 – 00:28:50:02
Ben Diggles: You can just Google my name, Benjamin Diggles. And, you know, we’re on Telegram. I’m very visible. Anybody who asks a question, I try to answer it. So, yeah, ConstellationNetwork.io. Track us there, you can find everything. But our Telegram community, very passionate. We call it #ThebestcommunityinCrypto because these guys are and gals are just super passionate and they’ve been with us since the beginning. I mean, we at one point were just, you know, a no namer and I wouldn’t say everybody knows who we are right now, but we’re certainly making our way up the ranks. And I really appreciate all the support from everybody.
00:28:50:21 – 00:28:58:05
Richard Carthon: One hundred percent. Well, you heard it here first. Again, Benjamin, thank you so much for spending some time with us. And of course, for everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.
Crypto Current will be guiding all of you who are new to the cryptocurrency world to becoming a cryptocurrency and blockchain expert. Crypto Current was founded to give access to information to everyone on current events occurring in cryptocurrency and blockchain in a digestible way. Since its creation, we have created content that impacted thousands of people through its podcast, blog, and social media.